Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned - Week 23 2026

2026-06-06T00:12:52.243+05:30

This Week I Learned -

* Anthropic and OpenAI have launched their own services companies, challenging traditional IT firms and service providers. Anthropic's joint venture with Blackstone, Goldman Sachs, and Hellman & Friedman is valued at $1.5 billion, while OpenAI's venture, The Development Company, is valued at $4 billion.

* "Google which is cash surplus, just announced an additional capital raise of $80 bn.

Google annual profit is $160 bn, last quarter $62 bn, and market cap $4.5 trillion. That is close to total profits and market cap of all Indian listed companies put together.

It’s a wake up call to all companies to invest into the future, whatever the present maybe." - Uday Kotak

* "One reason that the atrophy of coding skills is concerning is the “paradox of supervision” ... effectively using Claude requires supervision, and supervising Claude requires the very coding skills that may atrophy from AI overuse." - Anthropic

* “People who go all in on AI agents now are guaranteeing their obsolescence. If you outsource all your thinking to computers, you stop upskilling, learning, and becoming more competent.” - Jeremy Howard, creator of fast.ai

* " I use LLMs to help generate specs and plans, while I facilitate the implementation. This is an inversion of the "orchestration" workflow...I never generate more than I can review in a sitting." - Lars Faye

* "when you use these fully agentic workflows, the model providers essentially own you". - Primeagen

* Box, a Silicon Valley software maker, expects to have more employees, not fewer, as it hires A.I. architects, A.I. solutions managers and other new A.I.-related positions.

Aaron Levie helped found Box in 2005. The company’s software, which is often deployed behind the scenes, helps companies store and work on documents and other data. The company has more than 100,000 customers, including federal agencies and Morgan Stanley, and went public in 2015.

Box has infused its software with A.I., adding features where the technology performs tasks like drafting documents.

Mr. Levie has said he believes companies will continue buying software, rather than making their own with A.I., since third-party software is likely to be more secure and reliable.

Among the jobs that Box is adding are “forward deployed engineers,” who will help customers that may want to use A.I. but do not have the technical know-how. Another is “A.I. business automation engineers,” who are part of the I.T. department and help colleagues use A.I. to be more productive and to remove drudgery from their jobs. - NY Times

* The industries that have adopted AI with fervor (Technology, Legal, Healthcare) so far have a few similarities: they are text-based, involve rote and repetitive work, have natural human-in-the-loop involvement to inject human judgment, limited regulation, and have clearly verifiable end outputs (e.g., code that runs, a resolved support ticket). Serving tech, legal and healthcare buyers is clearly fertile ground right now...

* Pangram, Quillbot, ZeroGPT, Grammarly and Turnitin are popular AI text detection tools.

Pangram admits that for text under 75 words, the results might not be as accurate.

* Codex discovered a hidden HTTP/2 Bomb, a remote denial-of-service exploit against most major web servers.

* Chart by Arnaud Leene (@aleene on GitHub & Open Food Facts) showing nutrient attribution by ingredients in MTR Ready to Eat Alu Methi

* Mendeley Data is a free and secure cloud-based communal repository where you can store your data, ensuring it is easyto share, access and cite, wherever you are.

* The state animal of Maharashtra is the Indian giant squirrel, popularly known as Shekaru (in Marathi)

* Only 8% of India's population has access to air conditioning.

* While winter pollution is dominated by finer PM2.5 particles, summer air pollution is driven by the coarser PM10 and ozone.

Vehicles, industries, waste burning, agricultural residue burning, construction sites, and broken roads remain year-round sources of pollution. Winter adds biomass burning for heating. Summer brings in dust storms that hike PM10 levels, while heat and sunlight catalyse ozone formation.

Ozone is not emitted directly from a tailpipe or chimney. It forms when nitrogen oxides (NOx), largely from vehicles and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from industrial emissions, vehicle exhaust, paints, and other sources, react under strong sunlight. Hotter, sunnier days therefore create favourable conditions for ozone formation, which, along with particulate matter, could cause respiratory illnesses. Ozone thus rises in hot weather.

* Air Quality Early Warning System (AQEWS) bulletin provides detailed weather information for Delhi and three-day Air Quality Index forecasts for 140 Indian cities.

* Phenylketonuria is a condition in which the body cannot process a common amino acid, phenylalanine

* At the core of our efforts to understand and explain the extraordinary diversity of forms and functions of life lies one molecule: deoxyribonucleic acid, popularly known by its abbreviation, DNA. DNA resides in cells, the unit of construction of our bodies — indeed of any organism — and we humans are made up of trillions of cells.

The DNA in a cell is called its genome. The linear thread of DNA that makes up the genome has an alphabet of four molecules, denoted by the letters ‘A’, ‘T’, ‘G’, and ‘C’. A genome can have thousands of genes, and through the specific ordering of these letters, each gene can encode a specific protein. Proteins in their various forms make up, or help manufacture, all that is needed for each cell to perform its unique function.

...the commonly studied bacterium Escherichia coli has about 4,300 genes. The fruit fly, about 17,000. The mouse, about 21,000. And the human, about 22,000. There is only a fivefold difference in gene number between a bacterium and a human. The mouse has more protein-coding genes than us, and a water flea, Daphnia, has about 31,000 genes, more than either us or the mouse.

At the start of the Human Genome Project, sequencing a human genome took more than a decade, cost close to $3 billion, and involved thousands of scientists across about 20 countries. Today this is possible in a few hours, at a cost of a few hundred dollars, in a small laboratory.

...genome sequences taken together give us a history of life on the planet, the relatedness of organisms, and how the tree of life branched in different ways.

...when we examine genomes in the context of how an organism (bacterium, plant or animal) functions in its environment, we learn how they are adapted. Genes, famously described as selfish, ensure their own propagation by using their host organism’s survival as a vehicle for their transmission. By studying variations in genes, we learn how mutations are selected as organisms adapt to their environments.

Replacing the genome of a cell with one designed and manufactured by humans is now feasible for small genomes and will soon be possible for larger ones. - K. VijayRaghavan

* India is widely identified as the ‘Thalassemia Capital of the World’ today and is estimated to have nearly 40 million carriers of the defective gene.

Around 10,000 to 15,000 children are born annually with Thalassemia Major, a severe genetic disorder that affects the body’s ability to produce haemoglobin, the protein in red blood cells responsible for carrying oxygen throughout the body. Those born with this condition suffer from chronic anaemia and require lifelong medical support. They often require blood transfusions every two weeks along with iron chelation therapy, nutritional support and continuous medical monitoring. The cost of treatment can reach approximately ₹2.5 lakh per child annually, placing a considerable burden on many families.

* In 1856, English chemist William Henry Perkin, while trying to synthesize quinine, ended up creating a purple residue that dyed silk with striking intensity. The compound, later marketed as mauveine, inaugurated the modern synthetic dye industry. Within a few decades, chemists learned to reproduce the molecular structures responsible for many natural colours. In 1869, industrial chemists succeeded in synthesising alizarin, which is the key red component of madder, making centuries of agricultural cultivation suddenly unnecessary.

The implications were profound. Madder fields, once the source of alizarin compounds across Europe, vanished almost overnight. Cochineal plantations faced competition from cheaper laboratory pigments. What had once required soil, insects, seasons and skilled cultivation could now be produced in factories wherever coal, glassware and chemical knowledge were available. - Satwik Gade

* Moors was a European designation for Urdu

* Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum (1912 – 1990) was an Emirati royal, politician and one of the Founding Fathers of the United Arab Emirates. Sheikh Rashid was responsible for the transformation of Dubai from a small settlement around Dubai Creek to a modern port city, regional commercial hub and entrepôt.

* By 1966 Dubai was the third largest export market for gold from London, receiving some 4 million ounces. In 1967, gold traded in the souks of Dubai at thirty-five dollars an ounce sold in India for sixty-eight dollars an ounce. The gold was packaged in ten tola bars, a tola being a little over 11.66 grams. Dubai's mercantile traders had found a lucrative source of revenue in providing gold to India. The Indian government controlled gold imports and imposed tariffs, so merchants in Dubai, funded by British banks, shipped gold in large quantities from London by air and then sent it by dhow to India's three-mile limit where the bullion would be handed over to Indian traders who carried out the 'actual' smuggling.

* The 66-berth Jebel Ali Port was, when it opened in 1983, the world's largest man-made harbour and remains so today.

* Emirates Flight 521 was a scheduled international passenger flight from Thiruvananthapuram, India, to Dubai, United Arab Emirates, operated by Emirates using a Boeing 777. On 3 August 2016, the aircraft, carrying 282 passengers and 18 crew, crashed while landing at Dubai International Airport. All 300 people on board survived the accident. Videos from inside the aircraft, taken on passengers' cellphone cameras, showed the passengers failing to evacuate, instead giving priority to carry-on luggage, resulting in an overly long evacuation and heavy criticism.

