The Desk — Edition 78

Welcome to the 78th issue of The Desk — my weekly roundup of newly published content, project updates, and recommendations. Whether you’re following along for tutorials, blog posts, GitHub projects, or curated reads, there’s something for everyone building or exploring in tech, content, and open-source spaces.

🌍 Brandon Travel Website Is Now Live

I’m excited to share that Brandon Travel, my new travel intelligence platform, is officially live.

Brandon Travel brings together open datasets, analysis tools, research projects, and travel-focused algorithms designed to make global travel more transparent, data-driven, and accessible. From early models like the No/Low Single Supplement Scorer to upcoming APIs, geographic datasets, and travel analytics, the platform serves as the foundation for a growing ecosystem of open travel intelligence.

This launch marks the start of a long-term vision: a publicly accessible travel knowledge infrastructure for travelers, developers, researchers, and open source contributors. Many more datasets, tools, and insights will roll out over the coming weeks.

Brandon Travel

Travel guides, tools, and data-driven insights to help you explore the world with confidence.

Brandon Travel

📚 Introducing Awesome Learn

This week also marks the introduction of Awesome Learn, a new open source project under the AwesomeLists.io ecosystem.

Awesome Learn provides a unified structure for creating high-quality learning paths, spanning programming, web development, AI, data science, and STEM topics. The goal is simple:

• help people learn complex subjects through curated, progressive paths.
• maintain consistency across authors and topics.
• support open source contributions with a clear manifesto and template.

The first version of the official Learning Path Template is now published, making it easy for contributors to create structured, beginner-to-advanced guides. More paths are already in development and will appear across the Awesome Learn GitHub organization.

GitHub - awesomelearnio/awesome

Contribute to awesomelearnio/awesome development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHubawesomelearnio

📝 New Blog Posts

This week’s posts content focused on travel intelligence and digital marketing:

The Most Connected Airports in the World: A Data-Driven Look

A data-driven analysis of the world’s most connected airports, exploring destination reach, airline networks, geographic efficiency, and the global patterns that shape modern travel and mobility. Updated with the latest available route and aviation data.

Brandon TravelBrandon Himpfen

Google’s John Mueller Says Some Sites in “Bad State” May Need a Full Restart

Google’s John Mueller says sites damaged by low-quality content may not recover through rewriting alone. Domains in a “bad state” may require a full restart, emphasizing authentic value, clear purpose, and helpful content to regain indexing and performance.

Bold OutlookBrandon Himpfen

Google’s John Mueller Says Background Video Loading Unlikely to Affect SEO

Google’s John Mueller says large background videos loading asynchronously are unlikely to affect SEO if primary content loads first. The clarification highlights best practices for lazy loading, Core Web Vitals, and video performance optimization.

Bold OutlookBrandon Himpfen

Stay tuned as I continue publishing more posts each week across Bold Outlook, Solo Traveler, Brandon Travel and Travel Bloggers Network.

🏢 New GitHub Orgs

I launched six new GitHub organization to focus on This Week In newsletters:

reactweekly

GitHub is where reactweekly builds software.

GitHub

pythonweekly

GitHub is where pythonweekly builds software.

GitHub

Awesome Learn

Structured learning paths for developers, creators, and lifelong learners — curated the same way Awesome Lists curates resources. - Awesome Learn

GitHub

nodeweekly

GitHub is where nodeweekly builds software.

GitHub

phpweekly

GitHub is where phpweekly builds software.

GitHub

typescriptweekly

GitHub is where typescriptweekly builds software.

GitHub

These are all part of my broader GitHub ecosystem (e.g., BrandonTravel, Bold Outlook, AwesomeListsIO). Contributions welcome!

📦 New GitHub Repos

Here are a collection of brand new GitHub repos:

GitHub - boldoutlook/lightweight-feature-flags

Contribute to boldoutlook/lightweight-feature-flags development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHubboldoutlook

GitHub - boldwd/smart-accessible-components

Contribute to boldwd/smart-accessible-components development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHubboldwd

GitHub - awesomelearnio/learning-path: Official template and examples for creating new structured learning paths for Awesome Learn.

Official template and examples for creating new structured learning paths for Awesome Learn. - awesomelearnio/learning-path

GitHubawesomelearnio

I regularly publish new GitHub repos, so please ensure to follow my GitHub and or my GitHub orgs for the latest.

🛠️ Updated GitHub Repos

Here are notable updates to existing GitHub repositories:

GitHub - brandonhimpfen/brandonhimpfen

Contribute to brandonhimpfen/brandonhimpfen development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHubbrandonhimpfen

I’m constantly improving my GitHub repositories to make them more useful for both contributors and end users.

📚 Recommended Reading

Here are a few standout articles and blog posts I recommend checking out this week:

Gemini 3 Deep Think is now available in the Gemini app.

