Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned - * Meta has acquired Moltbook, the viral "social network for AI agents" where bots (many powered by OpenClaw) interact while humans observe. * Meta acquired Manus, the AI agent startup for approximately $2 billion.  * OpenClaw’s creator, Peter Steinberger, has joined OpenAI. * The OpenClaw project has been moved to an independent open-source foundation to ensure it remains free and accessible under its MIT license. *  The Batch - - The U.S. military uses AWS to run the unclassified version of Anthropic Claude. - Claude is integrated with Maven Smart System (MSS), a system for targeting and logistics built by Palantir. - Claude/MSS played a role in the January operation that captured Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, but the actions in Iran are its first use in “major war operations.” - The Qwen3.5 family of open-weights vision-language models includes impressive larger models as well as a smaller one that outperforms an OpenAI open-weights model 1...

The Grok icon seen at the upper right hand of each tweet can explain what a tweet is about and also respond to follow up questions. This is very helpful when you don't have enough context to follow what's tweeted or you if you want finer details. Grok's explanation for this post by Hari Raghavan who shared a 2025 screenshot of a satirical X exchange: a user posing as a lisping four-year-old "dropout" applies to Y Combinator to build an AI enslaving toddlers, mocking tech's dropout-founder trope. Garry Tan, Y Combinator's CEO, responds with paternal simplicity—"I think you should stay in school"—highlighting education's value amid startup frenzy, a reply that amplified the thread's 11K+ views. The follow-up pun, "the decelerator is crazy," flips accelerator jargon into ironic rejection rage, underscoring X's knack for enduring, clever banter that @haridigresses  revives for 60K+ impressions in 2026.

This Week I Learned - * " Kubernetes had become a badge of engineering sophistication.  And we wore it proudly — until it started hurting. I still use Kubernetes. I respect it deeply. But I no longer romanticize it. "  - Azeem Telli , Hotstar * When the final New Zealand wicket fell in the 19th over, giving India a 96-run victory, the concurrent viewership was 74.5 crore and reached 82.1 crore (0.82 billion) by the end of the post-match presentation. The number broke the previous record for an ICC tournament final at 5.9 crore peak concurrent viewership, registered during the India vs Australia match in the 50-overs format on November 20, 2023. Peak concurrency is the highest number of viewers during a live stream at a time. Hotstar uses Akamai + AWS CDN for delivery. * On March 2, strikes hit two AWS data centres in the UAE and one in Bahrain, disrupting local banking apps, airport systems in Dubai and Kuwait, and the UAE stock exchange. AWS and Microsoft Azure may rero...

Cartoon co-created with ChatGPT. See more of my AI co-creations

This Week I Learned -  * A literal disaster recovery - AWS operates 123 Availability Zones across 39 regions globally. One of the AWS Availability Zones in UAE was impacted by objects that struck the data center on March 1st. Vercel's Dubai region (dxb1) setup hosted on AWS me-central-1 is also impacted as a result. The event highlighted risks from physical incidents amid tense regional geopolitics. * Google Cloud is the only major hyperscaler without a data center in Dubai. *   S Anand shares his well-thought out AI prompts publicly on Github . Lots to learn & emulate. I love this prompt -  Think like an expert. In this context: - What patterns would an expert in this field check / recognize that beginners would miss? - What questions would an expert ask that a beginner would not know to? - What problems / failures would an expert anticipate that beginners may not be aware of? - How would an expert analyze this? At each step, explain what they are looking for and w...