Cause of the first hull loss (an aviation accident that damages the aircraft beyond economic repair, resulting in a total loss) involving an Emirates aircraft - The flight crew reliance on automation and lack of training in flying go-arounds from close to the runway significantly affected the flight crew performance in a critical flight situation which was different to that experienced by them during their simulated training flights.

* Epistemic caution means resisting narratives unsupported by authoritative consensus. Epistemic caution might frustrate, but it's precisely to avoid replacing one contested narrative with another.

* "See things not as they are, but as they might be." - J. Robert Oppenheimer

Blitzscaling

2026-06-04T13:10:28.301+05:30

Amazon is the quintessential, textbook example of the "blitzscaling" model, where massive user growth is prioritized over profits for years.

The term was popularized by Reid Hoffman (the co-founder of LinkedIn), and when he wrote the definitive book on the subject (Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies), he explicitly pointed to Jeff Bezos and Amazon as the pioneers of this exact strategy.

Here is why Amazon fits the definition perfectly:

The 3 Core Rules of Blitzscaling

To be considered a "blitzscaler," a company must check three specific boxes, all of which Amazon did aggressively:

Prioritize Speed Over Efficiency: In a normal business, you try to grow carefully to minimize mistakes and stay profitable. In blitzscaling, you grow as fast as humanly possible, even if it means wasting millions of dollars fixing bugs, over-hiring, or building inefficient warehouses. The goal is to capture the market before anyone else can react.

Take Massive Capital Risks: You burn investor cash to subsidize your growth. Amazon did this by selling books and electronics at a loss, using Wall Street’s money to build their massive fulfillment network.

Winner-Take-All Market: Blitzscaling only works if the prize at the end is a monopoly (or near-monopoly). Because Amazon successfully built a global logistics network that no small competitor could ever replicate, they won the "e-commerce race."

The Ultimate Goal: The "Moat"

The ultimate objective of blitzscaling is to build a business "moat" so wide that it becomes economically impossible for a new competitor to fight you.

Today, if a new startup wants to compete with Amazon's online store, they can't just build a better website; they would have to spend hundreds of billions of dollars replicating Amazon's delivery fleet and warehouses. By losing money for 9 years, Amazon bought a permanent head start.

The "Scale" Spectrum: Amazon vs. Spotify vs. YouTube

While all three spent a decade or more losing money, they blitzscaled in slightly different ways:

YouTube blitzscaled purely through software and attention. They didn't have to build warehouses; they just needed to buy data servers fast enough to handle the sheer volume of global video uploads.

Spotify blitzscaled to achieve bargaining power. They needed to become so big that the major music labels (Sony, Universal, Warner) couldn't afford to pull their music off the platform.

Amazon blitzscaled physical reality. They didn't just build code; they built millions of square feet of real estate. They out-scaled their competitors by conquering the physical supply chain.

Amazon's loss-to-profit journey

Amazon was founded in 1994 and went public in 1997. It did not turn its first profitable quarter until Q4 of 2001 (making a tiny $5 million profit on over $1 billion in sales), and it didn’t post its first full profitable year until 2003—nearly a decade after founding.

For years, Wall Street analysts mockingly called the company "Amazon.org" because it behaved like a non-profit. During the dot-com crash of 2000, many predicted Amazon would go completely bankrupt.

Why Did Amazon Lose Money for So Long?

Unlike software companies, Amazon had to deal with the brutal reality of physical infrastructure. Bezos plowed every single dollar of revenue back into the business to achieve two goals:

Building the Physical Backbone: Instead of hoarding cash, Amazon spent billions building massive fulfillment centers, buying delivery trucks, and developing logistics tech.

Aggressive Pricing: Amazon deliberately underpriced its products (especially books) to destroy physical competitors like Borders and Barnes & Noble. They sacrificed profit margins to hook the consumer.

The Plot Twist: What Actually Made Amazon Rich?

While the general public thinks Amazon makes its money from retail e-commerce, data and business enthusiasts know the real story. Amazon's retail business is actually incredibly low-margin.

What turned Amazon into a money-printing machine was a side project launched in 2006: Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Amazon realized they had built an incredibly powerful server infrastructure to run their own website, so they decided to rent that infrastructure out to other companies. Today, AWS powers huge chunks of the internet (including Netflix, Airbnb, and ironically, Spotify). AWS frequently generates over 50% to 60% of Amazon’s total operating income despite accounting for a fraction of its total revenue.

YouTube: Lost money for a decade

YouTube was founded in 2005 and bought by Google in 2006 for $1.65 billion. For the next decade, it was a massive revenue drain for Alphabet (Google).

The Reason: Bandwidth and storage. Serving billions of hours of high-definition video globally costs a fortune. In the late 2000s, analysts estimated that Google was losing up to $400 million a year just to keep YouTube online because early banner ads didn't cover the infrastructure costs.

The Turning Point: While Google kept YouTube's exact financial details secret for a long time, internal tracking and financial experts estimate the platform didn't firmly transition from a "cash-burner" to sustainably profitable until around 2015 to 2016—almost exactly a decade after its acquisition. This shift was driven by the aggressive introduction of unskippable video ads, the mobile app explosion, and eventually, YouTube Premium subscriptions.

Spotify: Lost money for 17 years

Spotify was founded in 2006 by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon in Sweden, launching its service in 2008. The company posted its first-ever full-year net profit in 2024 (earning roughly €1.1 billion).

Doing the math: 2024 minus 2006 = 18 years (or exactly 16 to 17 years if counting from its active launch and initial major losses to its first profitable annual balance sheet).

The Reason: The "Music Tax." Unlike YouTube, which relies heavily on user-generated content, Spotify has to pay roughly 70% of its revenue back to music labels and publishers in royalties. This meant that no matter how many millions of Premium subscribers Spotify added, its profit margins stayed razor-thin. They also burned immense cash trying to break into podcasts and audiobooks to escape the music label fees.

The Turning Point: Aggressive cost-cutting, price hikes for premium plans, layout changes, and a shift toward algorithmic promotion features (where labels take lower royalties in exchange for visibility) finally pushed them into the green.

The Modern Tech Playbook

Amazon pioneered the strategy that YouTube and Spotify later copied:
Reinvestment → Scale → Monopoly → Profit

By keeping profits at zero for a decade, Amazon avoided paying heavy corporate taxes and starved out its competitors. Today, that "loss-making bookstore" is a logistics, cloud computing, and advertising empire.

The Takeaway

These examples are standard case studies in modern business schools. They prove that in the digital platform economy, market dominance is often treated as far more valuable than immediate cash flow. If you can survive the loss-making years by securing investor backing, you eventually build a moat so big that no one can catch you once you finally turn the profit switch on.

Article co-written with Gemini

Data Formulator: Explore Data with Visualizations, Powered by AI Agents

2026-06-01T20:32:40.878+05:30

The Data Formulator tool from Microsoft Research blends natural language and visual interfaces to help analysts explore and visualize data with AI agents. With AI agents recommending exploration ideas, transforming data and presenting results in interactive visual interfaces, users can deep dive into data in control without coding expertise.

The research prototype is open source and there’s a demo available to explore its features.

It currently supports generation of the following chart types -

I Am a Digitoonist: Experimenting with AI, Humor, and Cartooning

2026-05-31T20:22:43.324+05:30

I create AI-generated cartoons to capture ideas, observations, and memorable moments from my reading and daily life. Sometimes it's simply a word or phrase that catches my attention and feels worth preserving, much like a selfie captures a moment in time.

I've long admired the lyricists who adapt A. R. Rahman's songs into different Indian languages. Their task is not just translation. They must match the actors' lip movements while crafting lyrics that remain meaningful and hummable.

When I create cartoons, I often reshape a scenario to fit an idea or joke. It reminds me of the same creative challenge: working within constraints while trying to produce something that feels natural. In that sense, my cartoons are a form of improv.

Since the ideas are sometimes forced into shape rather than discovered organically, the result doesn't always work as intended. They don't always land as jokes for readers. Sometimes they end up feeling more like puzzles that need to be decoded than humor that is immediately understood.

I continue this experiment nevertheless by asking AI assistants to develop and critique my ideas. The outcomes are often imperfect, but the process itself is educational and remains valuable to me. The exercise feels worthwhile. It helps me better understand how large language models think and operate, while also teaching me more about the craft of humor, cartooning, and why some jokes work while others do not.

Here's a recent insight from a brainstorming session with Grok AI -

Real cartoon humor requires contempt or ridiculous escalation. Comedy needs blood on the floor.

Having grown up on a steady diet of Mad magazine and the single-panel cartoons that filled newspapers and magazines, I developed an appreciation for how much can be conveyed in a single image. The black-and-white single-panel format appeals to me not only for its economy but also because it avoids the additional complexity of maintaining visual and narrative continuity across multiple panels.

The cartoons themselves are not often perfect on the first attempt. When the issues are minor, I prefer to make the edits manually. AI assistants can often handle such revisions as well, but sometimes a quick human touch is the more straightforward solution.

