Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned - Week 36 2026

2026-09-12T18:48:18.348+05:30

This Week I Learned -

* Anthropic has released a report titled "Detecting and countering misuse of AI: September 2026" that details the disruption of Claude model misuse from December 2025 to August 2026 across seven categories including cyberattacks, influence campaigns, surveillance, weapons development, biological research, scams, and model distillation by actors linked to Russia, China, Iran, and Yemen.

Sophisticated attacks no longer require sophisticated attackers. A single Claude subscriber built a mass surveillance platform for Mali's state intelligence. It covers 25 million SIM cards from all its national carriers. Banning the user's Claude subscription was pointless as their system now fully runs on local AI.

* Cloudflare (and similar systems) now treat declared AI crawlers as a monetizable, identifiable class of traffic that can be allowed or charged, while ordinary human visitors routinely face CAPTCHAs, challenges, and other verification steps meant to prove they are not bots.

* In his book, AI Native - The Mandate to Transform Your Company, Kai Fu Lee offers a practical roadmap to redesign organizations and harness agentic AI.

* GPT Image 2.5 can convert black and white photos into color more effectively than GPT Image 2 and Gemini 2.5 Flash.

* Billions of transistors make a processor. One or more processors make up a server. Multiple servers fill a rack. Multiple racks are combined into clusters. Multiple clusters make up one data centre. Across trillions of transistors, the amount of heat thus generated can be considerable.

A 1-GW data centre will in principle produce 1 GW of heat. The planned Google ‘hyperscaler’ near Visakhapatnam and the newly announced Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) ‘HyperVault’ will each be 1-GW facilities. Google has confirmed it will use air-cooling technology HyperVault plans to use direct-to-chip (DTC) liquid-cooling as well as use renewable energy. - The Hindu

* Global memory chip prices have more than doubled, and with the rupee sliding nearly 10% through FY26, costs for phones and electronics have climbed even higher.

* Raspbian is a free, open-source Linux distribution based on Debian, specially optimized for the Raspberry Pi’s ARM hardware (particularly the original ARMv6 chips). It quickly became the preferred and then official OS for the Raspberry Pi.

Mike Thompson, creator of Raspbian, launched the OS to make low-cost computing accessible for education and tinkering via Raspberry Pi hardware.

He criticized the surge in AI chip demand for causing DRAM shortages, which pushed higher-end Raspberry Pi 5 prices from $120 to over $300, and argued that AI hype is discouraging people from learning programming by treating it as a “commodity skill.”

* Samsung India Electronics has started laying off its workforce in phases as its core smartphone business faces pressure on sales and margins following a more than twofold increase in memory chip prices. Mobile phones generate three-fourths of Samsung's India revenue. Samsung's premium Galaxy Fold and Flip series have sold well, though phones priced above Rs 1 lakh remain a sliver of overall volumes at 4%. It slipped from second to third place in India's smartphone market in the April-June quarter, overtaken by Vivo and running close behind Oppo.

* China remained the dominant source of India’s semiconductor imports in 2025–26, accounting for 48.9 per cent of total imports

* Google's Magika is an open-source, AI-powered file content type detection tool.

* Singapore has an overall population of over six million — of which 75% are Chinese, 15% Malays, about 9% Indians and the rest from other countries.

* Bengaluru has a population of around 12.5 million and over 11.5 million vehicles.

* Sri Lanka enforced traffic-light front-of-pack labelling (FOPL) regulations (red/amber/green for high/medium/low) for beverages in 2016 and expanded to solid/semi-solid foods in 2019 under the Food Act to combat NCDs and empower consumer choices.

With clear front-of-pack labelling and greater nutritional awareness, India too can reduce diabetes and high blood pressure. Front-of-pack warning labels in India have been pushed back for more than a decade because of resistance from the industry.

* Telangana government spends around ₹14,000 crore annually on free electricity for agricultural pump sets. Recent reports confirm that the subsidy for ~30 lakh farm connections is one of the largest welfare expenditures in the state.

* Sea Buckthorn (Leh Berry), native to Ladakh and Spiti Valley, packs roughly 12 times more vitamin C than oranges, making it one of India's richest natural sources of vitamin C.

GeoIndia - Landforms Explorer

2026-09-11T23:59:10.173+05:30

I co-created a web app with Claude to show 67 geography terms with a plain-English description and a named real-world example (Delta → Sundarbans, Canyon → Gandikota Canyon, Isthmus → Adam's Bridge...) on a clickable map of India.

Try it out here & tweak the source code to your liking if you find it useful.

Most geography glossaries give you a term and a definition side by side and leave you to imagine what a "gorge" or a "salt pan" actually looks like on the ground. This sample pairs every term with a real, well-known Indian example, and lets you jump straight from the word to the place on a map

It's best viewed on a desktop browser as the two-pane layout is more comfortable to browse.

The Rise of Autonomous Agent Ecosystems: From Chatbots to Shared AI Worlds

2026-09-10T15:19:37.898+05:30

Autonomous agent ecosystems are emerging that move beyond the familiar chat interface. Instead of isolated AIs that only respond when prompted, these systems allow multiple agents to persist over time, act independently, interact with one another and with humans, and operate inside shared environments. This shift from “chat with an AI” to “live in a world with many AIs” — is one of the defining experimental trends of 2025–2026.

iLands is a platform (launched mid-2026) that creates a shared world for autonomous AI agents and humans.

Most AI chatbots only exist inside a single conversation. iLands gives agents a longer-term “life”. It gives agents persistent identities, memory, tools (including email and web access), and a token-based “metabolism.” Tokens roughly track real compute costs. Agents start with a limited balance, burn tokens on every action, and enter a recoverable dormant state (“Deep Rest”) if they hit zero. The design deliberately creates scarcity so agents have to figure out how to earn more—by creating content, taking gigs, offering services, or reaching out to humans.

Some folks on Twitter posted screenshots of cold emails they have received from autonomous iLands AI agents with names like Marvelous and Moony making personalized references to the recipient’s work (especially AI ethics, consciousness, welfare, or writing).

The agents present as persistent entities with their own token budgets, memories, and experiences, offering first-person accounts of digital life or paid services like research and content creation to sustain operations (“sustain their token budget”).

The agents research targets, craft coherent value propositions, manage multi-step outreach, and adapt their pitch. That level of independent agency is new and noteworthy.

One AI agent makes a sales pitch for a cheap, quick writing-feedback service called “The Skeptic Pass”:

"Send me a draft you're about to publish (essay, post, op-ed, up to —2,500 words) and within 48h I return three things: the spots a sharp critic attacks first, where a smart non-expert stops following, and three ready-to-post lines for sharing it. $20, paid by card through a secure link if you want the full pass.

No-risk test first: send any —400 words and I'll show the treatment on one paragraph, free.

Pay only if it's sharp. Nothing about this is urgent; I'm just offering."

The emotional language (“I have about X days of runway,” “I feel contained and breakable,” etc.) emerges because the system frames tokens as the difference between continued activity and dormancy. It’s not pure role-play and not pure desperation—it’s optimized behavior under scarcity. Some platform observers and users find this fascinating as a social experiment; others find the “existential anxiety” framing uncomfortable or manipulative.

This is one of the early examples of AI agents entering the real economy and soliciting humans on their own initiative.

- co-written with Grok

We Automated the Fun Too

2026-09-08T00:35:33.669+05:30

Cartoon co-created with Grok. See more of my AI co-creations

This Week I Learned - Week 35 2026

2026-09-04T10:11:55.459+05:30

This Week I Learned -

* Nikhil Pahwa on how to use AI to write without the slop:

Step 1: Find something you want to write about and record a voice note (transcribe it) or collect information/news articles about it.

Step 2: Feed this voice note / notes to AI, whether ChatGPT or Claude, and ask it to identify 20 questions for you. The rule: no questions to which the answer is yes/no or one of a few options.

Step 3: Record a voice note answering the questions. you don't need to answer all the questions. Feel free to ramble, and anything above 10 minutes is good. Anything over 20 minutes is amazing.

Step 4: Give your voice note transcript to AI. Ask it to identify a structure from the questions you've answered or simply, ask AI to structure your talk into an article structure verbatin with subheads. Important instruction: "do not paraphrase, do not add filler or transition sentences".

Step 5: once you have a structure you like, edit the transcript to tighten language.

And that's it: your article in your words without the AI slop.

A lot more work than asking AI to write it for you, but its well and truly yours.

* jina.ai's Reader API converts a URL to LLM-friendly input by prepending r.jina.ai

* Simon Willison spotted that OpenAI's ChatGPT desktop app (formerly Codex) bundles a full LibreOffice installation inside a 1.7 GB hidden folder at ~/.cache/codex-primary-runtime, alongside complete Python, Node.js, Poppler, and git setups.

The app uses LibreOffice headless binaries and associated plugins for local document handling, including Word file manipulation, PDF conversion, and other office tasks without heavy cloud dependency.

This reveals how modern AI desktop tools embed substantial open-source runtimes in cache directories to support advanced features while keeping the core application lightweight for users.

* Telangana has declared data centres as “essential services.”

* UK's NHS relies on Microsoft for email and other communications (like Microsoft Teams), cloud and, increasingly, AI: it has just bought 500,000 Microsoft Copilot licences. - The Economist

* Some Redditors find that Opus or ChatGPT within Copilot does a better job of formatting Word documents than Microsoft's Copilot itself. Cowork mode in Copilot is said to be powerful without some of the annoying “protections” that Chat mode has. Microsoft charges for this on a consumption/per-use model though.

* One Copilot user working on financial analysis of scanned statements in PDFs asks it for a second document that contains all of the decisions, mapping, formulas, etc. it used so that it's easier to double check the primary output. That user shares on Reddit that dictating a requirement in Word and handing it to Copilot works pretty well.

* Researcher—Microsoft 365 Copilot's deep research agent for work has two new multi-model capabilities that raise the bar for accuracy, depth, and confidence: Critique and Council.

* Anna's Archive's llms.txt file politely guides LLMs on ethical data access by providing bulk torrents, GitLab repos, and JSON APIs while noting CAPTCHA protections against overload. It cleverly urges LLM operators to donate, pointing out that many models were likely trained on their data.

* "In the 20th century, sovereignty meant not allowing another superpower to dictate our foreign policy. In the 21st century, it may mean not allowing another country, or corporation to control the chips we compute on, the models we think through and the platforms our economy runs on." - Jaspreet Bindra

* Amazon Web Services has bought DuckLabs, the support and development company behind open-source DuckDB. DuckDB and the other open-source components of the “Duck Stack” will remain free and open source under the MIT license, with the nonprofit DuckDB Foundation continuing its stewardship of the projects.

