If you’ve been to or lived in the subcontinent, you know what this is.

Trucks suggesting/requesting/demanding that you blow the horn are ubiquitous. The artwork comes in different shapes, colour and sizes, and is one of the distinctly subcontinental things you will find out there.

But I am not going into the eccentricities of truck art scene in south asia today. Perhaps that’s for another post/week.

I want to talk about the stark difference in the intended use and the practical reality of the phrases ‘Blow horn’, and ‘Use dipper at night’ in trucks, and how this correlates to the current state of AI, specifically AI in code and the developments with Anthropic and Github this past week(s).

Let’s get to that later though. Let’s talk about horns and trucks in India.

Ever since the dawn of time, if humans have wondered about one question, it is ‘why do indians honk so much?’

There are many hypothesis; a dearth of road etiquette and education/training, the lack of patience, arrogance, or maybe just one of the perks of being a low-trust society. The person in front of you will not move, unless you honk.

After having a verbal arguments with at least 3 different people on separate occasions last week due to incessant and unnecessary honking, I took a pause the next time I the ‘horn please’ sign at the back of a trucks.

I wondered if this onmi-present message was in any way an encouraging sign for the honk-happy general public. If it were, I would not be the only one thinking this. If it wasn’t, why do you find it everywhere? Why does everyone keeps putting it up? And where did it start?

I found that the origins of ‘Blow Horn’ or its sister variant ‘Horn OK Please’, were probably more of a safety reminder rather than being strictly prescriptive. It either started as a WW2 blackout traffic management strategies or something to signal to the drivers behind if they were too close to the vehicle upfront. Or maybe something else altogether.

Whichever may be the initial reason, the intended use and reason from times past seems to have transformed into a current reality where it now feeds back into the hive-mind knowledge that ‘horns are there to be used’, whether or not they are good for you.

Reminds me of a certain other tool in recent times.

An average person relies on them to try and ease their commute, instead of being patient and using their own mental faculties to judge for themselves.

Sometimes this strategy does work. If the horn is strong enough, people do move, and you reach home faster.

Justifiably, this gives the signal to the car companies and third party manufacturers to make bigger and better horns. This makes everyone use horns even more and manufacturers need to make yet bigger horns to keep them effective.

The performance graph always goes up.

But this is not enough, the future may demand more. Soon, the market will speed up and grow so much that each manufacturer will try to out-bench each other with their competitive, state of the art honkers. Of course, there will be a sub-group of horn influencers which will be reviewing and hyping up the new models.

You’ll want to drive with the latest horns, different horns for different situations/modes. A multi-modal horn, if you will.

How about something that even runs autonomously, like an agent of sorts. It will auto-honk for you whenever their is a pedestrian minding their business on the footpath. You wouldn’t even have to touch the horn with your hands anymore. It will just run on autopilot.

You’ll never be stuck in a traffic jam, or will have to figure out how to get out. The horn will just take care of everything.

At some point, they will make connected horns, so your horn honks automatically when somebody else’s horn dares to honk. They will deter the honking action and keep everyone in check. Of course, by this time, you wouldn’t simply be able to run it on your car’s meagre resources. They will need to come with a subscription. The best and most intelligent of which will cost a hefty sum. Keeping track of all the NPCs on the road takes a lot of power after all.

The intelligence is not cheap.

They’ll give it to you for cheap though, at first. But then one of the companies would need to show profitability soon to justify their valuation for a good IPO, and the prices will begin to rise. They never expected this level of horn usage initially, the head of growth will say.

By this time, you wouldn’t even know how to drive without a horn, and soon, you’ll be priced out of the horn market. You will be the NPC on the road, while the VIPs and some corporate vehicles will blare their way clear and get ahead.

This is a good thing, they’ll say. Most mediocre horn dependent drivers should not even be driving on the roads.

There will be talks of UBI.

Anyway, what I am trying to say is, ‘Use dipper at night’ is a much better instruction. It has a clear intended purpose. When night/dark » use dipper. Not during the day, not all the time, not unnecessarily. Just when it helps. Like any other tool.

In all other cases, use your brain and drive without a horn.

Interesting reads

1. Teach yourself programming in 10 years
   If you haven’t read it, it is a must.

2. GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing
   Well well well…

3. Hyperproblems: New Ways of Doing and Communicating Science
   This may not be the first time someone is talking about the problems in interactions, ownership and communication in science, but I like the direction in which solutions are being thoughts.

4. The CAPCOM sheets explorer
   It is absolutely fascinating to see how one of your all time favourite games were planned, designed, and programmed back in the day.

A project I discovered

The human control plane for AI labor

Paperclip — The human control plane for AI labor

Manage a team of AI agents to run your business. Org charts, budgets, governance, and goals — all in one deployment.

I know, this seems downright moronic to share after what I wrote above. But this time, I share it for the opposite reason.
It is interesting to see what people are building these days. And this has thousands of stars and was at the top of https://osscar.dev/ . Besides, I like the UI of the website, I am a sucker for good UIs.

A photo I took

Apologies about the late post this time. I was preparing for and travelling back to Berlin over the weekend. The newsletter will get its regular issue coming Sunday. Until then ✌️