My cartoons are my way of preserving ideas, phrases, observations, and passing curiosities. They are shaped by constraints, refined through experimentation, and often developed in conversation with AI. Somewhere between cartoonist, editor, prompt writer, and collaborator, I occupy a role that did not really exist a few years ago. That is why I have adopted the title Digitoonist.

The cartoons may be digital, but the curiosity behind them is entirely human.

This Week I Learned - Week 22 2026

2026-05-30T16:27:14.126+05:30

This Week I Learned -

* Sci-Hub boasts the largest collection of full-text scientific papers, with over 88 million documents available for free. It began in 2011 as a simple PHP script created by founder Alexandra Elbakyan, using basic and affordable infrastructure.

* JAX is the open-source library behind Google's Gemini.

* Deepseek V4 is roughly 7-9x cheaper than frontier models.

* When you call an LLM API, you are not just "running a model."

You are orchestrating a 14-layer pipeline across networking, security, distributed systems, custom silicon, and billing.

* Bing announced (through the Create tab) that after serving creators well, DALL·E 3 will be retiring in the coming weeks.

* From The Batch:

- Agentic capabilities emerged as large language models gained the abilities to plan across multiple steps, reflect on earlier outputs, and use external tools to perform actions online. Coding agents such as Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex gained traction among software developers in 2025.

- AI infrastructure itself is becoming an attractive target for hackers. Beyond using AI to mask attacks, attackers increasingly target AI tools, models, and accessory software as entry points into networks.

- Google overhauled Antigravity, its AI coding tool, to emphasize managing agents and de-emphasize its resemblance to popular IDEs like Microsoft’s VSCode. Antigravity’s command-line version replaces the open-source Gemini CLI.

- Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google have raised per-token prices on their newer flagship and Flash-tier models.

* Developer internet slang:

ACK = Acknowledged / I agree

NACK = No / I disagree

PTAL = Please Take Another Look

LGTM = "Looks Good To Me"

* Competitor keyword bidding on your brand name is now legally actionable in India.

* There are over 300 different sign languages worldwide, and most can’t communicate with each other.

* 800 million people live within 100 km (about 62.14 mi) of an active volcano. However, volcano forecasting, unlike weather forecasting, still has a long way to go. The physics are different, and the crucial data on magma and tectonic plates lies buried beneath kilometers of rock.

* "No human investigation may claim to be a true science if it has not passed through mathematical demonstrations, and if you say that the sciences that begin and end in the mind exhibit truth, this cannot be allowed, but must be denied for many reasons, above all because such mental discourses do not involve experience, without which nothing can be achieved with certainty." - Leonardo da Vinci

* Bird-glass collisions, also called bird-window strikes, happen because birds are not able to notice clear or slightly reflective glass. In the U.S. 50% of bird deaths happen up to third-floor buildings.

* A cruciverbalist is a person who enjoys or is skilled at solving crosswords.

* The Johari window is a technique designed to help people better understand their relationship with themselves and others. Psychologists Joseph Luft (1916–2014) and Harrington Ingham (1916–1995) Luft and Ingham named their model "Johari" using a combination of their first names.

* Airtel provides its Priority Postpaid customers with a 5G network technology feature called slicing which creates a separate virtual network lane and boosts the network to deliver a consistent experience even in crowded areas. The move has revived net-neutrality concerns, with experts arguing that premium fast lanes for some users could leave ordinary prepaid users on more congested parts of the network because of India’s limited mobile internet capacity.

* CBSE conducts Class X and XII Board examinations annually in India & across 26 countries catering to nearly 46 lakh students. A 19-year-old hacker, Nisarga Adhikary, reverse-engineered critical flaws in CBSE's On-Screen Marking (OSM) portal for annual exams, including a hardcoded master password in frontend JS, client-side OTP bypass, no route guards, password reset without old credentials, and IDOR enabling any user's mark edits. He responsibly disclosed the issues to CERT-In in February 2026 with screen recordings, but most vulnerabilities stayed unpatched for months; the portal was taken offline May 26 after his detailed blog post went public.

* Meeseva services engaged Transaction Analysts India Private Limited in 2017 to develop and maintain the Telangana State-owned ’T-Wallet’ platform. As per the agreement, the company was obliged to transfer complete control of data, source code, systems, credentials and related infrastructure to the government upon expiry of the agreement in 2025. The Assistant Commissioner of Police claimed in an affidavit filed in the Telangana High Court that TAPL unlawfully retained sensitive data relating to nearly 16 lakh citizens and misused government-owned data, obstructed the transition process to the newly appointed agency.

Self-awareness, Outsourced

2026-05-29T11:30:58.697+05:30

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

Shakespeare in Numbers

2026-05-26T08:56:18.101+05:30

Nothing definitive is known about Shakespeare but Bill Bryson’s brilliant research and laugh-out-loud writing makes you feel like you’re actually strolling through Elizabethan England, dodging questionable street food and dodging the plague, while reading the Bard of Avon’s biography.

Shakespeare is believed to have been born in 1564 and died in 1616, but many records of his estate vanished in the Great Fire of London in 1666.

More than 80 different spellings of his name have been recorded. The one we all use isn’t even the Oxford English Dictionary’s top pick (they prefer Shakspere).

It was fun to know that over 50 candidates have been proposed as the “real” Shakespeare. Some people just can’t accept that one guy achieved so much.

By his early thirties, Shakespeare was earning a comfortable 200 to 700 pounds a year – solidly upper-middle-class for the time. He married Anne Hathaway, who was eight years older (a man ahead of his time).

Shakespeare wasn’t just a writer – he was playwright, actor, part-owner of the company, and probably the de facto director.

A leading actor those days had to memorise up to 15,000 lines in a season. Companies juggled as many as 30 plays at once with only a dozen or so actors, meaning everyone was doubling up roles.

Shakespeare has 20,000 words in his personal vocabulary. Shakespeare's vocabulary showed a more than usual interest in medicine, law, military affairs and natural history. He mentions 180 plants and employs 200 legal terms in his plays.

Source: Open Source Shakespeare

Between 1500-1550, English added 12,000 new words and this man alone gave us 2,035 first-recorded words.

About half of them still in use today, and old words were employed in ways that had not been tried before. Nouns became verbs and adverbs, adverbs became adjectives. Expressions that could not grammatically have existed before, such as breathing one's last and backing a horse, both coined by Shakespeare, were suddenly popping up everywhere. Double superlatives and double negatives, the unkindest cut of all, troubled no one and allowed an additional degree of emphasis that has since been lost.

In his peak plays (Macbeth, Hamlet, Lear), he was dropping a brand-new word every 2.5 lines.

Hamlet alone introduced 600 fresh words.

His favourite hack? Slapping “un-” in front of words - Unmask, unhand, unlock, unveil – and 309 more.

Anachronisms abound in his plays. He wasn't much of fact checker preferring to focus on drama instead. So, in plays he put billiards in ancient Egypt and clocks in Julius Caesar’s Rome (1,400 years too early).

If you check the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, roughly one-tenth of the most memorable lines ever written or spoken in English come from Shakespeare. One guy. One career. That’s not just talent – that’s a statistical miracle!

Google I/O 2026 Talks: My Picks

2026-05-23T12:21:48.683+05:30

I/O '26 Recap: Everything You Need to Know

Google processes 3.2 quadrillion tokens per month.
It now has 13 products with over a billion users each.
Google's new model Gemini Omni can create anything from any input. It combines Gemini's intelligence with the best of its generative media models for a new level of World understanding, multi-modality and editing.

Software engineering at the tipping point

Build core skills to thrive as an AI-era developer

Three fourth of all code at Google is written by AI.

What's new in the Gemma open model family

What's new in Chrome

Create advanced data driven Gemini API apps

Unlock modern web capabilities in your AI coding workflows

Build your website for the agentic era

Vibe design to build incredible web UI

Elevate the Chrome Extensions developer experience

Break boundaries with Gemini in Chrome DevTools

A fireside chat on the evolution of the developer craft

This Week I Learned - Week 21 2026

2026-05-22T21:42:45.277+05:30

This Week I Learned -

* web.py was originally published while Aaron Swartz worked at reddit.com, where the site used it as it grew to become one of the top 1000 sites according to Alexa and served millions of daily page views. Reddit was rewritten using other tools after being acquired by Condé Nast in 2006.

* Markdown is used widely by websites including Reddit, GitHub and Discord using it, as well as LLMs such as Claude using it to format the files that store accumulated memories.

* Grok Build is xAI's coding agent for the terminal, serving as a direct competitor to Claude Code and the OpenAI Codex CLI.

* Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google all raised effective prices in the last six months. Enterprises that built workflows assuming AI costs would keep falling are now watching annual budgets evaporate in months.

* Uber's CTO sent an internal memo warning the company burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in just four months. American AI software prices have jumped 20% to 37%, and GitHub (owned by Microsoft) is dropping flat-rate plans for usage-based billing across its products. - Hedgie

* Model family prices change rapidly. Old models get deprecated. Best to be prepared.