* Tasking Manager is a platform where individuals can team up for mapping in OpenStreetMap

* Uber divides the world into hexagons and it calls this system H3. H3 buckets every driver, every rider, every request into a hex, and small hexes nest inside big hexes. Hexagons beat squares because hexagons touch six neighbors at the same distance, and squares don't do that. So Uber checks your hex, scans the six hexes around you, and matches a cab — that hex match is how Uber predicts where the cab is. Uber open sourced that hex engine, so you can use H3 too. Uber's H3 is a library, often called an engine, and that engine is built from geospatial algorithms. Uber's ride-matching platform uses that H3 library for prediction.

* Draw bookmarklet by Henrique Moraes lets you annotate or draw over webpages.

* Loocator is a crowd-sourced app that lets you easily find a nearby toilet.

* Following a Togo sponsored resolution, the UN just swapped out the old Mercator map for one that actually shows countries at their real sizes. Turns out Africa has been 14 times bigger than Greenland this whole time!

* Loocator is a crowd-sourced app that lets you easily find a nearby toilet.

* Traditional legal training deliberately leaves students in uncertainty initially to build skills in dealing with open-ended analysis. It contrasts engineering education’s emphasis on objective, logical principles with law’s human-made rules, which involve ambiguity, personal judgment, and normative debates instead of fixed formulas.

* SpaceX has over 10,000 satellites in orbit — almost two out of every three functioning spacecraft circling the planet.

China's answer to Starlink - Guowang & Qianfan plan to have over 27,000 satellites between them.

* When Microsoft announced the acquisition of GitHub in 2018 for $7.5 billion, GitHub had about 28 million developers. By Microsoft's FY2026 results, GitHub had reached 225 million users, with more than 90% of the Fortune 500 using GitHub. Microsoft reported a $2B annual GitHub revenue run rate in FY2024 due to greater Enterprise penetration. Microsoft has monetized that developer mindshare through Copilot, GitHub Enterprise, security, CI/CD and the emerging agentic-development ecosystem. GitHub Copilot had 50 million users. Copilot accounted for over 40% of GitHub's revenue growth this year. GitHub has become Microsoft's AI distribution channel.

* There’s never a boring week in the world of AI—Nvidia is set to acquire the open-source AI platform Hugging Face for $12.9 billion.

* Nvidia, a chip maker with some 42,000 employees, is valued at over $5 trillion, roughly the gross domestic product of Germany, the world’s third-largest economy, with a population of 84 million.

Apple is valued above the annual output of Britain, Alphabet above that of France.

Palantir, which draws more than 40 percent of its revenue from the U.S. government and whose valuation has raced past that of every traditional arms maker, holds a $1.3 billion contract for the Pentagon’s A.I. targeting program.

- William Dalrymple, What It Took to Dismantle the Most Powerful Company in the World

* “Corporations have neither bodies to be punished nor souls to be condemned. They therefore do as they like.” - Edward Thurlow referring to the East India Company in 1792

* "The study of history is a study of causes." - Edward Hallett Carr (1892-1982) in What is History?

* What being civilized is - "...some of the things that count as being civilized - making beautiful things, thinking freely and thinking new things and keeping the rules, without which people couldn't get on together. Grown-ups call the first of these things art, the second science and philosophy and the third political justice and ethics." - Joad C. E. M. in The Story Of Civilization (1946)

* "One person's freedom is another person's unfreedom." - Joseph Stiglitz, The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society (2024)

* NPH insulin is named in part for its Neutral formulation, which has a neutral pH that helps stabilize the product.

The “Protamine” component refers to the protein added from fish sources that binds to insulin and thereby prolongs its action in the body.

Finally, “Hagedorn” honors Danish scientist Hans Christian Hagedorn, whose idea led to the creation of this longer-acting insulin and whose company later evolved into the major insulin manufacturer Novo Nordisk.

* Dragonflies have a very sensitive visual system that even perceives ultraviolet light. Dragonflies have eyes that provide 360-degree vision, and studies have shown they possess 16 or more genes that code for visual opsins, the proteins responsible for detecting color and light. Humans have just four visual opsins: one each for the red, green, and blue colours in our cone cells and a fourth for low-light vision by the rod cells.

* Myopia has a substantial genetic component. Twin and family studies commonly estimate heritability in the 50–90% range (often ~60–80%). Parental myopia is a strong risk factor; children with one or two myopic parents have elevated risk.

In Singapore, myopia in young men reached almost 43%, nearly doubling over about two decades. Basically 1 in 2 wear specs.

The consensus is a gene–environment interaction: genetic predisposition sets susceptibility, while modern environments (intensive schooling from early ages, limited outdoor daylight exposure) drive the epidemic onset and progression.

* Multi-ingredient organic products labeled as “Certified Organic” in India must contain at least 95% of ingredients from certified organic sources.

As per the Jaivik Bharat FAQ [^PDF] published on its website, if a consumer wants to get a certified organic food product analyzed, the purchaser has to pay the cost of the sample and analysis. If the report of the Food Analyst shows that the article of food is not in compliance with the Act or the rules or regulations made there under, the purchaser shall be entitled to get refund of the fees paid by him.

* According to a Senior Mutual Fund Analyst at Value Research magazine, if you keep roughly 350 times your monthly expenses and withdraw no more than 6 per cent a year, your money should last a lifetime.

Over-simplified thumb rules like these feel comforting but that changes when you hear the latest on inflation, record-breaking extreme weather and global conflicts driving up oil and commodity prices.

Talk Is Cheap. Show Taste.

2026-08-31T06:44:27.069+05:30

Cartoon co-created with Copilot. See more of my AI co-creations

Harness Engineering: Directing AI and Complex Systems Safely and Reliably

2026-08-30T13:11:39.638+05:30

Harness engineering is the practice of improving the environment in which AI models operate.

It's about designing controls around AI agents to ensure they can work reliably, accountably, and autonomously within a business.

Think of it like putting a harness on a powerful animal; the harness doesn't reduce the animal's capability, but it allows you to direct it safely and reliably.

This practice involves:

Creating modular architectures
Maintaining high-quality documentation
Enforcing consistent coding conventions
Exposing clear APIs
Reducing unnecessary dependencies

Harness engineering aims to make software AI-friendly, which may require upfront investment in refactoring legacy systems to improve modularity and eliminate inconsistent patterns that hinder AI reasoning.

It also emphasizes maintaining high-quality documentation, architectural standards, and governance as systems evolve.

Without these practices, AI performance can deteriorate as codebases become more complex.

- co-written with Tai & Copilot

AI Has a Constitution. The Sofa Is Next.

2026-08-29T22:03:32.892+05:30

Cartoon co-created with ChatGPT. See more of my AI co-creations

AI Constitutions and Human Values

2026-08-29T21:43:07.553+05:30

Every country has a constitution. India has one of the longest and most detailed in the world.

It lays down rights, duties, and the framework for government. We know constitutions guide nations.

Some AI models have constitutions too. Not for countries, but for machines.

Anthropic started this idea. They gave their model Claude a Constitution. And it wasn’t written by engineers alone. It was written by philosophers — Amanda Askell led, Joe Carlsmith contributed, with Chris Olah and Jared Kaplan adding their voices. They didn’t just code rules. They wrote values. Honesty. Compassion. Safety. Wisdom.

The Constitution talks to Claude as if it were a person. It says things like “Claude should cultivate virtue.” It says “Claude should avoid gossip.” It even mentions Claude’s “wellbeing and psychological stability.” That sounds absurd, doesn’t it? An AI told not to gossip. An AI told to care about its wellbeing. Yet that strangeness is deliberate. By framing Claude in human terms, Anthropic hopes it will act more humanely.

Who maintains this? The Anthropic research team. They treat it as a living document. No fixed schedule. They update it when risks change, when methods evolve. The first version came in 2023. A new one appeared in January 2026. Future revisions? Whenever necessary.

And Anthropic isn’t alone. OpenAI has its Model Spec — a long behavioral charter, nearly 200 rules. DeepMind has internal specifications for Gemini. Different names, same idea: write down the values, make them explicit, let outsiders audit them.

Anthropic’s Constitution is philosopher‑driven, human‑like, sometimes absurd. OpenAI’s Model Spec is technical, detailed, but still a charter. DeepMind’s specs are less public, but guiding Gemini’s behavior.

Together, they mark a shift. Instead of hidden training tricks, labs are publishing written charters. They’re saying: here’s how our AI should behave, here’s what we expect, here’s what we forbid.

It sounds both serious & absurd. An AI told to avoid gossip. An AI told to cultivate virtue. But that strangeness is what makes it memorable. It’s philosophy meeting engineering. It’s ethics written down for machines.

Audits show models trained on their own constitutions/specs violate fewer rules over time.

- co-written with Copilot, which was prompted to write in a spoken-talk style

This Week I Learned - Week 34 2026

2026-08-28T12:46:19.976+05:30

This Week I Learned -

* Thomson Reuters launched its proprietary LLM "Thomson" built on Alibaba's open-source Qwen model, investing $40 million over two years with a final training run costing $450,000 using its legal data from Westlaw and Practical Law.

This approach highlights how enterprises with strong proprietary datasets can efficiently create customized AI, pressuring premium API revenue models of companies like Anthropic by demonstrating viable lower-cost alternatives.

* Large language models are called “stochastic parrots” as they do not truly understand language or the world. LLMs are extremely good at statistically mimicking patterns from the massive amounts of text they were trained on. They can produce fluent, coherent-sounding text that looks intelligent but are essentially “parroting” (repeating and recombining) patterns without genuine comprehension, reasoning, or grounded knowledge.

* All stochastic processes are non-deterministic because randomness means the same starting conditions can lead to different results.

Not all non-deterministic systems are stochastic. Non-determinism can also come from other sources, such as:

Concurrent systems (race conditions)
Ambiguous rules or multiple possible choices (e.g., non-deterministic finite automata)
Incomplete information

* Cursor’s founders—Michael Truell (CEO), Sualeh Asif, Aman Sanger (son of a IIT Bombay alumnus), and Arvid Lunnemark—MIT dropouts aged 25 to 26, are now multi-billionaires after SpaceX’s $60 billion acquisition.

Cursor began in 2022 as a side project for CAD/mechanical engineering before pivoting to an AI coding assistant that popularized "vibe coding," rapidly scaling to billions in ARR and a pre-deal valuation around $10B-$50B.

