Code, Cold & Chaos
This week has been… a lot.
The weather is starting to reveal its true colors - colder, moodier, and definitely less forgiving. Combine that with a hectic work week, and you have the perfect recipe for questioning your life choices.
At work, I found myself writing PHP again - yes, that PHP. I hadn’t touched it in a while, and let’s just say it felt like opening an old box in the attic: familiar, but covered in a layer of dust and a few questionable design decisions.
It wasn’t a “jump in and fix it” kind of task. It was a “stare at old notes, wonder what past-me was thinking, and slowly piece things together” type of week. Add in a generous amount of context switching, and my brain started resembling a browser with 47 open tabs - all playing background audio.
And speaking of browsers… OpenAI released its own web browser this week.
For the first time, I’m genuinely worried for Google. The search landscape is shifting faster than we can refresh our tabs. First, it was Perplexity with the Comet browser, now OpenAI has joined the race. The timing couldn’t have been more perfect (or more strategic).
It almost feels intentional - like they waited for everyone to start thinking about Comet, then swooped in with a “By the way, we built one too.” Genius move.
I’m also looking forward to what will happen to search engine result pages, especially now that these LLMs are starting to feel like know-it-alls. The web as we know it might be standing at the edge of its biggest shift since Google itself.
While we’re on the subject of AI, Google DeepMind just released a university-level course on AI research foundations. If you’ve been itching to get your hands dirty and understand how transformers work or how to build a modern language model, this is a great resource.
If you don’t have prior technical knowledge of how AI models are built, start with their Machine Learning Crash Course instead - it’s beginner-friendly and a solid entry point before you dive into the deeper waters.
That’s all I can think of this week - my brain is still defragmenting from all that PHP.