Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

More of my AI co-creations

Paraphrased from the blog article , "How we built Project IDX: A high-level overview": Project IDX is an experimental browser-based development experience that Google has designed to make the end-to-end multi-platform app development workflow faster and more frictionless. IDX was built on Code OSS , the Visual Studio Code product that Microsoft has open-sourced under the standard MIT license. Every IDX workspace comes with a full Debian-based VM and provides full access to the terminal so you can install your favorite tools. VMs automatically hibernate and activate as needed. IDX workspaces are built on top of Google's Cloud Workstations offering which enable provisioning and scaling of VMs. System software such as tools for running services, scheduling jobs (such as Supervisor), and other custom written jobs such as preview server are packaged within custom Docker containers. With IDX, you can get going in a Flutter environment with just one click instead of wasting hou

This Week I Learned -  * Intuit's own Gen AI operating system orchestrates the large language model (LLM) activity across the entire company. GenOS is a full-blown operating system to support the responsible development of GenAI-powered features across its technology platform. *  Good data creates good models.  Evaluating models based on what they contain and what answers they provide is critical.  Anytime we look to implement GenAI features, we have to balance the size of the model with the costs of deploying and querying it. The criteria for an LLM in production revolve around cost, speed, and accuracy. Response times decrease roughly in line with a model’s size (measured by number of parameters). *  Model drift—where an LLM becomes less accurate over time as concepts shift in the real world—will affect the accuracy of results. The sweet spot for updates is doing it in a way that won’t cost too much and limit duplication of efforts from one version to another. Removing or updatin

E Sreedharan, also known as "Metro Man," is said to have installed reverse clocks in the offices and work sites of Konkan Railways and the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) to create a sense of urgency among team members and encourage them to work towards their goals without wasting any time. Inspired by this approach, I decided to create a Reverse Clock Bookmarklet to help me allocate time for my daily tasks and improve my ability to estimate how much time I need to complete them. By visually counting down the minutes and seconds, it would also cultivate a heightened awareness of the precious moments slipping away. To use this bookmarklet, create a new bookmark in your browser and paste the above code as the URL. Then, navigate to any webpage and click the bookmark(let) to activate the countdown.  You'll be prompted to input the number of minutes you want the reverse clock to run for. A reverse clock with a semi-transparent black background and white text will appear

The first three Exercises of the book   Companion Reader To Arden's Telugu Grammar published in 1879 are only about pronunciation.  Arden writes, ". ..the Author's great desire is to impress upon the Student the supreme importance of thoroughly mastering whatever is read... It is not too much to say that the great bulk of foreigners pronounce these letters incorrectly. The reason often is that the Native Munshi takes it for granted that a foreigner cannot master them, and therefore he does not use sufficient care to point out the exact pronunciation, or to explain how that pronunciation can be effected by the vocal organs. " Using the limited printing capabilities available in 1879, the author tries to illustrate how various parts of the mouth have to be used to pronounce certain words & letters.  From the text of the book - The figure 1 marks the place where the upper side of the tip of the tongue strikes against the roof of the mouth, in pronouncing the English

The BioDigital Human is an interactive 3D software platform for visualizing anatomy, disease, and treatment. Often referred to as “Google Maps for the Human Body,” the BioDigital Human platform is a medically accurate, virtual map of the human body—composed of over 8,000 individually selectable anatomical structures, 600 simulated health conditions, and a toolkit to map and visualize data.  Sign up for free to access It is embeddable and available for integration across any device and platform including Windows, iOS, Android with support for both web/HTML5, native mobile applications and VR/AR development.  Having tried the web version on a desktop browser, I'm impressed with how well it has been built using HTML5 features. Also see - MedlinePlus Medical Encyclopedia , a service of the US National Library of Medicine (NLM), the world's largest medical library, which is part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

This Week I Learned -  *  clipboard.js is a lightweight JavaScript library (3KB gzipped) that simplifies copying text to the clipboard without relying on Flash or any bulky frameworks. It's a handy tool for web developers who want to enhance user experience when dealing with clipboard operations.  Part of a full drawing from  Generative AI in a Nutshell - how to survive and thrive in the age of AI * Aya is a new open-source, state-of-the-art, massively multilingual, generative large language model (LLM) and dataset from Cohere. This model built by 3,000+ independent researchers both outperforms existing open-source models and covers more than double the number of languages of existing models – 101 different languages. The model significantly expands coverage to more than 50 previously under-supported languages.  *  O’Reilly has created a GenAI policy for its experts to follow when leveraging GenAI in the creation of their own works. It expects authors and content providers to tr