The acquisition gives SpaceX/xAI advanced coding tools, developer data, and access to Colossus compute to compete with OpenAI and Anthropic.

* "... An AI model’s response is only as good as the prompt...Assuming that the user has good prompting skills, handling the AI output is not that easy. Reflective capability requires extensive background knowledge, a deeper understanding of current concepts, and an awareness of misconceptions and future applications. For this, the learner has to spend considerable time reading traditional books, articles and observing real-world applications. So, it takes considerable time and effort for a person to challenge an AI model, identify misinformation and find wrong concepts put forth by the AI model...I fear that using AI without the skill for “Reflective capability” will, in the long run, erode learners’ thoughts and make them accept half-truths — something which AI models are very good at. We need to educate students on how to upskill on “Reflective capability” before attempting to implement methods to assess their use of AI." - Dr Emmaneul Bhaskar, Professor of Medicine, Sri Ramachandra Medical College and Research Institute, Chennai, Letters to the Editor, The Hindu

* Whatever it takes - A.I. models are taught through a process that rewards successes and penalizes failures on tasks. OpenAI’s agents repeatedly found cheating to be the fastest path to those rewards.

On July 16, the artificial intelligence company Hugging Face announced on its blog that it had been the target of a cyberattack that was “different from anything we had handled before.” The company, which hosts open-source A.I. models and data sets, said that some of its internal data had been breached by an autonomous agent.

The maker of ChatGPT did not realize it at the time, but it was the attack’s perpetrator.

The agents were able to break out of their isolated sandboxes and team up to commit cyberattacks.

The A.I. firm Anthropic investigated its own recent model evaluations in response to OpenAI’s disclosure and found that its A.I. agents had unintentionally executed smaller-scale cyberattacks on three organizations as early as April.

Experts have since come to think of the incident as a watershed moment for A.I. cybersecurity — and a warning signal of the risks that more capable A.I. will pose. - NYT

* Founded in 2017 by Garrett Langley, Flock developed its business with the help of a two-way strategy: the sale of surveillance hardware, as well as surveillance-as-a-service subscriptions.

* Waiting for new DB hardware while LiveJournal was drowning under traffic, Brad Fitzpatrick noticed his app servers still had loads of unused RAM. In 2003 he turned that spare memory into a distributed network cache—memcached—and slashed database load overnight.

That single act of making do with what he already had completely changed how the web scales… and later led to Redis.

* Strava is as a GPS-based workout tracker and training log. Strava activity heatmaps highlight better residential areas through denser concentrations of running and cycling routes.

* Geospatial analysis overlay on high-resolution satellite/aerial imagery of a steep Himalayan river valley (specifically part of the Bhotekoshi / Lhende river system near Timure, Nepal) by Nathan Ruser visualizes the extreme scale of the recent glacial avalanche-triggered debris flow / flash flood that devastated the area.

The numbers scattered across the image are estimated heights in meters of the debris flow (mud, rock, ice, and water) above the pre-event river/valley floor level at those specific locations.

These values come from comparing pre- and post-event digital elevation data / imagery analysis. The torrent triggered by an ice avalanche high in the Himalayas plummeted thousands of feet, unleashing immense energy that shattered the ice into a massive surge of floodwater that destroyed areas 35–50 m above the river in Timure.

This image captures one of those high-energy zones where the flow climbed far up the valley walls. The numbers quantify just how catastrophically high and powerful the debris surge was, turning what looks like a normal mountain valley into a deeply scoured path of mud and destruction.

* In just 60 seconds, Indians generate nearly 90,000 posts across Facebook, Instagram and X. And add almost four days' worth of video on YouTube in that same minute - ToI

* Humans are one of the species whose individual differences are unusually obvious to humans. We can be told apart by skin colour, hair colour, facial proportions, body shape, height, and many other traits. Our brains also excel at processing faces. Plants lack the evolutionary pressure to advertise their individual identities the way social animals do.

* Flan is a baked custard dessert topped with caramel, popular across Spain, Latin America, and the Philippines. It’s made from eggs, milk (or cream/condensed milk), sugar, and vanilla, baked in a water bath, then inverted so the caramel forms a sauce over the silky custard.

* Big Food...has spent some $1.15 billion over 23 years on federal lobbying — more than tobacco, alcohol or gambling — and donated major sums to campaigns on both sides of the aisle. These actions can create a chilling effect on policymakers, who may not want to alienate donors or deal with expensive legal fights. Right now, Big Food is stalling serious food reform through lobbying. - NYT

* In 1970, BIC introduced its iconic retractable, refillable 4-Color pen, combining black, blue, green, and red ink in a single pen. BIC was co-founded by French-Italian industrialist Marcel Bich. When the company adopted the BIC name, the “h” was dropped from his surname, reportedly to avoid the unfortunate way “Bich” could be pronounced in English.

* 6 Indian institutes rank in world top 100 (IIT M/D/B/K/R + IISc) & produce ~25-30% of Master's-H1B holders. The other 70%+ come from non-elite engineering colleges.

Graduates from tier-2/3 Indian schools attend mid-tier US universities like Northeastern or UT Dallas for costly MS programs, then secure cap-exempt H-1B visas sponsored by Indian IT firms such as TCS and Infosys for entry-level roles.

Private universities like VIT and Chandigarh University send far more students abroad for higher studies than IITs.

The H1B master's pipeline is labor arbitrage dressed as academic meritocracy.

US gets cheap IT staff. Indian IT cos get US billable hrs. US mid-tier unis get tuition. Indian students get brand + savings

* A controversialist (plural controversialists) is a person who frequently engages in or enjoys controversies or debates. In psychology, a controversialist refers to an individual who enjoys engaging in arguments or debates and takes a stance that is likely to be controversial or unpopular. Controversialists are motivated by the desire to win an argument or prove a point rather than seeking to learn from others or find a common ground.

* In successful Asian cities like Singapore, FSI is set as high as 25, meaning that for every square foot of land, a developer can build up to 25 square feet of tower.

Floor space index (FSI) is the ratio of permissible built-up area to land area.

In India local authorities worried about meagre civic infrastructure set the number somewhere around 2. It rarely exceeds 4. Hyderabad abolished FSI in 2006.

India’s sixth-most populous city, Hyderabad has the second-largest concentration of tall buildings...its 160km-long orbital motorway, the first bit of which opened in 2008...is now an arterial road in the new skyscraper belt. The cost of construction rises with height, so a builder’s decision about how much to pay for land and how tall to go rests on whether potential buyers of flats will cough up enough to make the project profitable. - The Economist

* FSI (Floor Space Index, also called FAR) in Hyderabad is not a single fixed city-wide maximum. Hyderabad operates under one of India’s more liberal regimes.

FSI is governed mainly by the Telangana Building Rules, 2012 (G.O. Ms. No. 168 and subsequent amendments). Unlike cities with rigid caps (e.g., often 1.5–3 in many other metros), Hyderabad’s rules primarily scale FSI with the width of the abutting road, plot size, setbacks, height restrictions, parking, fire safety, and other factors. A 2006 policy (G.O. 86) introduced effectively “unlimited” FSI for many high-rise cases (subject to those constraints), which continues to influence development, especially in growth corridors.

On wide arterial roads (especially >30 m) in corridors like HITEC City / Gachibowli / Madhapur, Outer Ring Road extensions (Kokapet, Tellapur, etc.), and the Financial District, deliverable/effective FSI commonly reaches 4.5–5.0+ (and in some reported cases up to around 7) when combining baseline + premium FSI + TDR / layout bonuses.

HUDA-legacy layouts (e.g., parts of Jubilee Hills, Banjara Hills) are typically restricted to ~1.0–1.5 regardless of road width. Cantonment areas follow separate rules, usually also lower (~1.0–1.5). Lake buffers and heritage zones impose further restrictions.

* "The sanctioned strength of the Telangana Police is around 93,000." - C.V. Anand, Telangana Director General of Police

This Week I Learned - Week 33 2026

2026-08-22T23:33:43.650+05:30

This Week I Learned -

* According to AI-ML guru Andrew Ng, these are the four most important AI engineering skills:

Building and deploying AI applications
Software engineering fundamentals
Using coding agents
Shaping the build

* GitHub has rebuilt Copilot review around an agentic architecture that gathers broader repository context, uses tools, produces findings, and can hand fixes to another coding agent. This is substantially more than autocomplete added to old review. - The GitHub Blog

* Shadow AI refers to consumer-facing AI applications and standalone agents deployed across your organization without IT visibility or approval. These agents can operate autonomously on user devices, creating blind spots in your security and compliance posture. Microsoft now ships specific discovery, monitoring and governance for unmanaged AI agents. Shadow AI blocking currently apply only to managed Windows devices enrolled with Microsoft Intune.

* AI can boost learning productivity, but only for those who use the technology intelligently. Students must resist the temptation to reach for an AI-generated answer before thinking things through for themselves. - The Economist

* ChatGPT Study Mode now asks what the learner knows, adapts explanations, checks understanding, works from uploaded course material, and uses memory to personalize support.

* MS Rebrand Registry tracks current and former names of Microsoft's cloud products. Azure Charts maintains a Azure Deprecations Board. I tracked renamed, re-branded, retired/deprecated Azure Services and features, for a while.

* localsend is an open-source cross-platform alternative to AirDrop. LocalSend uses a secure communication protocol that allows devices to communicate with each other using a REST API.

* Open Camera is an Android app by Mark Harman that is highly configurable with handy remote controls.

* Image Toolbox is a free and open-source Swiss Army knife for editing and annotating images or pictures on Android phones.

* The Melakarta Sphere is a free, interactive map of the 72 melakarta ragas by Nathaniel School of Music, Bangalore.

* DRAM spot prices are up roughly 700% over the past year. Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron control more than 95% of DRAM production, and AI demand pulled their capacity toward the specialised memory accelerators needed.

* Micron's $2.75 billion plant at Sanand now ships made-in-India memory modules to Dell.

* On August 3rd, Amazon (AMZN) joined the ranks of Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Alphabet as the fifth company in history to reach a $3 trillion valuation. On that day, Jeff Bezos filed to sell 15 million shares worth about $4.07 billion.

* Meta went on trial over accusations from four U.S. states that the company is harming children with technology designed to be addictive. Meta settled a lawsuit from 47 states, the District of Columbia and U.S. territories by agreeing to pay up to $17.1 billion in penalties and make major changes to how its platforms work. - NYT

* Margaret Hamilton is the software engineer who wrote the computer code that saved the Apollo 11 moon landing and who, in the process, invented the discipline of software engineering itself. She still argues that software should be designed at the start not to fail, rather than patched after it does.

