This Week I Learned - Week 33 2026

This Week I Learned - 

* According to AI-ML guru Andrew Ng, these are the four most important AI engineering skills:

1. Building and deploying AI applications
2. Software engineering fundamentals
3. Using coding agents
4. Shaping the build

* GitHub has rebuilt Copilot review around an agentic architecture that gathers broader repository context, uses tools, produces findings, and can hand fixes to another coding agent. This is substantially more than autocomplete added to old review. - The GitHub Blog

* Shadow AI refers to consumer-facing AI applications and standalone agents deployed across your organization without IT visibility or approval. These agents can operate autonomously on user devices, creating blind spots in your security and compliance posture.  Microsoft now ships specific discovery, monitoring and governance for unmanaged AI agents. Shadow AI blocking currently apply only to managed Windows devices enrolled with Microsoft Intune.

* AI can boost learning productivity, but only for those who use the technology intelligently. Students must resist the temptation to reach for an AI-generated answer before thinking things through for themselves. - The Economist

* ChatGPT Study Mode now asks what the learner knows, adapts explanations, checks understanding, works from uploaded course material, and uses memory to personalize support.

* MS Rebrand Registry tracks current and former names of Microsoft's cloud products. Azure Charts maintains a Azure Deprecations Board. I tracked renamed, re-branded, retired/deprecated Azure Services and features, for a while. 

* localsend is an open-source cross-platform alternative to AirDrop. LocalSend uses a secure communication protocol that allows devices to communicate with each other using a REST API. 

* Open Camera is an Android app by Mark Harman that is highly configurable with handy remote controls.

* Image Toolbox is a free and open-source Swiss Army knife for editing and annotating images or pictures on Android phones. 

* The Melakarta Sphere is a free, interactive map of the 72 melakarta ragas by Nathaniel School of Music, Bangalore. 

* DRAM spot prices are up roughly 700% over the past year. Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron control more than 95% of DRAM production, and AI demand pulled their capacity toward the specialised memory accelerators needed.

* Micron's $2.75 billion plant at Sanand now ships made-in-India memory modules to Dell.

* On August 3rd, Amazon (AMZN) joined the ranks of Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Alphabet as the fifth company in history to reach a $3 trillion valuation. On that day, Jeff Bezos filed to sell 15 million shares worth about $4.07 billion.

* Meta went on trial over accusations from four U.S. states that the company is harming children with technology designed to be addictive. - NYT

* Margaret Hamilton is the software engineer who wrote the computer code that saved the Apollo 11 moon landing and who, in the process, invented the discipline of software engineering itself. She still argues that software should be designed at the start not to fail, rather than patched after it does.

* The nearly 50-year-old Voyager space probes have traveled farther into space than any other human-made object. 

* Universities increasingly want to hire stars who have amazing personal stories and big followings that can gain the institution positive media coverage. - NYT

* Decades of industrial waste dumping have contaminated groundwater with chromium (VI) across parts of three Uttar Pradesh districts — Fatehpur, Kanpur Dehat, and Kanpur Nagar, exposing villagers to unsafe water and serious health risks. Factories manufacture chromium sulphate in the area, which is used by tanning industries to make leather stronger. Kanpur and surrounding areas have had tanneries since the 19th century. - The Hindu

* India’s largest antelope, the nilgai or blue bull, was introduced to Texas nearly a century ago as a potential ranch animal. In its native environment, the nilgai evolved within a particular network of predators, competitors, diseases, seasonal conditions and habitat limitations. Those pressures helped shape its population and behaviour over thousands of years. Texas did not offer the same combination of predators. Without comparable natural controls, nilgai populations could expand across suitable habitat. What had been introduced as a managed ranch animal gradually became a free-ranging, feral population. One of the major concerns is their role in the spread of disease. Nilgai can act as hosts for ticks, including ticks associated with pathogens affecting cattle. - Business Today

* The 23 IITs in India offer 16598 seats in different programs and departments while the 31 NITs offer 23997 seats for undergraduate courses. 

