This Week I Learned - Week #37 2024

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 access this new feature, conduct a search on Google as usual. Next to each search result, you’ll find three dots—clicking on these will bring up the “About this Result” panel. Within this panel, select “More About This Page” to reveal a link to the Wayback Machine page for that website. Through this direct link, you’ll be able to view previous versions of a webpage via the Wayback Machine, offering a snapshot of how it appeared at different points in time.  The link to archived webpages will not be available in instances where the rights holder has opted out of having their site archived or if the webpage violates content policies. - Archive.org

* US Regulators contend that Google built, acquired and maintains a monopoly over the technology that matches online publishers to advertisers. Dominance over the software on both the buy side and the sell side of the transaction enables Google to keep as much as 36 cents on the dollar when it brokers sales between publishers and advertisers. They allege that Google also controls the ad exchange market, which matches the buy side to the sell side.

The 10 greatest acquisitions of all time

* About 4.4 million crypto users were impacted by the hacking of WazirX, India’s largest crypto exchange, in July, when the exchange lost almost 45 percent of over $570 million in crypto assets it held at the time. 

* Herniated disks also are called ruptured disks or slipped disks. The whole disk does not rupture or slip. Only the small area of the crack is affected. Compared with a bulging disk, a herniated disk is more likely to cause pain as they generally do not protrude far enough to press on a nerve. However, a bulging disc often progresses into full-blown herniated disc over time.

* Muscular dystrophy is a group of diseases that cause progressive weakness and  loss of muscle mass. In muscular dystrophy, abnormal genes (mutations) interfere with the production of proteins needed to form healthy muscle. 

* Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (DMD) is a progressive muscle wasting, degenerative genetic disease affecting 1 in 5000 children, mostly males. It is characterized by weakness of the skeletal, lung and heart muscles.

* The retirement age for men in China, previously 60, will increase in increments of several months before finally reaching 63 by 2040. The retirement age for women in white-collar jobs, previously 55, will rise to 58. Women in blue-collar jobs, who previously could retire at 50, will have to work until 55.

* The Luna moth of North America scatters bat sonar. Bats hunt using sonar, making high-pitched squeaks, following the rebounding echoes of beating wings — but the luna’s tails produce echoes, confusing bats.

* Two-time world heavyweight champion and an Olympic gold medalist, George Foreman named all five of his sons (George) after himself

* Amitabh Pandey led the digitization of IRCTC and catalyzed its foray into online commerce. In his book When It Clicks — Field Notes From India’s e-Commerce Revolution, he reminisces on a momentous journey that laid the foundations for the much-hyped e-commerce boom of the 21st century that was to follow. 

* India had over 1,700 GCCs in FY24, with their export revenue rising more than 40 percent from the previous year to $65 billion. - MoneyControl

* The median age of first-time homebuyers in Benguluru has dropped from 42 to 34 years in just three years. - MoneyControl

* 40% of air pollution in the country is due to the transport sector. - Nitin Gadkari, Road & Transport Minister 

* India is developing its own footwear sizing system, led by scientists at CSIR-CLRI in Chennai, to better suit Indian feet - Science Reporter

* It is more important to know what not to do than to know what to do - Rajiv Burman

* "Integrity has no need of rules" - Albert Camus