This Week I Learned - Week #9 2025
This Week I Learned -
* Message queues (Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS) solve problems but also introduce new ones (ordering, deduplication, backpressure). Nothing is more abused than Redis as a primary database. Understand trade-offs.
* Roboflow provides the means to label, train, and deploy computer vision solutions. It offers a Free Plan with 15 credits per month to try it and get started.
* Currently 45+ services are available in the AWS Free Tier to both existing and new AWS customers indefinitely unlike some others that are free for the first 12 months.
* Skype Joins Windows Phone in Microsoft's Graveyard of Forgotten Innovations -Founded in 2003, Skype’s cheap audio and video calls quickly disrupted the landline industry in the early 2000s. Microsoft bought Skype in 2011 for $8.5 billion after outbidding Google and Facebook. Microsoft will retire the two-decade-old internet calling service in May 2025.
* Dark Patterns & Dirty Tricks in Smartphone Apps - The District Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission of Rangareddy imposed a penalty of ₹35,000 on a food aggregator for artificially inflating delivery distances. The commission ruled that the platform inflated distances to charge higher delivery fees, despite the customer having a premium membership that promised free delivery. When questioned about the inconsistency, the platform attempted to justify the difference by claiming that delivery routes could be modified using mobile GPS. Unsatisfied with this explanation, the complainant approached the consumer court seeking redress. - ToI
* Although betting apps have been blocked in Telangana, GPS apps to manipulate location are being used to override the ban.
* The Samsung Omnia (released around 2008-2009) was part of the mid-generation of smartphones. These devices typically ran Windows Mobile, which was a smartphone operating system at the time. The Omnia was released during the transitional period just before the modern smartphone era truly took off with the iPhone (2007) and early Android devices. Nokia 9000 Communicator series, Ericsson R380, BlackBerry devices, Palm Treo devices were popular smartphones in the late 90's & early 2000s.
* Ilya Sutskever (born 1986) is an Israeli-Canadian computer scientist who specializes in machine learning. Sutskever has made several major contributions to the field of deep learning.He is notably the co-inventor, with Alex Krizhevsky and Geoffrey Hinton, of AlexNet, a convolutional neural network. Sutskever co-founded and is a former chief scientist at OpenAI. In 2023, he was one of the members of OpenAI's board that ousted Sam Altman from his position as CEO; Altman returned a week later, and Sutskever stepped down from the board. In June 2024, Sutskever co-founded the company Safe Superintelligence with Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy.
* An alum of IIT Madras and Brown University, Sridhar Ramaswamy was part of the early engineering team that built Google Search. He had joined Google as a software engineer in 2003 and had worked his way up to a senior vice president role within eight years before quitting to co-found an AI-powered search engine called Neeva in 2019.When Snowflake bought Neeva in 2023, Ramaswamy became their senior vice-president of AI and in 2024 was promoted to CEO.
* Berkshire Hathaway is a vast conglomerate spanning more than 189 operating companies, a public equity portfolio worth $272 billion and a cash pile worth $334 billion as of the end of 2024.
Berkshire Hathaway paid $26.8bn in taxes in 2024 alone — the figure amounts to roughly 5% of the total taxes paid by US companies last year.
Berkshire Hathaway has paid Uncle Sam more than $101bn in taxes over 60 years, more than any other company in history.
With a staggering $330 billion cash pile, Buffett is struggling to find attractive investment opportunities.
* KFC, the fast food chain formerly known as Kentucky Fried Chicken, is leaving the state where it all began.
* Germany is the top exporter of EVs to India.
* Astronomer Galileo Galilei was banned by the Church in 1616 for his view that Earth orbits Sun
* Japanese wasabi is so rare that most wasabi served worldwide is actually just colored horseradish.
* Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (DMD) is one of the most malevolent variants of muscular dystrophy.
* From the moment it launched the iPhone in 2007, Apple bound itself to China. Henan province alone, the home of Apple’s largest iPhone manufacturing complex, exported around 53mn smartphones in 2024. Many of the specialised machines used in iPhone assembly plants are programmed in Mandarin. Women form the backbone of Apple’s manufacturing and assembly operations in China and other Asian markets such as Vietnam. - FT
* Mobile phones have now surpassed diamonds as India’s biggest product export.
* Yet another app - The Reserve Bank of India has a RBI Retail Direct Mobile App to invest in Government Securities like Treasury Bills, Sovereign Gold Bonds, Floating Rate Savings Bonds 2020.
* Ketan Parekh, the notorious stock market manipulator infamous for his involvement in the 2001 stock market crash, used mobile phones, including one linked to his wife, to conduct a front-running operation involving non-public information (NPI). Sebi’s investigation exposed a Rs 65 crore scam, revealing a complex network of agents, traders, and facilitators. The investigation, using mobile tracking and data analysis, linked Parekh to fraudulent trading activities orchestrated with a Singapore-based trader, Rohit Salgaocar. - ET
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