Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned - *  Val Town is a social platform for writing and deploying JavaScript directly from your browser. You can create APIs and schedule functions, email yourself, and persist data. It offers a free tier * The Brave Browser is built on the open-source Chromium Web core and its own client code is released under the Mozilla Public License 2.0. *  In the last few weeks, AI coding really took off . Cursor, Cody, Replit Agents are FAR better than GitHub Copilot. *  Enterprise use cases that Pixtral 12B, the first-ever multimodal Mistral model can handle : 1. Image captioning 2. Image-to-Text Transcription (OCR) including Transcription of scientific content 3. Data Extraction and Processing 4. Analysis of complex images 5. Personal Assistants (visual assistance) 6. Information Extraction 7. Reasoning over input images * Users everywhere can view archived versions of webpages directly through Google Search, with a simple link to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. To acce

Imagine a country with a population equivalent to the entire United States in 2024. That was India in 1947, with approximately 344.9 million people. Fast-forward to today, and India's population has ballooned to over 1.4 billion, surpassing China's in 2023. China introduced its one-child policy in September 1980. The policy led to an aging population and a skewed sex ratio (due to preference for male children), prompting China to shift to a two-child policy in 2016 and a three-child policy in 2021. Source -  Our World In Data While China's population was substantially greater than India's in 1980, India has experienced a remarkable population boom in the last decade. In a stunning demographic reversal, India has now surpassed China as the world's most populous nation. from a  Flourish  animated bar chart The urban population of India is expected to grow at a faster rate than other major countries, with a projected annual growth rate of 2.5%, compared to 1.5% in Chin

Zooniverse is the world’s largest and most popular platform for crowd-sourced scientific research. It brings together research organizations and volunteers to drive impactful results. Many Zooniverse projects have led to published research papers and have contributed open-source datasets for broader use. The ClimateViz project , launched by the University of Oxford's Engineering Science Department on Zooniverse, aims to combat climate misinformation by translating complex climate science graphics into clear textual interpretations.  The project's goal is to extract information from climate graphics, transforming them into detailed descriptions to support scientific communication and foster informed public dialogue.  By involving participants, ClimateViz builds a robust dataset that enhances public knowledge and aids in developing an automated fact-checking system.  This initiative empowers the public to understand climate science, combats misinformation, and contributes to a

Highlights of Episode #27 - Chartjunk of Bill Shander's Data Visualization, Data Storytelling, and Information Design - Lesson and Listen Series : Edward Tufte, a prominent figure in data visualization, popularized the field for a business audience and coined terms like data-ink ratio, small multiples, and sparklines. He coined the term chartjunk to refer to unnecessary embellishments in charts that distract from the data. Tufte's data-ink ratio concept promoted minimalism in data visualization, which became a widely accepted best practice. There is a school of thought that believes reducing distraction boosts visual impact. Tufte identified three types of Chartjunk: unintentional optical art, excessive gridlines, and overly stylized designs that obscure data rather than enhance it. Nigel Holmes, a celebrated graphic designer, was criticized by Tufte for his work at Time Magazine, which featured embellishments. A 2010 study found that chart junk doesn't harm the integrity

In Episode #33 - Data Visualization Community of  Data Visualization, Data Storytelling, and Information Design - Lesson and Listen Series , Bill Shander highlights the importance of community in learning data visualization, acknowledging that while they didn't have formal training, they learned from the broader data visualization community. - Bill recommends various resources for data visualization, including: Books: There are many and Bill has shared a list of books that he has found useful and inspiring : Naked Statistics by Charles Wheelan, 2014, 304 pages Factfulness by Hans Rosling, Anna Rosling, and Ola Rosling, 2018, 352 pages Now You See It by Stephen Few, 2021, 301 pages The Functional Art by Alberto Cairo, 2012, 384 pages Storytelling with Data by Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic, 2015, 288 pages Information Visualization: Perception for Design by Colin Ware, 2020, 560 pages Good Charts: The HBR Guide to Making Smarter, More Persuasive Data Visualizations by Scott Berinato

Harsh Dattani's ~60-minute walkthrough of Google AI Studio during the workshop " Build AI Apps using Google AI Studio & Gemini AI " provides all the essentials you need to get started. Topics covered: Google AI Studio -browser-based IDE for prototyping with generative models Gemini AI - lets you access the latest generative models from Google API key - prerequisite for building apps with Gemini AI Prompt engineering Prompt Gallery  - examples of what's possible with Gemini models Fine tuning  - provides a mechanism for curating output when you have a small dataset of input/output examples System Instructions - for developers to manage prompts  idx.dev - cloud-based IDE for building Web, Android apps Focus of the workshop is on the inner loop of software development Google AI Studio provides several interfaces for prompts that are designed for different use cases Google AI Studio is a good starting point for beginners and small-scale projects, while Vertex AI St

* "AI is comparable in scale to the Industrial Revolution or electricity, or even the wheel". - Geoffrey Hinton, Godfather of Deep Learning * "Treat AI assistants as a slightly-drunk knowledgeable friend" - Richard Seroter * "No matter how valuable your skills are in the market today, they may or may not be highly valued by the market over the course of your lifetime. With artificial intelligence (AI) threatening to devalue entire categories of human work, we need to be more purposeful in recognizing a key distinction: the market value of a set of skills is not the same as its human value.  ...the US has become a service economy.  Many people still don’t recognize caregiving, for example — whether for the very young or very old — as a particularly skilled profession. This is mistaken. Anyone who has ever had a teacher who changed the course of their life simply by listening knows that some people develop skills that are extremely valuable and hard to acquire. H

This Week I Learned -  *  Decision tree for Azure Compute Selection in 2018 & 2024 [Image Credit: Microsoft] *  I think EA (and in fact all computing since the very beginning of computing) has always been about “Digital Transformation”.  -  Gideon Slifkin *  How many EAs does it take to change a light bulb ?  None, that's implementation. "EA: We herd the cats to develop the plans."  *  AI is the coming together of two forces that have become more powerful over the last few decades. The first is increasing (and cheaper) computing power, often coming into smaller and smaller packages; our phones are now computationally more powerful than the very first personal computers. The second is the cumulation of data, both quantitative and qualitative, especially with social media accelerating personal data sharing. *  The threat to your job or profession, from AI, will be greater if your job is mostly mechanical, rule-based and objective, and less if it is intuitive, princip

Learn AI-Assisted Python Programming: With GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT  by Leo Porter and Daniel Zingaro is one of the best programming books I’ve read. Written by experienced educators, the book stands out for its unique structure and presentation, effectively guiding readers on how to learn programming with the help of AI assistants like GitHub Copilot. This groundbreaking book sets a new standard for tech books, showing how programming skills can be taught while leveraging AI tools.  I had the privilege of participating in the beta review of this book by Manning in 2023, and I’m thrilled to have now read the complete version and put it to use. As a web developer with experience in JavaScript and C#, I appreciated the book's fresh approach to leveraging an AI Assistant and recognizing the advantages of Generative AI for coding. The authors of the book state at the beginning that no prior programming experience is needed, and basic computer literacy is sufficient for readers to ge