Things I Learned - 22 Mar 2026
This week, I learned: Psychological operations in design by Narendra Ghate When lights are dimmed people speak softer. So, dimming lights reduces sound levels in noisy offices. Rather than reduce the size of shampoo sachets (which customers and business both hate), include 2 shampoos in one sachet, tearable in the middle. Price saches at 95p with a 5p deposit for the sachet - which rag-pickers can collect and return to the retailer. People think of stains like wounds on cloth. So a “stain band-aid” where you stick a strip, and remove it after 5 min to remove the stain, is catchy. A mechanical wind-up fish that stirs the water in the bucket while clothes are soaking speeds up the process. Senthil & Amutha, founders of Payir demonstrated a re-usable fabric calendar that converts into a bag for re-use. Pretty clever! Their message at the Chennai Design Festival was that good design can be for the masses and by the masses to reclaim their time, energy, and joy. The urinary bladder works based on involuntary muscular contractions towards the end, to clear out the last bits of fluid. It’s not fluid flow, it’s muscle contractions. (Oh, the things I learn!) Gemini Indigo bans ghee in cabin baggage. Also coconuts, pickles, oily foods, gooey cakes, spices (masala, powders), strong-smelling food. ChatGPT New skill unlocked: how to demo without knowing what you’re demo-ing. STEP 1: Copy-paste all demo pages as Markdown. STEP 2: Tell AI “Here is a demo I’ll be showing. (Add context.) Tell me how I should explain this and what I should point out as specific examples. Use concise bullets.” We’ve learnt not to do things we don’t know how to (until we learn it). When AI is doing things, this is a bottleneck. Get out of the way. Stop filtering for what YOU can do. Stop learning what IT can do. Ask for it. That’s faster. Learning can come later. I keep forgetting that QR codes need a white border for them to work. TerraDraw provides a unified API across multiple mapping libraries. (In the vibe-coding era, this is not as useful.) To create desktop apps declaratively on Linux, Slint, Flutter, QML(Qt) and GTK4 are options. Slint and Flutter seem to be cross platform. Slint is newer, less mature but compiles to small fast binaries and might be a good option to explore. Flutter seems more mature and fairly popular. Claude PyTorch Tracing watches one forward pass and freezes the path into a portable recipe. But it silently ignores branches your example didn’t take. Claude The Internet is forking into a human internet vs an agent web LinkedIn SamGeo is a Python Package for geospatial image processing. While OlmoEarth provides geospatial embeddings, SamGeo can convert geospatial data to vector data! So you can do things like: Create the outer boundary of all apartments with swimming pools in a city Extract the shape of all lakes across the years to find out how they’re changing. Terence started Foundation for Science and AI Research (SAIR) to use AI in science research. Verifiable proofs (e.g. LEAN) are a big part of this. Since AI needs to run on phones and that needs GPUs, a lot of phones might need replacement in the next few years.
