This Week I Learned - Week 3 2026

This Week I Learned - 

* In 2024, the combined cloud computing revenue of AWS, Azure, and GCP exceeded $200B. 

* AI battles - Anthropic has blocked xAI from using its Claude AI models after xAI accessed them through the Cursor coding tool, citing rules against aiding competitors. 

* France’s armed forces ministry has signed a framework agreement with Mistral AI, giving its armed forces, directorates, services, and affiliated public entities—like the Atomic Energy Commission, the National Office for Aerospace Studies and Research, and the Navy’s Hydrographic and Oceanographic Service—access to AI models, software, and services developed by Mistral AI.

* An AI-altered image, uploaded to social media in the immediate aftermath of a minor earthquake across Lancaster, England, convinced Network Rail that a local bridge had been badly damaged, halting travel on the line. In other fake-image news, criminals are doctoring pictures they’ve found on social media and using them as “proof of life” in phony kidnappings. - O'Reilly Radar Trends

* You can simulate offline mode using your browser’s Developer Tools (Ctrl + Shift + I or F12). Just dock the DevTools window next to the website, head over to the Network tab, and select Offline from the dropdown menu in the toolbar.

* Chrome DevTools now supports individual network request throttling!

DevTools now allows developers to simulate slow network conditions for specific requests rather than the entire page. 

This helps in testing how a web application performs and handles issues when specific resources (like images, scripts, or API calls) are slow to load.

* Countries distinguish between metropolitan (homeland) and independent and semi-independent portions of sovereign states. For India's point-of-view (POV), EPSG:7755 is the Survey of India recommended projection for making maps of India. For Global maps however - use Equal Earth projection EPSG:8857 which is an equal area projection that preserves relative areas of countries - and is the official adopted projection of many agencies (including NASA) for producing global visualizations. 

* A Quarter Century of US Television -

A Quarter Century of Television [OC]
byu/gammafission00 indataisbeautiful

* The secret to 10-minute Quick Commerce delivery in India isn't driver speed. It's dark stores. Abhishek has curated a dataset of all known Blinkit, Zepto, and Instamart dark store locations across Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad, and Pune. 

* The US leads in mobile broadband subscriptions, international student enrollment, agriculture support, household disposable income, and numerous measures of foreign direct investment. It has the lowest tax on goods and services as a percentage of GDP.

* Americans spend more on health, but don't live as long. 

* A 401(k) is a US-specific employer-sponsored retirement savings plan (named after section 401(k) of the US Internal Revenue Code). It's a defined-contribution plan where employees contribute a portion of their salary (pre-tax in traditional 401(k), or post-tax in Roth 401(k)), often with employer matching (free money from the company), and the funds grow tax-advantaged until withdrawal in retirement. Many call NPS the "Indian 401(k)" because of the defined-contribution, investment choice aspect.

* Scott Adams - "good management is excellent manipulation"

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