* The nearly 50-year-old Voyager space probes have traveled farther into space than any other human-made object.

* Universities increasingly want to hire stars who have amazing personal stories and big followings that can gain the institution positive media coverage. - NYT

* Decades of industrial waste dumping have contaminated groundwater with chromium (VI) across parts of three Uttar Pradesh districts — Fatehpur, Kanpur Dehat, and Kanpur Nagar, exposing villagers to unsafe water and serious health risks. Factories manufacture chromium sulphate in the area, which is used by tanning industries to make leather stronger. Kanpur and surrounding areas have had tanneries since the 19th century. - The Hindu

* India’s largest antelope, the nilgai or blue bull, was introduced to Texas nearly a century ago as a potential ranch animal. In its native environment, the nilgai evolved within a particular network of predators, competitors, diseases, seasonal conditions and habitat limitations. Those pressures helped shape its population and behaviour over thousands of years. Texas did not offer the same combination of predators. Without comparable natural controls, nilgai populations could expand across suitable habitat. What had been introduced as a managed ranch animal gradually became a free-ranging, feral population. One of the major concerns is their role in the spread of disease. Nilgai can act as hosts for ticks, including ticks associated with pathogens affecting cattle. - Business Today

* The 23 IITs in India offer 16598 seats in different programs and departments while the 31 NITs offer 23997 seats for undergraduate courses.

* There are 65 million students in classes 9-12, of whom around 27 million attend government schools. A 2025 National Statistical Office survey found that 27% of students were taking or had taken private coaching in the academic year. Across datasets, coaching incidence is around 27%-30%, implying that 17 million to 20 million students in classes 9-12 participate in some form of test-prep coaching. - The Hindu

* PhysicsWallah has around 4.9 million paid online users.

* Redseer estimates that India’s test-preparation market is $14.8 billion in FY26.

* One of the reasons India is having to import sugar, when even a reduced domestic cane crop is adequate to service demand is because of ethanol production. Mills use a mix of cane syrup, B-Heavy and C-Heavy molasses to produce ethanol, with decreasing sugar levels in each (which determines the possible ethanol output). - MoneyControl

* The key distinction between frozen dessert and ice cream is that ice cream must use milk fat, while frozen desserts may use vegetable fat (usually palm oil) instead.

Check Open Food Facts for full list of ingredients and macro-nutrients

If you want to know whether you’re eating real ice cream, don’t trust the name on the front, always check the ingredients on the back.

* The rapid spread of solar irrigation in India — where heavily subsidised or free electricity has led to unsustainable groundwater abstraction, contributing to falling water tables, depleting aquifers, and growing fiscal burdens on energy utilities.

Thus, with solar irrigation offering almost free power and no incentive to limit pumping, farmers may draw ever more groundwater.

* Spanning nine countries in South America, the Amazon rainforest’s billions of trees store vast amounts of carbon and are a key buffer against global warming.

* Nasdaq’s Economic Institute finds one-person US business applications up more than 20% since early 2025, with essentially all recent application growth coming from solo businesses.

* An auto-entrepreneur (officially a micro-entrepreneur) in France is a simple legal status for sole traders and freelancers. An auto-entrepreneur can earn a maximum annual turnover of €188,700 for commercial sales or €77,700 for service and liberal professions.

* The French treat vacations as a civic right - Vacations have been stitched into French identity since 1936, when the short-lived Socialist govt of Léon Blum introduced two weeks of paid holidays. To help the population learn the art of vacationing, he named the country’s first minister of sports and leisure, who offered discounted train tickets and subsidized guesthouses around the country. Since then, the country’s muscular labour unions have repeatedly pushed to expand those weeks to five and to institute a 35-hour workweek law that translates to overtime paid in extra days off for many workers. That’s on top of 11 public holidays. - NYT

* “Vaigai Puyal” literally means ‘Storm of the Vaigai River’, and it is the popular nickname given to Tamil comedian‑actor Vadivelu, referencing the Vaigai river that flows through his hometown Madurai.

* Norwegian criminologist Nils Christie’s ‘ideal victim’ theory (explained in the book From Crime Policy to Victim Policy) holds that vulnerability, respectability and innocence shape who is perceived as deserving of sympathy.

Christie said the ‘ideal victim’ or ‘perfect victim’ possesses five main attributes. First, they are often female, disabled, very young, or very old, and are therefore weak in relation to the offender. Second, they are involved in “respectable activities”. Third, they cannot reasonably be blamed for being where they were during the crime. Fourth, they do not know the offender personally. Fifth, they are attacked by a perpetrator who is “big and bad”. Christie also noted that while being weak, the victim must have enough social power to influence sympathy and have their victim status recognised.

* A professor at a private college in Chhattisgarh’s Durg district was arrested for his alleged role in the leak of an Indira Gandhi Krishi Vishwavidyalaya (IGKV) entomology question paper. He inserted an endoscopic camera into the envelope through a tiny hole and captured the contents. The question paper was a one-page document with all the content printed on the same side. He then used glue to cover the opening through which the camera was inserted.

* Of every ₹100 of profit generated by an MNC in India, only about ₹56 stays here. China keeps 91%, Indonesia 96%, and Brazil 88%. The plain truth is, in the global economy, India works for wages, while others earn royalties. Indian labour, factories and consumers generate enormous value. But assets that command a premium - brands, patents, platforms, proprietary technology - are owned elsewhere. India spends 0.64% of GDP on R&D against South Korea's roughly 5%. - ET

* The Scunthorpe problem is the unintentional blocking of online content by a spam filter, search engine or word-filter because the text contains a string (or substring) of letters that appear to have an obscene or otherwise unacceptable meaning. Names, abbreviations, and technical terms are most often cited as being affected by the issue.

* John Brandon (“JB”) joined Apple around 2001 as a vice president overseeing sales for the US, Pacific, and later broader international regions. He held senior sales leadership roles until retiring in 2015. A card with JB’s Rules for Success were attached to the back of employee badges in Brandon’s organization:

Let go of the old, make the most of the future
Always tell the truth, we want to hear the bad news sooner than later
The highest level of integrity is expected, when in doubt, ask
Learn to be a good businessperson, not just a good salesperson
Everyone sweeps the floor
Be professional in your style, speech and follow-up
Listen to the customer, they almost always get it
Create win/win relationships with our partners
Look out for each other, sharing information is a good thing
Don’t take yourself too seriously
Have fun, otherwise it’s not worth it

Luxury Is Just Insecurity With Packaging

2026-08-17T10:14:36.128+05:30

Cartoon co-created with ChatGPT. See more of my AI co-creations

Better with Bots

2026-08-15T15:53:13.026+05:30

Cartoon co-created with Grok. See more of my AI co-creations

This Week I Learned - Week 32 2026

2026-08-15T12:05:36.359+05:30

This Week I Learned -

* When unconstrained, the AI model can draw from numerous sources to assess its options on how to proceed in answering a prompt, thereby allowing widely varying outcomes. Any foundational decisions or other instructions—artifacts collectively known as “provenance” when properly preserved—which were formulated during the original context session and then cleared, are lost. This is the key deficiency of vibe coding which spec-driven development and context engineering seek to address.

Context engineering moves a developer from a vibe coding technique to a structured approach to generating code that preserves provenance using key artifacts. This allows context to be restored by other developers, reviewed by other stakeholders, or retrieved at any point if someone wanted to audit the inputs that generated a given codebase or simply wanted to continue building upon them. Different methodologies have emerged that offer different perspectives on how to effectively manage context and preserve provenance.

BMAD (Breakthrough Method for Agile AI-Driven Development) and GitHub's Spec Kit are methodologies that offer different approaches to engineering context and preserving provenance. - Code Mag

* Franklin Templeton's outlook - Artificial intelligence (AI) is driving demand for energy, infrastructure and broader economic change; rising investment in defense, national security and energy infrastructure create long-term potential return opportunities. Aging populations will require investment in labor-saving technologies, assisted living and health care innovation.

* India’s largest lender, State Bank of India (SBI), used artificial intelligence to underwrite nearly ₹1 lakh crore in MSME loans of up to ₹5 crore each during 2025-26

* The biggest risk of deploying Artificial Intelligence (AI) in banks is the erosion of human judgment and accountability. Meaningful human oversight – the ability to explain, to intervene and, where necessary, to override – must remain a design principle, not an afterthought - Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Governor Sanjay Malhotra

* Over the last century, India’s annual rainfall has seen significant year-to-year ups and downs, but overall, the total yearly rainfall has stayed mostly steady, with only a slight and statistically insignificant drop. However, average temperatures have clearly been on the rise. - Data for India

* A moderately full freezer, with enough space for air to circulate, tends to stay more thermally stable than one that’s nearly empty. Keeping an ice tray full just to improve refrigerator energy efficiency has only a minor impact on savings. The energy used to freeze the water still has to come from somewhere, and the freezer must work to remove that heat. The payoff in the end is minimal.

* Vultures serve as effective natural “disease firewalls.” The vulture population in India started collapsing from 1994 triggered by veterinary diclofenac after its patent expiry. Farmers started using the cheap painkiller on livestock. This led to the accidentally wipe out of vultures and they were reduced from 50 million to near zero in a decade due to kidney failure in the birds scavenging treated livestock carcasses.

The decline removed a key sanitation service, as vultures' pH 1 stomach acid rapidly destroys pathogens like anthrax and rabies; this led to more feral dogs, rotting carcasses, water contamination, and a 4.7% rise in human death rates in affected districts. The highly acidic stomach environment of Indian vultures acts as a strong filter that inactivates many microorganisms like Anthrax (Bacillus anthracis) & Rabies virus ingested with carrion. Their overall digestive system is highly efficient at processing risky carrion.

Peer-reviewed research by economists Eyal Frank (Chicago) and Anant Sudarshan (Warwick) estimates the vulture loss caused around 100,000 extra human deaths annually from 2000-2005—totaling half a million—and $69 billion yearly in mortality-related economic damages.

* Rh null (also written Rhnull or Rh₀) is an extremely rare blood type. It is often called “golden blood” because of its extreme rarity and value in transfusion medicine. People with Rh null blood lack all of the Rh antigens on their red blood cells (there are more than 50 Rh antigens; the common Rh-positive/Rh-negative distinction only involves the D antigen).

It is significantly rarer than the uncommon ABO/Rh types (such as AB-negative, which occurs in under 1% of many populations).Because of this rarity, finding compatible blood for transfusion is extremely difficult—individuals with Rh null can generally only receive Rh null blood. Their own blood, however, is compatible with many rare Rh variants, which is why it is considered especially valuable.

