All payment rails in India are RBI regulated directly or indirectly. NPCI is a non-profit section 8 company which is basically owned by the major PSU and private banks of India. And NPCI operates not just UPI, it also operates NEFT, IMPS, AEPS (aadhaar based payments), NETC (fastag), NFS (ATM network), Rupay debit/credit card network and BBPS (billpay). Only RTGS is operated by RBI directly.
Money serves its purpose while it's in motion. Increasing the velocity of money is good for economy. All the payment rails above do that 24/7/365 with lowest friction – by making all modes of payment possible and for free.
Digital payment rails is an order of magnitude cheaper (all inclusive) compared to cash rails. Accepting notes, counting, and depositing them, doing book-keeping and reconciling it against sales receipts, paying workers and vendors, avoiding leakage and theft etc – all cost time and money. For small merchants, it costs them time away from their business to handle cash.
UPI person-to-merchant (p2m) payments puts money instantly in their bank account. Their bank statements showing P2M deposits help them borrow for working capital at better interest rates.
Risk of theft with cash is much higher than digital theft from their bank accounts. RBI mandated 2FA, velocity checks, cooling-off periods, and awareness campaigns etc help people avoid scams.
W.r.t taxes, GST surveillance does catch merchants who accept high volume of P2M payments but aren't filing GST returns. Conversely, filing GST returns again helps with credit ratings and borrowing on better terms for working capital.
AFAIK banks don't charge for NEFT transfers when initiated via their mobile app or Internet banking website. Fees apply only when you do it via their physical branch.
Yep. Here's the accurate Month-to-date stats published daily by the network operator NPCI https://x.com/NPCI_NPCI. If you want official stats across all banks, across all payment rails, look at the central bank (RBI)'s website.
The right comparison for Nasdaq's order processing volume or messaging volume would be India's National Stock Exchange (NSE). It does more executed orders per day than nasdaq.
I worked on scaling UPI a few years ago. Real-time Payments is vastly more complex as it is much more distributed - each transaction involves the two banks holding funds, two end-user apps (and their banks), and the network (npci) – for the payment to complete end to end, multiple message exchanges need to happen between these parties while the user at both ends are waiting. So, if you measure the scale in messages/sec it would 10-25x higher.
Real-time payment rails that works 24/7 365 days a year from any bank to any bank (domestic, no exceptions) for free is truly a game-changer. Compare that to US payment rails which is slow and expensive. Apart from UPI, India has 3 more payment rails – NEFT (similar to ACH – batch settlement), IMPS (similar to UPI, instantaneous - but different user experience), RTGS (real-time, intermediated by the central bank RBI, but only for high-value transactions) – all are 24/7/365 and free. Then, there's credit card rails – apart from Visa and Mastercard, India also has RuPay which has much lower interchange rate.
Right now, almost all the incentives are to build very large models that run across many machines in huge datacenters. There is very little incentive to build models that can run well on a small machine under your desk.
So it is less about whether people will be “allowed” to own AI, and more about whether there will be anything useful to own in the first place.
The incentive for local models is mostly to make them good orchestrators or user agents. They may give you some privacy and control, but they will still depend on much larger models running in datacenters for anything difficult.
I remember all the excitement around OpenMoko and other open-source “BlackBerry killer” projects. BlackBerry did get killed, but not by any of those individual-first projects.
For AI regulation, I think we should focus on normal commercial rules: consumer protection, privacy, antitrust, liability, and so on. In other words, focus on where money changes hands and where companies have power over users.
Military and offensive use is different. There, regulation is not much of a defense. The real defense is having enough capability and strength of your own.
Restricting AI because it can give dangerous knowledge to ordinary people is like restricting the printing press because it can be used to spread radical ideas.
I have not used voice mode much with chatgpt. I was surprised to learn that they were already not running the voice model like a UX orchestrator while utilizing other models in background for actual research/response etc. I guess it's good they launched what they could and got here in steps. I suspect in the near future my personal device (mobile/laptop) will be powerful enough to run any UX orchestrator model locally – and route to multiple frontier closed/open model providers in the background as appropriate. The battle is going to be platform owners (Apple/Google/Microsoft) wanting to lock-down the access to that local hardware and local interaction paradigms (ambient always-on full-duplex voice) and intermediate through their platform layers - rationalizing it as consumer security/privacy protection (which is right for most people, but sucks for the open market). Meanwhile I suspect OpenAI/Meta et al will try to build their own hardware and become platform owners themselves, though unsuccessfully. And it's going to take some company like epic games to get them to open that up. and that's probably what the next decade is going to be all about.
You can externalize the things you consider as taste by writing down generalized statements, but those statements need boundary conditions and exceptions to be also specified. Except, exceptions have exceptions and when to apply the rule vs when to use exception is contextual judgement. so, whatever residual that cannot be explicitly and unambiguously and generally spelled out, we call it as taste/judgement.
