---
title: Things I Learned - 24 May 2026
date: 2026-05-24T00:00:00+00:00
categories:
  - til
description: I built a scraper for Google Linked apps, tracked BitWarden’s pricing shifts, and benchmarked audio transcription models. I also explored space survival mechanics, Mars' moons etymology, and why children's vision is better for surprise than focus.
keywords: [bitwarden, anthropic, qwen, google takeout, whisper, gemini, pax memoriae, meta ai]
---

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](https://blog.ppb1701.com/the-quiet-renovation-at-bitwarden)
- 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](https://claude.ai/share/f9932e93-a632-4015-93f4-84359670f53c)
- The open-source Chinese models about 6 months behind frontier models. [Qwen 3.7-Max](https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen3.7) is [on par](https://arena.ai/leaderboard/text) with Claude 4.5 Opus (Nov 2025) and Gemini 3 Flash (Dec 2025).
- [Google basically became Gemini](https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/search/search-io-2026/). 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](https://claude.ai/share/9f3f6172-2965-40a0-8b67-053a0769e455)
- I wanted a list of sites I log into with my Google Account. [Google's Linked apps](https://myaccount.google.com/connections) page does that. Unfortunately, I can't find a way to use [Google Takeout](https://takeout.google.com/) to export that data. So I wrote a [scraper](https://github.com/sanand0/scripts/blob/deb4c1ecbc93e03511ca264ce14d2977d01b7d90/googleconnections.py) which can be [single-shot prompted](https://github.com/sanand0/scripts/blob/deb4c1ecbc93e03511ca264ce14d2977d01b7d90/prompts/googleconnections.md) 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](https://gemini.google.com/share/4a15b461a2d3)
- 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](https://chatgpt.com/share/6a0aae2f-9b64-83ec-8db5-00c2f3a465b0)
- 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 (<a> 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](https://pythonicvarun.github.io/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.