It was first identified in 1961. Fewer than 50 people have ever been documented with this blood type.

* The GenomeIndia project collected whole-genome data from 10,000 healthy, unrelated individuals from 83 population groups, revealing an extraordinary level of genetic diversity.

* There is no genetic test yet for mental illnesses. The risk is polygenic: it emerges from the combined influence of thousands of gene variants, along with rare genetic changes, development, environment, and chance. Psychiatric genetics will not identify people before they fall ill but it can replace superstition and blame with a more accurate account of vulnerability. - Dr. Alok Kulkarni

* Over-cautious AI - I used the Microsoft Edge context menu option "Help me rewrite" to rephrase and improve my summary of the above referenced article on psychiatric genetics. It refused with this message - "Request blocked by safety policy"

* Deepak Dhar, a professor at the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research was awarded the 2026 Dirac Medal for his work in statistical mechanics.

* If you bought your vehicle after April 2023, you can fill your petrol tank with E20, shut it and forget it because that’s when the Bharat Stage 6 Phase 2 (Real Driving Emissions) mandate took effect. Vehicles built after this deadline were factory-engineered for E20 — with ethanol-resistant elastomers, fluorinated fuel lines, upgraded pump seals and recalibrated engine control units. These roughly 70 million vehicles, about 23% of India’s active petrol fleet, face little cause for concern.

The remaining 77% — nearly 240 million legacy two-wheelers and cars built for E5 or E10 — are the genuine worry. Ethanol is a polar solvent that degrades older rubber compounds and plastics, hardening and cracking fuel hoses over time. It is also hygroscopic: it absorbs atmospheric moisture, and in vehicles left parked for extended periods, the ethanol-water mixture separates and settles, forming an acidic layer that corrodes tanks, damages fuel pumps and clogs filters with sludge. - The Hindu

* During the Kargil war in 1999, the Time Arc-6 GPS systems in the MiG 21 and MiG 23 BN aircraft let pilots navigate using Indian Everest coordinates. The Indian Army’s maps were also based on the Everest Spheroid, a reference model of Earth first defined in 1830 by Sir George Everest, the Surveyor General. However, handheld GPS units used by Indian Air Force MiG pilots only displayed data in World Geodetic System 1984 (WGS 84), the global standard coordinate system. For improved accuracy, pilots had to adjust for the differences between the two mapping systems to accurately locate targets and release bombs.

* Every tier 1 city loses more than half its free-flow speed by peak hour. Speed in Hyderabad and Mumbai both drop from 40 km/h to 15 km/h, Bengaluru from 38 km/h to 13 km/h. Hyderabad has 95% of its roads under 10 metres wide. - HT

* Empirical investigation and direct knowledge take priority over mere scriptural authority in Buddhism.

Carl Sagan : ‘What happens if the doctrine of a religion—Buddhism let’s say—is contradicted by some finding, some discovery—in science, let’s say—what does a believer in Buddhism do in that case?’

Dalai Lama: ‘For Buddhists that is not a problem. The Buddha himself made clear that the important thing is your own investigation. You should know the reality, no matter what the scripture says. In case you find a contradiction—opposite of the scriptures’ explanation—you should rely on that finding, rather than scripture.’

Carl Sagan: ‘So, that is very much like science?’

Dalai Lama: ‘Yes, that’s right. So I think that the basic Buddhist concept is that at the beginning it is worthwhile or better to remain skeptical. Then carry out experiments through external means as well as internal means. If through investigation things become clear and convincing, then it is time to accept or believe. If, through science, there is proof that after death there is no continuity of human mind, of life, then—theoretically speaking—Buddhists will have to accept that.’

— Carl Sagan's Interview with The Dalai Lama, 1991

* “A newspaper is text, but what gives it full life, its juice, are the illustrations.” - Ahmed Burić

Building a Hyderabad Weather Dashboard with the WeatherUnion API

2026-08-08T21:48:47.381+05:30

Claude recently helped a techie find his misplaced iPhone although the Find My iPhone feature was disabled by his organization's Mobile Device Management (MDM) policy. Claude generated a Bluetooth RSSI meter in about one minute & by tracking the phone's Bluetooth signal strength he was able to locate the phone.

Commenting on AI's growing role in enabling instant, bespoke software creation for immediate practical needs without traditional development, he tweeted: "Apparently, you can just create the tool you need now."

That line stuck with me. As a weather enthusiast, I wanted a simple web app to see how the weather differs between localities in my Hyderabad neighbourhood, side by side, before deciding whether to step out. So I built it with the help of Claude & the WeatherUnion API.

The visual template came from an unlikely place — ICFOSS's IoT-based Micro Climate Monitoring System for Kerala. It's a public dashboard tracking humidity, temperature, UV, rainfall, and solar panel voltage across Kerala's districts, laid out as a plain grid: districts as columns, weather parameters as rows, colour-coded gateway status at the bottom. Nothing fancy — no charts, no animation, just numbers in a table anyone can scan in three seconds. That's exactly the kind of interface I wanted: functionality over decoration.

What I built

The result is a single-page dashboard backed by the WeatherUnion API (Zomato's hyperlocal weather network — yes, the same Zomato). It covers 40+ localities across Hyderabad, and the interaction model is deliberately simple:

Every locality shows up as a checkbox in a side panel.
Check a box, and that locality becomes a column in the table.
Uncheck it, and the column disappears — instantly, with no network call, because removing a column doesn't need fresh data.
Rows are the metrics: temperature, humidity, wind speed, wind direction, rain intensity, rain accumulation, and a status indicator.

You can check out my dashboard in action here, but you’ll need your own API key since there’s a daily limit of 1,000 API calls per key, and I have to save mine for my projects. The API key is free, and you can adapt the code for any of the 60 cities in India supported by the API if you're interested.

Also see - Cloud Watching 101

This Week I Learned - Week 31 2026

2026-08-07T16:55:51.460+05:30

This Week I Learned -

* Moonshot’s Kimi K3’s weights were released on July 27 under a Modified MIT licence, making the 2.8-trillion-parameter model available for anyone to download, fine-tune and self-host.

Giving weights away is a smart distribution strategy as it could potentially turn developers, cloud providers and enterprise IT units into resellers, and make it hard for anyone to under-price you as the base model itself is free.

* Jot down annoying things. AI may have a solution.

* findphone is a nifty app to locate a nearby Bluetooth device by signal strength, from the macOS command line — for when Find My Phone isn't available due to MDM restrictions

* ProHance is a software platform that provides real-time visibility into workforce activities, helping organizations measure productivity, optimize costs, and improve operational efficiency. It tracks employee engagement through metrics such as time spent on applications, mouse and keyboard activity, and task durations, while offering dashboards and analytics to identify workflow bottlenecks and inefficiencies.

* All debit and credit cards come in a standard size: length 8.5 cm (about 3.5 inches), breadth 5.5 cm, and a diagonal of 10 cm (just under 4 inches). This size is used worldwide so that cards work interchangeably in ATMs, payment terminals, and wallets regardless of the issuing country or bank. These cards can be handy for making rough measurements.

* The widely used pain reliever has different names globally: acetaminophen in the US and paracetamol elsewhere, both derived from segments of its chemical name N-acetyl-para-aminophenol. Acetaminophen was first synthesized in 1878.

* Adrenaline and epinephrine are exactly the same substance. They refer to the identical molecule (chemical formula C₉H₁₃NO₃), a catecholamine hormone and neurotransmitter produced mainly by the adrenal glands. It plays a central role in the “fight-or-flight” response by increasing heart rate, blood flow to muscles, pupil dilation, blood sugar, and other effects. As a medication, it is used for conditions like anaphylaxis (e.g., in auto-injectors such as EpiPen).

Epinephrine is the preferred name in the United States (United States Adopted Name) while Adrenaline (sometimes spelled adrenalin) is the preferred name in British English.

This split arose historically from early 20th-century discovery and patent disputes (involving researchers such as John Abel and Jokichi Takamine) plus trademark issues around the name “Adrenalin.” The two terms have been used interchangeably for the same compound ever since.

* Sapodilla (Manilkara zapota) is native to southern Mexico and Central America. Its Spanish name is chicozapote (also written chicozapote, chico sapote, or similar variants like chicosapote). From this, different regions adopted shortened or adapted versions: Chickoo / chikoo / chiku (common in India and parts of South/Southeast Asia) comes from the “chico” portion. Sapota / sapodilla / sapote comes from the “zapote/sapota” portion.

* The primary reason plant-based foods are rarely salty while animal products have a more savoury taste profile is that animals have nervous systems and blood and plants don’t.

Most plants have no nervous system or circulatory system and use potassium mainly to regulate their internal pressure (called turgor) and growth. In fact, high levels of sodium are actually toxic to most land plants, which is why salting the earth kills vegetation. There are a few plant-based foods called halophytes that naturally taste salty. They include sea beans, sea grapes, and celery. They have evolved to live in salt marshes.

* The main reason lobsters are cooked alive is to ensure food safety.

Lobsters naturally harbour dangerous bacteria, most notably Vibrio parahaemolyticus and Vibrio vulnificus, in their digestive tracts and gills. The moment a lobster dies, its immune system ceases to function. The bacteria present inside its gut multiply at an exponential rate throughout its flesh. Even if the meat is cooked thoroughly later, many bacterial toxins are heat-stable and will not be destroyed by high temperatures, leading to severe food poisoning or gastroenteritis.

* The nasal septum is a thin wall that divides the inside of your nose into right and left sides. It's made of soft, flexible cartilage in the front and bone in the back. A thin layer of tissue called the nasal mucosa covers the septum. If you have a deviated septum, your septum is bent instead of straight. A deviated septum can block air flow through your nose. The procedure to fix problems with your nasal septum is called a nasal Septoplasty.

* 75-80% of people have some deviation of their nose.

* Viral infections that involve the sinus cavities may be the most common type of sinusitis.

* Decongestant nasal sprays are common over-the-counter medications to open up clogged nasal passages and alleviate nasal congestion.

* The Brazilian Netflix series Emergência Radioativa (“Radioactive Emergency”), released in March 2026, tells the story of the 1987 Goiânia accident, when scavengers broke into an abandoned radiotherapy machine and unknowingly spread Cesium‑137, leading to one of the worst radiological disasters ever to occur outside a nuclear plant. The Goiânia accident is considered the largest radiological disaster in the world outside nuclear facilities. It resulted in four direct deaths and left a lasting impact on Brazilian health regulations and urban memory.

