Weekly Notes 2026/12

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  • All rounds of Toyota interviews are finally over. The HR discussion lasted 90 minutes. I enjoyed most of it.🤞
    • And they rejected! Apparently I am over qualified. Didn’t they know from the resume? The reason is perhaps something else — a wrong pause between sentences! I was under the impression that things are going very well.
  • Early this week, a light shower. The leaves of the mango tree outside my house are cleaned! It wasn’t strong enough to clean the dust from the road and wash my parked car. Two days later, we had a good enough rain that washed my car. The mangoes on the tree outside my home are big enough to pickle :-). This year March is not as hot as the last one. Already a few showers.
  • Due to LPG shortage, the restaurant near my workplace is serving a few items, mostly dosa, tea, coffee! At least they are open. But only a fraction of people are working. Everyone pays for the war expect for people who started it?
  • At work, use of AI tools are now compulsory. I am learning to use them, begrudgingly!
    • I already have a big win. I was given .NET6 codebase with empty readme file — a language I never wrote. I asked Claude to act as a staff engineer/product manager and walk me though the codebase and quiz me later. The purpose of walk-through: I can contribute to the codebase. It did a much much better job than a co-worker would have done. It saved me so many pings and emails.
  • I learnt more about AI tooling yesterday from a talk by a coworker. This blog post was also pretty helpful explaining how context window size impacts the quality of response.
    • When the context is filled, the quality of response suffers. The context size is typically 20,000 to 1,000,000. An archive paper is roughly 10,000 tokens. So its not very large!
    • Either you drop some of the context (loose information) or do compaction (summarize the context) and loose nuance. While compacting, pinning important information helps. Perhaps claude is already doing all that. For a general purpose chatbot, I see why this could be a hard problem to solve. A single word may have the most nuance.
  • In other news, uv, ruff and ty joins OpenAI. These tools are created by Astral. Many AI companies have been buying tooling (especially cli tooling).

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