Daily Reading List – April 9, 2026 (#760)

I spent the latter half of today trying to help Future Richard who somehow has a meeting-filled “no meeting Friday” tomorrow. Better to tackle tasks I usually leave for Friday today, and not stress it later.

[blog] The 49MB Web Page. How did we get here? Trackers, bloat, auto-play videos, and more ambush us on seemingly every website.

[article] Antarctica, and the Extreme Logistics of Human Exploration. Long, super-fascinating piece on what it takes to live in Antarctica for months at a time.

[blog] Try notebooks in Gemini to easily keep track of projects. Super cool. This is an integration I will absolutely take advantage of.

[blog] Your parallel Agent limit. Managers, read this. And AI fanatics, dig in. Adding agents doesn’t scale developers linearly. There’s a ceiling for what we can handle.

[article] Managers and Executives Disagree on AI—and It’s Costing Companies. Looks like a fairly large divide, which doesn’t surprise me. Unless you co-create the plans and have on-the-ground sense of results, it’s easy to be out of sync on AI impact.

[blog] 5 new features for Android XR. I don’t know where this AR/VR space is heading, but you can read this and get a sense for problems it can solve.

[blog] Fine-Tuning Gemma 4 with Cloud Run Jobs: Serverless GPUs (NVIDIA RTX 6000 Pro) for pet breed classification. Neat example of fine-tuning this latest open model, and using a serverless platform to do it.

[article] The golden rules of agent-first product engineering. A handful of good points, but I particularly liked the direct guidance on the right way to define agent skills.

[article] Waymo robotaxis are tracking potholes and sharing that data with Waze users. Great use case for these self-driving vehicles. They can detect and report issues on the road with regularity.

[article] Developer ramp-up time continues to accelerate with AI. Wow, developers are getting significantly more productive, faster, in new jobs. Will we reach a plateau where there’s nothing left to speed up with AI?

[blog] Introducing Learn Mode: your personal coding tutor in Google Colab. This “Learn Mode” is terrific for those who don’t just want step-by-step instructions, but want to be able to explore as they go.

[blog] Improving the academic workflow: Introducing two AI agents for better figures and peer review. I could use this for my own docs which are decidedly not very academic.

[article] Unstructured data is piling up as AI risks rise. Hmmm, I wonder why AI pilots have a middling chance of success? Maybe because most data estates aren’t remotely set up to work with AI scenarios?

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