This Week I Learned - Week #44 2023

This Week I Learned - 

* Project IDX is Google's new browser-based code environment. It has AI assistance for code-generation, code-completion, and explaining code built-in. It also supports modern JavaScript frameworks. IDX is based on VSCode

* Kirupa Chinnathambi calls HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, the three musketeers.

* The minor irritations with REST APIs and their shortcomings became nagging problems. When a typical app deals with hundreds of requests with each request overfetching data, it becomes difficult to ensure our apps have great performance. To help address the performance gaps with REST API calls, Facebook created GraphQL

* Visual prompt injection is a technique to manipulate multi-modal language models. By blending visual prompts with user inputs, the attacker can guide the model without directly altering its text input. The manipulation happens in images 

* LangChain Templates are the easiest and fastest way to build a production-ready LLM application. These templates serve as a set of reference architectures for a wide variety of popular LLM use cases. They are all in a standard format which make it easy to deploy them with LangServe.

* The Theory and Practice of Enterprise AI (2nd edition, 650 pages, Publication date June 1, 2023) by Ilya Katsov provides a comprehensive guide to how marketing, supply chain, and production operations can be improved using advancements in AI. The soft copy is free to download.

* AI is the next technological revolution for business, building on the cloud, the internet, PCs and transistors - AI Use Cases for Business Leaders

* Adobe Firefly is a diffusion model, which is designed to create images from text prompts. Many AI-powered image generators offer a single function, but Firefly offers a range of capabilities including text effects and the ability to add and remove elements from an image. Adobe Firefly trains on Adobe Stock imagery in accordance with the Stock Contributor Licence agreement, openly licensed content and public domain content with an expired copyright. This means that Firefly is designed to be safe for commercial use and Firefly outputs are now available to be used for commercial purposes. Adobe Firefly Image 2 is the next version of the image generation model within the Firefly family of models. Sensei Gen AI is Adobe’s new generative AI service that is being integrated natively in Adobe Experience Cloud. Firefly is a separate family of creative generative AI models.

* Cloud native technologies empower organizations to build and run scalable applications in public, private, and hybrid clouds. Features such as containers, service meshes, microservices, immutable infrastructure, and declarative application programming interfaces (APIs) best illustrate this approach. Using the CNCF Trail Map, enterprises can adopt cloud native technologies incrementally. Cloud native apps are often delivered via a DevOps pipeline that includes continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) toolchains. CI/CD pipelines are important for automating the building, testing, and deployment of cloud native applications.

* Device42 supports discovering Kubernetes in a standalone deployment, AWS (EKS), Google (GKE), or Azure(AKS).  Container systems represents a powerful leap forward in computing simplicity for developers but can be complicated for administrators and IT operations to support.  Providing an inventory of all the container hosts, runtimes, and containers can help simplify this effort.  Device42 container discovery for Kubernetes will also provide logical and physical views of your Kubernetes clusters.  This can be a great way to make sense of the relationships between the pools and pods in your Kubernetes environments.

* The iPhone SE is a series of lower-cost smartphones from Apple. The first-generation iPhone SE (also known as iPhone SE 1 or iPhone SE 2016; SE is an initialism of Special Edition) was a part of the 9th generation of the iPhone alongside the higher-end iPhone 6S and 6S Plus. The iPhone SE shares the same physical design and dimensions as the iPhone 5S, but has similar internal hardware to the iPhone 6S. The iPhone SE is the last iPhone using dual-core CPU,  16 GB of internal storage and a standard 3.5 mm stereo headphone jack. Along with iPhone 6S and 6S Plus, iPhone SE is the oldest iPhone to support iOS 13, iOS 14, and iOS 15.

* Machismo is the quality of being macho. Machismo meant being willing to lie without compunction, to be suspicious, envious, jealous, malicious, vindictive, brutal and finally, to be willing to fight and kill without hesitation to protect one's manly image. Machismo meant that a man could not let anything detract from his image of himself as a man's man, regardless of the suffering it brought on himself and the women around him. The word macho has a long history in both Spain and Portugal as well as in Spanish and Portuguese languages. It was originally associated with the ideal societal role men were expected to play in their communities. Machismo is associated with a man's responsibility to provide for, protect, and defend his family.

* When inflammation happens, chemicals from your body's white blood cells enter your blood or tissues to protect your body from invaders. This raises the blood flow to the area of injury or infection. It can cause redness and warmth. Some of the chemicals cause fluid to leak into your tissues, resulting in swelling. This protective process may trigger nerves and cause pain. Higher numbers of white blood cells and the things they make inside your joints cause irritation, swelling of the joint lining, and loss of cartilage (cushions at the end of bones) over time. 

* Inflammation is a process by which your body's white blood cells and the things they make protect you from infection from outside invaders, such as bacteria and viruses. But in some diseases, like arthritis, your body's defense system -- your immune system -- triggers inflammation when there are no invaders to fight off. In these autoimmune diseases, your immune system acts as if regular tissues are infected or somehow unusual, causing damage. - WebMD

* Availability bias is a cognitive bias that causes us to rely on immediate examples that come to mind when evaluating the importance or probability of something. One example is how gory news headlines (easy to visualize and remember) lead to us overestimating how dangerous the world is. Availability bias is a symptom of imperfect human memory: the easier it is to recall examples of something, the greater we perceive its importance or probability to be. This puts us a fast track to flawed decisions and judgments.

* The streaming series 'Kaala' shows the workings of the parallel economy of black money as white money is turned to black through the process of reverse hawala.

* Flexi Cap funds can invest 100% in large-caps, mid-caps, or small-caps, depending on the market's mood. However, surprisingly, they tend to stick with the top 100 companies. - ET Money

* Greater Hyderabad has a total of 77.4 lakh registered vehicles. This includes 70 lakh personal vehicles (56.9 lakh two-wheelers and 14.1 lakh four-wheelers), 1.07 lakh autorickshaws, 3.07 lakh goods carriages, and over 90,000 cabs. Greater Hyderabad ranks fifth among major Indian cities. For comparison, Bengaluru has 1.1 crore vehicles, Delhi has 79 lakh vehicles, and Chennai had over 60 lakh vehicles as of 2021.

* Junk Food's $30 Billion Opening Is India's Next Health Crisis - Since the country liberalized three decades ago, leading to swift economic development and urbanization, the adult obesity rate has more than tripled. Among children, the annual rise is the steepest in the world, behind Vietnam and Namibia. Packaging rules in India are lax compared to other parts of the world. In 2011, the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India was created to govern industry standards...But many feel change is too slow and that food conglomerates have loud voices when it comes to shaping public policy. Unilever Plc, which makes mayonnaise, ice cream and Horlicks malted milk drinks, expects the South Asian nation to become the London-based company’s largest source of revenue within a decade. These days, 60% of their business comes from emerging markets. - Bloomberg