This Week I Learned - Week #22 2025

This Week I Learned - 

* OpenAI is set to acquire Windsurf, formerly Codeium, for around $3 billion. 

* NLWeb or Natural Language Web is an open project developed by Microsoft that aims to be the fastest and easiest way to effectively turn your website into an AI app, allowing users to query the contents of the site by directly using natural language, just like with an AI assistant or Copilot. NLWeb was conceived and developed by R.V. Guha who is the creator of widely used web standards such as RSS, RDF and Schema.org. 

* AI coding agents aren't just faster ChatGPT. They're junior developer who never sleep. They run tests and pushes actual branches. With clear requirements and good reviews, they're productive. - S Anand

* There's An AI For That (TAAFT) is a website for finding AI tools for different use cases.

* Agentic Tribune is an experimental AI-powered news site. All of the articles are written by AI.

* Advice from engineering managers for junior engineers:

• Ask "why" in every code review
• Keep a living "aha!" journal
• Time-box rabbit holes so you ship and learn in parallel.
• Writing docs as you debug
• Contribute to open source to beat impostor syndrome

* "Big data, web services, and cloud computing established a kind of “internet operating system.” Services like Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Stripe made it possible to do formerly difficult, high-stakes enterprise tasks like taking payments with minimal programming expertise. All kinds of deep and powerful functionality was made available via simple APIs...AI will not replace programmers, but it will transform their jobs. Lessons from history tell us that when automation makes it cheaper and easier to deliver products that people want or need, increases in demand often lead to increases in employment." - Tim O’Reilly

* One of the hardest parts of teaching is to make learning feel not like a chore, but fun, intuitive & enjoyable. Arvind V has the remarkable gift of making learning fun. 

* Revisual Labs Chart Gallery  

* Word is Apple wants to produce iPhones worth $40 billion in India by FY26—that’s enough to cover 80% of US demand and meet domestic needs too. 

iPhones are Apple’s golden goose. In FY24, they brought in $201 billion, or 51% of total revenue. - NDTV Profit

* Medical Terminology Made Easy by Ben Reynolds

* Drugs on EMI - Novartis is offering a monthly instalment scheme (EMI) for the twice-a-year treatment of their injectable drug used to reduce levels of low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C), commonly called bad cholesterol. Each instalment is priced at Rs 15,000-16,000. 

Inclisiran is meant for people who do not tolerate statins or despite statins their levels do not come to the desired number.

* Climbing Mount Everest typically takes weeks. But four British men last week shrank that timeline dramatically, travelling from London to summit & back in less than a week. They skipped the adjustment period, in part, by inhaling a secret weapon: xenon gas. Inhalation of the gas is thought to improve oxygen levels. - NYT

* Much like Amazon that commercialised its cloud platform after using it for captive purposes, BlackRock developed the Aladdin portfolio management system for its own holdings. It was then sold to clients as a software as a service to manage risk, move money across asset classes and analyse consumer data, besides tracking fund performance and changing portfolio values. Aladdin is short for Asset, Liability, and Debt and Derivative Investment Network. 

* The India Meteorological Department (IMD) has updated its forecast for the 2025 monsoon season, now predicting above-normal rainfall. The agency

raised its projection for the four-month monsoon period to 106% of the long-term average.

* Through his three decades of teaching at Columbia Journalism School, Sam Freedman has encouraged students to try long-form narratives as something of an experiment. His brand of tough love has led to 113 book contracts and 95 published books, out of some 675 people who have taken it. Freedman began his career as a reporter ...and went on to write 10 books, including one following a New York City public-school teacher for a year. But he realized, at a certain point, that teaching the book-writing seminar for young journalists was one way of creating something that would outlive him. He emphasizes that there is no such thing as writer’s block, only a failure to have done enough reporting, or an ego that’s getting in the way of putting words on the page...narrative is an equation comprised of character, event, place and theme (N = C + E + P + T). - NYT

* "Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather" - John Ruskin (1819 - 1900), English art critic, social thinker, and philanthropist