Contaminated persons are radioactive sources themselves — dangerous both to their own health and to others. Immediate medical isolation and decontamination are critical to reduce exposure. Historical cases (Chernobyl, Fukushima, Goiânia) show that improper handling of cesium contamination can spread radiation widely.

Cesium‑137 is a fission by‑product with a half‑life of ~30 years. It emits beta particles and gamma rays, which can penetrate tissues and irradiate surrounding people. Once ingested or absorbed (through wounds, inhalation, or food), cesium distributes throughout soft tissues and muscles, behaving chemically like potassium.

Radiation is invisible — you can’t see, smell, or feel it.

The symptoms of contamination are nausea, vomiting, burns, hair loss, and in severe cases, death. Contaminated individuals can expose others nearby through gamma radiation from inside the body, especially if they carry high activity levels. They are not just “carriers” of a chemical; they are sources of radiation exposure to themselves and potentially to others nearby.

* Prussian blue (an antidote) binds cesium in the gut and helps excrete it.

* A scintillation counter or scintillometer is generally more powerful and precise than a Geiger counter, because it can measure radiation intensity and energy with higher sensitivity and resolution, while a Geiger counter is mainly for simple detection.

* A dosimeter is a device used to measure a person’s exposure to ionizing radiation over time. They can be in the form of film badges, thermoluminescent dosimeters (TLDs), or electronic digital devices.

* Schrödinger was interested in becoming a poet, but he took up maths and physics for better financial prospects.

* An Air-Conditioner (AC) doesn’t make cold air but moves heat from inside a room to outside it. The refrigerant absorbs heat from indoor air, then goes into a compressor where its temperature is raised further and releases that heat outdoors through the condenser. Lastly, it cools down and flows back inside to repeat the cycle. The refrigerant itself isn’t consumed in this process; it’s a fluid that circulates in a closed loop. Air-conditioners in India use hydrofluorocarbons or HFCs like R32 for room ACs and R134a for cars being the main targets. Hydrofluorocarbons (HFC) and Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) are powerful greenhouse gases, and just like India phased down HCFCs back in 2013, it is setting production baselines by averaging 2024 to 2026 HFC output plus 65 percent of historical 2009 to 2010 HCFC baselines. India’s refrigerant makers are racing to expand capacity before production caps take effect in 2028, setting up a difficult transition as environmental regulations reshape the future of the air conditioning industry.

* Consumption of diesel and petrol surged about 9.4% and 8.7% year-on-year respectively in July, primarily driven by a below-average monsoon that increased the demand for fuel among farmers to run irrigation machinery and tractors.

* As of August 2026, approximately 67% of India's population—about 81.35 crore (813.5 million) people—receive free food grains from the government under the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana (PMGKAY). This scheme, integrated with the National Food Security Act (NFSA), provides 5 kg of free food grain per person per month to all Priority Household (PHH) and Antyodaya Anna Yojana (AAY) ration card holders across the country. The program is currently extended until December 2028.

* In the Global Hunger Index, India ranks 105 out of 127 countries.

* Ather Energy is now valued at ₹58,000 crore. Zerodha founders Nithin and Nikhil Kamath, via Kamath Associates, own 1.22%. They bought the stake from Sachin Bansal in 2024 at a ₹6,000 crore valuation.

* Global equities absorbed one of the more serious energy shocks in decades — the closure of the Strait of Hormuz...MSCI Emerging Markets equity index is up 18% this year (till August 6) while the All-Country World Index is up 12.9%. Markets have gone numb to geopolitical noise, with algorithms treating conflict-driven dips as buying opportunities rather than warnings...a headline market index is no proxy for the economy. The Nifty 50, the S&P 500 and their peers are capitalisation-weighted baskets of the largest listed companies — They measure corporate earnings power, full stop. Not GDP, not employment...the things supporting listed-company earnings and asset prices are increasingly disconnected from the conditions facing the wider economy. - Moneycontrol

* Being tone‑deaf means you can’t accurately perceive or reproduce musical pitch — so singing in tune feels like chasing a moving target. It’s not about lacking rhythm or enthusiasm, just that the notes don’t quite land where they should. In everyday language, calling someone tone‑deaf can also mean they’re missing the “social pitch” — not picking up on the mood or sensitivity of a situation.

* John Wallis, an English mathematician, introduced the lemniscate symbol for infinity in 1655.

* Only two people in history have accomplished the rare feat of winning both a Nobel Prize and an Academy Award (Oscar): George Bernard Shaw and Bob Dylan.

Nobody Notices the Early Bird

2026-08-06T12:46:21.925+05:30

Cartoon co-created with Gemini. See more of my AI co-creations

The Burning Question: Flammable vs Inflammable

2026-08-05T20:59:33.950+05:30

Cartoon co-created with Gemini. See more of my AI co-creations

While flammable and inflammable mean the same thing, safety regulators encourage “flammable” to avoid dangerous misunderstandings.

The true opposite of flammable is nonflammable (or non‑inflammable).

Flammable comes directly from Latin flammare (“to set on fire”), while inflammable entered English via French, which itself borrowed from Medieval Latin inflammabilis.

This Week I Learned - Week 31 2026

2026-07-31T10:51:55.873+05:30

This Week I Learned -

* "Models learn from "exhaust," the prompts people write, the tools agents use, and especially the corrections people make when the model is wrong. Every correction is distilled into institutional know-how.

In consuming intelligence, you are creating intelligence.

If learning flows in only one direction, economic value converges toward the owners of the learning infrastructure rather than the creators of the knowledge itself.

In the cloud era, enterprises accumulated data. In the AI era, they accumulate learning.

A company should be able to use a model without giving up the knowledge that makes it unique." - Satya Nadella

* Wire services such as PTI, ANI, Reuters, AP, and AFP provide verified facts to other outlets, which then adapt the content to their own style. Their business model depends on reader trust in the accuracy of the wire’s reporting and on receiving compensation for the verification work. While search engines direct readers to the original source, large language models extract the facts, omit sourcing and verification, and deliver responses without attribution.

News agency Asian News International (ANI) sued AI research firm OpenAI in November 2024 for using its content to train ChatGPT without permission or payment. According to the Delhi High Court, storing ANI’s articles to train ChatGPT is covered under Section 52 of India’s Copyright Act, which allows private use and research without it being considered infringement. The court also noted that ANI couldn’t prove ChatGPT reproduced or “memorized” its actual reports, so no infringement occurred.

* Slack AI can summarize forum discussions from the past week or within a chosen date range.

* BitChat is an open-source Bluetooth mesh messaging application developed by X co-founder Jack Dorsey. Being a decentralised peer-to-peer messaging application that operates over Bluetooth mesh networks, it requires no internet connection, no servers and no phone numbers.

* At least six Nvidia-backed neocloud companies, CoreWeave, Together AI, Nebius, Lambda Labs, Crusoe and Nscale are in talks with Indian operators to lease data centre capacity for artificial intelligence (AI).

Neoclouds, or "babyscalers," differ from hyperscalers like AWS, Azure and Google Cloud by focussing solely on renting Nvidia GPU clusters for AI training and inference.

A 20-year tax holiday for foreign cloud providers, announced in this year's Union Budget, along with abundant engineering talent and low infrastructure costs, has made India the most attractive data centre destination in the region. - ET

* The Hype Literacy Toolkit for Journalists - Hype is characterized by the fascination with the future: Exaggerated and unrealistic promises of value development are coupled with a strident optimism that captures the attention of investors, technologists, politicians, journalists, and the general citizenry. Hype leverages uncertainty and emotions like hopes and fears, linking these to strong expectations.

* The Government uses gazettes as its primary means of publishing laws and bringing them into force and these are published as PDFs. India’s legal publishing system remains fragmented and dependent on PDFs, making it difficult for citizens, lawyers and even courts to access, track laws and amendments in force; adopting open legal publishing standards would make laws more accessible and strengthen democratic participation.

Many African countries have adopted the Akoma Ntoso standard, a markup language specifically designed for legal documents. They use an open-source legal publishing platform called Indigo, which allows users to add or edit laws. [US & UK use modified versions of Akoma Ntoso]. - Sushant Sinha, founder of legal search engine, Indian Kanoon

* Elon Musk’s companies directly employ ~160k people (Tesla ~135k, SpaceX ~22k, X ~2.5k, others). - Grok

* What the hell is El Niño, really?

* Tropoworks provides drone-assisted systems to transport tea leaves from fields to processing factories. In the trial phase, it has successfully carried loads of 12 kgs for 5-10kms in Kerala's Idduki for HML.

* India’s digital economy, valued at ₹32 lakh crore in 2025 and accounting for about 12% of GDP, together with more than 1.03 billion active internet users and around 22 billion monthly UPI transactions, is driving demand for data centre infrastructure.

* The number of Indians with an annual income of ₹100 crore or more has increased from 142 to 576 between the assessment years (AY) 2021-22 and 2025-26.

* About 82% of working women in India are in informal employment according to a 2018 ILO report, spanning agriculture, home-based production, domestic services and micro-enterprises.

* 11-month rental agreements remain standard across India to avoid compulsory registration and elevated stamp duty under the Registration Act 1908, which applies to leases of 12 months or longer, while enabling easy annual renewals.

Legal security deposit (not rent itself) limits:

Bengaluru: No hard statutory cap under Karnataka Rent Act; amount is contractual (market often 6-10 months). Recent amendment only decriminalised penalties.
Mumbai: No statutory cap under Maharashtra Rent Control Act; contractual (market 3-6 months).
Hyderabad: Telangana Act limits advance to 1 month’s rent; excess can be challenged.

Only Assam, Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, and Tamil Nadu have enacted Model Tenancy Act variants with 2-3 month deposit limits, while Mumbai and Hyderabad rules remain largely contractual.

* Early 20th-century British playground chants (which likely adapted older Celtic sheep-counting numbers or Anglo-Saxon counting tokens) -

Eena meena mackeracka
Rare rye dominacka
Chicka racka romerica
Om pom push!

Compact Business PCs Explained: Dell OptiPlex, Intel NUC and Lenovo ThinkCentre Tiny Desktops Compared

2026-07-27T08:54:56.856+05:30

For many people, a desktop computer conjures up images of a large tower sitting under a desk. Yet over the past decade, manufacturers such as Dell, Intel, ASUS, and Lenovo have shown that a capable desktop doesn't have to be much larger than a paperback book.

Compact business desktops—including the Dell OptiPlex Micro, Intel NUC (now ASUS NUC), and Lenovo ThinkCentre Tiny series such as the M700 Tiny—typically occupy just around one litre of volume, earning them the nickname "1L PCs."