Even if you are on modern 5G network, and set your phone to never connect to 2G/3G network, your location is still compromised because the overall network is still backward compatible to support someone who might be trying to reach you from a 2G or 3G network which run on the insecure SS7 protocol. This enables protocol downgrade attacks. Only way to insulate yourself from this while still being on mobile networks is to use a "data-only" sim and stick to purely Internet based secure messaging and calling apps and not use the phone number for anything.
The way mobile radio/phone networks have evolved (trusted walled garden with backward compatibility) vs Internet has evolved (untrusted with end to end security) is in stark contrast to each other.
I'm not buying another expensive AirPods from Apple until they have their story straight w.r.t battery health and battery repair that is cost-effective. I'm done wasting money on these only to have battery issues, clicking noises etc in less than 2 years of continuous use.
Irritating thing is how Apple hides bluetooth headphones pairing 2-3 clicks deeper than AirPods pairing – on iPhones and Apple TV.
> that require legal to get involved and you do end up with documents that sound excessively broad
If you let your legal team use such broad CYA language, it is usually because you are not sure what's going on and want CYA, or you actually want to keep the door open for broader use with those broader permissive legal terms.
On the other hand, if you are sure that you will preserve user's privacy as you are stating in marketing materials, then you should put it in legal writing explicitly.
Any controls that's not on the steering wheel is a distraction. If there are very few buttons or dials for very simple/standard/common functions on the centre dash, that's okay. Anything more is definitely not safe to operate in a busy and fast moving traffic situations. All the touch-screen stuff is only safe to operate in very slow-moving traffic jam situations.
Corrosion seems over-engineered. Instead of doing a simpler federation of multiple databases (one per datacenter) across the globe, they decided to do gossip amongst every single VM across the globe! You don't really gain much but you do get all the noisy complexity for sure.
It is simultaneously impressive and sad and hilarious that security of millions of people depend on the work of one volunteer software developer (gorhill – ublock origin) and a bunch of volunteer block-list maintainers.
Google tends to take on problems that have high technical complexity, potential wide user base and extremely low marginal cost per user and monetizable via ads. And they detest manual/field operational work and don't have the institutional muscle to do fast incremental iterative product development. These are good predictors of what product of theirs will succeed vs fail.
Within high technical complexity space, they differ in significant ways with Apple or Tesla – they don't have organizational mechanisms to do deep vertically integrated problem solutioning. Even when they have academically much superior AI tech, their ability to productize those capabilities is slow and less effective due to how cross-organization collaboration works.
On the business side, they don't have a business team really. There's no MBAs scheming new pricing or bundling models nor are there people wanting to chase/beat market competitors. So, whenever they do SKU based pricing or subscription based pricing, they tend to get it less right than, say, Microsoft.
Traditional Indian architecture has separation between outer zone and inner zones with different walls and roofs. Basically outer walls and attic roofs can heat up (and cool down with airflow) while inner walls and roofs will remain cooler. Also, the traditional clay-brick walls are much thicker than today's concrete blocks. Those clay bricks have much higher heat capacity.
For years, I have refused to install zoom, webex etc clients for exactly this reason. Their installer wants admin user access for no apparent reason. They could have given a simple drag and drop installation app. Instead they want to run an installer with root user permissions to do whatever. Also, I hate apps that installs a helper background program, and doesn't let me disable it via preferences. I refuse to use those too.
Besides, for what zoom does, why do they need an app? Browser has all the capabilities they need.
I was an Apple Music subscriber listening music on AirPods until I bought a pair of studio reference monitors for 700 USD equivalent (Yamaha HS8). The joy of listening for hours without pain or fatigue from these while WFH is great. These ays my AirPods run out of battery and cut out in the middle of a meeting. The need for all kinds of portable battery powered devices have significantly gone down while working from home.
Money serves its purpose while it's in motion. Increasing the velocity of money is good for economy. All the payment rails above do that 24/7/365 with lowest friction – by making all modes of payment possible and for free.
Digital payment rails is an order of magnitude cheaper (all inclusive) compared to cash rails. Accepting notes, counting, and depositing them, doing book-keeping and reconciling it against sales receipts, paying workers and vendors, avoiding leakage and theft etc – all cost time and money. For small merchants, it costs them time away from their business to handle cash.
UPI person-to-merchant (p2m) payments puts money instantly in their bank account. Their bank statements showing P2M deposits help them borrow for working capital at better interest rates.
Risk of theft with cash is much higher than digital theft from their bank accounts. RBI mandated 2FA, velocity checks, cooling-off periods, and awareness campaigns etc help people avoid scams.
W.r.t taxes, GST surveillance does catch merchants who accept high volume of P2M payments but aren't filing GST returns. Conversely, filing GST returns again helps with credit ratings and borrowing on better terms for working capital.