Week #71

It was a roller-coaster week. Half of the week, it was travelling and outside. The rest was coping with AI news and code agents. Getting back to work after a week is a bit stressful and brings a bit of hurdle of health. I wasn’t quite well for a couple of days after the trip, and couldn’t really work at my 100% best. So, this weekend I would be pacing up, slowing down when needed to rest with ease. I have a few plans for Advent of Code, I haven’ gotten the time to solve even the first problem, looking forward to the weekend to keeping up with it.

On the AI side, there were a lot of releases and news all over the place. Anthropic with a wired deal, OpenAI with its red alert, Mistral with a new family of models, and Deepseek with frontier model releases. The tech is moving faster then ever, and I am finding it really overwhelming, its hard to keep up with the models.

Quote of the week

“It’s not the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write. What’s hard is not the work itself, but the belief that we are worthy of doing it.”

— Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

I’ll leave it here. I have wrote almost consistently for 30 days. 1000+ words each day. Crossing even 2k mark on couple of days. I am also on a 71 week streak on this newsletter. I write consistently, it’s not hard to write, its just hard to sit and start. The rest is flow, the rest is not art, it’s intuition and the muscle that develops over time. Real art is fighting the initial hurdle, the resistance to begin is hardest, the rest is smooth ride, once one is immersed.

Read

  1. On 10 years of writing a blog that nobody reads

    • Interesting take on writing in the age of AI, relating to breathe, inhale -> read, exhale -> review and reflect

  2. All it takes is for one to work out

    • Yes, this is true. For it to happen though you might have to attempt 99 shots, good or bad, doesn’t matter, that’s what the journey is about. Figuring and Learning things through action.

Watched

  • Google’s Nano Banana Pro Image Generation Model

    • He is saying he won’t use Adobe Photoshop anymore, my god. This models are getting into our heads. Art is at stake, or is it.

    • The SynthID is not quite a solution, just a label from Google or a tag to show that they care about safety but they don’t know how to.

    • The quality of these images is so crisp, OpenAI models have some edgy and fainted colors, but Google’s models are so vibrant.

  • Anthropic acquires Bun

    • Yes, this is a wired deal. No one really knows what is happening and what they are going to do. Bun was a good step. The decision to merge into Anthropic might be good as they are now paid to do their work.

    • Sustainability is solved, but what if they are no longer the owner of the product or the tool? What about the future of it? We have seen open source project falter under big companies.

  • Anthropic confirms software engineering is not dead

    • Six months are over, we are in 2026 almost, are there developers still around. I don’t think so, yesterday I heard someone yell at a computer and bang its keys to prompt another fix. We are safe for now.

  • Code Optimisation via Memoization

    • Such a great explanation. Drawing helps so much in computer science. Being able to visualize how each number is computed, it gives a lot of insight into what the pattern is being repeated and carve out the commonality in the pattern.

Learnt

  • Grabbing Slack token for custom scripts

    • If you wanted to scrap data from an alert channel in slack, then you have to go to the web platform and perform a certain operations for authenticating the api from the script.

    • Any conversation like api request in the network tab, can fetch you the token in the payload, usually beginning with xoxc-. Store it and then you can request any messages from any channel or chat. Simple.

  • Google Sheets Count formula

    • Use COUNTA with the parameters as the range of rows to get the number of rows in the provided range.

    • Use COUNTA(UNIQUE()) with the parameters as the range of rows to get the unique rows in the provided range.

Tech News

I want to watch this video. It just intrigued me, I have been a django developer till late 2023. But then, AI came in and here I am. I haven’t touched Django development since then. I want to see why it might be the case, I suspect its due to ai automating the boilerplate code? Maybe the repetitive and boilerplatey code is no more a cognition on the developers, AI is doing it with flask for them. Not sure. Watch it to find out.

That’s it from this week. I have been out of sync in tech for a while. Need to get hands on and create a few project, the itch is there, just procrastination is holding me back. Let’s see if this year I can complete Advent of Code, in Golang of course, need to learn tests, more concurrent operations and stuff.

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