This Week I Learned - Week 35 2026

This Week I Learned - 

* Nikhil Pahwa on how to use AI to write without the slop:

Step 1: Find something you want to write about and record a voice note (transcribe it) or collect information/news articles about it.

Step 2: Feed this voice note / notes to AI, whether ChatGPT or Claude, and ask it to identify 20 questions for you. The rule: no questions to which the answer is yes/no or one of a few options.

Step 3: Record a voice note answering the questions. you don't need to answer all the questions. Feel free to ramble, and anything above 10 minutes is good. Anything over 20 minutes is amazing. 

Step 4: Give your voice note transcript to AI. Ask it to identify a structure from the questions you've answered or simply, ask AI to structure your talk into an article structure verbatin with subheads. Important instruction: "do not paraphrase, do not add filler or transition sentences".

Step 5: once you have a structure you like, edit the transcript to tighten language. 

And that's it: your article in your words without the AI slop. 

A lot more work than asking AI to write it for you, but its well and truly yours.

* jina.ai's Reader API converts a URL to LLM-friendly input by prepending r.jina.ai

* Simon Willison spotted that OpenAI's ChatGPT desktop app (formerly Codex) bundles a full LibreOffice installation inside a 1.7 GB hidden folder at ~/.cache/codex-primary-runtime, alongside complete Python, Node.js, Poppler, and git setups.

The app uses LibreOffice headless binaries and associated plugins for local document handling, including Word file manipulation, PDF conversion, and other office tasks without heavy cloud dependency.

This reveals how modern AI desktop tools embed substantial open-source runtimes in cache directories to support advanced features while keeping the core application lightweight for users.

* Telangana has declared data centres as “essential services.” 

* UK's NHS relies on Microsoft for email and other communications (like Microsoft Teams), cloud and, increasingly, AI: it has just bought 500,000 Microsoft Copilot licences.  - The Economist

* Some Redditors find that Opus or ChatGPT within Copilot does a better job of formatting Word documents than Microsoft's Copilot itself. Cowork mode in Copilot is said to be powerful without some of the annoying “protections” that Chat mode has. Microsoft charges for this on a consumption/per-use model though.

* One Copilot user working on financial analysis of scanned statements in PDFs asks it for a second document that contains all of the decisions, mapping, formulas, etc. it used so that it's easier to double check the primary output. That user shares on Reddit that dictating a requirement in Word and handing it to Copilot works pretty well. 

* Researcher—Microsoft 365 Copilot's deep research agent for work has two new multi-model capabilities that raise the bar for accuracy, depth, and confidence: Critique and Council.

* Amazon Web Services has bought DuckLabs, the support and development company behind open-source DuckDB. DuckDB and the other open-source components of the “Duck Stack” will remain free and open source under the MIT license, with the nonprofit DuckDB Foundation continuing its stewardship of the projects. 

* Tasking Manager is a platform where individuals can team up for mapping in OpenStreetMap

* Uber divides the world into hexagons and it calls this system H3. H3 buckets every driver, every rider, every request into a hex, and small hexes nest inside big hexes. Hexagons beat squares because hexagons touch six neighbors at the same distance, and squares don't do that. So Uber checks your hex, scans the six hexes around you, and matches a cab — that hex match is how Uber predicts where the cab is. Uber open sourced that hex engine, so you can use H3 too. Uber's H3 is a library, often called an engine, and that engine is built from geospatial algorithms. Uber's ride-matching platform uses that H3 library for prediction. 

* Draw bookmarklet by Henrique Moraes lets you annotate or draw over webpages.

* Loocator is a crowd-sourced app that lets you easily find a nearby toilet.

* "In the 20th century, sovereignty meant not allowing another superpower to dictate our foreign policy. In the 21st century, it may mean not allowing another country, or corporation to control the chips we compute on, the models we think through and the platforms our economy runs on." - Jaspreet Bindra

* Traditional legal training deliberately leaves students in uncertainty initially to build skills in dealing with open-ended analysis. It contrasts engineering education’s emphasis on objective, logical principles with law’s human-made rules, which involve ambiguity, personal judgment, and normative debates instead of fixed formulas.

