Somewhere around the second century CE, near present day Thanjavur, a Chola king named Karikala put thousands of labourers to work sinking unhewn stone into the sandy bed of the Cauvery to make a dam, in a hope that it could supply water to his kingdom. To everyone’s surprise, no mortar was used to hold it together; there were only rocks laid against rock for more than three hundred metres, across a mighty river that flooded every year without fail. I’ve often wondered what h

As the economics and ecology of hyperscale AI begin to crack, Apple’s delayed strategy appears remarkably prescient. Apple’s WWDC 2026 delivered one unmistakable message: it has rebuilt its entire software and device ecosystem around Apple Intelligence. Siri AI has been re‑engineered from the ground up with on‑device reasoning, Private Cloud Compute now anchors Apple’s hybrid AI architecture, macOS and iOS have become AI‑native operating systems, and developers received new a