This Week I Learned - Week #47 2023

This Week I Learned - 

* The Applied Skills assessment lab gives you the opportunity to demonstrate your skills by completing tasks in the associated technology, such as Azure, Microsoft 365, or Power Platform.  You will perform tasks in a virtual environment. Most Microsoft Applied Skills assessment labs for a given scenario typically contain 12-16 tasks; however, the number can vary depending on the skill domain being assessed. You will have 2 hours to complete the lab with the ability to request an additional hour if needed as you progress through the lab. For most Applied Skills credentials, you’ll be informed of your results within minutes, but it can take up to 24 hours for results to appear in your Learn profile’s Credentials tab. 

* Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) UltraClusters can help you scale to thousands of GPUs or purpose-built ML accelerators, such as AWS Trainium, to get on-demand access to a supercomputer. They democratize access to supercomputing-class performance for machine learning (ML), generative AI, and high performance computing (HPC) developers through a simple pay-as-you-go usage model without any setup or maintenance costs. Amazon EC2 P5 instances, Amazon EC2 P4d instances, and Amazon EC2 Trn1 instances are all deployed in Amazon EC2 UltraClusters.

* The post-mortem process after an outage is known as a “COE” (Correction of Errors) at Amazon and uses the “5 whys methodology” developed originally at Toyota - The Pragmatic Engineer

* Microsoft Copilot for Azure Cosmos DB can convert a natural  language instruction into a query

* Amazon.com ran on top of a monolithic C binary named “Obidos,” named after the narrowest, swiftest section of the Amazon river, in Brazil. Obidos shouldered the entire load of a business which became an online retail behemoth. 

* In 2012, Conor Neill summarized Amazon's unique approach to running meetings by driving the meeting around the 6-page narrative. The down side to the 6-pager is that writing a good six-page evidence-based narrative is hard work. Amazon has fundamentally innovated in how to scale the process of bringing groups of people deeply up to speed in new spaces and making critical decisions based on that insight quickly.  Speed and scale are weapons and Amazon has already told everyone its secret...the six-pager - Brad Porter

* Since their introduction in 2017, transformers have quickly become the dominant architecture for achieving state-of-the-art results on a variety of natural language processing tasks. Transformers have been used to write realistic news stories, improve Google Search queries, and even create chatbots that tell corny jokes. In the guide Natural Language Processing with Transformers (May 2022), authors Lewis Tunstall, Leandro von Werra, and Thomas Wolf use a hands-on approach to teach you how transformers work and how to integrate them in your applications.

* Duet AI is much wider in scope than Github Copilot. It provides Code Assistance in VS Code and other IDEs. However, it also helps out with Log Analysis, BigQuery Studio, Looker, Security Postures and therefore it spans across Google Cloud services and personas while retaining the best of Google Cloud Security and Privacy.  DuetAI for Google Cloud understand Terraform HCL syntax. For instance, DuetAI as an AI Assistant is able to generate a Terraform tf file to create a GKE cluster on GCP, as well as explain what each portion of the code does.

* The failure of OpenAI’s unusual for-profit/nonprofit corporate structure is glaring. Investors and donors will be more hesitant to fund organizations with novel structures. - The Batch

* To activate a spotlight that focuses on the cursor's position, press the Ctrl key twice. Click the mouse or press any keyboard key to dismiss it. This features comes through Find My Mouse tool in PowerToys.

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* Over the last 20 years, scientists have uncovered evidence that immersive sounds like white, brown and pink noise may help the brain to focus, sleep or relax — especially for people with A.D.H.D. The human ear only detects sounds within a certain range of frequencies — those that stimulate the cochlea, a spiral-shaped cavity swirling in our inner ears. When we play brown noise, we hear every frequency that the ear is able to detect at once, said Dr. Berlau. Listening to all of these frequencies at once creates an immersive, even smothering, experience that some people may find pleasant. Researchers have identified a spectrum of sounds that have been named after colors; each is defined by the relative intensity of different frequencies of sound. (The origins of each color’s name aren’t definitively known.) For people with standard hearing function, brown noise’s better-known and better-studied cousin, white noise, has a more hissing sound than brown noise. Pink noise is a softer version of white noise, playing lower frequencies a bit louder. Violet noise plays higher frequency sounds louder than brown noise and also makes a hissing sound. Gray noise, which is calibrated so your ears hear all frequencies at the same volume, sounds similar to white noise, but is smoother. White, brown and pink noise are the most commonly known and studied, because scientists have the clearest consensus on how to replicate them.  Brown noise’s name comes from Robert Brown, a Scottish botanist, who discovered “Brownian motion” — the way pollen grains suspended in water “dance” under a microscope. Brown noise, experts say, mimics that movement, with sound signals that change at random, from one moment to the next, producing static. - NY Times

There is not robust research to suggest that brown noise alleviates stress...but...there is the power of the placebo effect, especially as people seek out brown noise already convinced that the sound can soothe them.