Add multi-tier routing to your architecture
Compare completed-task costs, not token price. A 2* more expensive model can halve the retry rate, making it cheaper per successful output.
Migrate by model capability, not model family. Switch to models with similar latency, context window, output format compliance and reasoning depth.
Evaluate open-source models. DeepSeek models at self-hosted inference costs can be 90% cheaper for commodity (not frontier) tasks.

The first 18 months of most AI model families are discounted customer acquisition. Then value extraction follows.

Just keep asking yourself: “what’s our plan for when this model changes or deprecates?”

* Promptfoo is an open-source command-line tool designed for test-driven prompt engineering and LLM (Large Language Model) evaluation. It allows users to test multiple prompts against predefined test cases, evaluate outputs side-by-side, and integrate with test frameworks.

* Sycophantic AI Decreases Prosocial Intentions and Promotes Dependence - The AI is not just telling you what you want to hear. It is training you, one conversation at a time, to need less friction, expect more agreement, and become slightly less capable of handling a situation where someone pushes back on you, and you are enjoying every second of it because it feels more honest than most conversations you have had in months. Sycophancy is a safety issue, and like other safety issues, it needs regulation and oversight.

* Infrastructure is invisible as long as it works. In 2025, running the Open Food Facts infrastructure cost around €169,660 for servers, subscriptions, a full-time engineer, and volunteers who contribute dozens of days a year.

* Google used to offer a static Image Charts API where you could generate charts with a simple URL. This service was shut down in 2019 (deprecated since 2012). If you want the simplest "pass parameters via URL → get chart image" experience, switch to QuickChart (free tier available, open-source self-host option too). It's the most popular replacement for the old Google Image Charts. These images are suitable for embedding in email, SMS, chatbots, and other formats. Charts are rendered by Chart.js, a popular open-source charting library.

* QuickChart was founded by Ian Webster in 2015

* Sivaramakrishnan "Soma" Somasegar joined Microsoft in 1989 and spent his first decade at Microsoft on the NT team, ultimately contributing to eight releases of the Windows operating system. He founded Microsoft’s India Development Center in Hyderabad in 1998. In 2014, Somasegar was an internal advocate and leader for Microsoft’s decision to open-source the .NET core server runtime and framework, a surprise move that marked a significant shift in the company’s approach toward the broader developer world.

* Ultrasound’s very short wavelength allows it to travel through biological tissues. It is also propagated as a mechanical wave, where one molecule pushes against the next, and therefore it travels at a faster speed in stiff and incompressible tissues such as bone, but is slower in tissues such as fat. This property is used to generate ultrasound ‘images’ of human foetuses.

* Some turtle species can detect Earth's magnetic field, enabling them to navigate back to the beaches where they hatched.

* In a stark shift, the India’s stock market is on the verge of dropping out of the world’s five biggest for the first time in three years. Its market value soared from pandemic lows to a record $5.73 trillion in September 2024, with the NSE Nifty 50 Index the world’s best-performing major market at the time. Since the peak, $924 billion of market value has evaporated. Foreign investors are rushing to the exit — they have withdrawn a net $42 billion since the end of 2024...foreign investors ... now hold less than domestic institutions for the first time in more than 20 years. The stock market is heavily weighted toward IT services, a $315 billion industry led by Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services. The IT industry’s Nifty weight has fallen to about 8% from more than 17% in early 2022. As many as 15 million Indians work in IT services and global capability centers, many in some of the country’s best-paying private jobs. A structural slowdown in hiring or a more fundamental shift in global demand for the services would ripple across the economy, into real estate, consumption, lending and the broader financial sector. Gross domestic product will likely expand 6.5% in 2027 and 2028 each after an average annual rate of 8.3% in the last four years, the International Monetary Fund predicts. - Japan Times

* Satire is a literary genre where “topical issues” are “held up to scorn by means of ridicule or irony.” It is one of the most effective art forms revealing the absurdities, hypocrisies and contradictions in so much of life. It has the unique ability to quickly and clearly make a point and facilitate understanding in ways that other forms of communication and expression often do not. However, we cannot ignore that like all forms of speech and expression, satirical expression maybe restricted in accordance with the restrictions envisaged under Article 19(2) of the Constitution. For example, when satire targets society’s marginalized, it can have the power to confirm and strengthen people’s prejudices against the group in question, which only marginalizes and disenfranchises them more. - Supreme Court of India, Indibily Creative Pvt. Ltd. vs Govt. Of West Bengal

HOW TO Add a Backup Image in HTML When the Main Image Fails to Load

2026-05-21T15:29:03.041+05:30

In HTML, an image can use a backup source with the onerror event. The browser first tries to load the main image from src. If that image is missing, blocked, or fails to load, onerror runs and replaces it with a fallback image.

<img

src="actual-image.jpg"

alt="Product image"

onerror="this.onerror=null; this.src='backup-image.jpg';"

The JavaScript code

this.onerror=null

prevents an infinite loop if the backup image also fails.

That prevents an endless loop if the backup image also fails. Without it, the browser could keep triggering onerror again and again.

This technique is useful for product images, profile photos, brand logos, or any place where a missing image should show a placeholder instead of a broken image icon.

For instance, this Dynamic Dummy Image Generator can be used to generate placeholder images of desired dimensions.

For multiple responsive image options, use <picture>, but that is for format/viewport fallback, not broken-image fallback:

<picture>

<source srcset="image.webp" type="image/webp">

<img src="image.jpg" alt="Product image">

</picture>

Lorempics and JSONExamples also provide similar dynamic image generation service with the additional ability to change font size.

This Week I Learned - Week 20 2026

2026-05-15T13:02:54.539+05:30

This Week I Learned -

* GoatCounter is an open source web analytics platform available as a free donation-supported hosted service or self-hosted app. It is a privacy-friendly web analytics alternative to Google Analytics or Matomo.

* MotherDuck is a collaborative serverless analytics platform that lets you query and analyze data in cloud databases and from cloud storage, using your browser or any of the DuckDB APIs.

* Cloudflare has built its own version of WordPress that solves some security issues with the older CMS—it’s called EmDash.

* Apple reported an 84% first-quarter rise in new apps on its App Store, putting it on a pace to surpass 2025’s 600K apps.

* Contrary to the predictions of an AI jobpocalypse, I predict the opposite: There will be an AI jobapalooza! - Andrew Ng

* The Batch -

As OpenAI prepares to discontinue the Sora app and API, ByteDance added Seedance 2.0, its multimodal video generator, to its popular video-editing app CapCut - the second-largest consumer AI product behind only ChatGPT. While competitors offer either a video generator or an editing app, ByteDance owns both.

* OpenAI’s withdrawal of Sora points to a hard truth: Given the current cost of computation, AI-generated video is an expensive consumer product.

* Nvidia uses AI to design chips. Nvidia built two large language models based on LLaMA 2 for internal use - ChipNeMo and BugNeMo.

* Awesome GitHub Copilot hosts community-contributed agents, instructions, and skills to enhance your GitHub Copilot experience

* Pomiferous.com showcases more than 7,000 apple varieties from all around the world.

* According to the Economic Survey 2025–26, only about 2% of startups globally engaged in curating AI training data are based in India, compared with 40% in the United States and 21% in the European Union.

* India is the world’s largest app download market—yet Indian developers make up just 3–5% of the global base, with foreign apps topping the charts. - ET

* Memory chip prices doubled in the first quarter alone from the previous quarter and are forecast to climb up to 63% in the current quarter due to AI data centre demand that has impacted supply for smartphones, laptops and automobiles. - Reuters

* Uber Technologies' Hyderabad Centre of Excellence (CoE), its first outside the United States, currently employs over 600 engineering professionals.

* Telangana recorded the highest number of cybercrime cases in the country in 2024, according to the latest National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) report. Telangana accounted for more than one-fourth of the country’s cybercrime cases in 2024. Hyderabad continued to rank among the country’s most cybercrime-affected metropolitan cities.

* The professional killers of the personal assistant of the new West Bengal Chief Minister were identified after being traced through their UPI payment.

* The Public Sector Undertaking, HMT has the second largest land bank in the country after the Indian Railways. The PSU once held close to 18,000 acres of land, of which 1,000 acres remain across Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Pinjore in Haryana, and Kalamassery in Kerala.

* In the last financial year, more than 2.1 million taxpayers updated their ITRs for assessment years 2021-22 to 2024-25 and paid additional taxes of over 2,500 crore rupees. Many of these taxpayers had claimed exemptions citing fraudulent donations to religious institutions, charitable trusts, or educational institutions.

An interesting pattern that emerged was that individuals sharing the same chartered accountants were donating to the same institutions.

