Vol. III, No. 62
Covering 21 April - 4 May 2025
Monday, May 5, 2025
Late edition · A Relentless publication
The Relentless Dispatch
All the fortnight that mattered, in technology and in the world, read next to what we were building at the time.
KASHMIR

A massacre of tourists pushes India and Pakistan toward the brink again

Gunmen killed 26 people, almost all tourists, at a beauty spot in Kashmir. India blamed Pakistan, suspended the treaty that shares their rivers, and moved troops to the border. Two nuclear-armed neighbours edged, once more, toward war.

Gunmen opened fire on tourists at Pahalgam, a scenic meadow in Indian-administered Kashmir, on April 22, killing 26 people, almost all of them Indian visitors, in the deadliest attack on civilians in the region in years, singling out victims, survivors said, by religion. India blamed Pakistan-based militants and, beyond them, the Pakistani state, and responded with a ferocity that signalled this would not be contained to the usual exchange of condemnations: it suspended the Indus Waters Treaty, the 1960 agreement that governs the rivers on which Pakistan's agriculture depends and that had survived every previous war between the two countries, expelled diplomats, closed the border, and moved forces forward. Pakistan denied involvement, called the treaty suspension an act of war, and readied its own forces. Two nuclear-armed nations, with a history of four wars and a permanent, bleeding quarrel over Kashmir, stood once again at the edge of the abyss, and the world, distracted by tariffs and a papal funeral, was slow to notice how close the edge had come.

The suspension of the water treaty marked something new and dangerous. For 65 years, through wars hot and cold, the Indus Waters Treaty had held, an island of cooperation in an ocean of enmity, because both sides understood that water was too fundamental to weaponise. India's suspension of it, in fury over the massacre, crossed a line that had held for two generations, threatening the water supply of a nation of 240 million and signalling that this crisis would be fought without the old restraints. Whether it escalated to open war or was pulled back from the brink depended on decisions being made in Delhi and Islamabad under the pressure of public rage and the logic of deterrence, the same escalation machinery this paper has watched grind toward catastrophe elsewhere, now operating between two states that hold, between them, some 300 nuclear weapons.

THE WORLD

Voters abroad punish anything that looks like Trump

An unexpected pattern emerged from elections across the democratic world: association with Donald Trump had become electoral poison. In Canada, the Liberal Party, written off for dead months ago, surged to victory on April 28 under Mark Carney, its revival powered almost entirely by a nationalist backlash against Trump's tariffs and his musings about annexing the country. Days later, on May 3, Australia's Labor government under Anthony Albanese won a thumping re-election, as its conservative opposition, tarred by comparisons to the American president, collapsed. The global anti-incumbent wave of 2024 had reversed: in 2025, incumbents who could position themselves against Trump were thriving, and the opposition parties that had borrowed his style were being punished.

IN BRIEF

A conclave gathers; a president's hundred days; an oracle steps back

The cardinals of the Catholic Church gathered in Rome to bury Pope Francis on April 26, a funeral that drew world leaders including a brief, awkward encounter between Trump and Zelensky, and then to begin the conclave that would choose his successor. Trump marked 100 days in office on April 29 with the lowest approval ratings of any president at that milestone in the modern era, as data showed the American economy had shrunk in the first quarter. And Warren Buffett, at 94, announced that he would step down at year's end as chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway, ending the most storied run in the history of investing.

The Column

The man who was rich by waiting

Warren Buffett stepped down this fortnight after sixty years, and the tributes reached for the wrong word. He was not a genius of the markets. He was something rarer and less glamorous, and the difference is the whole of what he has to teach.

By The Dispatch

Warren Buffett announced this fortnight that he would hand over Berkshire Hathaway at the year's end, closing a run of about sixty years that turned a failing textile mill into one of the largest companies on earth and made him, along the way, the most studied investor who ever lived. The tributes have mostly reached for the word genius, and it is the wrong word, or at least it points in the wrong direction, because it suggests a man who saw what others could not, some flashing quantitative gift, a mind moving faster than the market. He was not that. What he had was rarer and far less exciting, and the gap between what he actually did and what the word genius implies is the most useful thing about him.