* White noise machines and other white noise sources are sold as privacy enhancers and sleep aids (see music and sleep) and to mask tinnitus. White noise is a common synthetic noise source used for sound masking by a tinnitus masker. Alternatively, the use of an FM radio tuned to unused frequencies ("static") is a simpler and more cost-effective source of white noise. 

* Listening to noise above 70 decibels over a long period of time can damage your hearing.

* Water hyacinth, often seen as a nuisance, has become a source of empowerment for rural artisans, particularly women, in India. Through self-help groups (SHGs), these women have transformed the water hyacinth into various products, such as bags and lamps - Times of India

* Cetaceans is just a fancy word for whales, dolphins and porpoises. Dolphins are famous for self-awareness and empathy and for performing tricks and even solving complex problems - A Day Out with Delphie [PDF]

* Insurers attach high probability of occurrence of one of the critical illnesses with diabetic patients.

* Under the provisions of FEMA non-resident Indians and persons of Indian Origin (POI) are allowed to buy residential properties in India without having to take any specific permissions from the Reserve Bank of India.

* There are almost 1,900 companies listed on the NSE. The NIFTY LargeMidcap 250 index comprises the 250 largest companies by market capitalisation. 

* Agatha Christie (née Miller; 1890 – 1976) was an English writer known for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections, particularly those revolving around fictional detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. She also wrote the world's longest-running play, the murder mystery The Mousetrap, which has been performed in the West End since 1952. She was made a Dame (DBE) by Queen Elizabeth II for her contributions to literature. Guinness World Records lists Christie as the best-selling fiction writer of all time, her novels having sold more than two billion copies. According to UNESCO's Index Translationum, she remains the most-translated individual author. During both World Wars, she served in hospital dispensaries, acquiring a thorough knowledge of the poisons that featured in many of her novels, short stories, and plays. 

Christie as a nurse in the Voluntary Aid Detachment of the British Red Cross. She is pictured in 1915

* In 1817, James Parkinson (1755–1824) defined a form of dementia so precisely that we still diagnose Parkinson's Disease today by recognizing the symptoms he identified.

* Changpeng Zhao, commonly known as CZ, is a Chinese-born Canadian businessman, investor, and software engineer. Zhao is the co-founder and former CEO of Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume as of July 2022.  Born in China in 1977, Zhao acquired a Canadian visa in 1989. In 2005, he moved back to China, eventually owning an apartment in Shanghai. Zhao first heard of Bitcoin in 2013 when playing poker. In 2015, he sold his Shanghai apartment and used the funds to purchase Bitcoin. Zhao stayed in China until the Chinese government banned crypto exchanges in late 2017. In 2018, his estimated net worth of $1.1-2 billion & it rose to $13.1 billion by December 2022. In 2019, Zhao launched Binance's U.S. affiliate, Binance.US. In 2021, Zhao told Bloomberg Markets that nearly 100% of his liquid net worth was in the form of cryptocurrency. In 2022, Zhao invested $500 million through Binance to finance the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk. In June 2023, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said it was suing Zhao and Binance on 13 charges for alleged violations of US securities rules. In November 2023, Zhao agreed to resign from Binance and pay a $50 million fine as part of a guilty plea in US federal charges. Binance also agreed to plead guilty, and to pay $4.3 billion in fines. 

* Mozart loved animals. He owned dogs (Bimberl, Nannerl), a pet grasshopper, and birds! For about three years, the composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart kept a pet starling. The starling is remembered for the anecdote of how Mozart came to purchase it, for the funeral commemorations Mozart provided for it, and as an example of the composer's affection in general for birds. Starlings are reviled by even the most compassionate conservationists. A nonnative, invasive species, they invade sensitive habitats, outcompete local birds for nest sites and food, and decimate crops. 

* "I am not a complete libertarian, I'm not an anarchist... I don't believe human civilization is advanced enough to live in a world with no rules." - Changpeng Zhao 

* "… experiment patiently, accept failures, plant seeds, protect saplings, and double down when you see customer delight. A customer-obsessed culture best creates the conditions where all of that can happen." — Jeff Bezos

* "A lot of very smart people work in strange ways / with a lot of quirks (e.g. contemplating for hours and appearing to do nothing, while then suddenly having 100x output burst). This usually makes them not a great fit for traditional corporate world, where you often have to fake being busy & work around fixed structures." - Laura Wendel

* "Heroes are ordinary people who make themselves extraordinary" - Gerard Way