Today, we’re rolling out Gemini 3 Deep Think mode to Google AI Ultra subscribers in the Gemini app. This new mode delivers a meaningful improvement in reasoning capabili…

GoogleTulsee Doshi

Fintech firm Marquis alerts dozens of US banks and credit unions of a data breach after ransomware attack | TechCrunch

Marquis said ransomware hackers stole reams of banking customer data, containing personal information and financial records, as well as Social Security numbers, belonging to hundreds of thousands of people. The number of affected people is expected to rise.

TechCrunchZack Whittaker

MoneyGram Taps Fireblocks to Expand Stablecoin Use in Global Payments and Treasury Ops

The deal aims to bring stablecoin settlements and programmable treasury tools to MoneyGram’s global network.

CoinDeskKrisztian Sandor

Django 6.0 released

Posted by Natalia Bidart on Dec. 3, 2025

Django Project

AWS DevOps Agent helps you accelerate incident response and improve system reliability (preview) | Amazon Web Services

New service acts as an always-on DevOps engineer, helping you respond to incidents, identify root causes, and prevent future issues through systematic analysis of incidents and operational patterns.

Amazon Web ServicesSébastien Stormacq

Netflix Wins the Warner Bros. Discovery Bidding War With $82.7 Billion Offer, Enters Exclusive Deal Talks

Warner Bros. Discovery has selected Netflix after the streaming giant offered $30 a share for the studio and streaming assets.

TheWrapRoger Cheng and Sharon Waxman

Robinhood Acquires LedgerX to Expand Prediction Markets

Robinhood and Susquehanna will take on a 90% stake in MIAXdx (also known as LedgerX).

Covers.comGrant Mitchell

Gmarket suffers unauthorized payment incident affecting 60 users amid hacking woes - The Korea Times

Financial authorities have begun an emergency on-site inspection of the major e-commerce platform Gmarket after reports of unauthorized mobile paym…

The Korea TimesYonhap

Everest Ransomware Claims ASUS Breach and 1TB Data Theft

Follow us on Bluesky, Twitter (X), Mastodon and Facebook at @Hackread

Hackread - Cybersecurity News, Data Breaches, Tech, AI, Crypto and MoreWaqas

NVIDIA Shatters MoE AI Performance Records With a Massive 10x Leap on GB200 ‘Blackwell’ NVL72 Servers, Fueled by Co-Design Breakthroughs

Scaling performance on MoE AI models is one of the industry constraints, but it appears that NVIDIA has managed to make a breakthrough.

WccftechMuhammad Zuhair

Google Workspace Updates: Now available: Create AI agents to automate work with Google Workspace Studio

Workspace Updates Blog

K7 Antivirus Vulnerability Allows Attackers Gain SYSTEM-level Privileges

A serious privilege escalation vulnerability in K7 Ultimate Security, an antivirus product from K7 Computing, was found by abusing named pipes with overly permissive access control lists.

CybersecurityNewsGuru Baran

Anthropic reportedly preparing for one of the largest IPOs ever in race with OpenAI: FT

Anthropic, the AI startup behind the popular Claude chatbot, is reportedly in talks to launch one of the largest initial public offerings ever as 2025.

CNBCDylan Butts

Bitcoin (BTC) ETFs Coming to Bank of America’s Brokerage Clients

The Second-largest U.S. bank embraces bitcoin ETFs as a portfolio sleeve, putting Wall Street’s remaining holdouts on notice as the industry races crypto adoption

CoinDeskOlivier Acuna

Anthropic reportedly preparing for one of the largest IPOs ever in race with OpenAI: FT

Anthropic, the AI startup behind the popular Claude chatbot, is reportedly in talks to launch one of the largest initial public offerings ever as 2025.

CNBCDylan Butts

Privilege escalation with SageMaker and there’s more hiding in execution roles

A subtle AWS privesc hiding in SageMaker lifecycle configs, and what it reveals about execution roles.

privilege escalation path in EC2

Runway Research | Introducing Runway Gen-4.5

A new frontier for video generation. State-of-the-art motion quality, prompt adherence and visual fidelity.

Introducing Runway Gen-4.5

China to Intensify Crackdown on Virtual Currencies, Including Stablecoins: Report

China’s central bank expressed concerns over stablecoins.

CoinDeskOmkar Godbole

Thread by @WALLACHLEGAL on Thread Reader App

@WALLACHLEGAL: NEW: Kalshi has been hit with a nationwide class action lawsuit in the SDNY for operating an illegal online sports betting platform and for “duping” customers into believing that they are legally gamb...…

Thread ReaderDaniel Wallach

These are curated for developers, creators, travelers, and digital professionals — with an eye on quality and depth.

Thanks for reading The Desk — Edition 78! If you found something valuable, feel free to share it or subscribe to keep up with future updates.