Sydney

Weekly Notes 30/2026

Week 30 summary - another milestone week.

Sathyajith Bhat

26 Jul 2026 • 5 min read

What's been happening

Brr now we're properly dipping into Winter. The night time temperatures have been dipping below tens, and this past week it's dropped to under 5 degrees multiple times. Getting into the rooms has been hard since the house doesn't retain heat well and we don't have heating in the bedroom. But with our double layer fleece blankets, it's been nice and cosy.

This week also marks 4 years of us moving to Sydney and 4 years of me being part of The Trade Desk. The last year has been quite interesting to say the least. Like a lot of tech industry, we went all in into LLMs & AI agents and that's fundamentally changed the way I work. That said, many of our challenges are still a lot for LLMs to conquer, and I've been enjoying the myriad of projects I've been working on - some of which I have covered on my past weekly notes. On the personal side, the last year has been nothing short of fabulous. We got our PR last August, we decided to go ahead with a house purchase that we finalised in November and settled in January and since then we've been living the suburb life. Grateful for all that we have.

We also had a pretty quiet week. Our gym sessions went well - Tuesday had the usual back squats with a metcon of 5 burpees/10 dumbbell cleans/15 v-tucks (aka jack knife sit ups) - which I did well at. Wednesdays was a bit more relaxed with gorilla rows/bench press/push ups/pull ups and bicep curls. That was not all the workout we did. We signed up for a drop in session at a gym that is new to us, closer to home. The goal was to check out a session and see how the gym is - how they do their sessions, how welcoming they are etc. And for this, we woke up at a very early 05:15 on Friday (shock, horror can't believe I did that) and drove to the gym for the 6am session. The workout of the day was something we hadn't done before, but the trainer was very helpful in getting us up to speed. Having experience with barbell made it easier to do the workouts - which included barbell push jerk, wall balls and burpee for the second time in the week. Happy to report the gym was very welcoming, the sessions were not too crazy and we will sign up there and move from our existing gym. They have been great for us, but this one is closer to home and makes it easier to get to and come back.

For the weekend, we had planned to do a small walk around Lake Parramatta and then check out Paddy's Markets nearby at Homebush. However, with the cold weather, we decided against the walk but did go to the markets. I was completely overwhelmed with not just the size but by the sheer amount of people and the pushing and the jostling around - it was like being back at home for Sunday markets I'd go with Dad.

We had a look at the fruits, produce and fish and bought some fish, watermelon, mandarins and a few veggies and herbs. The prices are pretty good but it's cash only and most of the value comes from the large quantities that you can get for. The fish will be grilled later today. Speaking of which - I wrote up on my experiences on the Weber Q 3200n+ grill in a separate post.

Sunday was another relaxed day as the cold meant that we ended up skipping walk, again. We did however make use of the griddle for breakfast as Jo made almond flour pancakes while I did the bacon. They came out well! Later on, we went over to Woolies for some more grocery shopping that we couldn't do at the markets, bought some chicken for the kori rotti, and relaxed the rest of the day.

Music of the Week

Only came across this song last week and not sure how I didn't listen to it till now. Here's Time by Creed. Should listen to their albums this week.

Link of the week

Dude's entire channel (Vinyl 1954) revolves around him sitting by his music corner and listening to records, and air drumming/guitaring/vibing to it. Very cool aesthetic.

For the past few years, Simon Willison has tested every major LLM release with the same prompt: “Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle”.

What began as a tongue-in-cheek benchmark has become one of the most famous informal benchmarks in AI [...] there’s plenty of discussion about its usefulness and about whether AI labs might be benchmaxxing

TLDR: They probably aren't, and if they are, it isn't very obvious. Nice read though.

Thanks for reading.

Thanks for reading and have a great week ahead.