What Buffett had was temperament, and temperament is the one edge that cannot be bought, taught, or automated. His actual method was almost insultingly simple and has been public for decades: buy good businesses at fair prices, hold them more or less forever, ignore the noise, and let compounding do the work that no cleverness can rival. There is no secret in it; he published the whole recipe every year in a folksy letter anyone could read. The reason almost no one replicates it is not that the method is hard to understand but that it is nearly impossible to execute, because executing it means doing nothing for years at a stretch while everyone around you is doing something and getting rich at it, means sitting on cash through a bubble while your rivals crow, means buying when the world is ending and refusing to buy when the world is euphoric, means, above all, being patient in a profession that pays people to be busy. The method is arithmetic. The temperament is the entire game, and temperament is exactly what the market selects against, rewarding the frantic and the fashionable right up until it doesn't.

That is why his most quoted line, that you should be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful, is easy to recite and almost impossible to obey. It asks you to feel the opposite of what every person around you is feeling, at the precise moment the feeling is strongest, which is a demand not on the intellect but on the nerves, and nerves are not distributed to the clever. The dot-com mania, the crypto manias, the meme-stock spasms, the whole recurring carnival of the sure thing that everyone is getting rich on except you: Buffett sat out every one of them, endured the mockery each time for being a dinosaur who did not understand the new era, and was proved right each time not because he predicted the crash but because he simply declined to play a game whose rules he could not see. He was rich, in the end, by waiting, and waiting is the one strategy that no amount of processing power or financial engineering has ever managed to improve upon.

There is a lesson in the timing of his exit, too, arriving as it does in an age loud with the opposite of everything he was. He leaves in a market drunk on artificial intelligence, on the promise of returns too large and too soon to be quite believed, on the conviction, eternal and eternally renewed, that this time the old rules of value and patience have been repealed by something new. They have not. They never are. Buffett's whole career was a sixty-year demonstration that the fundamentals do not change, that a business is worth what it will earn and not a penny of the story told about it, and that the people who forget this in the excitement of each new era are the reliable, recurring donors to the patience of the people who do not.

So the man steps down, and the eulogies call him a wizard, and he would be the first to wave the word away. He was not a wizard. He was a supremely disciplined ordinary man who understood one boring truth deeply enough to hold it through sixty years of temptation to abandon it, and who got, as his reward, the slow and unglamorous miracle of compounding left alone to work. The lesson he leaves is not a stock tip or a secret. It is that the hardest thing in any market, and maybe in any life, is to do nothing when doing nothing is right, and that the returns on that terrible discipline, invisible for years and then enormous, are the closest thing to magic that patience has ever produced.

Field Notes
A Relentless build, told plainly

The system nobody uses, and the unglamorous truth that building it is the easy half

This fortnight's front page is about restraints abandoned under pressure. This is about a quieter failure I have seen destroy more good software than any bug: the excellent system that no one adopts, and why getting people to actually use the thing is harder than building it. No client is named.

By Alosh Paul

I have built systems that were, by every technical measure, excellent, and that failed completely, because no one used them. It is the most common and most demoralising failure in enterprise software, and it taught me the single most important lesson of my career: that building the system is the easy half, and getting human beings to actually adopt it, to change how they work, to trust it, to use it the way it was designed to be used, is the hard half, the half that determines whether all the building was worth anything at all. A brilliant system that people route around, that they quietly keep doing the old way beside, that they enter bad data into because they never understood why it mattered, is worth less than a mediocre system that people genuinely use, because software delivers its value only when it is actually used, and use is a human problem, not a technical one.

