This Week I Learned - Week #3 2024

This Week I Learned - 

* CodePen is a popular online platform where developers can easily create and share HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code snippets, known as 'Pens.' It's a social space for front-end designers and developers, offering features like embedding pens on other websites, creating Collections to organize related pens, and utilizing a powerful in-browser IDE called Projects, which includes automatic preprocessing, drag-and-drop uploading, live previews, and website deployment.

* As DevTools is popular with hackers who may deviously ask unsuspecting users to make changes pertaining to web pages within DevTools, the Edge browser now  shows this warning and asks for & verification -

* Surya is a multilingual document OCR toolkit

* Ozonetel, a Hyderabad-based telephony company, involved with the Swecha Movement, took this as a challenge and developed a 7 billion parameter Telugu small language model (SLM) called ‘AI Chandamama Kathalu’. The team at Ozonetel tried building the model by fine-tuning models like Meta’s Llama and Mistral. However, creating a model on top of other open-source models posed challenges for the team, given the time constraint to release the model in January. The team also tried fine-tuning Google’s MT-5 open source model, however, they finally settled with building the model similar to GPT-2 from scratch. Training the model on a cluster of NVIDIA’s A100 GPUs took nearly a week. Interestingly, the estimated GPU cost involved in training the Telugu SLM was around $1000. - Analytics India Magazine 

* Indic LLMs - Tech Mahindra’s Project Indus, Ola’s Krutrim, and Sarvam AI

* Stable Diffusion now runs client side in the Web browser in under 1 second. Stable Diffusion 100% in the browser with running at < 1s per image

* Playwright is an open source, end-to-end testing framework from Microsoft.

* A cryptocurrency airdrop is a marketing strategy executed mainly by blockchain-based start-ups, involving distributing tokens to wallets. 

* AirDrop is a proprietary wireless ad hoc service in Apple Inc.'s iOS, macOS, and visionOS operating systems which can transfer files among supported Macintosh computers and iOS devices by means of close-range wireless communication. 

* Breath analysis is a relatively recent field of research with much promise in scientific and clinical studies. When a person contracts an infectious or metabolic disease, their odor fingerprints change due to the production of new VOCs or a variation in the ratio of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that are normally produced. Breath in the case of some prominent diseases smells differently, for example, the ‘fruity smell’ of acetone in diabetes, “musty and fishy smell” in advanced hepatic disease, ‘urine-like smell’ in severe kidney disease and “putrid smell” in lung abscess. The concept of an E-nose as an intelligent system containing an array of sensors was first reported in 1982, while the term ‘electronic nose’ was first used in 1987. Patients with typhoid fever, caused by an infection of the intestinal tract with Salmonella typhi, have a musty or baked-bread body odor while odor resembling butcher’s shop is emanated by patients with yellow fever, a viral infection caused by female mosquitoes. Patients with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder had significantly higher levels of ethane and butane in their breath.  

* Streisand effect refers to the phenomenon in which an attempt to censor, hide, or otherwise draw attention away from something only serves to attract more attention to it.

* ...the thirst for learning begets knowledge, which I liken to collecting valuable items in a backpack. Over time, this backpack has journeyed far and wide. - Juan Ma Perals

* 'India is more of a continent than country' - Manolo Arroyo, CocaCola’s Global Marketing Chief