This Week I Learned - Week 32 2026

This Week I Learned - 

* When unconstrained, the AI model can draw from numerous sources to assess its options on how to proceed in answering a prompt, thereby allowing widely varying outcomes. Any foundational decisions or other instructions—artifacts collectively known as “provenance” when properly preserved—which were formulated during the original context session and then cleared, are lost. This is the key deficiency of vibe coding which spec-driven development and context engineering seek to address.

Context engineering moves a developer from a vibe coding technique to a structured approach to generating code that preserves provenance using key artifacts. This allows context to be restored by other developers, reviewed by other stakeholders, or retrieved at any point if someone wanted to audit the inputs that generated a given codebase or simply wanted to continue building upon them. Different methodologies have emerged that offer different perspectives on how to effectively manage context and preserve provenance. 

BMAD (Breakthrough Method for Agile AI-Driven Development) and GitHub's Spec Kit are methodologies that offer different approaches to engineering context and preserving provenance.  - Code Mag

* Franklin Templeton's outlook - Artificial intelligence (AI) is driving demand for energy, infrastructure and broader economic change; rising investment in defense, national security and energy infrastructure create long-term potential return opportunities. Aging populations will require investment in labor-saving technologies, assisted living and health care innovation.

* India’s largest lender, State Bank of India (SBI), used artificial intelligence to underwrite nearly ₹1 lakh crore in MSME loans of up to ₹5 crore each during 2025-26

* The biggest risk of deploying Artificial Intelligence (AI) in banks is the erosion of human judgment and accountability. Meaningful human oversight – the ability to explain, to intervene and, where necessary, to override – must remain a design principle, not an afterthought - Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Governor Sanjay Malhotra 

* Over the last century, India’s annual rainfall has seen significant year-to-year ups and downs, but overall, the total yearly rainfall has stayed mostly steady, with only a slight and statistically insignificant drop. However, average temperatures have clearly been on the rise. - Data for India

* The GenomeIndia project collected whole-genome data from 10,000 healthy, unrelated individuals from 83 population groups, revealing an extraordinary level of genetic diversity.

* There is no genetic test yet for mental illnesses. The risk is polygenic: it emerges from the combined influence of thousands of gene variants, along with rare genetic changes, development, environment, and chance. Psychiatric genetics will not identify people before they fall ill but it can replace superstition and blame with a more accurate account of vulnerability.  -  Dr. Alok Kulkarni 

* Over-cautious AI - I used the Microsoft Edge context menu option "Help me rewrite" to rephrase and improve my summary of the above referenced article on psychiatric genetics. It refused with this message - "Request blocked by safety policy"

* If you bought your vehicle after April 2023, you can fill your petrol tank with E20, shut it and forget it because that’s when the Bharat Stage 6 Phase 2 (Real Driving Emissions) mandate took effect. Vehicles built after this deadline were factory-engineered for E20 — with ethanol-resistant elastomers, fluorinated fuel lines, upgraded pump seals and recalibrated engine control units. These roughly 70 million vehicles, about 23% of India’s active petrol fleet, face little cause for concern.

The remaining 77% — nearly 240 million legacy two-wheelers and cars built for E5 or E10 — are the genuine worry. Ethanol is a polar solvent that degrades older rubber compounds and plastics, hardening and cracking fuel hoses over time. It is also hygroscopic: it absorbs atmospheric moisture, and in vehicles left parked for extended periods, the ethanol-water mixture separates and settles, forming an acidic layer that corrodes tanks, damages fuel pumps and clogs filters with sludge. - The Hindu

* During the Kargil war in 1999, the Time Arc-6 GPS systems in the MiG 21 and MiG 23 BN aircraft let pilots navigate using Indian Everest coordinates. The Indian Army’s maps were also based on the Everest Spheroid, a reference model of Earth first defined in 1830 by Sir George Everest, the Surveyor General. However, handheld GPS units used by Indian Air Force MiG pilots only displayed data in World Geodetic System 1984 (WGS 84), the global standard coordinate system. For improved accuracy, pilots had to adjust for the differences between the two mapping systems to accurately locate targets and release bombs.

* Every tier 1 city loses more than half its free-flow speed by peak hour. Speed in Hyderabad and Mumbai both drop from 40 km/h to 15 km/h, Bengaluru from 38 km/h to 13 km/h. Hyderabad has 95% of its roads under 10 metres wide. - HT

* “A newspaper is text, but what gives it full life, its juice, are the illustrations.” - Ahmed Burić