The mistake I made early, and watch others make constantly, is to treat adoption as an afterthought, something you handle with a training session at the end, once the real work of building is done. It is exactly backwards. The people who will have to use the system are not obstacles to be managed after the fact; they are the entire point, and if you have not understood their actual work, their real incentives, the reasons they do things the way they currently do, then you have not gathered requirements, you have gathered wishes, and the system you build will collide with reality the day it ships. People do not resist new systems because they are stupid or stubborn. They resist because the new system asks them to change, and change is costly to them personally, and if the system does not visibly make their own working life better, they will, entirely rationally, keep doing what they know, whatever the org chart says. Adoption is not won by mandate. It is won by building something that actually serves the people who have to use it, and by bringing them along from the start so that it is, in a real sense, theirs.

This is why I have come to believe that the human side of building software, the change management, the training, the patient work of understanding and winning over the people who will use the thing, is not soft, secondary, or separable from the engineering. It is the engineering, the part that determines whether the technical work delivers any value at all. And it connects, strangely, to this fortnight's darker front page: the deepest truth of both is that systems, technical or social, only work when the people inside them actually honour them, use them, hold them. You can build the finest system in the world, or agree the finest treaty, and if the humans do not adopt it, do not use it, do not hold to it when it costs them something, it is worth nothing. The building is the easy half. Getting people to genuinely use what you have built, to make it theirs, to hold to it under pressure, is the hard half, and it is the half that everything actually depends on, and it is the half that everyone, always, wants to skip.

The Ledger
AI
A fortnight dominated by the subcontinental crisis and the papal transition. The models advance in the background; the deeper story, of whether human systems can hold their restraints under pressure, plays out this fortnight on a nuclear border rather than a server.
Data centers & power
Quiet against the geopolitics. The build-out and its power demands continue; the trade war's disruption of chip supplies remains the near-term threat.
Rates
The US economy shrank in the first quarter, a warning sign, as the tariff whiplash bites; the Fed holds, watching a stagflationary fog thicken. Buffett's exit removes a steadying voice from the markets at an unsteady time.
Real estate
US 30-year mortgage 6.76 percent (May 1). Range-bound amid the uncertainty; the American housing market strangely placid while a nuclear crisis builds an ocean away.
India tech
The India-Pakistan crisis is the fortnight's gravest story for the country, overshadowing all else; a full war would be catastrophic for the economy and the technology sector alike, and the world's dependence on Indian software makes the stability of the subcontinent a global concern, however little the world is currently paying attention.
What we called wrong
The restraints that prevent catastrophe are exactly the ones fury most wants to abandon, and a line crossed in rage removes a floor that calmer hours will wish had held. Watch this one; it may be the entry we come to regret writing so mildly.
The Back Page

The oracle steps down

Warren Buffett announced this fortnight that he will step down at the end of the year, at 94, ending the most remarkable run in the history of investing: 60 years turning a failing textile company called Berkshire Hathaway into one of the largest and most admired enterprises on Earth, and himself into a figure the world came to call, only half in jest, the Oracle of Omaha. This paper noted, a year ago, the poignancy of his first annual meeting without his partner Charlie Munger, the empty chair beside him. Now the man himself prepares to leave the stage, on his own terms, at a time of his choosing, having spent decades preparing his successor so that the enterprise he built does not depend on him, the very lesson this paper keeps preaching about succession and single points of failure. He is handing over not in crisis but in calm, not carried out but walking, having made himself, at last, replaceable, which is the hardest and most selfless thing a founder can do. He leaves behind not just a fortune, most of which he is giving away, but a way of thinking, patient, rational, honest, contrarian, humane, that he taught the world for free, in folksy annual letters that generations read like scripture. He was never the flashiest investor, and that was the point; he was the one who lasted, who compounded, who understood that time and temperament beat brilliance and speed, and who proved it over a span longer than most careers by simply refusing to do the stupid thing, year after year, for sixty years. He is 94, and he is leaving while he is still sharp enough to choose the moment, which is its own final lesson. The oracle is stepping down. The wisdom, thankfully, he already gave away.