Weekly Notes 21/2026

What's been happening

It's been a quiet, rainy week. I mentioned having given my Apple Watch for repairs last week - I got an email stating that they can't service my Watch in time and would offer a replacement of the same model - but in a different colour.

(L) the new watch (R) the old one

I wasn't keen on the band colour but then again I was reminded that I still have my old band and the main unit's colour is barely perceptible so I agreed to the replacement. I received it towards the end of the week and it's going well. I restored from backup and all my apps and Watch configuration - including the complications — were preserved. Happy to have my Watch back - Apple Health though seemed to believe that I was slacking around persistently reminding me that my activity was much lower than usual.

The PT went pretty well. We started working towards 1RM for bench press. Right now, we're still building up towards our working weights. Last I recall, the max I'd done on the barbell bench press was 50kg. Would be nice to get to 70kg - probably that's what my target would be as our trainer had told us to have a target in mind and he'll let us know if it's close to what he's thinking.

On the work front, I started working on a new project to deliver a benchmark/stress testing harness so teams can request for a benchmark across a variety of instance types and the harness will orchestrate it. I'm using Temporal as the provisioner and orchestrator for the harness. I have an initial proof-of-concept ready and looking to hear feedback from the requesting team.

I've also booked tickets for my first work trip in a few months - I will be heading to Bellevue, Washington for a meeting with my colleagues. I asked Jo if she'd be interested in joining and after thinking about it - she said yes. We won't be there for long (only for a week) and Jo hopes to spend a couple of days in San Francisco to meet her sister before coming back to Bellevue and explore a bit of Seattle. I probably will have a second trip to Seattle in August for the AWS Hero Summit - I haven't figured out yet if I will make the trip or not. Something to decide soon.

With the rainy week, we stayed indoors this weekend. On Thursday, we got the barbeque out. We applied some tandoori marinade to the chicken drumsticks and grilled them via indirect heat on the barbeque - and they came out well. Jo had pre-cooked some veggies - I heated them on the grill.

Grilling moments, and listening to some mixes by Jo's cousin

Jo also got a notification that the stocks for blood of her group were in low quantity, so we went over to a nearby mobile blood donation bank and donated some blood. After that, we went over to The Ettamogah to grab some lunch and were so full that we ended up skipping dinner.

As a bonus, I got to see this pretty cool Nissan GT-R near the blood bank.

What we ate

The Ettamogah, Kellyville Ridge - The Ettamogah is a cartoon pub created by cartoonist Ken Maynard, and built as a real pub just outside of Albury at Table Top, New South Wales. This is now a chain of four pubs and we'd always see this on our commute back home and we'd been planning to visit here since we first saw it. While the facade remains a faithful recreation, the entry isn't from there but from the back, leading to a pretty large open area consisting of beer garden, sports bar, arcade and a dining section.

Jo got the beer battered fish and chips while I got the smash burger with us sharing a plate of cauliflower arancini. The batter of the fish and chips was really good - only to be let down by the fish itself. My smashburger was really good. Overall a decent place to visit but you're not really missing out much if you skip.

Music of the Week

Not quite the Robert Plant songs that I was expecting but great Tiny Desk Concert nonetheless

Links of the week

Nisarga posts about how he found vulnerabilities in the CBSE scoring portal.

Exposing Critical Vulnerabilities in CBSE’s On-Screen Marking Portal: From Authentication Bypass to Full Account Takeover — ni5argathoughts about programming, security & lifeni5argaNisarga Adhikary

Simon Willison has a cool preso/post recapping the past 6 months in LLMs. Good wrap-up on what's been happening

The last six months in LLMs in five minutesI put together these annotated slides from my five minute lightning talk at PyCon US 2026, using the latest iteration of my annotated presentation tool. # I presented this lightning …Simon Willison’s WeblogSimon Willison

This blog describes the build, some of the issues I faced, and answers the question “was it worth it to build the server myself, or should I have rented cloud GPUs?”

tldr: probably yes if you can run them 100% of the time and have the required capital not only to buy the hardware, but also invest in supporting stuff (for example electrical work required to support it). If you ask me, for a casual person, I don't think the investment in local inference is worth it especially at current consumer hardware levels & cost. Also related: this is a good read.

Was my $48K GPU server worth it?In 2024 I quit my FAANG job to become an independent researcher. To do this I needed GPUs, so I built “grumbl”, a 6x 6000 Ada GPU server. This blog describes the build, some of the issu…Rosmine ML BlogFixing LLM writing with Distribution Fine TuningApple Silicon costs more than OpenRouterLocal LLMs can be very very cheap

Thanks for reading.

Thanks for reading and have a great week ahead.