This Week I Learned - Week #16 2025

This Week I Learned - 

* A practical
guide to building agents from OpenAI

* "AI is a powerful genie that does what we ask it to do, which is not necessarily what we actually want. Every story about genies revolves around the inability of those given the magic wishes to wish for the right thing. The art of asking is everything. That is, the future belongs to those who are exercising the intelligence and insight that AI itself does not have." - Tim O’Reilly

* Folksonomy is a user-generated system for classifying and organizing online content using metadata like electronic tags. Also known as social tagging, folksonomies are collections of user-defined metadata. They evolve naturally as users create or store content on specific sites and identify what they believe the content is about. "Tag clouds" highlight various identifiers and their frequency of use on a folksonomy site. This grassroots classification method, similar to blogs and wikis, is subject to vandalism and manipulation but demonstrates collective intelligence. Unlike taxonomies, which are formally defined classifications, folksonomies structure content through user-generated tags.

* Meta earns about half of its US ad revenue from Instagram alone. WhatsApp to date has contributed only a sliver to Meta’s total revenue, but it is the company’s biggest app in terms of daily users and ramping up efforts to earn money off tools like chatbots. - Reuters

* S Anand published a Kindle book in 60 minutes with blog content. 

* As of 2023, 40,822 research articles were retracted globally, according to the Retraction Watch Database. Retractions occur when a paper is found to be flawed due to errors, plagiarism, data fabrication, or peer-review fraud. While some stem from honest mistakes, many involve misconduct, driven by the ‘publish or perish’ culture. In India, academic promotions and funding often hinge on publication counts, tempting researchers to cut corners. Paper mills, which produce fraudulent studies for a fee, have exploited this pressure, flooding journals with sham research.

* There are approximately 11,833 active satellites orbiting Earth in various Earth orbits, according to the satellite tracking website “Orbiting Now” as of March 5, 2025. Among these, SpaceX’s Starlink constellation alone accounts for over 5,200 active satellites providing broadband internet.  A satellite constellation is a group of artificial satellites that are designed to work together to provide a specific service or functionality. In addition to active satellites, there are many thousands of other human-made objects, including defunct satellites and debris, with total tracked objects exceeding 40,000

* India operates merely 9 or 11 defence satellites, while both US and China maintain fleets exceeding 240 and Russia has more than 100. Indiaʼs space budget hovers under $2bn, dwarfed by NASAʼs $25bn, Chinaʼs estimated $18bn, and European Space Agencyʼs 7.7bn.

* A growing number of apps in India restrict certain key functions to be performed exclusively within the app. For instance, while an Airtel Xstream subscription can be accessed on both a desktop browser and the app, unsubscribing can only be done through the app.

* Delayed salaries can hurt CIBIL score, 

* India has the fifth-largest, rare earth deposits after China, Vietnam, Brazil and Russia, but China controls almost 90% of refining capacity.

* Indian tractors account for almost all those sold for agricultural use in USA. Carpets from India make up over 90 percent of American sales. 

* India is now 6th largest market for US inbound arrivals, as per National Travel and Tourism Office (NTTO). - Times of India

* India has a trade deficit of $99 billion with China, as imports from China are eight times higher than exports to China.

* "Two wrongs don't make a right, but they make a good excuse." - Thomas Szasz