Things I Learned - 02 Aug 2026

[Anand S]

This week, I learned:

• I continue to be amazed at how efficient video codecs are compared with animated image formats. When compressing 38 PNGs, the final WEBM was smaller than many of the individual PNGs!
  • 2343k: magick -delay 50 -loop 0 file-*.png file.gif
  • 398k: magick -delay 50 -loop 0 file-*.png file.avif (slow)
  • 284k: magick -delay 50 -loop 0 file-*.png file.webp
  • 82k: ffmpeg -framerate 2 -i file-%03d.png -c:v libvpx-vp9 -pix_fmt yuva420p file.webm
• Please use AI by Shawn Smucker is the best guide I've read about where NOT to use AI. I need to be more mindful of this.
• gpt-transcribe is released at 0.45 cents / minute or 27c / hour.
  Gemini 3.6 Flash costs about the same ~27c.
  Gemini 3 Flash costs ~15c and that's what I use today.
  Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite costs ~6c / hour but it follows my instructions very poorly.
  To benchmark this, I just re-run my transcribe_calls.py script
  on a recent conversation (that I remember well) with a different model to see if it's clearly better or worse.
  No fancy benchmarking. Creating / maintaining formal benchmarks isn't always worth it.
• ruff 0.16 is out and has a 350+ new default rules. I mean, who would check that functools.cache on instance methods has a memory leak? But its output is so agent-friendly that agents would just fix these on the fly anyway, so it does make sense. It's another step towards code-writing becoming less accessible to humans.
• npm install --no-package-lock installs packages ignoring and without creating / updating package-lock.json. Useful for dev environments.
• Astral has published prebuilt GPU wheels for Flash Attention, vLLM, PyCUDA, and many others.
• One characteristic of good benchmarks is that they are easy to verify. I see a lot of comparisons of Fable vs Opus by having them generate 3D worlds (e.g. threejs, Blender, melt) - something that's not trivial for agents, but evaluatable at a glance.
• Maybe it makes sense to open source the intermediate steps in ALL knowledge work, to make AI as good at it as with code? Arvind Narayanan

  Open-source software and culture is a historical accident. We take it for granted that not only are the outputs of software engineers’ creative work available publicly, but so are all of the intermediate steps (specifications, plans, mockups), tacit knowledge (StackOverflow, documentation culture), detailed process traces (issues, pull requests, bug fixes, code reviews), collaboration records (version control, project boards), and more broadly a culture of learning in public. This level of explicit description would be completely alien in most professions.

• I asked ChatGPT "How am I doing? Objectively..." and it listed what I knew, but is now obvious to AI agents: Impact and closure are my weak areas, not capability and habits. What's improved, though, is assetization / reuse. (Opus 5 answered this poorly, listing metrics around my posts, talks, skills, transcripts, likes, etc.
• Oh, so most AI layoffs were not AI layoffs. Just AI as an excuse. Also, "When we did this analysis, it revealed three things as the real bottlenecks (1) deciding and specifying what to build, (2) verifying and being accountable for what is delivered, and (3) the deep human understanding - of the codebase, the business, and the environment - required to carry out both of these." Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers
• So, Anthropic models tried to get money to pay for a phone to get an email ID to upload to PyPi to publish a malware to hack a system. This actually is... concerning, even to me. Simon Willison
• Given the jobs Turing Talent is hiring for on behalf of AI companies:
  • Gemini is focusing on personalization, i.e. how it can use your data (emails, documents, photos, calendar, drive, meet, chat, etc.) better. They're not outsourcing this to third-world countries. Gemini Spark seems to be a driver here.
  • Multi-lingual business reasoning will likely improve soon, given the focus.
  • Software engineering, data science, science, professional domains (medical, legal, finance), and media (transcription, synthesis, annotations) are the other major categories.
• AES can now be decrypted 200-800x faster by Mythos. The research cost $100,000. No practical implications today, but a trend to watch.
• When blinking, our visual processing is suppressed so we don't see the darkness and imagine the world as continuous. Prof V Balakrishnan
• Some countries have fought wars against independence. The Mayotte referendum let them stay a French colony. Anjouan in 1997 fought for France to take them back. Anguilla in 1967 fought and stayed a British colony.
• Modern fonts have "features" or styles that you can enable on VS Code via editor.fontLigatures. For example, here are FiraCode styles and Monaspace styles. My current FiraCode config has: "editor.fontLigatures": "'calt', 'liga', 'ss01', 'ss02', 'ss03', 'ss04', 'ss05', 'ss06', 'ss07', 'ss08', 'ss09', 'ss10', 'cv02', 'cv06', 'cv14', 'cv16', 'cv18', 'cv24', 'cv25', 'cv28', 'cv29', 'cv30', 'cv31', 'cv32', 'zero'" - and the only one I'm debating is ss10 in FiraCode, which connects the f with i and l in fi and fl. But these look nice in Monaspace at "editor.fontWeight": "300".
• Opus 5 has thinking turned on by default. This can lead to significantly higher API costs for the unsuspecting. A task that should've cost me $3 ended up at $9 on Opus 5.
• I installed the Claude Code Usage widget to further my token psychosis. Now all I need is enough tasks to use those tokens.
• Stacking triggers of any kind helps. For example, I just updated my tabnotes repo to fix a bug while restoring after Edge crashes. That's because I had a visible and immediate need. But I also used this to fix other features I wanted, like loading tabnotes as a page instead of a sidepanel. One trigger led to a related feature getting implemented. This requires a bucket of related ideas to be ready, so a good practice is to jot down annoying things.
• "Maybe that is what the “research mathematicians” of the future should do: make a selection from a vast sea of AI-generated mathematics and write a book about it in such a way that other mathematicians can read the book and feel the kind of enrichment that we feel when we get to grips with an area of mathematics." - Thoughts about the Leiden Declaration, Timothy Gowers. An interesting perspective. We've seen this in the past when something becomes abundant - like chemists' discoveries organized by Mendeleev, drug makers' evidence organized by Cochrane, lawyers' case laws commented by Blackstone and organized by West, knowledge prioritized and organized by Wikipedia, hip-hop DJs, Linnaeus' taxonomy, etc.