This Week I Learned - Week 9 2026

This Week I Learned - 

* Supabase is an open-source Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) built around PostgreSQL. It is a Firebase alternative that can help you set up a backend in less than 2 minutes.

* Add the possibility of an Internet Service Provider-level blocking of a service to the list of things you should debug when your code isn't working. Now if your perfectly working code accesses some paid premium AI-Model APIs suddenly throws errors, you'll be losing tokens while you figure that it was in fact your ISP that was glitching.  A subset of users based in India accessing Supabase over JioFiber, Reliance Jio's fiber-to-the-home broadband service, faced routing/block issues. Supabase’s own infrastructure was fully operational but users on JioFiber (and some other Indian ISPs) couldn’t connect to Supabase services like Dashboard, Auth, Edge Functions, Postgres in ap-south-1, etc. The root cause turned out to be ISP-level DNS resolution failure. The ISP’s DNS servers were either blocking or returning incorrect responses for Supabase domains. Supabase kept updating about the issue through an Incident Report on its service status page. The workaround offered was to use a VPN to connect to Supabase.

* India represents 9% of Supabase's global traffic, its fourth-largest market with 179% year-over-year growth. 

* According to Grok, Supabase isn't officially "banned," but Indian govt issued a blocking order under Section 69A of IT Act on Feb 24, restricting access via ISPs (patchy on Jio, Airtel, etc.).

A senior official said it was due to "information was being shared that should not have been shared," but no public specifics or confirmation on exact reason (could be security, compliance, etc.).

Supabase is engaging authorities for resolution. Workaround: switch to Google/Cloudflare DNS or use VPN. 

* Website blocking orders are rarely made public, and they propagate slowly, leading to initial speculation that certain operators — which were among the first to comply with the blocking order — had misconfigured their systems. - The Hindu

* Flightradar24 is a real-time flight tracking service that provides detailed analytics and insights into significant aviation events. During normal operations, FR24 handles roughly 3 million users a day. During "attacks" or major events, this can spike to 1 million users per hour. Even with a Content Delivery Network (CDN) like Cloudflare, the sheer volume of unique WebSocket connections (needed for real-time movement) can saturate the edge servers. FR24 relies on third-party data from the FAA and Eurocontrol. During surges, if the FR24 backend makes too many requests to these providers to verify flight statuses, it can hit its own external API limits, causing certain flights to "disappear" or stop updating even if the website is still loading. FR24 uses Hybrid infrastructure consisting of on-prem virtualized data centers + AWS & Azure. The cost of maintaining a server infrastructure capable of handling 50x normal load at all times is financially impossible; thus, they rely on "elastic scaling" which always has a few minutes of "lag" before it catches up to a sudden news-driven surge.

* LLMs can now unmask your anonymous accounts. LLMs deanonymize like this in simple terms:

Your anonymous posts (Reddit, HN, etc.) get fed to an LLM. It spots subtle clues: writing style, hobbies, job hints, specific events or opinions that scream "unique person."

It then searches the web/LinkedIn/Reddit for matching real profiles using "embeddings" (AI math that measures text similarity).

Top matches? LLM reasons step-by-step: "Does this detail line up? Timeline match? Style consistent?" 

Finally, it calibrates confidence—only guesses when 90%+ sure.

* "History demonstrates that the advancement of technology destroys some jobs while simultaneously creating others.

This raises two fundamental issues: the rate of change (and the societal ability to metabolize that change) and whether or not the result is net positive, neutral, or negative (with regard to human value and human costs).

"AI Slop Cleaner" is a job category that I did not see coming." - Grady Booch

* "...programming is becoming unrecognizable. You’re not typing computer code into an editor like the way things were since computers were invented, that era is over. You're spinning up AI agents, giving them tasks *in English* and managing and reviewing their work in parallel. The biggest prize is in figuring out how you can keep ascending the layers of abstraction to set up long-running orchestrator Claws with all of the right tools, memory and instructions that productively manage multiple parallel Code instances for you. The leverage achievable via top tier "agentic engineering" feels very high right now.

