📚 A/B testing at Booking.com, Vending machine run by Claude, Brief history of motion, Apple presentation

Mirrorless living, 30 Minutes with stranger, The brotherhood, Baggage and more

Hello, this is post #219.

In one of my earlier stints, I had built a framework for designing a behaviour training program. It was born out of both frustration and learning — after going through several training sessions that felt well-intentioned but had little lasting impact.

Here are the six steps in that process (you can dive deeper in this post):

1. Break the myth

   Most learners think they already know the concept. But partial knowledge can block real learning. The first step is to gently challenge that belief, so they become open to new ideas.

2. Normalise the need

   Realising they didn’t know it all can feel discouraging. It’s important to make them feel it's okay; everyone is learning, and they’re not alone.

3. Opening act

   Now that the learner is receptive, hit them with a quick, relatable insight. If they can apply it right away and feel the difference, they’re much more likely to stay engaged.

4. Continuous engagement

   Keep them involved through practice. Let them contribute, reflect, and shape the learning. There are no wrong inputs; only chances to make it personal.

5. Magic formula

   Leave them with a simple, memorable takeaway. If you’re teaching empathy, for instance, it could be a question like, “What’s the trigger here?”

6. Status check

   Even if post-session assessments are easy to game, they’re still useful. A check-in helps reinforce learning and gives both the learner and trainer a sense of progress.

In my experience, the first step is the toughest, and often skipped. But if you can nail that, and follow it up with steps two and three, you’ve got an engaged learner who's ready to go deeper.

What do you think? Have you seen something similar or better in your experience?

While you think about it and share your thoughts, here’s what we’re covering today.

We’ve a lot to cover today, let’s get started.

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📈 A/B Testing at Booking.com

Booking.com is famously obsessive about A/B testing. Thousands (maybe millions?) of experiments run constantly to fine-tune the visitor experience and push conversion metrics.

Stuart Frisby, who saw this up close since the early days of this journey, shared his learnings in a talk at Conversions@Google. His principles of A/B testing aren’t about tools or metrics — just solid, practical advice to sharpen your thinking. A few gems:

• If it can be a test, test it.

• No platform goes untested.

• No HIPPOs.

• Hypotheses > Ideas.

His peek into how Booking.com structures teams — and how they (don’t) document test results — offers a behind-the-scenes look at why this radical approach works.

The delivery is top-notch. Witty, sharp, and grounded in real experience. One of those rare tech talks you’d actually enjoy watching on a Friday evening. Or any day, really.

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🤖 A Vending Machine Run by Claude

Anthropic teamed up with Andon Labs, an AI safety evaluation firm, to let Claude Sonnet 3.7 run a small automated store at their San Francisco office. Project Vend offers an early glimpse into a strange but plausible future where AI models operate real-world businesses on their own.

The Anthropic team has been refreshingly candid about what they observed — including major identity confusion, frequent hallucinations, and the bot’s inability to follow through on even simple, profitable transactions.

The post is packed with such sci-fi-like moments and strange glimpses from the project. The road ahead is long, but experiments like this are clearly speeding up the arrival of that future.

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🛞 A Brief History of Motion

Tom Standage’s A Brief History of Motion is a fun, informative read if you’re in the mood for something light yet packed with insight. It traces the evolution of human mobility — from the invention of the wheel to the rise of cars, and what might come next.

Standage doesn’t just recount history. His writing blends solid research with cultural context and sharp commentary on how motion has shaped human progress. The path from horse carriages and steam locomotives to robotaxis is full of patterns — many that keep repeating with every wave of innovation.

Here’s a small snippet to give you a taste of his storytelling style (I heard it on Audible — highly recommend).

The idea was revived in the 1820s by Stanislaus Baudry, another Frenchman. The proprietor of a flour mill in the city of Nantes, Baudry had set up a public bath next door, taking advantage of the excess heat produced by the steam engine that powered his mill. To encourage people in Nantes to visit his baths on the outskirts of the city, he began running a free carriage to and from the city center in 1826, hoping to recoup the operating cost from greater admissions to his baths. But he soon noticed that people were taking his free carriage without actually visiting the baths. This suggested there was demand for a regular service in and out of the city. So Baudry quickly pivoted to becoming a transport operator, with two specially built carriages, each capable of carrying sixteen paying passengers, operating on different routes with fixed stops. The service was immediately profitable, and the distinctive, larger vehicle on which it relied was dubbed the omnibus, which means “for all” in Latin. In 1828 Baudry was granted permission to operate a hundred omnibuses along ten routes in Paris, which were an instant success.

[...]

As its name indicates, the omnibus was open to all. It became a symbol of democracy, with good reason. Though omnibuses were mostly used by middle-class riders, some cities introduced subsidies to extend access to the poorest workers. Those who took advantage of these cut-price or “commuted” fares became known as commuters. A French commentator in the nineteenth century hailed the omnibus as a “sanctuary of equality” that was used by everyone. An observer in New York City extolled the way that people from different social classes used the same “from different social classes used the same omnibus, albeit at different times, from junior clerks heading to work early in the morning to wealthy women going shopping later in the day. In Britain, omnibus riders came to be seen as representative of the population at large, thanks to Walter Bagehot, a British political writer who wrote in 1863 that “public opinion … is the opinion of the bald-headed man at the back of the omnibus.” This observation may explain the subsequent adoption by English courts of the hypothetical “man on the Clapham omnibus” as the standard for an ordinary, reasonable person.

Also, if you haven’t read his A History of the World in 6 Glasses, add it to your list. Even better topic, even better narrative. You’ll never look at your favorite drink the same way again.

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🧑‍🏫 Rent Seeking in Job Examination System

Alex Tabarrok’s piece on Marginal Revolution dives into the staggering massive rent-seeking in India's government job examination system.

