This Week I Learned - Week 40 2025

This Week I Learned - 

* Alibaba released weights for Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B in Instruct and Thinking variations. They incorporate some of the latest research on alternate forms of attention and mixture-of-experts approaches to use less processing power at inference. Rapidly rising demand for cheaper and faster token generation is pushing more teams to tune mixture-of-experts architectures so they use fewer active parameters. - The Batch

* NeuTTS Air is the world’s first super-realistic, on-device, TTS speech language model with instant voice cloning. Built off a 0.5B LLM backbone, NeuTTS Air brings natural-sounding speech, real-time performance, built-in security and speaker cloning to your local device - unlocking a new category of embedded voice agents, assistants, toys, and compliance-safe apps. It is optimised for on-device deployment - provided in GGML format, ready to run on phones, laptops, or even Raspberry Pis

* Greater Manchester Police (GMP) suspended remote working after uncovering a scheme where 26+ officers/staff used "key jamming" tactics—placing objects on keyboards to fake productivity and trick monitoring software. Detected via keylogging anomalies (e.g., one officer pressing 'I' 16,000 times), it sparked an internal investigation and debate on surveillance/trust in public sector remote work.

* Transit agencies across the world publish GTFS (General Transit Feed Specification) feeds, an open standard for transit data. GTFS makes it easier to use, analyze and optimize transit networks. They consist of a series of text files collected in a ZIP file, which model various aspects of transit information such as stops, routes, and schedules.

* The six-hour window between 3pm and 9pm has emerged as the most dangerous period on Telangana’s roads, with nearly 40% of total accidents reported during these hours, according to the latest National Crime Records Bureau data for 2023. Railway fatalities in Telangana were most common during morning hours, with 329 of the total 770 deaths (about 43%) occurring between 6 am and 12 noon. 

Source - The Times of India

* Wealth Of (Non-US) Nations, Ruchir Sharma: Since 2015, the world has generated a total of 444 companies with average annual returns in dollar terms of more than 15%, and a market cap that today exceeds $10bn. 

A solid majority of these firms – 248 – emerged outside US. Unicorns – private firms valued above $1bn – are not an exclusively American species either; roughly 40 of the world’s top 100 are based in other countries. 

America’s wealth machine is now run largely by and for Silicon Valley. 

Fewer than one in ten of the world’s 50 largest tech firms are European. 

India, which is home to 40 companies with high average annual returns 

* As of August 2025, the US has declared disasters for 66 fires, 25 severe storms, and 8 floods.

These disaster categories are among the most common in the US since Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was founded in 1979. The agency is responsible for coordinating the federal government's response to disaster declarations.

Fires accounted for 1,665 (38.1%) of all disaster declarations, the highest of any disaster type.

- USAFacts.org 

* If you have dry skin, you should look for products that contain ingredients like hyaluronic acid, ceramides, glycerin, or petrolatum (petroleum jelly) to lock in moisture.

* Central Consumer Protection Authority (CCPA) is cracking down on deceptive e-commerce pricing. Its Rs 2 lakh fine on FirstCry reinforces that all displayed prices must be upfront and tax-inclusive, linking drip pricing to dark patterns under the E-Commerce Rules, 2023.

* Hyderabad tops the list for local bus fares.

* "The quality of your life is determined by the quality of your thoughts." – Marcus Aurelius