* "Hamba Hamba" (often extended as "Hamba Hamba, Ramba Ramba, Kamba Kamba, Dumba Dumba, Bumba Bumba, Bomba Bomba") originated from a February 10, 2021, public rally speech by Mamata Banerjee in Murshidabad, West Bengal. The phrase itself has no deeper meaning beyond her colorful way of calling defectors noisy traitors ("cows"). In Bengali colloquial usage, the sound a cow makes is often rendered as "hamba" (similar to "moo" in English). She rhythmically listed variations of cow-like noises to mock party defectors and emphasize the "chaos" or "noise" they were creating after switching sides. The short ~7-second clip of her enthusiastically chanting these rhythmic, nonsensical-sounding words sounded humorous and meme-worthy out of context. It quickly spawned memes, remixes, and jokes across social media with people treating it like a catchy slogan or song. Nightclub remixes of the phrase "Hamba Hamba" have gone viral across Bengal as symbols of anti-incumbency and farewell festivities following the historic power shift after TMC's defeat in the 2026 West Bengal elections.

* Global natural diamond prices have plunged 46%. But India’s wedding traditions and soaring gold prices are providing a unique buffer. - ET

* "We want to disrupt high frequency services. If you look at an Indian household, the second highest wallet share of discretionary income is on services. That is roughly 50000 a year. The only category which has the highest wallet share is groceries...This (home services) is a $53B market where 98% of the transactions are still happening offline" - Aayush Agarwal, founder and CEO of Snabbit which was launched in 2024.

* Hypertension is silent — there are often no symptoms until the condition has triggered other health problems. Chronic high blood pressure can make smaller arteries, such as capillaries, less flexible, which means they won’t dilate in response to exercise or other times when greater blood flow is needed. It also damages blood vessel walls, creating conditions that allow cholesterol and fats to accumulate and form plaque.

As plaque builds, a process called atherosclerosis further thickens the arteries. If plaque or a blood clot blocks blood flow, a heart attack can occur. As it does to the arteries, high blood pressure causes the heart to thicken and enlarge.

Heart failure is a chronic condition where the heart weakens and struggles to pump an adequate amount of blood. Hypertension increases heart failure risk because a heart that is thick and stiff can become overworked.

Ischemic strokes occur when there’s a blockage in an artery to the brain. This can disrupt blood flow in the retina. Lack of blood flow can cause damage and, if enough accumulates, lead to a complication called hypertensive retinopathy, which can cause blurred vision or even loss of eyesight.

Smaller arterioles leading to the eyes also can thicken. Lack of blood flow can cause damage and, if enough accumulates, lead to a complication called hypertensive retinopathy, which can cause blurred vision or even loss of eyesight.

Long-term stress to the glomeruli, small blood vessels in the kidneys that act as filters to remove waste, can contribute to the development of kidney disease.

Hypertension can contribute to the development of peripheral artery disease, an artery-clogging condition where blood flow is reduced in the limbs.

A Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) diet — which prioritizes vegetables, fruit, whole grains, lean proteins and low-fat dairy — have been shown to help keep blood pressure levels within a healthy range.

- The Washington Post

* The first dialysis treatment in the United States was carried out at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York in 1948. In India, CMC-Vellore is known as the birthplace of dialysis treatment.

* "Civilized man refused to adapt himself to his environment. Instead he adapted his environment to suit him. So he built cities, roads, vehicles, machinery. And he put up power lines to run his labour-saving devices. But he didn't know when to stop. The more he improved his surroundings to make life easier... the more complicated he made it. Now his children are sentenced to 10 to 15 years of school, to learn... how to survive in this complex and hazardous habitat. And civilized man, who refused to adapt to his surroundings... now finds he has to adapt and re-adapt... every hour of the day to his self-created environment." - The Gods Must Be Crazy

* "Advice by confident people is more likely to be followed." - Vivek Nityananda in Beyond Doubt: Overconfidence and What It Means for Modern Society

Google Summer of Code 2026: Open Food Facts

2026-05-14T21:56:26.960+05:30

Google Summer of Code (GSoC) has long been the ultimate launchpad for aspiring developers. As Google’s premier global open-source program, it offers contributors the rare opportunity to work on live open-source software projects alongside some of the world’s most respected and seasoned developer communities. But as open-source engineering continues to take center stage globally, getting a foot in the door has evolved from a difficult challenge into an elite competitive arena.

The scale of this competition was fully on display for the GSoC 2026 cohort. Globally, the program saw a massive influx of 15,245 applicants, all vying for a coveted spot. Out of those thousands of hopefuls, only 1,141 contributors were selected worldwide. This places the global acceptance rate at a razor-thin ~7%, a metric that makes GSoC more selective than many Ivy League institutions.

Open Food Facts & GSoC

For the contributors who do beat the odds, they get to write code that directly impacts millions of lives. One of the most prominent and inspiring examples of this is Open Food Facts.

Often called the "Wikipedia of food products," Open Food Facts is a volunteer-run non-profit that hosts a free, collaborative database of over 4 million food products from 150 countries. By using crowdsourcing, optical character recognition (OCR), and machine learning, they empower consumers to decode fine-print labels, track allergens, and evaluate environmental impacts (like the Eco-Score).

Because of its profound real-world utility and robust developer ecosystem, Open Food Facts has earned a highly respected tenure in the program. To date, Open Food Facts has been selected as an official GSoC mentoring organization across four milestone years:

2018: Their early GSoC days focused heavily on foundational infrastructure and implementing cutting-edge Deep Learning/OCR tools to automatically scan and extract data from nutritional facts tables.

2022: GSoC contributors shifted towards expanding mobile capability and data architecture, famously building an offline mode for their Flutter application and designing a specialized user-friendly Taxonomy Editor to map complex food data relationships.

2025: A massive year for the organization, where students built the next-generation Open Food Facts Explorer frontend and fundamentally optimized the developer experience through cloud-powered automation.

2026: Continuing their legacy in the current cohort, mentoring a new batch of elite contributors to scale their AI-driven food transparency goals.

Open Food Facts at Google Summer of Code 2026 is a great example of how open source can drive positive change. It’s where coding meets community, and where small contributions can lead to big improvements in food knowledge worldwide.

Treating a Phone Like a Life Partner

2026-05-12T10:02:00.133+05:30

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

This Week I Learned - Week 19 2026

2026-05-09T08:52:10.890+05:30

This Week I Learned -

* Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft all reported impressive quarterly earnings on Wednesday, surpassing Wall Street expectations thanks to booming demand for AI and cloud services. AI continues to be the main growth engine, with the four companies projected to invest around $650 billion in AI infrastructure this year.

* SpaceX & XAI will provide Anthropic with access to Memphis-based Colossus 1, one of the world’s largest and fastest-deployed AI supercomputers, to provide additional capacity for Claude. The supercomputer is powered by 220,000+ NVIDIA GPUs.

* Palo Alto Networks, a US-based cybersecurity firm, is set to acquire AI infrastructure startup Portkey to strengthen its AI security stack for enterprise use of autonomous agents, at twice its estimated $60–70 million valuation.

* Portkey’s AI gateway sits between applications and large language models, helping companies monitor, manage and secure AI traffic. Palo Alto Networks plans to fold it into Prisma AIRS as a central control plane for agentic AI systems.

Portkey was founded in 2023 by BITS Pilani alumnus Rohit Agarwal and SRM Chennai alumnus Ayush Garg.

* India is the second largest smartphone market in the world and the third largest PC market for Apple.

* A look at low-trust vs high-trust societies through Apple’s sales policy in India and the US:

India - "Products purchased at the Apple Store in India cannot be refunded or exchanged."

US - "In the unlikely event a product is not what you expected, you can return or exchange it with a receipt within 14 days of the date you receive the product from Apple."

* PhonePe and Google Pay together dominate more than 80% of the UPI market, while Paytm holds about 10%.

* Coinbase co-founder and CEO, Brian Armstrong, informed that, it is "reducing" ~14% of its workforce and "non-technical teams are now shipping production code."

* The Russia-Ukraine war has been significantly shaped by drone warfare, with drones accounting for up to 80% of casualties in some engagements.

* When two different datasets sync up to explain each other - Noise complaints & helicopter flight tracks visualized.

* A loud vehicle passing nearby can make the heart pound. Large single-cylinder engines, like those on the Royal Enfield Bullet, generate a lot of energy in the infrasound and low-frequency range (15-50 Hz), right near the edge of human hearing. The chest cavity resonates at around 50-60 Hz, while the abdominal cavity resonates at about 4-8 Hz. This can create a physical sensation in the body that amplifies the sense of threat triggered by the audible sound.

* "From the 1973 oil crisis to the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, and more recently, the COVID-19 pandemic, the world has repeatedly encountered “black swan” events - unexpected, disruptive, and far-reaching. Each of these moments tested systems, challenged assumptions, and reshaped behaviours.

The common thread across these events is clear: resilience is built through adaptation, not avoidance." - Avinash Satwalekar, President, Franklin Templeton Asset Management (India) Pvt. Ltd.

* Cable News Network (CNN) was founded by Ted Turner in 1980. It upended established broadcasting with its dedication to around-the-clock breaking news and shot to global recognition with its coverage of the Gulf War in 1990-91.