It’s not perfect, it needs high-level direction, judgement, taste, oversight, iteration and hints and ideas. It works a lot better in some scenarios than others (e.g. especially for tasks that are well-specified and where you can verify/test functionality). The key is to build intuition to decompose the task just right to hand off the parts that work and help out around the edges. But imo, this is nowhere near "business as usual" time in software." - Andrej Karpathy 

* The Component Gallery is an up-to-date repository of interface components based on examples from the world of design systems, designed to be a reference for anyone building user interfaces.

* UI Guideline is a guide to standardizing names of UI components.

* Microsoft, the world’s fourth most valuable public company, named Asha Sharma as CEO of its Microsoft Gaming division. 

* Wilson Greatbatch (1919 – 2011) is the prolific inventor renowned for developing the first successful implantable cardiac pacemaker in 1958. He first became interested in the medical applications of electronic devices when he was studying at Cornell University. Reminiscent of Edison's many dogged attempts to find the right solution in pursuit of an ingenious idea, his book The Making of the Pacemaker is a human-interest story at its best and also an important firsthand account for the medical archives of an invention that today saves millions of lives. 

Greatbatch's pivotal invention occurred serendipitously in 1958 while he was building an oscillator to record heart sounds at the University of Buffalo; he accidentally installed a 1 MΩ resistor instead of a 10 KΩ one, resulting in a circuit that produced a steady 1.8-millisecond pulse every second, mimicking a heartbeat. Collaborating with surgeons Dr. William Chardack and Dr. Andrew Gage at the Buffalo Veterans Affairs Hospital, he refined the device over two years, including through animal testing beginning with the first successful implant in a dog in 1958. The inaugural human implantation took place in 1960 on a 77-year-old patient, who survived for two years, followed by reports of 15 successful human implants by 1961. 

Embodying a modest personal ethos, Greatbatch maintained a simple lifestyle, reinvesting the bulk of his earnings from over 325 patents back into research and development rather than accumulating personal wealth, which further amplified his contributions to society.

* Mosquitoes began biting hominins 1.8 million years ago, according to a study publsihed in Scientific Reports. The malaria-causing mosquito group, including the important vector Anopheles leucosphyrus, encompasses around 20 species in South and Southeast Asia, including in Northeast India, and each species has different host preferences. While some feed on non-human animals in forest canopies, such as monkeys, gibbons, and orangutans, others feed on humans on the ground, and some on both

* The Netherlands is the world’s second largest agri-food exporter despite its diminutive size because it prioritises technology over territory.

* Kerala is one of the world’s eight “hottest hotspots” of biodiversity housing approximately 5,679 species of flowering plants (2022-23 data) including 1,200 species of medicinal plants.

* Gandhi wasn't the most nominated Indian. That honour goes to Dr Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, who was nominated 18 times for peace and literature. - 

* In FY 25, Indian health insurance companies rejected claims worth Rs 30,000 crore, a nearly 17% jump from FY 24. Nearly one in eight claims were rejected. Of the 37.2 million claims filed, 4.6 million were either denied or left pending. As a result, grievances in general and health insurance jumped 41% in FY25. - The Ken

* Telangana holds the distinction of being the State where the government employees get the highest salaries. Coupled with the interest payment, the outgo from the State exchequer accounts to over 40% of the revenue expenditure.

* The maximum salary drawn by a GHMC sanitation worker on regular employment is around ₹96,000-₹1,02,000 per month by the time she or he retires.

* In 2024, the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) had to transition its sanitation staff, including over 21,000 sweepers, from handheld fingerprint scanners to an AI-driven, mobile-based facial recognition system to mark daily attendance and tackle high-tech fraud. The move was aimed to increase transparency, prevent proxy attendance, and eliminate "ghost" or bogus workers, a problem that plagued the earlier Aadhaar-enabled biometric system (AEBAS).

* From Steve Martin's "Number One Is Walking" - In movies, young children are often played by twins. If one is fussy, the other one can be brought in with no delay in production.