Things I Learned - 24 May 2026
This week, I learned: BitWarden seems to be sneakily jacking up prices and going towards a PE sale. Might be time to shift out or self host. Sigh, I just migrated into it… Source Andrej Karpathy has joined Anthropic. Likely to use Claude to build better Claudes - automating AI research. Also, it probably isn’t a good time to build an AI education platform. Claude The open-source Chinese models about 6 months behind frontier models. Qwen 3.7-Max is on par with Claude 4.5 Opus (Nov 2025) and Gemini 3 Flash (Dec 2025). Google basically became Gemini. Entirely! I’m not sure there’s a difference any more. Which means it will scrape websites and not send traffic through - just killing the search economy. But it’s far more useful. Claude I wanted a list of sites I log into with my Google Account. Google’s Linked apps page does that. Unfortunately, I can’t find a way to use Google Takeout to export that data. So I wrote a scraper which can be single-shot prompted these days. As long as you remember to exhale, your chances of recovery from being ejected into space is pretty good for the first 15-60 seconds. Gemini I don’t understand half the comments I read on LinkedIn. Earlier, I was able to separate good from bad. Now, I’m not sure if what I read is actually insight or idiocy. Is the AI use making their comments too smart or making my brain too dumb? “Pax Memoriae”: peace of memory. Putting past conflicts to rest. The best part of it was, I learnt the phrase by typing “Pax” into VS Code and wasn’t sure what to write next. Before I could search for it, GitHub Copilot completed it. I searched for what it meant, and it was so apt! Children’s vision is worse than adults, but filter less and absorb ore irrelevant information than adults. This is useful for learning and surprise detection, but costly for focus, speed, and relevance. ChatGPT The word phobia comes from the Greek god of fear, Phobos, which is the name of one of Mars’ moon. Deimos, the other moon, is the Greek god of dread/terror. They’re the children of Ares (Mars), the god of war. Nice planet. On WhatsApp, I can type @Meta AI and then /imagine to have it draw an image. The quality is OK - not great, not terrible. Surprising but GPT Realtime Whisper ( new model) isn’t as good as the older open-source Whisper models. Also, Gemini 3 Flash Preview is as good at transcription as Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview for up to medium-length text. LLM Audio Transcription benchmark Google Maps typically shows me a cycling time of 30 minutes when it take me 40 minutes and a walking time of 40 minutes when it take me 30 minutes. Either I walk much faster and cycle much lower than the typical person or Google Maps is not well calibrated to Singapore and India.
