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#18 & AI: 2025 Reading List
If you’re new around here, hi! I’m Om, and this is my occasional letter where I share what’s on my mind, my latest writings, articles worth reading from around the web, my recommendations, and some of my photography.
Holidays often signal the looming end of the year. They give all of us a reason to pause, slowdown, reflect, and spend time with people we appreciate. In our increasingly fast, networked world, it’s hard to overstate the need to lower life’s tempo. For me, though, the holidays are also a celebration for another reason.
They also bring a special red-letter day for me. A red-letter day describes a memorable day, usually because something happy or significant happens. The expression comes from printed calendars, where major festivals, holidays, and other special days were marked in red ink, while the rest were in black. So any day worth noting became a red-letter day.
Eighteen years ago, after a heart attack, I ended up in the hospital, fighting for my life. I lived, and since then I’ve celebrated that day as my re-birthday. Why? Because I became a new person. My lifestyle, my habits, and my outlook on life changed—they remade me. I was reborn.
What doesn’t kill you indeed
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Merry Christmas
I hope you and your families are having a wonderful holiday break, and taking the opportunity to recharge. Wishing you all a very Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays.
December 25, 2025. San Francisco
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Leftovers
I’m always looking for a scene that feels like “my photo.” It doesn’t happen often. But life offers its little miracles all the time. When light, color, or contrast grabs me, I press the shutter. Too often, those photographs have remained unseen because of old rules and preconceived notions. Time to change that.
I have no idea why I’ve had this change of perspective now. Maybe it’s because I’m not traveling as much for landscape photography. Or perhaps my journey as a landscape photographer is coming to an end. Or maybe I’m simply embracing the idea that I can be two photographers.
There’s the one who chases minimal, abstract landscapes, and presents an imagined reality to the world. And the otherwho shoots off the cuff, led by light and life as they happen. No edits, no fuss! I want the camera to do the work, sharing the moment as it was.
Given that it is Thanksgiving weekend, I will call this series of photos “Leftovers.”
The best part of a Thanksgiving meal is not the meal itself, but the leftovers you enjoy for days to
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Why Value Outlasts Valuation
After a long innings in the technology industry and as an avid student of history, I have formed a simple personal thesis about technology that doesn’t change much, no matter the technology or era. Value (and values) always trump valuations. I have seen this play out time and time again, and I was reminded of this truism by a video I saw on the internet.
A few days ago, the internet lit up with viral videos of Neo, a humanoid housekeeper. The robotic helper is a project by a company called 1X Technologies. To gain attention in a crowded market for a questionable product category, a decade-old startup that began as Halodi Robotics took a gamble and gave The Wall Street Journal’s Joanna Stern access to the robot. They knew even a moderately good review would be enough to achieve their near-term goal: to raise gobs of money from investors hoping to find a pot of gold in these robots.
The review
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Why Tech Needs Personalization
Every weekend, my good buddy Hiten Shah and I head to The Coffee Movement’s Balboa Street location. They make a nice pour-over. And while it’s about a half-hour from my apartment, the coffee is worth the drive, the time, and the money. It’s a long enough drive for us to talk about life, work, and, most importantly, new ideas about technology. Sometimes, if our schedules sync up, we even go twice a week. What doesn’t change is where we meet. It’s the same location. We drive the same route. The only variable is the time of day we go for our coffee.
On the way to the café recently, Hiten switched the car into self-driving mode. Tesla does a remarkably good job pilotingitself, especially on crowded streets. It’s far more careful and attentive than some of my fellow human drivers. As we drove, I wondered aloud: Why can’t Tesla learn our favored route? Why can’t it pick up our weekly driving patterns and store that information in the system? It doesn’t have to upload anything to the cloud; it could just keep it local. Whenever it detects the start and destination, it should automatically follow our preferred route, adjusting only for traffic.
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Fall Classic, 5 GoodReads & Happy Diwali
Fall is the season for baseball’s fall classics. Earlier this week, we saw Shohei Ohtani play the game of his life, leading the Los Angeles Dodgers to the World Series once again. What a game! What a player! What a winner! Three home runs and 10 strikeouts over six innings – this is our new Mr. October.
The Dodgers spend their money smartly. They win smartly. They do things the way the Yankees used to do. And they win. And win. And win. Even when they don’t win, they try. It’s no surprise that all the best players in the world want to play for them—not for the Yankees.
There was a time when the New York Yankees were built for the Fall Classic. Not anymore. These days, they’re a team of almost-rans, lacking the killer instinct of Derek Jeter’s Yankees. They’ve become a team run by numbers, managed by a paint-by-numbers crew, and owned by a guy whose dad built this dynasty. The Yankees of today exemplify what happens when inherited wealth takes charge. No one is firing Hal, or his lickspittle, Brian Cashman. I once compared the Yankees to Microsoft. Now, like Microsoft, it’s time for their moment of Satya, aka their moment of truth.
On the upside, I did win my Fantasy Baseball League,
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The Inverse Law of Conference Speaking
When driving down to Stanford earlier this week, a good friend from my Wall Street days, Josh Baylin, called. “I’m heading to the East Coast for a conference,” he said.
I’m the guy who starts peppering his friends with questions like a reporter, so I queried him about why he was going, what he wanted to achieve, and who the speakers were. We’d been talking about the OpenAI-AMD deal—how ludicrous it was, though Josh didn’t mind the pop in AMD stock.
We both laughed at the idea that Nvidia gets to invest and own a piece of OpenAI for $100 billion, but AMD has to sell a piece of itself for OpenAI to use its GPUs. (Okay, I’m simplifying the whole financial rigmarole, but you get the joke. I hope.) The more I heard Josh talk about this conference, the more I realized that the whole conference model is completely broken.
There is a
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Sunset in Saint Malo
Six years ago, I was on a photography workshop with Michael Levin. He had found this spot, captured it and immortalized it, and then shared it with all of his students. I was one of them. This edit, six years later, is my interpretation of that gift he gave me.
Michael has been so instrumental in helping me find my path, learning what I don’t like and what my eyes see. He is the one who pointed out to me that I gravitate to shapes and abstraction.
That remark led me to explore my desire to photograph differently. If my memory serves me right, this was the last time I actively tried to do “long exposures” in the classic sense. Most of my work now is handheld, in quest of imperfection.
Anyway, that is a long-winded way of saying — enjoy this scene, share your knowledge and don’t be so
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Go Out & Get Some Air
Over the weekend, I got a surprise package from the folks at Apple: a review unit of the iPhone Air. I don’t tend to get smitten by something so quickly, but the “Air” is really up there. It’s so thin you think a strong gust of air could really blow it away from your hands. (These puns keep coming on their own. I swear I’m not trying.) It ranks as one of the most beautiful objects—not just phones—that I have ever held.
“It does seem like it’s going to fly away when you’re holding it,” Apple chief executive Tim Cook told the Wall Street Journal after the keynote. Normally, you would dismiss an Apple CEO’s typical product praise, but this time he’s spot-on. At about 5.6mm thick, I found myself often wondering if it was actually there.
The more I use it, the more I’m convinced this is the fully realized version of the