Unlike StackOverflow's convenient Filter/Search feature on the Tags page , which allows users to quickly jump to tags of their choice,  Microsoft Q&A  currently lacks such functionality.  At the time of writing there were 423 active Tags As someone interested in specific Microsoft Q&A tags to follow, paging through approximately 13 pages of tags seemed cumbersome and time-consuming. To address this issue, I discovered a PowerShell script by MotoX80 that fetches the complete Tag list from Microsoft Q&A. I then adapted this script to generate the necessary HTML code to create hyperlinks. With this single web page, users can easily navigate and explore Microsoft Q&A Tags by Popularity directly - Check it out ! Here is the modified PowerShell code I used to create hyperlinks for the Tags:

This Week I Learned -  * "When pressure rises in companies you often have to prove your worth as a developer. And as lines of code are easy to measure, this is often the hammer used to hit the nail in the coffin of company trust.... lines of code are often seen as productivity or even quality of a developer. And that’s nonsense...Often the best code is the one that didn’t need to be written." -  Christian Heilmann *  The Prime Video team at Amazon has published a rather remarkable case study on their decision to dump their serverless, microservices architecture and replace it with a monolith instead. This move saved them a staggering 90%(!) on operating costs, and simplified the system too.   What makes this story unique is that Amazon was the original poster child for service-oriented architectures .  *  Microsoft's Data Modernization Planner can help you in finding out where your data platform maturity stands, and provide business recommendations to modernize. *  Mic

" AI in a Minute " is a series of short videos by Microsoft that simplifies generative AI concepts into easily understandable language for people from various backgrounds, regardless of their job roles or industries. Paraphrased notes - Generative AI is an innovative tool that's making AI a household name. With generative AI, you have a superpowered partner that's able to generate content on command-images, text, music, even code. The power come from Large language models that train on huge libraries of data. Large language models are deep learning models that understand and generate text that mirrors natural language. They're trained on massive sets of text-based data-novels, peer-reviewed studies, Wikipedia entries, tabloid gossip, it's all there. An LLM reads all this raw data and uses it to establish "parameters". Parameters are the different patterns and characteristics an LLM identifies - things like tone, medium, style, audience, syntax .

The open-core model is a business model for the monetization of commercially produced open-source software. The open-core model primarily involves offering a "core" or feature-limited version of a software product as free and open-source software, while offering "commercial" versions or add-ons as proprietary software . Examples: Kafka, a data streaming service  Cassandra, an open-source database is the core to the company, Datastax Oracle's MySQL database software  Eucalyptus, private cloud software IntelliJ IDEA  GitLab Neo4j  Seldon Core, a machine learning platform Redis  GitLab  Odoo, suite of business management software tools Some critics argue that the core of the product being open source, is marketing  and take issue with COSS organizations that they will happily take, but not give.  xkcd #2347 "Dependency" alt text : "Someday ImageMagick will finally break for good and we'll have a long period of scrambling as we try to reassemble

I recently watched "The Bicentennial Man" that was first released in 1999. The movie is based on a short story of the same name written by Issac Asimov in 1976 . "The Bicentennial Man" is a thought-provoking exploration of what it means to be human.  Set in a future where robots serve humanity, the story follows Andrew, a robot who desires to become more than just a machine. The story makes us ponder about themes like identity and consciousness as Andrew embarks on a journey of self-discovery spanning two centuries. Robin Williams who plays the character of Andrew, captures the subtleties of the android’s journey towards self-awareness masterfully. There are many humorous scenes and it was a delight to hear the jokes Robin Williams cracks as a robot to the amusement of his human friends. The film offers both humor (including that hilarious Buddhist joke - A Buddhist walks up to a hot dog vendor and says, "Make me one with everything") and profound message

See more of my AI-Assisted cartoons

Gideon Slifkin, Global Architecture Lead at Deloitte shares his perspective of Enterprise Architecture through his LinkedIn posts . The recent discussion sparked by his post on ' The Ultimate EA Picture ' makes for interesting reading. EA is broad The Ultimate EA Picture Security impacts all layers at all levels The World of Architecture

This Week I Learned -  *  Next.js is an open-source web development framework created by the private company Vercel providing React-based web applications with server-side rendering and static website generation. *  Preact is a lightweight and fast library that provides the same modern API as React, but with a much smaller footprint (3Kb) and a thinner Virtual DOM abstraction. *  Astro works a lot like a static site generator. If you have ever used Eleventy, Hugo, or Jekyll (or even a server-side web framework like Rails, Laravel, or Django) then you should feel right at home with Astro.  It is a web framework that can be used with any major JavaScript framework, such as React, Preact, Svelte, Vue, Solid, Lit, and AlpineJS. * VS Code Remote Container allows you to use a Docker container as a full-featured development environment *  Many cloud providers, such as AWS and Azure, provide free data ingestion services. However, when it comes to extracting data from their platforms, the as

I find Amazon's AI-driven Reviews Summarization & Sentiment Analysis very helpful. The concise summaries and clear sentiment indicators give me a much better understanding of customer experiences.   Coupled with its star rating system, it aids in purchase decision making. I would like to see similar interaction patterns on other ecommerce sites too.