This Week I Learned - Week 20 2026
This Week I Learned -
* GoatCounter is an open source web analytics platform available as a free donation-supported hosted service or self-hosted app. It is a privacy-friendly web analytics alternative to Google Analytics or Matomo.
* MotherDuck is a collaborative serverless analytics platform that lets you query and analyze data in cloud databases and from cloud storage, using your browser or any of the DuckDB APIs.
* Cloudflare has built its own version of WordPress that solves some security issues with the older CMS—it’s called EmDash.
* Apple reported an 84% first-quarter rise in new apps on its App Store, putting it on a pace to surpass 2025’s 600K apps.
* Contrary to the predictions of an AI jobpocalypse, I predict the opposite: There will be an AI jobapalooza! - Andrew Ng
* The Batch -
As OpenAI prepares to discontinue the Sora app and API, ByteDance added Seedance 2.0, its multimodal video generator, to its popular video-editing app CapCut - the second-largest consumer AI product behind only ChatGPT. While competitors offer either a video generator or an editing app, ByteDance owns both.
* OpenAI’s withdrawal of Sora points to a hard truth: Given the current cost of computation, AI-generated video is an expensive consumer product.
* Nvidia uses AI to design chips. Nvidia built two large language models based on LLaMA 2 for internal use - ChipNeMo and BugNeMo.
* Awesome GitHub Copilot hosts community-contributed agents, instructions, and skills to enhance your GitHub Copilot experience
* Pomiferous.com showcases more than 7,000 apple varieties from all around the world.
* According to the Economic Survey 2025–26, only about 2% of startups globally engaged in curating AI training data are based in India, compared with 40% in the United States and 21% in the European Union.
* India is the world’s largest app download market—yet Indian developers make up just 3–5% of the global base, with foreign apps topping the charts. - ET
* Memory chip prices doubled in the first quarter alone from the previous quarter and are forecast to climb up to 63% in the current quarter due to AI data centre demand that has impacted supply for smartphones, laptops and automobiles. - Reuters
* Uber Technologies' Hyderabad Centre of Excellence (CoE), its first outside the United States, currently employs over 600 engineering professionals.
* Telangana recorded the highest number of cybercrime cases in the country in 2024, according to the latest National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) report. Telangana accounted for more than one-fourth of the country’s cybercrime cases in 2024. Hyderabad continued to rank among the country’s most cybercrime-affected metropolitan cities.
* The professional killers of the personal assistant of the new West Bengal Chief Minister were identified after being traced through their UPI payment.
* The Public Sector Undertaking, HMT has the second largest land bank in the country after the Indian Railways. The PSU once held close to 18,000 acres of land, of which 1,000 acres remain across Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Pinjore in Haryana, and Kalamassery in Kerala.
* In the last financial year, more than 2.1 million taxpayers updated their ITRs for assessment years 2021-22 to 2024-25 and paid additional taxes of over 2,500 crore rupees. Many of these taxpayers had claimed exemptions citing fraudulent donations to religious institutions, charitable trusts, or educational institutions.
An interesting pattern that emerged was that individuals sharing the same chartered accountants were donating to the same institutions.
* "Hamba Hamba" (often extended as "Hamba Hamba, Ramba Ramba, Kamba Kamba, Dumba Dumba, Bumba Bumba, Bomba Bomba") originated from a February 10, 2021, public rally speech by Mamata Banerjee in Murshidabad, West Bengal. The phrase itself has no deeper meaning beyond her colorful way of calling defectors noisy traitors ("cows"). In Bengali colloquial usage, the sound a cow makes is often rendered as "hamba" (similar to "moo" in English). She rhythmically listed variations of cow-like noises to mock party defectors and emphasize the "chaos" or "noise" they were creating after switching sides. The short ~7-second clip of her enthusiastically chanting these rhythmic, nonsensical-sounding words sounded humorous and meme-worthy out of context. It quickly spawned memes, remixes, and jokes across social media with people treating it like a catchy slogan or song. Nightclub remixes of the phrase "Hamba Hamba" have gone viral across Bengal as symbols of anti-incumbency and farewell festivities following the historic power shift after TMC's defeat in the 2026 West Bengal elections.
* Global natural diamond prices have plunged 46%. But India’s wedding traditions and soaring gold prices are providing a unique buffer. - ET
* "We want to disrupt high frequency services. If you look at an Indian household, the second highest wallet share of discretionary income is on services. That is roughly 50000 a year. The only category which has the highest wallet share is groceries...This (home services) is a $53B market where 98% of the transactions are still happening offline" - Aayush Agarwal, Snabbit founder and CEO
* Hypertension is silent — there are often no symptoms until the condition has triggered other health problems. Chronic high blood pressure can make smaller arteries, such as capillaries, less flexible, which means they won’t dilate in response to exercise or other times when greater blood flow is needed. It also damages blood vessel walls, creating conditions that allow cholesterol and fats to accumulate and form plaque.
As plaque builds, a process called atherosclerosis further thickens the arteries. If plaque or a blood clot blocks blood flow, a heart attack can occur. As it does to the arteries, high blood pressure causes the heart to thicken and enlarge.
Heart failure is a chronic condition where the heart weakens and struggles to pump an adequate amount of blood. Hypertension increases heart failure risk because a heart that is thick and stiff can become overworked.
Ischemic strokes occur when there’s a blockage in an artery to the brain. This can disrupt blood flow in the retina. Lack of blood flow can cause damage and, if enough accumulates, lead to a complication called hypertensive retinopathy, which can cause blurred vision or even loss of eyesight.
Smaller arterioles leading to the eyes also can thicken. Lack of blood flow can cause damage and, if enough accumulates, lead to a complication called hypertensive retinopathy, which can cause blurred vision or even loss of eyesight.
Long-term stress to the glomeruli, small blood vessels in the kidneys that act as filters to remove waste, can contribute to the development of kidney disease.
Hypertension can contribute to the development of peripheral artery disease, an artery-clogging condition where blood flow is reduced in the limbs.
A Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) diet — which prioritizes vegetables, fruit, whole grains, lean proteins and low-fat dairy — have been shown to help keep blood pressure levels within a healthy range.
* The first dialysis treatment in the United States was carried out at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York in 1948. In India, CMC-Vellore is known as the birthplace of dialysis treatment.
* "Civilized man refused to adapt himself to his environment. Instead he adapted his environment to suit him. So he built cities, roads, vehicles, machinery. And he put up power lines to run his labour-saving devices. But he didn't know when to stop. The more he improved his surroundings to make life easier... the more complicated he made it. Now his children are sentenced to 10 to 15 years of school, to learn... how to survive in this complex and hazardous habitat. And civilized man, who refused to adapt to his surroundings... now finds he has to adapt and re-adapt... every hour of the day to his self-created environment." - The Gods Must Be Crazy
* "Advice by confident people is more likely to be followed." - Vivek Nityananda in Beyond Doubt: Overconfidence and What It Means for Modern Society
Comments
Post a Comment