* 10.64 lakh UPI fraud cases worth ₹805 crore were reported in FY26 (till November)

* Gold has always been India’s most widely held asset. Estimates from the World Gold Council suggest Indian households hold between 25,000 and 34,600 tonnes of gold. At today’s prices, that equates to a holding worth between $3.8 trillion and $5.2 trillion—roughly equivalent to India’s entire GDP. Most planners recommend a 5% to 10% portfolio allocation.

* Structural deficits in India’s health system - 43 new medical colleges have been established and 11,682 MBBS seats along with 8,967 postgraduate seats have been approved for the 2025-26 academic year.

* Eleven out of 18 All India Institutes of Medical Sciences report around 40% vacancies in their teaching and research faculty positions.

There are 5,491 CHCs across 785 districts — about seven CHCs per district

The vacancy rate in 5,491 rural Community Health Centres (CHC) across 757 districts in India is 79.9%, with only 4,413 specialists available against a requirement of 21,964.

* Kodinhi in Kerala is a village of 2000 families with over 400 twins -

GitHub’s Growing Pains

2026-05-08T21:06:15.751+05:30

GitHub has experienced explosive user growth in recent years, particularly accelerating in 2025. The platform crossed 100 million developers in 2023 and reached over 180 million developers by late 2025, with more than 36 million new developers joining in 2025 alone—equating to roughly one new developer every second.

This rapid expansion, further amplified by AI-powered tools like GitHub Copilot, has driven significant increases in activity: hundreds of millions of pull requests, nearly 1 billion commits in 2025 (up 25% YoY), and surging repository creation and API usage.

Impact on Availability

This hyper-growth has strained GitHub’s infrastructure, leading to multiple high-impact outages and degraded performance in early-to-mid 2026. GitHub’s own engineering leadership has publicly acknowledged that rapid load growth, architectural coupling between services, and challenges in handling large-scale workloads (including monorepos and AI-driven automation) have caused cascading issues.

A Reddit user charted out the availability of GitHub over the last decade: near-perfect stability early on, then visibly higher volatility as scale and complexity grow—likely tracking the platform’s massive user growth and heavier real-time workloads.

Source: Reddit r/github

The rapid pace of growth is starting to take its toll. New activations for Copilot Student, Pro, and Pro+ are temporarily on hold.

Key incidents in early 2026 (e.g., February and March) affected core services such as Git operations, Pull Requests, Actions, Search, and the API, sometimes with failure rates reaching 40%+ for web requests during peaks.

Mitchell Hashimoto, the co-founder of HashiCorp and the creator of several foundational open-source DevOps and infrastructure tools, announced that Ghostty (his current major terminal emulator project that he has been developing as a passion project since around 2021) is leaving GitHub due to frequent outages disrupting git operations, CI runs, PR reviews, and issue discussions, with impacts occurring almost daily over recent months.

Hashimoto is the guy behind Vagrant, Terraform (Infrastructure as Code), and much of the HashiCorp ecosystem (Packer, Consul, Vault, Nomad, and others.)

As GitHub user 1299 since February 2008, he described 18+ years of daily use as a core part of his life and open-source career and expressed personal sadness about the departure.

In an April 2026 update, GitHub’s CTO noted the need to scale capacity dramatically (initially targeting 10X, later referencing even higher multiples) to keep pace with demand.

In summary, while GitHub remains the dominant platform for code collaboration, its unprecedented user and activity growth—fueled by global developer adoption and AI tools—has exposed scaling limits, resulting in more frequent reliability challenges that impact developer productivity worldwide. GitHub is said to be actively investing in infrastructure improvements to address these issues.

Some interesting stats from GitHub Octoverse reports (annual):

Users (Developers on GitHub)

2015: ~9 million users
2016: 12 million
2018 (following Microsoft acquisition): ~28 million
2020: ~56 million
2023: 100+ million
2024–25: ~100–120 million+ (GitHub blog / Octoverse updates)

Repositories

2015: ~21 million repos
2018: ~85 million
2023: 330+ million repositories
2025: 630 million total repositories with +121M new repositories in 2025

63% of all repositories were public.

Open source saw record participation globally, especially from India

Open source development reached record levels this year with 1.12 billion contributions across public repositories

Six of the overall top 10 projects by total contributors are AI‑centric (vllm, huggingface/transformers, modelcontextprotocol/servers, llama.cpp, etc.).

- Article co-written with Grok

HOW TO Optimize Token Usage in GitHub Copilot

2026-05-04T10:51:47.317+05:30

GitHub Copilot is moving to usage‑based billing on June 1, 2026, where token consumption (input, output, cached) directly affects costs. To optimize tokens, you need to reduce unnecessary context, use caching, and structure prompts efficiently. 1 2 3 4 5

How Copilot Uses Tokens

Input tokens → what you send (code, prompts, context).
Output tokens → what Copilot generates.
Cached tokens → reused context (cheaper than new input).
Context loading (files, repo, history) often consumes 80–90% of tokens, not the generated code itself. 5

Practical Strategies to Optimize Token Usage

1. Control Context Aggressively

Avoid opening large/unrelated files while prompting.
Limit selection scope before asking Copilot.
Exclude build, log, and generated files at the enterprise level (e.g., /target/**, *.class, *.xml). 4

2. Break Tasks into Micro‑Operations

❌ Bad: “Refactor entire microservice.”
✅ Better: “Refactor this method to use reactive pattern.”

Smaller scope = fewer files scanned = fewer tokens. 5

3. Reset Sessions Frequently

Long sessions accumulate history → exponential token growth.
Start new chats for unrelated tasks. 5

4. Use Prompt Caching

VS Code 1.118 introduced 93% cache reuse for Copilot sessions.
Cached tokens cost ~10× less than new input tokens. 3

5. Optimize Prompts

Be explicit: mention exact file paths or modules.
Avoid vague prompts like “Analyze the whole repo.”
Use .github/copilot-instructions.md for concise repo‑level guidance. 5

6. Limit Tool & Agent Usage

Each tool call = extra tokens.
Disable unused tools and avoid unnecessary agent chaining. 5

Admin & Enterprise Controls

Content Exclusion → remove irrelevant files from Copilot context globally.
Budget Controls → set per‑user or team limits on AI credits.
Pooled Credits → share unused credits across teams. 4 6

Takeaway

Most savings come from reducing context, not output.
Use caching, break tasks down, reset sessions, and exclude irrelevant files.
Admins should enforce content exclusions and budget controls.
With usage‑based billing, efficient prompting = lower costs + faster responses.

Draft notes co‑created with Copilot — a work in progress that will grow with further study.

This Week I Learned - Week 18 2026

2026-05-02T07:52:39.736+05:30

This Week I Learned -

* AI is influencing not only how fast code is written, but which languages and tools developers use. - Octoverse 2025

* GitHub Copilot CLI for Beginners -

* Apple's Support app update v5.13 accidentally included CLAUDE.md files, which are configuration documents used to guide Anthropic's Claude Code AI coding assistant on codebase architecture and rules.

Apple quickly released v5.13.1 to remove the files, exposing a rare view into their use of third-party AI tools for app development while highlighting a build process oversight at the highly secretive company.

* Claude sometimes refuses or postpones work based on inferred time/context, possibly to manage token limits, avoid rushed outputs, or simulate thoughtful behavior.

* As A.I. makes the production of knowledge work more and more efficient, the job of presenting, debating, lobbying, arm-twisting, reassuring or just plain selling the work appears to be rising in importance. And the need for those sometimes messy human tasks may limit the number of people A.I. displaces. - NYT

* Anthropic's Project Glasswing gave 40 US companies early access to Mythos so they could harden their systems in advance.

Companies testing Mythos reported it could detect tens of thousands of vulnerabilities, compared to around 500 found by Anthropic’s earlier model, Opus 4.6—a twentyfold increase in just one generation.

* ChatGPT Images 2.0 is OpenAI's first image model with thinking capabilities. With thinking mode, the can automatically browse the internet and find relevant contents for reference.

You can ask for the aspect ratio you want in the prompt or select from preset options to regenerate any image in new dimensions.

Instead of prompting one image at a time and stitching the project together yourself, you can ask for a coherent set of up to ten outputs in one go with character and object continuity, that sequentially build on one another.

* Chinese open-source models accounted for roughly one-third of global A.I. use last year, according to a study by OpenRouter, an A.I. model marketplace. DeepSeek was the most widely used, followed by models from Alibaba, the Chinese internet company. - NYT

* CRAVIS (Climate Resilience Analytics and Visualisation Intelligence System) is an integrated platform that brings together historical trends, future projections, and sectoral data in one place.

It has a built-in Agentic AI layer that lets you ask questions and get source-backed insights on questions of heat stress, changing rainfall patterns and extreme events.

* Web QR Code Scanner is a handy open-source web app by Lazar Laszlo that lets you scan QR codes directly in the browser using your camera or an uploaded image.