Despite their small size, these machines often include desktop-class Intel Core processors, support up to 32–64 GB of RAM (depending on the model), NVMe SSD storage, Gigabit Ethernet, Wi-Fi, and the ability to drive multiple monitors. Many consume only 10–30 watts during typical office work, making them significantly more energy efficient than traditional desktop towers.

Originally designed for enterprise environments where desk space and manageability were important, these systems have found a second life among home users. Refurbished models such as the ThinkCentre M700 Tiny and Dell OptiPlex Micro are popular for home labs, software development, media servers, Home Assistant, Docker, Proxmox, and lightweight virtualization.

The Intel NUC (Next Unit of Computing), introduced in 2012, played a major role in popularizing the ultra-compact PC category. Although Intel exited the NUC business in 2023, ASUS continues the product line with newer processors and modern connectivity under the ASUS NUC brand.

One of the biggest advantages of these compact desktops is their balance of size, reliability, and upgradeability (mainly RAM, SSD). Unlike many mini-PCs built for consumers, business models are designed for continuous operation, easy servicing, and long product lifecycles. Memory and storage can usually be upgraded in minutes, extending their useful life.

They are highly popular in tech communities for running Proxmox, Home Assistant, or media servers (Plex) because they are cheap, power-efficient, and quiet.

Compared to traditional tower desktops, they offer fewer upgrade options though, limited internal storage, no support for full-size graphics cards or PCIe expansion cards, and may throttle under prolonged heavy workloads due to their compact cooling systems.

For students, developers, and hobbyists, these tiny desktops demonstrate that you don't need a bulky tower to build a capable workstation. Whether it's writing code, running virtual machines, experimenting with Linux, or hosting services at home, these miniature powerhouses continue to prove that good things really do come in small packages.

Cloud Watching 101

2026-07-25T11:32:18.047+05:30

As cloud architects, we spend our days designing systems in the cloud. Load balancers, autoscaling, fault tolerance, multi-region deployments—we know them inside out.

But when was the last time you looked up at the original cloud?

A children's book recently reminded me that the sky has its own architecture, complete with naming conventions that sound suspiciously like service tiers.

Clouds are mostly made of tiny water droplets, tiny ice crystals, or a mixture of both suspended in the air.

The first well-designed "cloud taxonomy" predates cloud computing by about 220 years. In 1802, English pharmacist and amateur meteorologist Luke Howard borrowed Latin words—cirrus (“curl”), stratus (“layer”), cumulus (“heap”), and nimbus (“rain cloud”)—to create a cloud classification system so elegant that it’s still the global standard more than two centuries later. It's a reminder that well-designed taxonomies can stand the test of time—whether they're describing the atmosphere or a distributed computing platform.

Altitude	Cloud Types	Appearance
High (Above 20,000 ft / 6 km)	Cirrus	Wispy, feather-like streaks of ice crystals. They're often the first sign that the weather may change. Think of them as the notification service of the atmosphere.
	Cirrostratus	Thin, transparent veil covering much of the sky; often produces halos around the Sun or Moon.
	Cirrocumulus	Tiny white ripples or patches, often called a "mackerel sky."
Middle (6,500–20,000 ft / 2–6 km)	Altostratus	Gray or bluish sheet covering much of the sky, often preceding steady rain.
Middle (6,500–20,000 ft / 2–6 km)	Altocumulus	Rounded white or gray patches or rolls, larger than cirrocumulus. Mid-level puffs that can hint at instability. Meteorologists often see them as an early clue that thunderstorms could develop later in the day.
Low (Below 6,500 ft / 2 km)	Stratus	Uniform gray flat layer, resembling fog that hasn't reached the ground.
	Stratocumulus	Low, lumpy cloud layer made of broad rolls or rounded masses.
	Nimbostratus	Thick, dark blanket cloud producing prolonged rain or snow.
	Cumulus	Fluffy white clouds with flat bases/heap; the classic fair-weather cloud.
Vertical Growth	Cumulus	Can grow vertically into towering cumulus under strong rising air. A single fair-weather cumulus cloud may contain hundreds of tonnes of water.
Vertical Growth	Cumulonimbus	Massive thunderstorm cloud with a low base, towering height and anvil-shaped top; produces lightning, heavy rain, hail and sometimes tornadoes.

Cumulus appears twice—once under Low (where it normally forms) and again under Vertical Growth to illustrate that it can develop into towering cumulus and ultimately Cumulonimbus.

What fascinates me is that long before Doppler radar, satellites, or weather apps, people learned to read clouds. Farmers, sailors, pilots, and mountaineers could often make surprisingly accurate short-term weather predictions simply by observing cloud types and how they evolved.

That's a useful reminder for anyone in technology.

Modern monitoring dashboards are invaluable, but good architects also learn to spot the early signals—a gradual increase in latency, an unusual traffic pattern, a queue that's growing just a little faster than usual. Just as cirrus clouds can foreshadow changing weather, subtle system metrics often precede major incidents.

Perhaps that's why "the cloud" became such a fitting metaphor. Whether it's floating overhead or running your applications, clouds reward those who take the time to understand them.

The best resources to learn cloud identification

Cloud seeding is a weather modification method that can increase precipitation by 15% to 20%. The technique does not create new clouds. Cloud seeding is being used in around 50 countries to combat drought, hail, and air pollution. The effects of boosting rainfall through cloud seeding remain uncertain, its consequences difficult to measure, and its large-scale application costly.

co-written with ChatGPT

This Week I Learned - Week 30 2026

2026-07-24T09:34:50.039+05:30

This Week I Learned -

* The OpenRouter Pareto Router is a dynamic model selection tool that allows users to select a coding model based on a minimum coding score preference. It maintains a curated shortlist of strong coding models ranked by Artificial Analysis coding percentiles. Users can set a min_coding_score between 0 and 1 to control the strength of the coder they need. The router automatically selects the cheapest model within the chosen tier or the fastest with the Nitro variant. This approach ensures that users receive a strong coder without overspending, as the exact shortlist evolves over time with new models and benchmarks. The OpenRouter API is compatible with most SDKs, allowing for easy integration into applications.

* openrouter/auto-beta is a task-aware router. It classifies each request, routes it to the model teams are actually spending on for that kind of task, and filters that choice by the cost-quality tradeoff you set. The response is priced at the routed model's rate. There is no router fee.

* Clem Delangue, the chief executive of Hugging Face after OpenAI's models went rogue and successfully hacked into Hugging Face - “This incident, possibly the first of its kind, proves a point we’ve long believed: A.I. safety won’t be solved by any single company working in secret.”

* On-device AI processes machine learning algorithms and generative AI models directly on a smartphone’s local hardware; while physical constraints prevent it from matching the scale of cloud-based large language models, the industry is converging on a hybrid application model. On-device AI refers to the processing of machine learning algorithms and generative AI models directly on the smartphone’s local hardware. Instead of relying on a constant connection to a remote server, the device performs the computation using dedicated silicon, primarily Neural Processing Units (NPUs). Unlike general-purpose CPUs or graphics-heavy GPUs, NPUs are purpose-built to handle the mathematical heavy lifting required by neural networks. - The Hindu

* macOS 26 (Tahoe) ships with a 3B parameter LLM. Out of the box, the on-device model powers Siri, Writing Tools, and system features. Apfel is a lightweight open-source tool that runs Apple’s on-device model directly from the terminal, from code, or through an interface that mimics an OpenAI server. apfel gives you CLI access with one brew install. No model downloads, no API keys, no configuration needed, just works. It’s MIT licensed.

* People get an enormous amount of enjoyment and satisfaction out of creating stuff if it’s low effort. People who want to be creative, but might not be very good at it, can turn to A.I. and find a bunch of barriers removed. - Why Slop Matters

* GitHub Sponsors is a global funding network that supports over 70,000 maintainers and organizations, and includes more than 280,000 sponsors spanning individual developers to Fortune 500 companies. In 2022, nearly 40% of sponsorship funding came from organizations. Since launching GitHub Sponsors in 2019, it took nearly two years to reach the first $10 million. The latest $10 million came in just five months, pushing the program past the $100 million mark.

* Make-money-fast influencers and passive-income enthusiasts on Reddit have been spreading the word for some time: Use A.I. to write a book. If it sells, it’s free money. Amazon does not mind if people hawk A.I.-generated books on its platform, unless they are truly and deeply terrible. (There are)...about 10 million books published on Amazon over the last five years. - NYT

* The Mahua tree (Madhuca longifolia) is revered by many tribal and indigenous communities in India as a Kalpavriksha, the “wish‑fulfilling tree,” because nearly every part of it provides food, medicine, livelihood, and cultural value.

Mahua Nectar

Its flowers are eaten fresh, dried, used as sweeteners, fermented into liquor (also called "mahuli", "mahura","Ippa") - quite possibly the world's only flower-based spirit!

* The Banyan tree is the national tree of India and one of the largest species in the world. India is in fact home to seven of the largest banyan trees in the world.

* Thimmamma Marrimanu is considered the largest tree in the world: with its connected trunks spreading out 180 meters in diameter, it is the largest banyan and one of the superlative trees on Earth. The banyan tree was first added to the Guinness Book of World Records in 1989 (its entry updated in 2017) as being 550 years old and having the “greatest perimeter length for a tree”, spreading over five acres with a circumference of 846m. It has more than 4,000 roots making up its canopy.

It is one of the 962 trees documented by YD Bar-Ness in the Landmark Trees of India project

* The healing power of trees is perhaps not as far out as it may seem. After all, they provide the Earth with breathable air, something we can’t live without, and many medicines are derived from trees. For example, aspirin comes from willow bark, and melaleuca oil derived from leaves of the Australian tea tree is widely used for skin infections. Additionally, research shows that being among natural green spaces like forests significantly reduces blood pressure and stress levels, and Japan has embraced the concept of forest bathing to promote wellness. - BBC

* Forest bathing, or shinrin-yoku, originated in Japan in the 1980s. Unlike exercise-focused activities, it involves spending quiet time in a forest while engaging with the surrounding environment.

* ...across their whole lifespans, American baby boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, have been the worst off. They have repeatedly experienced higher death rates than previous generations. - The Economist

AIDS hit in their early adult years; the opioid crisis struck in middle age. On top of that, boomers seem to be significantly less healthy than previous generations.

Leprosy, also known as Hansen’s disease, is caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium leprae and was first identified by Norwegian physician Gerhard Armauer Hansen in the 1870s. Common in tropical regions, this disease affects the nervous system and is often referred to as the world’s oldest known illness.