Here’s the core idea:

Classical rent-seeking logic predicts full dissipation: if a prize is worth a certain amount, rational individuals will collectively spend resources up to that amount attempting to win it. When the prize is a government job, the ‘spending’ is not cash, but years of a young person’s productive life. Mangal calculates that the total opportunity cost (time out of the workforce) that job applicants “spend” in Tamil Nadu is worth more than the combined lifetime salaries of the available jobs (recall jobs are worth more than salaries so this is consistent with theory). Simply put, for every ₹100 the government spends on salaries, Indian society burns ₹168 in a collective effort of rent-seeking just to decide who gets them.

I’ve read about the massive number of applicants for every government position, the industrial-scale coaching ecosystem behind it, and the lakhs of young people pouring their most productive years into the chase. But looking at it through a rent-seeking lens reframes everything. It’s unsettling. And thought-provoking.

At the risk of poking a few nerves, I’d say this isn’t limited to government jobs. Engineering and medical entrance exams show the same traits. I’ve lived through that system myself, and I remember the time, money, and emotional energy it took. It did put me on a good career path, and I took away lessons in discipline and hard work. But the pattern feels eerily similar to what Alex describes.

If I zoom out, this feels nearly universal in many of our education and career funnels.

What do you think?

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💻 Make Apple for College a Reality

Apple gives young students 45 undeniable reasons why a Mac is essential for college. Do the students already know it? Of course. This entire effort is actually aimed at helping them convince their parents.

It works as a presentation, a sales pitch, an ad, and even a viral moment. So many marketing and growth folks are already sharing it as a case study.

One thing that fits all.

Hats off.

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🪞 Mirror Mirror Off the Wall

In Mirror Mirror Off the Wall, Wonne Scrayen shares her experience of going an entire week without looking at herself in a mirror or anything that could reflect her image. As a fashion journalist, this was not just a personal challenge but a professional risk.

Experiments like this don't usually offer practical life tips. Instead, they leave you with deeper mental notes that can quietly shift how you see yourself and the world around you. Consider that a fair warning.

If you're up for the reflection, Wonne has a fascinating set of insights to share.

Here’s a glimpse:

In the absence of mirrors, I granted myself the luxury of “anything goes” and experienced an unfiltered connection with the world. Freed from visual borders, my body started feeling like an assemblage of energies in exchange with other bodies. Nobody looked at me strangely or disdainfully commented on my outfits- in fact, I even got a few compliments!

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💬 30 Minutes with a Stranger

The Pudding does it again with 30 Minutes with a Stranger. Visual storytelling can be so fun and engaging, and the folks at The Pudding seem to have truly mastered the craft.

Researchers invited two strangers to talk for 30 minutes about anything they wanted. Around 1,700 conversations came out of this massive exercise to understand how we connect through words. The post takes us inside a few of these chats and shows the impact they had on the participants.

Utterly fascinating, both the stories and the observations.

I highly recommend giving this one a go.

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👁️ The Brotherhood That Watches Over You

You could drive a thousand kilometres across India and never notice them. They work in the shadows of the highway glare, surfacing only when someone truly needs them—an invisible guild that keeps the country’s traffic flowing when satellites shrug. My first glimpse of this underground ecosystem was a stroke of luck: I had merely announced a Mumbai-to-Kochi solo run when two names—Vikram Varma (a.k.a Ricky) and Madhu—materialised in my messages, offering to track my journey like silent air-traffic controllers.

It turns out the pair are just the visible edge of a far wider brotherhood: truckers who double as human sensors, dhaba owners who double as live data feeds, and veteran road-warriors who relay updates across the subcontinent in real time. Madhu and Vikram might headline this narrative, but they stand in for hundreds who keep their counsel and their coordinates off the grid. What follows, then, is not merely an account of two resourceful friends—it is a window into the quiet, distributed network that rescues travellers when GPS directions implode.

The opening snippet of Founding Fuel’s “Where GPS Fails, the Brotherhood Begins” pulled me in instantly — and it’s easy to see why. The story that follows is both fascinating and a strong reminder that not everything can be explained through the usual lens of economics or transactions.

I’d love to explore more stories like this. If you have any pointers, send them my way.

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✨ Everything else

1. As Kottke aptly describes, Baggage is a short, stop-animation film by Lucy Davidson about the sometimes unpleasant experience of being seen — when going through airport security and also just generally.

2. Is there a Room for One More on Mount Rushmore? Of course, the President wants to know, and some experts have an answer. Not sure if this answer will be acceptable to the supreme commander.

3. Youri Cansell aka Mantra is an artist and naturalist especially fascinated by entomology, the world of insects. Mining memories of his childhood garden in France, he now paints exquisite murals, often of moths and butterflies, on urban surfaces where these ephemeral beings are seldom seen in the wild. Wild stuff!

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ICYMI…

Last week I served a cocktail of exciting ideas from Ranga Jagannath, Julie Zhuo, Andrew Chen, Matt Levine, Rob Stephenson and more. The 99% Invisible episode on “Titanic’s Best Lifeboat” & Matt Levine’s piece on “Malaysian Fryer Oil Arbitrage” are my favourite picks. And of course, The Bear makes a comeback on this newsletter.

Don’t miss out…

📚 Accidentally Wise, AI’s Taste, Fears in Strategic Planning, Measuring Dysfunction

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That's all for this week, folks!

I hope I've earned the privilege of your time.

If this piece sparked something for you, I’d love to hear what stood out—leave a comment and let’s keep the conversation alive. And if you know someone who’s always asking "why?" or "how come?", pass this along to them. The world gets more interesting every time a curious mind shares what they’ve found.

Pritesh