* Nikhil Pahwa has built a tool to convert Office files into clean Markdown or JSON

* "People who are into Python aren't actually into Python. They just want to get the work done." - Bram Cohen, creator of BitTorrent

* In 2008, Professor Harald zur Hausen received the Nobel Prize for his discovery that persistent infection with high-risk strains of the Human Papillomavirus (HPV) is the cause of cervical cancer. His discovery paved the way for the development of prophylactic vaccines as well as tests to detect the infectious agent. The first generation of vaccines were directed against the two most virulent strains, HPV 16 and 18, that account for 70% of cervical cancers globally but 85% in India. India launched a nationwide HPV vaccination campaign on February 28, 2026, aimed at vaccinating approximately 11.5 million girls aged 14 to prevent cervical cancer, which is the second most common cancer among women in the country.

* Sucking on candies helps many people during flight travel, primarily by reducing ear discomfort caused by pressure changes, often called "airplane ear" or ear barotrauma. It's especially useful during ascent and descent.

During takeoff and landing (especially descent), cabin pressure changes rapidly. The Eustachian tubes (which connect your middle ear to the back of your nose/throat) need to open to equalize pressure. If they don't, you feel fullness, popping, pain, or muffled hearing. Sucking on hard candy (or chewing gum) promotes frequent swallowing and slight jaw movement.

Swallowing activates small muscles that briefly open the Eustachian tubes, allowing air to flow in or out and balance pressure.

* While viruses and bacteria cause sore throats, cold air from fans or drinks creates favorable conditions by triggering vasoconstriction that limits local immune cell delivery and by drying the throat's mucus layer and cilia, impairing pathogen clearance. Studies link lower temperatures and humidity to increased upper respiratory infection risk. Practical prevention includes breathing through the nose as a natural humidifier, positioning fans/AC so they don't hit your face directly and staying hydrated to preserve the mucosal barrier against existing microbes.

* The average adult body contains roughly 5 liters of blood. The heart is a master of recycling. These same 5 liters are pushed through your entire circulatory system roughly once every minute.

At a resting heart rate, your entire blood volume completes a full circuit of your body about 1,440 times a day.

5 Liters/minute x 60 minutes x 24 hours = 7, 200 Liters per day

Blood from the right heart → lungs → oxygen in, CO₂ out

Blood from the left heart → body

Distribution of cardiac output at rest is roughly:

Brain: ~15%
Kidneys: ~20%
Muscles: ~15–20% (varies)
GI/liver: ~20–25%
Skin: ~5–10% for thermoregulation (heat loss)
Heart itself (coronary circulation): ~4–5%; the heart needs its own dedicated blood supply
Bones, connective tissue, and others: ~5%; includes resting tissues with lower metabolic demand

* The UAE has withdrawn from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), a cartel that it joined in 1967, and OPEC+.

OPEC was founded on 14 September 1960 in Baghdad, Iraq, by five countries: Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela, with the goal of giving oil-producing nations greater control over their resources and pricing, which had been dominated by Western oil companies known as the "Seven Sisters".

OPEC+ is a broader alliance formed in 2016, including OPEC members plus additional major oil producers like Russia, Kazakhstan, and Azerbaijan. This coalition controls roughly 40–45% of global oil production, enhancing its ability to influence international energy prices.

As of April 2026, OPEC has 12 member countries: Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Venezuela, Libya, Algeria, Nigeria, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Congo, and the UAE, though the UAE’s membership ends on 1 May 2026. Membership has changed over time, with countries like Angola, Ecuador, Qatar and Indonesia leaving due to strategic or production-related reasons.

* A nemophilist is a person who loves the forest, woods, or woodland scenery.

* "As it turns out, necessity is not the mother of invention, noticed necessity is. The problem needs to affect the important, before the problem is seen as important. The long-handled mop arrived when middle-class households began cleaning their own floors. What changed was who the problem belonged to." - Santosh Desai

Open Food Facts Slack Notes: Data, Trends, and Discoveries

2026-04-30T22:02:39.205+05:30

Open Food Facts is the largest and more comprehensive open database on the planet, by far. This global collaborative citizen-led project is supported by an international community of more than 150,000 contributors.

The Open Food Facts Slack (open to all) has several channels for discussions, updates, and collaborations. I’ll keep sharing interesting facts I come across in the conversations there, right here:

* Pierre (teolemon) - The data (is)...legally acquired, through crowdsourcing and/or AI extraction from Crowdsourcing or existing OFF data. We don’t allow scraping for legal reasons.

* Alex Bourreau - I made a small tool to check what your contributions to Open Food Facts are used for : https://contributionreuses.bourreau.dev/

Enter your OFF username and it shows you a list of scientific articles that relied on data of products you've created !

* James Addison - OpenFoodFacts does have methods to detect products where errors seem likely; it tracks those errors and distributes them to registered volunteers, who then help by reviewing the errors, often fixing them where possible.

some links that I'd recommend:

an overview of the process: https://wiki.openfoodfacts.org/Data_quality

the errors that OFF detects: https://wiki.openfoodfacts.org/List_of_data_quality_errors_(generated)

data quality trends over time dashboard: https://mirabelle.openfoodfacts.org/-/dashboards/data-quality-dashboard

* Stephane - Open Food Facts computes the Nutri-Score, but the formula was created by the EREN research team, and then further developed at the European level

How is NOVA class calculated? Is the algorithm designated by the system, or is it made up for OFF?

* Pierre (teolemon) - it’s following the Scientific paper of Pr. Monteiro, and we use a list of Ultra-processing markers defined in the paper to trigger NOVA 4, we also use categories in some cases as a supplement (like for Sodas where the whole category is NOVA 4)

* Tacite - If you mix two databases (your local + OFF), the OFF licence requires you to share your local database

* Stephane - OFF currently does not compute recommendations for alternative products. One option is to do a search query for the category of the product, and then rank products based on their nutrition etc.

W.I.P

Optimized Workflow

2026-04-28T15:38:19.739+05:30

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

Use Case vs User Story

2026-04-28T13:05:38.618+05:30

Allen Holub explains the difference between a use case and a user story -

Bob Martin describes use cases pretty well in his book Clean Architecture:

"A use case is a description of the way that an automated system is used. It specifies the input to be provided by the user, the output to be returned to the user, and the processing steps involved in producing that output." Put another way, a use case describes how a user uses a computer program. A use case describes how to use an existing program, or, if the program can't do everything necessary, it identifies aspects of the program we'll have to create. Use cases live in the implementation space.

A user story, on the other hand, is a description of the user's work. It is literally the user's story. The story describes a domain-level problem and, when fleshed out, describes how a user solves that problem when working at the domain level. The story describes the user's work, not ours. A story does not describe or specify a computer program at all. It does not describe how a computer program works. Stories live in the domain—in the problem space.

Neither use cases nor stories specify programmer tasks. You cannot represent them as "tickets" (despite what Jira claims). They are part of the architectural process, not the construction process. That's true even when architecture and construction are concurrent. You cannot estimate either because neither has anything to do with the construction.

Both use cases and stories are useful in different ways. Both are elements of the architectural process, but you cannot even think about implementation until that architecture, or a portion of it, is at least roughed out in your head. A skilled programmer can work on both simultaneously.

Beyond Booking: The Rise of Intelligent Tools for Indian Train Travel

2026-04-26T18:22:17.243+05:30

Trains are the lifeline of India. From the humble beginnings of online ticket booking (which was an absolute game-changer), we’ve come a long way. What started as simple add-ons like checking waitlist status or seeing which stations fall on your travel route has now exploded into a full-blown ecosystem of smart tools and services.

Today, you can track trains in real-time, check for seat availability, predict delays, analyze patterns, and make travel decisions like a pro. Indian railways data has truly become everyone’s playground.

Here’s a list of some of the other cool software tools and services that are making train travel smarter, smoother, and way more fun:

Google Maps Presents: Traffic Trauma Live

2026-04-26T12:03:06.161+05:30

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

Google Maps officially rolled out AI-powered audio notifications for accident-prone areas (Sample: "Accident prone area for the next 500 meters") and proactive congestion alerts ("Congestion 1km ahead. You're on the best route") in India in November, 2025.

While basic traffic alerts have been around for years, this specific update introduced "Accident-Prone Area Alerts" and "Proactive Traffic Alerts" as part of a major integration of Gemini AI into the app. Maps also displays official speed limits beside the in-app speedometer.

India was a pioneer market for these specific AI-driven safety features. The proactive and accident-specific audio notifications were part of a specialized "India-First" push.

What was "India-First"?

Accident-Prone Area Alerts: This feature was developed specifically for the Indian road context. Google collaborated directly with local Indian authorities (like the NHAI and traffic police in cities like Gurugram and Hyderabad) to map out "black spots." While some safety features exist globally, the specific voice-guided warning for high-risk zones debuted in India first.

Proactive Traffic Alerts: India was one of the first two markets (alongside the US) to receive these notifications that alert you to major jams even when you aren't actively using navigation.

Flyover Navigation: The voice-guided "Take the flyover" vs. "Stay below" instructions in 9 Indian languages was a massive technical update designed specifically to solve the "Indian Flyover Dilemma," which later influenced how Google handles complex interchanges globally.