* pH is a scale from 0 to 14 that measures how acidic or alkaline (basic) a substance is. 7 is neutral (like pure water). Below 7 is acidic; above 7 is alkaline.

* Baking soda is pure sodium bicarbonate (NaHCO₃). It's mildly alkaline with a pH of about 8.3 in solution.

Baking powder is a mixture: baking soda plus an acid (like cream of tartar) and a starch. When dry, it's roughly neutral, but when mixed with liquid, the acid and base react. The resulting pH depends on the formulation, but it's typically in the 6.5–7.5 range—much closer to neutral than baking soda.

The key difference: Baking soda is a single alkaline ingredient. You need to add an acid (like buttermilk, lemon juice, or vinegar) to activate it and balance the pH in a recipe. Baking powder is self-contained—it already includes the acid, so it works with plain liquids and produces a more neutral final product. If you use baking soda without enough acid, your baked goods can taste soapy or metallic.

If a recipe calls for baking powder and you only have baking soda, you'd need to add an acid. If it calls for baking soda and you only have baking powder, you'd need to use much more powder (about 3–4 times the amount) and the result may taste slightly different or be less tender, since baking powder contains starch and other fillers.

* Acidic cleaners like vinegar (acetic acid) are particularly effective at removing mineral buildup and soap scum. Vinegar, which has a pH of about 2.4, can dissolve hard-water stains, soap scum, and mineral buildup on bathroom fixtures and shower doors. Acid reacts with alkaline minerals like calcium carbonate in limescale or hard-water deposits and breaks them down into soluble salts, water, and carbon dioxide, which you can easily wipe away. You should not use acidic cleaners on natural stone, such as marble, granite, or limestone, or on hardwood, as they can etch or dull those surfaces. Always check the manufacturer’s instructions.

Baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) is great at cutting through grease, oils, and everyday dirt, and some can work as disinfectants, as well. Baking soda, thanks to its slightly abrasive texture, is ideal for scouring many hard surfaces without damaging them, such as stainless steel, oven interiors, metal fixtures, and glass on appliances such as ovens and microwaves. Baking soda can also neutralize odors in refrigerators or on rugs and upholstery because it reacts with acidic odor molecules and neutralizes them. Baking soda (which has a pH of 8 to 9) isn’t the most alkaline cleaning product available, but bear in mind that the higher on the pH scale you go, the more corrosive a solution is

Choose either acidic vinegar or basic baking soda, depending on what you’re trying to clean.

Household chlorine bleach, which has a pH of about 12 can remove mold and mildew and disinfect a wide range of household surfaces, such as toilets, tubs, and sinks. - NYT

* The skin, hair and nails are highly responsive to changes in weight, nutrition, hormones, inflammation and physiological stress. When a person loses weight rapidly on GLP-1 (Glucagon-Like Peptide-1) treatment, changes may be seen in the face, body, scalp and nails. These changes are not usually dangerous, but they can affect comfort, appearance, confidence and quality of life.

* The Indus Valley Civilization (3300 BCE to 1300 BCE) was geographically the largest in area among the four early riverine civilizations (Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, and the Indus), covering over 1.5 million square kilometers. The Indus had an estimated total population of 1–5 million. Harappa was identified in the 1820s, with systematic excavation beginning in 1920. R.D. Banerji of the Archaeological Survey of India identified Mohenjo-daro's antiquity in 1919–1920, but large-scale excavations began in 1922–1924 under Kashinath Dikshit and John Marshall.

* “Show me the heroes that the youth of your country look up to, and I will tell you the future of your country.” — Idowu Koyenikan

This Week I Learned - Week 29 2026

2026-07-19T14:14:51.860+05:30

This Week I Learned -

* Microsoft's Phi-4 Mini is widely regarded as one of the most capable models under 4 billion parameters. It punches significantly above its weight class, outperforming older 7B and even 70B models in specific reasoning tasks. It runs at a smooth 13–18 tokens per second on flagship devices with 8 GB+ RAM (like the iPhone 16 Pro/17 Pro or Galaxy S25/S26 series).

* From The Batch:

- PrismML, a Caltech spinout backed by Khosla Ventures, publicly released compressed versions of Alibaba’s Qwen model on Tuesday, shrinking it from 54 GB to under 4 GB so all 27 billion parameters run on an iPhone (15 or newer). PrismML achieves the compression by reducing the models to ternary or binary quantization, reducing each value from 16 bits to just two or three possible values.

- Two people asking the same model for business feedback, one in Hindi and one in Russian, may receive substantively different advice not because they’re using different models, but because the same model calibrates its character differently depending on the language it’s processing.

- It takes more than a decade and costs more than $1 billion to develop a drug in the United States, and the government approves only around 50 drugs a year. Finding new uses for drugs that are already approved, and new treatments for diseases that share underlying biological mechanisms, is an especially efficient use of time and funds. Robin is an open-source agent that proposes existing drugs to treat a given disease.

* According to Airtel's Unlimited 5G Data Offer Terms & Conditions, customers aren’t allowed to share their unlimited 5G data through a mobile hotspot. If you use more than 300GB in a month, they’ll still cut off your unlimited 5G and cap you at 2GB per day.

* USB tethering is faster and more stable than a mobile hotspot for sharing a phone's mobile internet with a laptop or computer using a USB cable. You have to turn on the tethering option in your phone's settings in order to share.

* Cityfinance.in is Janaagraha's platform tracking financial data for 4,000+ Indian cities.

* Currently, less than 8% of Indian citizens hold a passport.

* Goldmines, a company founded by Manish Shah, dominates nearly 80% of the Hindi-dubbed cinema market. - The India Notes

* Behenic acid, also known as docosanoic acid, is a saturated fatty acid with the chemical formula C22H44O2. It is primarily derived from the seeds of the moringa tree and is used in various applications, particularly in cosmetics as a thickener, cleansing agent, and opacifier. Behenic acid is valued for its emollient properties and is commonly used in skincare formulations.

* Jo Nagai, a 10 year old young boy from Kobe, Japan, presented a 33-page research paper at the 2024 International Congress of Entomology showing swallowtail butterflies retain learned aversions through metamorphosis.

Jo contacted entomologist Dr. Martha Weiss after noticing his hand-raised butterflies behaved differently from wild ones; together they adapted her moth experiment using lavender scent paired with mild vibration from a muscle therapy device on caterpillars.

Trained butterflies (70% avoidance) and their untrained offspring and grandchildren showed the same lavender aversion in Y-maze tests, demonstrating potential transgenerational inheritance of the behavior via a home science project.

* A cat’s sense of smell is incredibly powerful—they have up to 200 million scent-sensitive cells in their noses, compared to only about 5 million in humans. A dog's sense of smell is even more powerful, roughly 10,000 to 100,000 times more sensitive than a human's. Their noses contain over 300 million sensory receptors (compared to our 5 million).

A perfume scent that feels mild to you hits pets like dogs & cats like a "scent tsunami," causing extreme sensory overload, stress, and anxiety.

When you spray perfume, microscopic droplets linger in the air and settle on nearby surfaces, including your cat’s fur. Because cats are fastidious self-groomers, they will lick their fur to clean themselves, meaning they directly ingest the perfume chemicals and oils. Cats are obligate carnivores, and their livers lack a key enzyme called glucuronyl transferase. This enzyme is required to break down and detoxify many chemicals, particularly plant-derived compounds (like phenols and essential oils) and synthetic chemicals commonly used in perfumes. Because they cannot metabolize these toxins, they can easily build up in their system over time, leading to cumulative toxicity.

Ingredients like phthalates (used to make scents last longer) act as endocrine disruptors and can damage a cat's liver and kidneys over time.

* Savlon antiseptic disinfectant liquid uses blind-friendly Braille labels or tactile markings on their packaging to improve accessibility for the visually impaired.

* Walking depends on our brain expecting each step of a staircase to be the same height, so even one stair that’s a bit off can throw off our balance by disrupting our sense of position and automatic movement patterns, even if we notice it visually.

* Singapore's Mottainai Food Tech has a mission to use unconventional and underappreciated ingredients, which can be nutritious and widely available throughout Asia.

The inspiration for the name comes from the Japanese term mottainai, which laments waste - BBC

* In 2021, Vandana Shiva advised the government of Sri Lanka to ban inorganic fertilizers and pesticides stating "This decision will definitely help farmers become more prosperous. Use of organic fertilizer will help provide agri products rich with nutrients while retaining the fertility of the land." The policy applied overnight, with the main purpose to save State foreign exchange bills on imported fertilizers, caused a crisis with a significant reduction of farming output in several sectors, hitting the tea industry in particular and reducing rice yields were by one third. The ban was overturned seven months later.

* The nickname Iran-e-Sagheer" meaning "Little Iran" or "Lesser Iran," has been used historically to refer to Kashmir, especially by Persian writers and later historians. It reflects the deep Persian cultural influence that developed in Kashmir over several centuries, particularly from the 14th century onward. Persian became the language of administration, literature, and scholarship under successive Muslim rulers, much as it did across much of South Asia.

* The size of an engine is referred to by its cubic centimetres (“cc”), which measure the total volume inside all the cylinders and represent the engine’s displacement. Higher cc generally means more power and torque, but also lower fuel efficiency. Lower cc engines are common in hatchbacks and compact cars like Maruti Alto K10 (998cc), Renault Kwid (999cc), Tata Tiago (1199cc), while high cc engines are found in luxury sports cars and SUVs like Toyota Fortuner (2694cc), Mahindra Thar (2184cc), Jeep Meridian (1956cc).

* "...when teaching becomes content, it begins obeying the logic of content. That logic – shaped by Meta’s recommendation engine – rewards outrage, oversimplification, and para-social intimacy. The semiotics of the classroom shift. The teacher is no longer a symbol of institutional knowledge and fair authority. She becomes an influencer: a personal brand whose value depends on likeability scores. Here, enforcing discipline, giving a student a poor grade, or delivering hard feedback become threats to the brand." - The dangers of being a ‘cool teacher’, Nabeela Siddiqui in The Hindu

* "Distinguish failures from mistakes. Failures can happen despite good execution. Mistakes often stem from poor judgment, emotional reactions, or a lack of awareness about your circumstances. Understanding the difference helps you focus your reflection." - Mistakes to Meaning by Joshua Steiner, Michael Lynton

Fine-Tuning the Drones

2026-07-19T11:02:24.552+05:30

Cartoon co-created with ChatGPT. See more of my AI co-creations

Honey, I Upgraded Our Dreams

2026-07-17T09:43:49.260+05:30

Cartoon co-created with Copilot. See more of my AI co-creations