Shubhendu Trivedi

No time to meet today, perhaps tomorrow? I will block some time.

Haven't been able to submit a single one yet. :-/

US weighs oil futures market action to combat price spikes, White House official says The U.S. Treasury Department is expected to announce measures ​as soon as Thursday aimed at combating rising energy prices in the wake of the Iran conflict, including potential action involving the ‌o...

To their credit, they said it openly (which is surprising), and seems like they acted once it started touching 115-120. www.reuters.com/business/ene...

Something more has been happening in the oil market.The worst thing you can do in a supply shock is to block open and free market pricing. De facto price controls will turn into shortages if all this doesn't buy too much time.

Asteroid-Smashing NASA Mission Sped Up Space Rocks’ Journey Around the Sun

NASA smashed a spacecraft into one of a pair of asteroids. the impact shifted the pair’s orbit around the sun:

www.nytimes.com/2026/03/06/s...

One thing I have learnt is that there are infinite opportunities, never chase anything. Let it come to you and then move only when you are almost certain about a structure, and then too put tight stops. Re: Term, I have been keeping away from it entirely since September or so. It's not worth it.

I had posted this late night. But then later removed as I wanted to keep spamming in check (but forgot I talk to myself here). Too bad I didn't have the stomach, was a 53% net profitable trade had it been closed by 4 PM ET today (so in less than 16 hours).

Theoretical Foundations of Conformal Prediction This book is about conformal prediction and related inferential techniques that build on permutation tests and exchangeability. These techniques are useful in a diverse array of tasks, including hypot...

The new conformal prediction book now seems to be final after a bunch of updates: arxiv.org/abs/2411.118...

Most of them graduated to being professional contrarians later on (changing specializations). I mean, it had literally been 3-4 months, nothing was known, and for unknown unknowns it seemed completely rational to just do the boring thing. Zero understanding of risk management.

I did a sort of mini study on mask cranks at the time. Not sure why. But that is how he came on my radar.

During COVID this guy used to write his name as "Dr. Vinay Prasad MD MPH, Associate Professor" (the full thing). Started out as a mask crank (working up a sweat how no RCTs had been done, so it was a no go), then graduated to being a professional (and increasingly cynical) contrarian shaped by SM.

now increasingly seems appropriate for the world we are heading towards.

It's interesting that the sort of financial advice my father always gave me (from childhood) seemed to be too paranoid, overly defensive and hyper-hedged, focused on hard assets, developing multiple income streams and multiple fungible skills. It seemed out of touch and for a different world, but

An Indian security establishment of 10+ years ago would likely see arming Armenia as a key national security priority, but it's unthinkable with the current one (not just because of the empty bravado).

had enough heft in the region to deter it. Iran and Azerbaijan have a strained relationship despite their obvious cultural affinity. Azerbaijan was a territory of Qajar Iran, and there are more Azeris in Iran then there are in Azerbaijan. The regime also fears possible Azeri separatism.

The outcome of the Iran-US-Israel war would be a major deciding factor when these two countries again enter a state of war. Iran's presence and regime posture was a key reason the previous war did not expand into Armenia proper. Iran saw any action on Zangezur as a threat to their security, and they

In short, Armenia doesn't have a lot of time to rearm properly and develop a strategy to counter Azerbaijani (Israeli weaponary-induced) aerial superiority. Neither do they have the oil wealth to fund it. Neither the Russians nor the Americans are going to help them nor give any security guarantees.

Don't worry, they'll be at war again at a time of Azerbaijan and Turkey's choosing.

Specifically writings from 2008/2010 till 2012 or so.

It's a culmination of a process since the early 2000s. I used to read Ivan Krastev on this when I used to be in undergrad, and it used to sound like baseless speculation at the time. But it all came true. He didn't have any kind words for EU in enabling the whole process as well.

People sometimes like showing a USB stick to illustrate how it holds thousands of their books. I started staging for shelving and realized these amount to six ikea billies (with six shelves each). Visually, though, the piles look much smaller, almost as big as a USB stick.

Barely started unboxing books and already hurt my back. This is gonna take months.

Chinese Open Source: A Definitive History Open source used to be a niche topic.

Must read on Chinese open source from Kevin Xu with the very similarly named substack (story for another time)

interconnect.substack.com/p/chinese-op...

War is war.

AAAI sends out emails where it's so vague that you can't even tell whether you were sent a reviewer or area chair invitation.

Compact deep neural network models of the visual cortex - Nature Parsimonious deep neural network models can be used for prediction of visual neuron responses.

Nature research paper: Compact deep neural network models of the visual cortex

go.nature.com/3OKRXZU

Surprise, then defensive, then basically acknowledging.

We put probabilistic circuits into diffusion language models and got a big boost in reasoning performance!

tbc, each time this happened, I did mention it to the student i.e. that I can't provide useful input if I am not able to discern what they know.

It's strange. I was only asking stuff like -- why this area? how did you get interested? What have you read or looked into? It was a way for me to probe their internal state to make some suggestions. Doesn't need perfect answers. I am terribly inarticulate these days, I would have empathized!