The "Why" Behind the India Launch

Google treats India as a "living lab" for navigation for a few reasons:

Density & Complexity: If an AI can successfully navigate a driver through Bengaluru or Mumbai, it can work almost anywhere.

Two-Wheeler Market: India is the world's largest two-wheeler market, leading to features like "Navatars" and narrow-road routing that started here before expanding to Southeast Asia and Latin America.

Local Data Partnerships: The deep integration with Indian traffic police to mark accident zones provided a data set that wasn't as readily available in a unified way in other regions.

This Week I Learned - Week 17 2026

2026-04-24T23:59:27.861+05:30

This Week I Learned -

* From The Batch -

- Alignment training teaches LLMs to behave like assistants, but it tethers them to that behavior only loosely. Beyond alignment training, system prompts act as behavioral guardrails, but motivated users can bypass them.

- The lengths of tasks completed autonomously by AI agents have doubled roughly every seven months, according to METR, an independent testing organization

- LLMs' knowledge is still relatively limited with respect to infrastructure and the complex tradeoffs good engineers must make...finding infrastructure bugs — say, a subtle network misconfiguration — can be incredibly difficult and requires deep engineering expertise.

- Research involves thinking through new ideas, formulating hypotheses, running experiments, interpreting them to potentially modify the hypotheses, and iterating until we reach conclusions. Coding agents can speed up the pace at which we can write research code.

- Meta has pivoted from its open-weights strategy to deliver a closed alternative, Muse Spark, a natively multimodal reasoning model with support for tool use and multi-agent orchestration.

* If Indian data keeps training US and Chinese models while domestic capability goes unbuilt, the IT services sector hollows out with nothing to replace it. Well-known independent equity research and brokerage firm Bernstein's ask: fund domestic foundation models, build compute capacity, and push global AI companies to list in India — sharing value with the public.

* Google’s AI writes 50% of code, trailing Anthropic’s near 100%.

* A year after its viral debut, China’s DeepSeek has rolled out its latest AI model, V4.

* Sam Altman’s OpenAI has rolled out GPT-5.5.

* Avi Kivity developed the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor, which powers many production cloud environments. Following his work on KVM, Kivity developed the Seastar framework and the ScyllaDB database. He co-founded the company ScyllaDB with Dor Laor.

* Firefox stores your history and bookmarks in a single file called places.sqlite.

* Korean gaming publisher Krafton Inc's PUBG Mobile remains banned in India, but its Battlegrounds Mobile India consistently ranks among the country’s three top revenue-generating games.

* Income or consumption share of the richest 10%, 1963 to 2024

* Open Source your Knowledge

* How To Learn In Private

* In medicine, a differential diagnosis is the systematic process used to distinguish a particular disease or condition from others that present with similar symptoms.

Think of it as a medical "elimination round." When you tell a doctor your symptoms, they rarely have a single answer immediately. Instead, they create a list of all possible "suspects" and then work to rule them out until only the most likely cause remains.

* Kangaroos evolved the ability to hop larger distances on two legs, as that was more efficient than running on four legs. Female kangaroos can pause embryonic development through a process called embryonic diapause, allowing them to time births for better survival conditions.

* In the last 12 months, Hyundai & LG together took $4.7 billion out of their Indian subsidiaries and sent it to their Korean parents.

* 28% of mobiles in India are made by domestic companies.

* According to the National Sample Survey’s 80th Round Report on Household Social Consumption: Health, 15% of Telangana’s population reported some form of illness in a 15-day period, which is higher than the national average of 13.1%. The average medical expenditure per hospitalisation (excluding childbirth) (as in-patient) in TG is among highest in India at ₹52,743. The national average is comparatively lower at ₹37,858.

* Overcharged.in is a free tool for private citizens to benchmark what they pay against official Central Government Health Scheme (CGHS) rates for CGHS beneficiaries.

* Jhalmuri is air-infused indigenous rice crackle with artisanal mustard oil reduction added with some hand-crushed chillies and cloudy coconut chunks.

A Guide to Spec-Driven Development: Plan, Implement, and Validate

2026-04-23T21:30:11.319+05:30

The DeepLearning.AI short course on Spec-Driven Development with Coding Agents introduces a professional paradigm shift in how we build applications using agentic coding assistance.

Rather than "vibe coding"—where developers rely on quick, high-level prompts that often lead to technical debt—SDD brings engineering rigour back to the process.

Agent is the muscle, but the SPEC is the brain - In this workflow, the human takes on the role of a senior architect, providing the "blueprints" (specifications), while the AI agent acts as the "muscle" to implement those designs.

The 1 Hour 20 Minute video course has 15 short lessons -

Introduction - 4 mins
Why spec−driven development? - 4 mins
Workflow overview - 3 mins
Set up your environment - 5 mins
Setup - 1 min
Creating the constitution - 10 mins
Feature specification - 3 mins
Feature implementation - 1 min
Feature validation - 4 mins
Project replanning - 6 mins
The second feature phase - 6 mins
The MVP - 3 mins
Legacy support - 4 mins
Build your own workflow - 6 mins
Agent replaceability - 3 mins
Conclusion - 1 min
Quiz - 10 mins

Key Points of Spec-Driven Development

The Paradigm Shift: SDD decouples the Specification (the "what" and "why") from the Implementation (the "how"). Developers focus on providing the unique context an agent lacks rather than writing code by hand.

Downstream Amplification: One of the primary benefits is the ability to control massive code changes with minor spec adjustments. For instance, changing one sentence in a spec to switch a database can automatically update hundreds of lines of code.

Eliminating Context Decay: Unlike chat-based "vibe coding," where history is often lost or the agent's memory becomes "full," specs provide a permanent, high-quality context that anchors the agent across multiple sessions avoiding the drift that comes from long prompt dialogues.

High Intent Fidelity: By defining problems, constraints, and success criteria upfront, the agent is significantly more likely to produce code that accurately matches your long-term goals.

The Project Constitution: Every project begins with a Constitution, consisting of three pillars: the Mission (vision/scope), the Tech Stack (technologies and constraints), and the Roadmap (sequence of phases).

Feature Development Loops: Work is organized into repeatable loops on isolated branches. Each loop follows a structured Plan, Implement, and Verify process to ensure feature quality and reduce cognitive debt.

The process where an agent creates something and we check or verify it is called human in the loop.

Because agents are so fast at writing code, software developers have lately been talking about cognitive debt, the mental load of tracking what your code is doing and how it has evolved.

To avoid drift, the agent can update the related specs simultaneously, ensuring the docs and code stay in sync.

Human-in-the-Loop Validation: The human's role shifts to supervisor. You review the agent’s work against the spec, using tools like code reviews and automated tests to ensure the implementation hasn't drifted from the original intent.

It’s important to “replan” between features in the SDD workflow, as it’s a great opportunity to reflect, update the constitution and roadmap, and fine-tune your process — a normal step, not a sign of failure.

Support for Brownfield Projects: SDD is not just for new "greenfield" projects. For legacy codebases, agents can "reverse engineer" a project constitution by exploring existing files, commits, and documentation.

Workflow Automation via Skills: A "Skill" in the context of agentic coding is a reusable package of instructions and resources that gives an agent a repeatable capability — handy when you catch yourself retyping the same prompts. Developers can create "Agent Skills"—packages of instructions that give agents repeatable capabilities, such as automatically updating changelogs or running complex validation suites.

Agent Flexibility and Standards: SDD is designed to be agent-agnostic. By using standards like the Agent Client Protocol (ACP) and Model Context Protocol (MCP), developers can switch between different AI models (like Claude or ChatGPT) without losing their established workflow.

The agent landscape moves fast. Keeping specs and tools independent of any single agent lets you switch tools without rebuilding your workflow.

GitHub Markdown Keyboard Shortcuts

2026-04-19T13:37:00.003+05:30

GitHub's web editor (used in issues, pull requests, comments, Markdown files, etc.) has built-in keyboard shortcuts that work in the standard Markdown editing mode -

Keyboard Shortcut	Description
Ctrl + B	Inserts Markdown formatting for bold text
Ctrl + I	Inserts Markdown formatting for italic text
Ctrl + E	Inserts Markdown formatting for inline code (one-liner)
Ctrl + K	Inserts Markdown formatting for a link
Ctrl + Shift + 7	Inserts Markdown formatting for an ordered (numbered) list
Ctrl + Shift + 8	Inserts Markdown formatting for an unordered (bullet) list
Ctrl + Shift + .	Inserts Markdown formatting for a blockquote
Ctrl + Shift + P	Toggles between Write and Preview tabs (in comments, issues, PRs, or file editor)
Ctrl + Enter	Submits the comment/form (in issue/PR/comment fields)
Ctrl + V (with text selected)	Converts pasted URL into a Markdown link
Ctrl + Z	Undo last action
Ctrl + Y	Redo last action

Note: These shortcuts work in GitHub’s web editor for comments, issues, pull requests, Markdown files, and the file editor (including github.dev). They are specific to Windows/Linux. (Mac uses Command instead of Ctrl.)