* SpaceX has over 10,000 satellites in orbit — almost two out of every three functioning spacecraft circling the planet.

China's answer to Starlink - Guowang & Qianfan plan to have over 27,000 satellites between them.

* When Microsoft announced the acquisition of GitHub in 2018 for $7.5 billion, GitHub had about 28 million developers. By Microsoft's FY2026 results, GitHub had reached 225 million users, with more than 90% of the Fortune 500 using GitHub. Microsoft reported a $2B annual GitHub revenue run rate in FY2024 due to greater Enterprise penetration. Microsoft has monetized that developer mindshare through Copilot, GitHub Enterprise, security, CI/CD and the emerging agentic-development ecosystem. GitHub Copilot had 50 million users. Copilot accounted for over 40% of GitHub's revenue growth this year. GitHub has become Microsoft's AI distribution channel. 

* There’s never a boring week in the world of AI—Nvidia is set to acquire the open-source AI platform Hugging Face for $12.9 billion.

* Nvidia, a chip maker with some 42,000 employees, is valued at over $5 trillion, roughly the gross domestic product of Germany, the world’s third-largest economy, with a population of 84 million. 

Apple is valued above the annual output of Britain, Alphabet above that of France.

Palantir, which draws more than 40 percent of its revenue from the U.S. government and whose valuation has raced past that of every traditional arms maker, holds a $1.3 billion contract for the Pentagon’s A.I. targeting program. 

- William Dalrymple, What It Took to Dismantle the Most Powerful Company in the World

* “Corporations have neither bodies to be punished nor souls to be condemned. They therefore do as they like.” - Edward Thurlow referring to the East India Company in 1792

* "The study of history is a study of causes." - Edward Hallett Carr (1892-1982) in What is History?

* What being civilized is - "...some of the things that count as being civilized - making beautiful things, thinking freely and thinking new things and keeping the rules, without which people couldn't get on together. Grown-ups call the first of these things art, the second science and philosophy and the third political justice and ethics." - Joad C. E. M. in The Story Of Civilization (1946) 

* "One person's freedom is another person's unfreedom." - Joseph Stiglitz, The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society (2024)

* NPH insulin is named in part for its Neutral formulation, which has a neutral pH that helps stabilize the product.

The “Protamine” component refers to the protein added from fish sources that binds to insulin and thereby prolongs its action in the body.

Finally, “Hagedorn” honors Danish scientist Hans Christian Hagedorn, whose idea led to the creation of this longer-acting insulin and whose company later evolved into the major insulin manufacturer Novo Nordisk.

* Myopia has a substantial genetic component. Twin and family studies commonly estimate heritability in the 50–90% range (often ~60–80%). Parental myopia is a strong risk factor; children with one or two myopic parents have elevated risk.  

In Singapore, myopia in young men reached almost 43%, nearly doubling over about two decades. Basically 1 in 2 wear specs. 

The consensus is a gene–environment interaction: genetic predisposition sets susceptibility, while modern environments (intensive schooling from early ages, limited outdoor daylight exposure) drive the epidemic onset and progression. 

* Multi-ingredient organic products labeled as “Certified Organic” in India must contain at least 95% of ingredients from certified organic sources.

As per the Jaivik Bharat FAQ [^PDF] published on its website, if a consumer wants to get a certified organic food product analyzed, the purchaser has to pay the cost of the sample and analysis. If the report of the Food Analyst shows that the article of food is not in compliance with the Act or the rules or regulations made there under, the purchaser shall be entitled to get refund of the fees paid by him. 

* According to a Senior Mutual Fund Analyst at Value Research magazine, if you keep roughly 350 times your monthly expenses and withdraw no more than 6 per cent a year, your money should last a lifetime. 

Over-simplified thumb rules like these feel comforting but that changes when you hear the latest on inflation, record-breaking extreme weather and global conflicts driving up oil and commodity prices.