This Week I Learned - Week #10 2024

This Week I Learned - 

* MERN stack is a popular JavaScript framework used for building web applications. It is an acronym for MongoDB, Express.js, React, and Node.js.

* Postman Student Programs are programs designed to promote API literacy amongst students and educators.

* While in technical parlance the “Cloud” might refer to the pooling of computing resources over a network, in popular culture, “Cloud” has come to signify and encompass the full gamut of infrastructures that make online activity possible, everything from Instagram to Hulu to Google Drive. The Cloud now has a greater carbon footprint than the airline industry. A single data center can consume the equivalent electricity of 50,000 homes. - Steven Gonzalez Monserrate, anthropologist and PhD candidate at MIT

* Copilot GPTs let you customize the behavior of Microsoft Copilot on a topic that is of particular interest to you.  

* Soon, Copilot Pro users will also be able to create their own Copilot GPTs using Copilot GPT Builder. 

* LangChain.js just passed 1 million monthly downloads and 10,000 GitHub stars

* While RAG frameworks and vector databases are all the rage, function calling capabilities are where LLMs will really shine in the future. RAG is ideal for retrieving unstructured data, which is typically stored and indexed through batch processing. However, RAG fails to provide near-real-time data such as stock prices, order tracking, and flight information. For real-time, streaming data access, vector databases have little role to play. Function calling allows the LLM to retrieve the context in real time by invoking the appropriate endpoint. The output from a chain of functions forms the most valuable and concise context for the LLM to deliver real-time results. RAG + function calling are a lethal combination to deliver near-real-time and factually correct responses to users.  - Janakiram MSV

* On working in A.I. - "I’m excited about value pluralism. Another way to put it is that there’s no universal truth." - Yejin Choi, researcher who works on developing common sense and ethical reasoning in A.I.

* Opinion about Kutrim - They've not trained a foundation model — which is expensive, but likely fine-tuned a Llama or similar model

* Simon Willison is the creator of Datasette, an open source tool for exploring and publishing data. He currently works full-time building open source tools for data journalism, built around Datasette and SQLite. He is a co-creator of the Django Web Framework.  His thumb rule for presenting: a minimum of ten hours of preparation for every one hour spent on stage.  He publishes his talks with a text and image version of the talk for the sake of those who cannot watch a long video.

* Dogsheep is a collection of tools for personal analytics.

* Seeking the Productive Life: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure - Stephen Wolfram

* Adam Karpiak is the creator of Jobseeking is Hard, a website that aims to help  job seekers in navigating the difficult job market.

* Flipkart Israel was established from the acquisition of Upstream Commerce, a leading provider of ML/AI-based competitive intelligence and price optimization solutions for retail. Upstream Commerce’s predictive analytics and ML/AI-based solutions were used by customers such as JCPenney, HP, Microsoft, Nestle, GoPro, Saks 5th Avenue and many others.

* Body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) causes people to feel worried that parts of their body are flawed in some way. It's related to obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). People with this mental health condition spend hours concerned that something is wrong with their looks.

* Indulgence in idle daydreaming is called woolgathering. "Idea sessions can easily dissolve into wandering and woolgathering."

* The Gates Foundation funds more work in India than in any other country (other than the United States)

* Census 2011 data has revealed that Jains in India have the highest percentage of members in the above-70 age group, among major religious communities. - ToI

* The tabla consists of two small drums of slightly different sizes and shapes. Each drum is made of hollowed-out wood, clay or metal. The smaller drum (dayan/tabla) is used for creating treble and tonal sounds, while the primary function of the larger drum (baya/dagga) is for producing bass. 

* Muslim armies had hundreds of soldiers on camels and horses carrying paired drums as they invaded the Indian subcontinent. They would beat these drums to scare the residents, the non-Muslim armies, their elephants and chariots, that they intended to attack. The large paired drums were called naqqara (noise, chaos makers).