Hi, I am Akshay.

Send a WhatsApp link too fast and it goes out without a preview, and stays bare on the other person’s phone too. Your own phone builds the preview before it sends, so if you hit enter early, there’s nothing for them to show

The three squares in the corners of every QR code use a fixed 1:1:3:1:1 black-white ratio - picked in 1994 by measuring stacks of magazines and boxes to find the one pattern that almost never shows up in normal print, so a scanner locks on instantly and never mistakes a busy cereal box for a code

The Cmd+Tab switcher only ever lists ‘Regular’ apps - which is why menu-bar utilities like Rectangle or 1Password’s helper run the whole time but never show up when you tab through. macOS lets an app declare itself an Accessory and stay invisible instead

Sturgeon’s Law - ‘90% of everything is crap’ - was coined by a 1950s sci-fi writer as a defence of his genre, not a put-down

The doors that confuse you on whether to push or pull are called Norman doors, named after Don Norman - the author of “The Design of Everyday Things”. Shopify has now removed all Norman Doors from their office, to promote the design philosophy of not building things that people predictably end up doing wrong.

For a lot of OTTs and streaming players, ARPU is ‘surprisingly’ highest for the hybrid tier (lower fee + ads), not the premium ad-free tier - Bob Iger accidentally revealed Disney+’s internal split

CRED hijacks the UPI remarks field to advertise inside GPay’s transaction history - ‘Paid via CRED and got cashback’ shows up in the receiver’s app

Uninstalling an app on macOS doesn’t delete all its data - apps like Spotify and Prime Video can leave behind 10+ GB of orphaned data

If you ‘undo’ a highlight on a Kindle, temporary ghosting remains on the page that only disappears on full page turn. This is because e-ink displays use ‘partial refresh’ for small actions like removing highlights

When you copy an image from Google Docs to markdown, to give ahead to an LLM tool, your context will almost always bloat out. This is because the image gets converted to a massive Base64-encoded data and a single image can blow up into a 15+ page Google doc

A big share of Lego’s sales now come from first-time Adult purchasers, buying for self - they call it Adult Fans of LEGO (AFOL) and lean into it with the ‘Adults Welcome!’ marketing

Smallest width developer settings on Android let you increase screen real-estate beyond what’s normally possible

Netflix has a second-screen-viewability score before it greenlights projects because people can’t follow dense movies/tv series anymore

Bluetooth has a ‘sniffing’ mode to magically connect with switched-off devices

Spotify allows you to paywall podcast access from other subscriptions

Your Mac has a built-in job scheduler!