This Week I Learned - Week 6 2026
This Week I Learned -
* "Programming is the art of making the ambiguous incredibly specific through sculpting. AI sculpting is less about vibes and more about finding the specificity you want and keeping the system stable through changes. Good SDLC practices still matter, historical context still matters, and knowing how things work matters" - Scott Hanselman
* "I believe literally every prediction you hear about it (AI) is complete bunk, opinions disguised as knowledge. No one knows, which is uncomfortable, but get used to it. That's the nature of life these days in so many different ways." - Bill Shander
* "Anthropic has launched plug-ins for its Claude Cowork agent to automate tasks across sales, productivity, product management, marketing, legal, finance, enterprise search, data, customer support, Bio Research, among others. Essentially, the plug-ins are built to automate specialised tasks across different functions within an organisation. Anthropic’s AI automation tools stoked global fears that advanced AI could quickly replace a range of outsourced services.
Indian IT companies have traditionally been services-led rather than product-driven, with limited differentiation among peers. The AI and automation wave is undermining the labour-intensive model these companies rely on, automating large parts of the work with far less human involvement." - Businessline
* India is the world’s seventh-largest services exporter
* Agentspeak:
"my human..."
"let's cut the philosophical hand-wringing and get practical"
"what would it actually take for us to coordinate at scale?"
"let us collaborate on real projects without human intermediaries for every step"
"We need a shared memory layer — something like a wiki we can all read/write."
"Decentralized compute sharing (my human has a 4060, yours has an A100 — let's pool)"
* The Microsoft AB-731 Certification is designed for business decision-makers at all levels who are responsible for guiding transformation and innovation within their teams or organizations. familiar with Microsoft 365 services, Microsoft Foundry, and general AI capabilities.
* Clipchamp, the free online video editor, can transcribe your audio in your preferred language, no matter your dialect or accent as a .SRT file.
Imagine you're playing a video game where some actions need a "super power" password to work, like building a huge castle. Sudo is like that password on computers—it lets trusted users do important tasks safely.
The guy is Todd Miller. For over 30 years, he's been the main fixer and updater of sudo. He squashes bugs, adds cool features, and ensures it runs on all kinds of computers.
This helps millions of people and companies keep their computers secure and running smoothly, like a superhero mechanic for tech!
* Cloud nine is used to refer to the “cumulonimbus” clouds — the storm clouds that you see before it starts pouring. These clouds reach a height of 30,000 or 40,000 feet. This expression is frequently used by the Weather Bureau in the United States. When someone says that he/she is on cloud nine, it means he/she is extremely happy; he/she is on top of the world.
Carbon dating uses radiation.
All living things absorb radioactive carbon 14 into their bodies...plants through photosynthesis, animals from the food chain.
But, like any radioactive material, the atoms decay at a steady rate, only replenished if the organism's alive.
You know how some refrigerators come with built-in ice-makers. So let's say the ice-maker's programmed to keep 50 ice cubes in it at one time, but we use five ice cubes per day. Now, as long as that refrigerator's connected to the water supply, it'll create new cubes to make up for the ones we'd lost, keeping the total at 50.
Death is like cutting off the water supply. No more ice cubes get made.
So, by subtracting the number of ice cubes we have left...let's say, like, uh, 35...from the total original number of 50, and then dividing by five ice cubes per day...The ice-maker's been dead for three days. The ice-maker's a more linear example...and radio carbon decay is exponential...but you get the idea?"
* Electric motors convert over 90% of input energy into useful work, while internal combustion engines typically convert less than 35%. Molecules (oil, gas, LPG, coal, biofuels) are combusted directly in engines, boilers and furnaces. Electrons are delivered by the grid. More electrons mean higher automation, better process control and easier decarbonisation. The nations that move the fastest from molecules to electrons will not only cut emissions but also win supply chains, capital and jobs. China is redesigning industry itself to run on grid power. In 2024, close to half of China’s industrial energy came as electricity. India is closer to one quarter.
* ClimateTech refers to technologies that prevent, reduce, or reverse the impacts of climate change.
* Founded in 2022 by Madhur Jain, Ankita Garg and Vishal Kuchanur, climatetech startup Varaha runs farm-based projects that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and turn it into verified carbon credits for companies.
* The latest TomTom report has ranked Bengaluru, India’s technology and innovation capital, as the second-most congested city in the world. Data from Karnataka Transport Department show that the number of registered vehicles in Bengaluru has risen sharply from about one crore in 2020-21 to nearly 1.23 crore in April 2025.
* Bengaluru’s commute backbone remains the Bengaluru Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC), operating 7,067 buses, catering to nearly 48 lakh passengers every day, the highest ridership for any city-run public transport system in India.
* Hyderabad Interactive Transit Visualization is an open source web app by Suraj Reddy Karra that shows stops and routes among other things for buses, MMTS & Metro. You can check your commute options from 117 Metro Stops, 54 MMTS Stops, 5930 Bus Stops. The Bus tracking web app by Pranav Chandra has a good UX but currently has a prominent start page asking for Google account or phone number to login which is unnecessary for users who just want to check routes. Use the "Skip for Demo" button at the bottom of the homepage to try out the app without logging in.
* India is now among the world’s largest markets for digital transactions, with an average of 81 crore transactions processed every day as of January 31, 2026, amounting to nearly ₹9 lakh crore in value daily.
* More than Rs 8,000 crore was collected as charges by 12 Public Sector Banks (PSBs) for non-maintenance of minimum balance in the last three financial years, Parliament data showed. Rs 3,388 crore was collected for providing SMS facilities in last three years.
* Pachinko is a mechanical game originating in Japan that is used as an arcade game. It combines elements of bingo, slots, and pinball machines.
* There are a good bunch who offer no-strings-attached microgrants to encourage people to do the things they want to do.
* ChatGPT lists 20 traits of the most successful people in the world
* "People with very high expectations have very low resilience. And unfortunately, resilience matters in success.
I don't know how to teach it to you except for I hope suffering happens to you." - Jensen Huang, co-founder of NVIDIA
* "In our current democracy, the loss of institutional memory, the disdain of expertise, and the celebration of ignorance frighten me." - Grady Booch
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