This Week I Learned - Week #6 2025

This Week I Learned - 

* Officially announced by Mozilla in 2010, Rust is a systems programming language that delivers C++-level performance while eliminating entire classes of bugs. Rust is well-designed for performance, safety, and concurrency. Rust is a top choice for Wasm modules, enabling fast, secure, browser-based applications.

* Microsoft ran a hackathon "Accelerate App Development with GitHub Copilot" on the DevPost platform for developers to build apps using GitHub Copilot using Azure services.  The submissions that are available for review provide proof of what's possible.

* "AI tools can be unreliable—AI is often only as good as the data it is trained on and the manner it has been trained. But humans are often inadvertently overawed by advancements in technology. This may result in some of us trusting AI chatbots blindly...it’s imperative we enable and build systems with trust at the core if AI has to reach its true transformational potential." - Beyond Tomorrow, NDTV Profit newsletter

* The European Union is writing a $56 million check for researchers to build a large language model to rival its American and Chinese competitors. - Forbes

* With the US imposing export curbs of AI technologies, including GPUs, India, along with 118 countries, is subject to a limit of 50,000 GPU exports. - Moneycontrol

* India is the second largest market for OpenAI; users have tripled in the last one year.

* Directors of the Generative AI Lab at Wharton, Ethan Mollick and Lilach Mollick have shared their Prompt Library

* Gemini can not only transliterate text from Telugu to English but also provide a phonetic approximation of the pronunciation!

* Pleased to see ChatGPT referring a post from my blog

* GitHub Copilot Certification voucher is available conditionally upon participation in study group.

* "...blogging doesn’t have to be about unique insights. The value is in writing frequently and having something to show for it over time—worthwhile even if you don’t attract much of an audience (or any audience at all)...Sharing interesting links with commentary is a low effort, high value way to contribute to internet life at large." - Simon Willson

* Signing his first batch of executive orders following his return to the White House on January 20, 2025, Donald Trump announced the United States' withdrawal from the World Health Organization (WHO). resources to WHO. This is a massive blow to WHO as the U.S. is its largest contributor. The U.S. has consistently contributed close to 15% of WHO's total funding since at least 2016-17. The share of contributions from China accounted for 3%. 

* US Agency for International Development (USAID) is an independent agency of the US govt that provides developmental assistance of about $50 billion across the globe. USAID runs 41 projects across 582 districts in India with the support of 26 civil society partners. USAID funding in India amounted to about $141 million or about Rs 1,214 crore for 2024 (partially reported). To put that in perspective, the Union health ministry budget for 2023-24 was Rs 80,292 crore and the govt spends about Rs 1,100 crore annually in running a hospital like Ram Manohar Lohia in Delhi. - ToI

* A climate researcher who lost his job for refusing to fly home has won a legal settlement for unfair dismissal. Gianluca Grimalda’s return trip from Papua New Guinea to Germany took 72 days. His legal battle took a little longer. The Kiel Regional Labor Court ruled that Grimalda’s contract had been terminated due to “incompatible ideological convictions” and ordered his employer to clear him of any contractual violations. 

* The Government of Singapore is the largest foreign investor in Indian stock markets. 

* India is one of the world’s youngest nations, with 65% of its people under the age of 35, India can tap the demographic dividend.

* India's coffee exports have jumped by 50 percent in 2024 and crossed $1 billion annually for the first time. Indian coffee exports to Europe have nearly doubled. Strikingly, Italy- the home of coffee culture - is among the biggest recipients as more and more Italians switch to Indian coffee. - Moneycontrol

* India is the second-largest smartphone market with the lowest data rates and fastest 5G rollout.

* Around 25% of I-T return filers report incomes of ₹6-10 lakh a year. They will no longer be taxpayers in the new regime. So, the number of taxpayers will shrink even further unless there is a sharp increase in the number of people earning more than ₹12 lakh a year.

* "We have the best risk capital system in the world by far...What's different here is that you can raise $50 million of seed capital to do something that only has a 10% chance of working." - Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon on US Venture Capital