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.

Questions I was asked

Week ending 22 Mar 2026

  • Question: If I outsource all my creative decisions to AI, am I becoming a lesser version of myself?
    Answer: Cognitive offloading is real - but each generation trades old skills for new ones. Rickshaw pullers were replaced by machines; many found other work.
  • Question: We must have considered the long-term impact of AI when developing it, right?
    Answer: “No. Who considers long-term impact over money? Or fame? Or power?”
  • Question: Do you have any critique of this technology - is it all sunshine?
    Answer: “I don’t have a problem dying. I’m having fun. If AI wants to kill me, it can. Just shoot me in the back.”
  • Question: Do we have a direction for how to use AI in HR?
    Answer: AI is like a very smart intern with no hands or legs. If you can find a use for an intern in HR, you can find a use for AI.
  • Question: I’ve been using NotebookLM to summarize things before reading - am I cheating?
    Answer: Learning comes from effort, not the tool. If your brain is as tired after using the LLM as without it, the learning is there.
  • Question: For making presentations, which is best - Gemini, Claude, or ChatGPT?
    Answer: Claude makes the best presentations; Gemini does the best research (Google access); ChatGPT does the best analysis.
  • Question: Is AI change management consulting scalable as a business?
    Answer: Scales only as large as your trusted relationships; relationships become more valuable as AI commoditizes the rest; scalability through product defeats the entire premise.
  • Question: What is the profile of a person to hire to build a retail AI solution?
    Answer: Any engineer qualifies; the less experience the better; test them live: “sit down, build this solution, one hour.”
  • Question: Who owns the commit - the AI or the developer?
    Answer: Humans know how to assign responsibility for companies, ships, gods, rivers; we haven’t learned yet how to do it for agents.
  • Question: What is the biggest blocker to having AI as part of SDLC?
    Answer: The people - “I am a coder. If AI is going to do my code, what am I?”