This Week I Learned - Week 22 2026

This Week I Learned - 

* Sci-Hub boasts the largest collection of full-text scientific papers, with over 88 million documents available for free. It began in 2011 as a simple PHP script created by founder Alexandra Elbakyan, using basic and affordable infrastructure.

* JAX is the open-source library behind Google's Gemini.

* Deepseek V4 is roughly 7-9x cheaper than frontier models.

* When you call an LLM API, you are not just "running a model."

You are orchestrating a 14-layer pipeline across networking, security, distributed systems, custom silicon, and billing.

* Bing announced (through the Create tab) that after serving creators well, DALL·E 3 will be retiring in the coming weeks.

* From The Batch:

- Agentic capabilities emerged as large language models gained the abilities to plan across multiple steps, reflect on earlier outputs, and use external tools to perform actions online. Coding agents such as Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex gained traction among software developers in 2025.

- AI infrastructure itself is becoming an attractive target for hackers. Beyond using AI to mask attacks, attackers increasingly target AI tools, models, and accessory software as entry points into networks. 

- Google overhauled Antigravity, its AI coding tool, to emphasize managing agents and de-emphasize its resemblance to popular IDEs like Microsoft’s VSCode. Antigravity’s command-line version replaces the open-source Gemini CLI.  

- Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google have raised per-token prices on their newer flagship and Flash-tier models. 

* Developer internet slang:

ACK = Acknowledged / I agree

NACK = No / I disagree

PTAL = Please Take Another Look

LGTM = "Looks Good To Me"

* Competitor keyword bidding on your brand name is now legally actionable in India.

* There are over 300 different sign languages worldwide, and most can’t communicate with each other. 

* 800 million people live within 100 km (about 62.14 mi) of an active volcano. However, volcano forecasting, unlike weather forecasting, still has a long way to go. The physics are different, and the crucial data on magma and tectonic plates lies buried beneath kilometers of rock.

* "No human investigation may claim to be a true science if it has not passed through mathematical demonstrations, and if you say that the sciences that begin and end in the mind exhibit truth, this cannot be allowed, but must be denied for many reasons, above all because such mental discourses do not involve experience, without which nothing can be achieved with certainty." - Leonardo da Vinci

* Bird-glass collisions, also called bird-window strikes, happen because birds are not able to notice clear or slightly reflective glass. In the U.S. 50% of bird deaths happen up to third-floor buildings.

* A cruciverbalist is a person who enjoys or is skilled at solving crosswords.

* The Johari window is a technique designed to help people better understand their relationship with themselves and others. Psychologists Joseph Luft (1916–2014) and Harrington Ingham (1916–1995) Luft and Ingham named their model "Johari" using a combination of their first names.

* Airtel provides its Priority Postpaid customers with a 5G network technology feature called slicing which creates a separate virtual network lane and boosts the network to deliver a consistent experience even in crowded areas. The move has revived net-neutrality concerns, with experts arguing that premium fast lanes for some users could leave ordinary prepaid users on more congested parts of the network because of India’s limited mobile internet capacity.

* CBSE conducts Class X and XII Board examinations annually in India & across 26 countries catering to nearly 46 lakh students. A 19-year-old hacker, Nisarga Adhikary, reverse-engineered critical flaws in CBSE's On-Screen Marking (OSM) portal for annual exams, including a hardcoded master password in frontend JS, client-side OTP bypass, no route guards, password reset without old credentials, and IDOR enabling any user's mark edits. He responsibly disclosed the issues to CERT-In in February 2026 with screen recordings, but most vulnerabilities stayed unpatched for months; the portal was taken offline May 26 after his detailed blog post went public.

* Meeseva services engaged Transaction Analysts India Private Limited in 2017 to develop and maintain the Telangana State-owned ’T-Wallet’ platform. As per the agreement, the company was obliged to transfer complete control of data, source code, systems, credentials and related infrastructure to the government upon expiry of the agreement in 2025. The Assistant Commissioner of Police claimed in an affidavit filed in the Telangana High Court that TAPL unlawfully retained sensitive data relating to nearly 16 lakh citizens and misused government-owned data, obstructed the transition process to the newly appointed agency.