Things I Learned - 12 Jul 2026

[Anand S]

This week, I learned:

• How to become an applied AI engineer is a concise, well-written, and suprisingly current summary of what AI engineering is.
• Xinjiang seems to be China's Kashmir problem. Not quite, but similar.
• Analogies for how forward deployed engineers work:
  • It is like a food truck that brings and serves home food while building a kitchen and restaurant around it.
  • It is like setting up a field hospital: patients are treated from day one, while the equipment and procedures are built around the live work.
• Froghoppers excrete ~300x their weight daily. ChatGPT
• There's a growing shift away from AI-written commit messages, e.g. Kenton Varda. I compared my human written commit messages vs AI-generated commit messages and the AI-generated ones are less helpful.
• Finally, GPT live gets an update and the new speaking model can delegate to GPT 5.5 when required. I tried it once today, to plan for a teacher workshop, and it was fairly good. It tends to begin with "Hmm" like it's thinking, which feels comforting.
• Using a Unicode character like 🟢 is unusually low-risk across file systems today. It works well across OSs, mobile, ZIP, attachments, file share systems, etc. Some old apps might have trouble, but for storing and sharing, it's fine. I've been using Unicode symbols like these a lot in my notes, and extending to file names feels like a natural next step.
• Though swimming gets the most Olympic medals (11%), for a country chasing its first medals, 78% of first-medal breakthroughs came from Athletics, Wrestling, Shooting, Boxing, Judo, Weightlifting, or Taekwondo (which are 44% of medals) - where single athletes can win without a support ecosystem. ChatGPT
• JMFL accidentally emailed several people a letter intended for their brokers. It roughly said: "Many of you are recording client calls. That's a regulatory risk. If you keep doing this, we'll hold your payments, even fire you."
• Several Smart TVs have software that let your TVs act as proxies for data collection companies. Include Security
• MapDraw is a convenient tool to annotate maps (e.g. routes, boundaries, places) and share or download it.
• There seems to be no way to edit the "About" message on WhatsApp Web. Though the help suggests steps, and the "About" mood/status is visible, there's no way to edit it. (Editing on the phone works.)
• Cloudflare optimised a reader component by sometimes letting the input buffer fill fully. This inadvertently introduced a hard to reproduce race bug because the producer would close the socket if the buffer was full. The producer bug was old (it didn't check if a flush succeeded or not) but was never visible since the readers never let the buffer fill in the past. Cloudflare
• A neofirm is a start-from-scratch AI-native business, e.g. Crosby's AI-first law firm. An AI rollup is where a company buys small traditional firms and AI-enables them - like General Catalyst proposed. AI SaaS is selling AI agents to services firms.
• Give people free platforms and collect their data. Learn the supply-demand network patterns, what pepole value, and add value-added services.
• Claude Code checks if you're working behind a Chinese corporate domain - somewhat sneakily - by changing an apostrophe or slash in the date to visually similar Unicode. Claude Code Is Steganographically Marking Requests
• You can use the Kaggle CLI via Codex to solve Kaggle problems. (AutoKaggle automates it - but is 2 years old.) But, like GitHub bounty hunting bots, we will probably have a Kaggle bounty-hunting bot ecosystem - maybe already do.
• OpenSubtitles2024 and subscene are large pre-AI subtitle datasets with a 2024 cutoff. IndicDialogue is a 7.7K OpenSubtitles snapshot of Indic language SRTs. The OpenSubtitles API lets you search by IMDb/TMDb ID and is up-to-date.
• A soup spoon is better than a table spoon (for soup), though both carry about the same volume, because you can fit a soup spoon it fully into your mouth (a table spoon is too long) and this reduces spilling.
• Here's a sign of accelerating AI progress. I used to critique outdated techniques by saying "This feels like a 20th century approach." Then "This feels like a 2010s solution." Recently, "This is SO 2025-ish." Now, "That's Q1 2026. It's Q2."
• The 7-day week emerged from the Hellenistic planetary week and the Jewish week (not astronomy based), which Rome adopted, then spread by several routes to India, China, and worldwide. Unlike the astronomical year and month, the week is just a convention. Egypt, China, and Athens grouped days in tens; Etruria and Rome used 8-day market cycles; West Africa used varied cycles; Java used five days; Mesoamerica used 13- and 20-day cycles. Gemini
• I met an ex-photographer and learned that photography is another profession where technology (mobile cameras) squeezed the middle. Generation (taking good pictures) became cheap. Value moved upstream (direction), downstream (selection, editing, album design), and into niches (forensic, industrial, sport/event photography).
• Looks like Claude favors Claude Code. Might not be intentional, and just a result of training more on Claude Code data, but it does look like a network effect that could weaken open harnesses. Armin Rocher