* One of the reasons India is having to import sugar, when even a reduced domestic cane crop is adequate to service demand is because of ethanol production. Mills use a mix of cane syrup, B-Heavy and C-Heavy molasses to produce ethanol, with decreasing sugar levels in each (which determines the possible ethanol output). - MoneyControl

* The key distinction between frozen dessert and ice cream is that ice cream must use milk fat, while frozen desserts may use vegetable fat (usually palm oil) instead.

Check Open Food Facts for full list of ingredients and macro-nutrients

If you want to know whether you’re eating real ice cream, don’t trust the name on the front, always check the ingredients on the back.

* The rapid spread of solar irrigation in India — where heavily subsidised or free electricity has led to unsustainable groundwater abstraction, contributing to falling water tables, depleting aquifers, and growing fiscal burdens on energy utilities.

Thus, with solar irrigation offering almost free power and no incentive to limit pumping, farmers may draw ever more groundwater.

* Spanning nine countries in South America, the Amazon rainforest’s billions of trees store vast amounts of carbon and are a key buffer against global warming.

* Nasdaq’s Economic Institute finds one-person US business applications up more than 20% since early 2025, with essentially all recent application growth coming from solo businesses.  

* An auto-entrepreneur (officially a micro-entrepreneur) in France is a simple legal status for sole traders and freelancers. An auto-entrepreneur can earn a maximum annual turnover of €188,700 for commercial sales or €77,700 for service and liberal professions.

* The French treat vacations as a civic right - Vacations have been stitched into French identity since 1936, when the short-lived Socialist govt of Léon Blum introduced two weeks of paid holidays. To help the population learn the art of vacationing, he named the country’s first minister of sports and leisure, who offered discounted train tickets and subsidized guesthouses around the country. Since then, the country’s muscular labour unions have repeatedly pushed to expand those weeks to five and to institute a 35-hour workweek law that translates to overtime paid in extra days off for many workers. That’s on top of 11 public holidays. - NYT

* “Vaigai Puyal” literally means ‘Storm of the Vaigai River’, and it is the popular nickname given to Tamil comedian‑actor Vadivelu, referencing the Vaigai river that flows through his hometown Madurai. 

* Norwegian criminologist Nils Christie’s ‘ideal victim’ theory (explained in the book From Crime Policy to Victim Policy) holds that vulnerability, respectability and innocence shape who is perceived as deserving of sympathy.

Christie said the ‘ideal victim’ or ‘perfect victim’ possesses five main attributes. First, they are often female, disabled, very young, or very old, and are therefore weak in relation to the offender. Second, they are involved in “respectable activities”. Third, they cannot reasonably be blamed for being where they were during the crime. Fourth, they do not know the offender personally. Fifth, they are attacked by a perpetrator who is “big and bad”. Christie also noted that while being weak, the victim must have enough social power to influence sympathy and have their victim status recognised.

* The Scunthorpe problem is the unintentional blocking of online content by a spam filter, search engine or word-filter because the text contains a string (or substring) of letters that appear to have an obscene or otherwise unacceptable meaning. Names, abbreviations, and technical terms are most often cited as being affected by the issue.

* John Brandon (“JB”) joined Apple around 2001 as a vice president overseeing sales for the US, Pacific, and later broader international regions. He held senior sales leadership roles until retiring in 2015.  A card with JB’s Rules for Success were attached to the back of employee badges in Brandon’s organization:

1. Let go of the old, make the most of the future
2. Always tell the truth, we want to hear the bad news sooner than later
3. The highest level of integrity is expected, when in doubt, ask
4. Learn to be a good businessperson, not just a good salesperson
5. Everyone sweeps the floor
6. Be professional in your style, speech and follow-up
7. Listen to the customer, they almost always get it
8. Create win/win relationships with our partners
9. Look out for each other, sharing information is a good thing
10. Don’t take yourself too seriously
11. Have fun, otherwise it’s not worth it