This Week I Learned - Week #23 2025
This Week I Learned -
* Jules from Google Labs, is an asynchronous, agentic coding assistant that integrates directly with your existing repositories.
* With Chain-of-thought reasoning, AI sacrifices speed for depth and better answers by sharing the intermediate reasoning steps with the user before arriving at a final answer.
* How People are Really Using Generative AI Now (PDF, 104 pages, March 2025)
* To list your app on Google Play Store, the largest Android app store, costs a one-time fee of $25. To get your app onto Apple’s App Store costs a $99 annual fee. Service fees Both charge 30% on apps and in-app purchases. This drops to 15% after your first year and if you earn less than $1M.
* Indian High Court Judgments dataset - This dataset contains judgements from the Indian High Courts, downloaded from ecourts website. It contains judgments of 25 high courts, along with raw metadata (in json format) and structured metadata (in parquet format).
* The 188-year-old agriculture-equipment maker, Deere & Co., paid 'ethical' hackers $1.5M to hack them and detect computer network vulnerabilities.
* YouTube provides four ways of earning revenues for producers. These include:
- Advertisements-supported service
- Subscription-based
- Shorts monetization
- Transaction-based service, which includes watching films on rent (a film stays in your account for two days) or buying films (a film stays in your account as long as it is there on YouTube).
* Global Top Content Types Watched on YouTube (%)
- Music/Music videos
- Comedy
- How Tos
- Documentaries
- Films or TV shows
* Companies are spending more on AI infrastructure than entire countries’ GDP. xAI built a 200,000 GPU data center in 122 days (faster than building a single house). Data centers now consume 1.5% of global electricity, growing 12% annually (4x faster than total electricity consumption).
* Mary Meeker published the 1st edition of the “Internet Trends Report” in 1996 - a 322 page deep-dive into the web’s potential. She paused writing the Internet Trends report in 2019 to focus on building BOND - but she’s back to long form & data driving writing with the AI Trends Report 2025.
* Uber burned $17B over 7 years before positive cash flow
* JSR, Tokyo Ohka Kogyo (TOK), and Shin-Etsu Chemical are publicly traded on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. They dominate the semiconductor materials market, controlling about 90% of EUV photoresists and 53% of silicon wafers, critical for digital infrastructure and AI.
Photoresists are exotic light-sensitive chemicals that enable the patterning of circuits on silicon wafers when UV or EUV light hits these materials through a mask.
JSR began as Japan Synthetic Rubber in 1957, making tires. A radical pivot to semiconductors in the 1980s led them to pioneer chemically amplified photoresists. Today they lead the market with $3.5B revenue.
* India’s UPI payments platform has overtaken the world’s largest credit card payments processor Visa in daily transaction volume. India now accounts for nearly half of all real-time payment transactions, according to a recent RBI report.
* No one really wins in a war - During World War II, according to one estimate, the Allies lost 91,015 aircraft and 18,587,000 soldiers, while the Axis powers lost 70,569 aircraft and suffered 5,930,000 fatalities.
* Warren Buffett consumes around 2,700 calories a day, drinks five Cokes, eats McDonald’s for breakfast, and humorously admits to not knowing his blood type. Ironically, Buffet’s lack of obsession with longevity may just be part of the secret of his simple, low-stress life. It is possible Buffett hit the genetic lottery for longevity. His father lived into his 90s.
* "Knowledge is a process of piling up facts; wisdom lies in their simplification" - Martin H Fischer, German-born American Physician/Teacher/Author (1879-1962)
* "Middle age is when your age starts to show around your middle" - Bob Hope
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