This Week I Learned - Week #27 2023

This Week I Learned - 

* Visual Blocks for ML is a visual programming framework for rapidly prototyping and experimenting with ML models and pipelines. Using Visual Blocks, you can mix and match premade ML models and pipeline components in a graphical editor. The editor renders your pipeline as an interactive node graph where you can connect components by dragging and dropping nodes. Visual Blocks is mainly written in JavaScript. It leverages TensorFlow.js and TensorFlow Lite for ML capabilities and three.js for graphics rendering. Currently, Visual Blocks is available as a Colab integration. The integration lets you build interactive demos in Colab notebooks using prebuilt components.

* Machine Learning for Web Devs & Creatives (Web ML) - Next gen web apps with TensorFlow.js course on YouTube by Google's Web ML Lead, Jason Mayes,  teaches you everything you need to know about machine learning in JavaScript

* CBL-Mariner is the internally recommended Linux distribution for use with Microsoft cloud services and related products.

* The Oscar Academy Award-winning films 1927-2022 dataset on Kaggle is curated from Wikipedia.

* Intel's Bridge technology allows Android apps to run natively on Windows 11 devices as if they were desktop apps and software. Windows Subsystem for Android utilizes Intel Bridge Technology to enable Arm applications on x86 based processors. 

* Uber broke its original monolithic architecture into many parts to scale with growth. Uber's business runs on a hybrid cloud model, using a mix of cloud providers and multiple active data centers. 

* Vertabelo's web-based Data Modeler is like Google Docs for database modeling. You can create, share, access your database models anytime, anywhere. 

* In February 2020, the Wayback Machine was integrated into the Brave browser. Upon hitting an HTTP 404 error, among other error codes, the Wayback Machine is automatically queried to display a cached version of the page.

* LangChain is a framework for developing applications powered by language models. By prompting an LLM or large language model, it is now possible to develop AI applications much faster than ever before. But an application can require prompting an LLM multiple times and parsing its output, and so there's a lot of glue code that needs to be written. LangChain, created by Harrison Chase makes this development process much easier.

* Learn LangChain from the creator of LangChain, Harrison Chase 

* Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are a type of AI that can generate images from a simple prompt.

* A CartoonGAN model can take an input image (preferably natural images) and cartoonize it in a way such that the resultant image is visually and semantically pleasing.

* Google Colab offers free GPU-usage in a Jupyter notebook

* The inability of artificial intelligence to draw circular pupils gives away whether or not a face comes from a real photograph. AI can’t do circles. Often these are misshapen; not oval or egg-shaped, but incomplete, as if they are asymmetrical or have a notch taken out. In images generated by AI the details related to ear can be indistinct. They should contain a helix (the outer curve that bends in) an anti-helix (that curve that protrudes), a tragus (the knob on the side of your face), an ear-notch and lobe. Also look out for mismatched earrings. 

* Detection technology has been heralded as one way to mitigate the harm from A.I. images. Umm-maybe, Sensity, Hive and Inholo are A.I. Art Detectors that look for unusual patterns in how the pixels are arranged, including in their sharpness and contrast in synthetically generated artwork. They tend to struggle with images that have been altered from their original output or are of low quality. These signals tend to be generated when A.I. programs create images.  Many of the companies behind A.I. detectors acknowledged that their tools were imperfect and warned of a technological arms race: The detectors must often play catch-up to A.I. systems that seem to be improving by the minute. Every time somebody builds a better generator, people build better discriminators, and then people use the better discriminator to build a better generator.  - NY Times

* Machine learning algorithms are complex. To get good at applying a given algorithm you need to study it from multiple perspectives: algorithmic, mathematical and empirical. You need to build up an intuition or how an algorithm behaves on real data. You need to work on lots of problems.

* On July 4th, Americans celebrate the signing of the Declaration of Independence, a statement by the 13 American colonies that they would sever ties with the British Empire, and would rule themselves as the United States of America.

* 21 Types of Revenue (and what they mean) - The CFO Guy

* Entrepreneurship is part and parcel of what has come to be known as the "American Dream". You don’t need pedigree or any fancy "titles", nor do you need to have gone to the best schools. What matters is that you have an idea and you are willing and able to "cross the threshold" and begin your entrepreneurial journey! Immigrants from all over the world (including myself) have some to the U.S. to pursue this dream. It is a path which requires tremendous courage, as there are a multitude of reasons to dissuade yourself from going off on your own — namely financial stability, security for your family, fear of failure or humiliation, as well as concern of the unknown obstacles you will encounter.

* Haruki Murakami is an accomplished novelist, short-story, writer, essayist, translator who took up running at the age of 33. He is an experienced marathon runner and triathlon enthusiast who has competed in twenty-six marathons.

* "For my entire education, from elementary school through college, I was never interested in things that I was forced to study. As a result, although my grades weren’t the kind you have to hide from people, I don’t recall ever being praised for a good performance or a good grade, or being the best in anything. I began to enjoy studying only after I had made it through the educational system and become a so-called “member of society.” If something interested me, and I could study it at my own pace, I was reasonably efficient at acquiring knowledge." - Haruki Murakami

* ROT? They couldn't have thought of a better name? - Yusra Mardini is a Syrian former competition swimmer and refugee of the Syrian civil war. She was a member of the Refugee Olympic Athletes Team (ROT) that competed under the Olympic flag at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. On 27 April 2017, Mardini was appointed a UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador. The Swimmers is a biographical film based on Mardini's life.

* No country has more neighbours than China, with 14 land borders.

* ONDC, the open network is billed to be the UPI of e-commerce - Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), an initiative of the Department of Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT), Ministry of Commerce, has gone Beta live in five additional cities of Mumbai, Delhi NCR (including Noida, Gurgaon and Faridabad), Chennai, Hyderabad and Kolkata. This was done post the seller apps density had scaled up in these cities. Bengaluru and Meerut were chosen for the Beta live in September 2022 and December 2022. 

* Google has said that it will make its core infrastructure APIs (application programming interfaces) available to ONDC participants. It will also provide retail search and generative artificial intelligence to developers on the network to enhance buyer and seller experiences. Additionally, Google will grant $25,000 in cloud credits to startups on ONDC. The tech giant is also enabling an integration of ONDC and Google Maps, which will enable better serviceability of orders via address descriptors—an India-first experimental feature available in 25 Indian cities. This integration aims to make it easier to find and communicate addresses using landmarks and area names. - MoneyControl

* Normally John Doe orders are issued against the males, while such orders issued against the females are termed as Jane Doe orders. In India, John Doe orders are terms as Ashok Kumar Orders. In 2018, PepsiCo India has secured an interim 'John Doe' or 'Ashok Kumar' order from the Delhi High Court, which made social media platforms responsible for deleting any post maligning the company's product Kurkure. These orders are significant in modern days, where technology and the large influence of social media groups make identification quite hard.