This Week I Learned - Week #43 2024

This Week I Learned - 

* Claude.ai, Replit.com, Bolt.new, V0.dev, Pythagora.ai and a few other tools write and deploy code just based on a prompt.  

* "We (Thoughtworks) see some antipatterns starting to appear in the hyperactive AI space, including the mistaken notion that humans can fully replace pair programming with AI as the companion, overreliance on coding assistance suggestions, code quality issues with generated code and faster growth rates of codebases. AI tends to solve problems via brute force rather than use abstractions, such as using dozens of stacked conditionals rather than the Strategy design pattern. The code quality issues in particular highlight an area of continued diligence by developers and architects to make sure they don’t drown in "working-but-terrible" code. Thus, team members should double down on good engineering practices — such as unit testing, architectural fitness functions and other proven governance and validation techniques — to make sure that AI is helping your endeavors rather than encrypting your codebase with complexity."

* An LLM prompt injection can happen via invisible instructions in pasted text. A simple text containing invisible instructions can cause ChatGPT to invoke DALL-E to create an image. 

* Startups live or die by their ability to execute at speed. Generative AI makes it possible to quickly prototype AI capabilities. - The Batch, Issue 272

* In a series of deals that started in 2019, Microsoft invested a total of $13 billion in OpenAI, giving the startup access to Microsoft’s processing infrastructure and Microsoft special access to OpenAI’s models (which it integrated into its own applications), a large cut of its revenue, and potential equity. Microsoft built a 10,000-GPU system on Azure for training OpenAI models.

* Under the original agreement, Microsoft would lose access to OpenAI’s technologies if the startup were to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI). This clause was intended to prevent commercial exploitation or abuse of emergent AI capabilities.

* Nvidia and Reliance Industries will partner to build AI infrastructure in India.

* The US has adopted a 'laissez faire' (the policy of leaving things to take their own course, without interfering) approach to AI, while Europe is in favour of having bureaucratic control. The Chinese approach is also on the lines of Europe.

* "System design is inherently about boundaries (what's in, what's out, what spans, what moves between) and it's about trade-offs. It reshapes what is outside just as it shapes what is inside." - Ruth Malan (via Vlad Khononov)

* Rust is the language of choice when replacing older system-level utilities as well as when re-writing part of an ecosystem for improved performance.

* WASM (WebAssembly) is a binary instruction format for a stack-based virtual machine, which sounds esoteric and too low level for most developer interests until people see the implications: the ability to run complex applications within a browser sandbox. WASM can run within existing JavaScript virtual machines, allowing applications that developers could formerly only implement in native frameworks and extensions to be embeddable within browsers. The four major browsers now support WASM 1.0 (Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Edge).

* PayPal, The New York Public Library, Sanity, Perplexity use Next.js

* Alpine Linux is a lightweight Linux distribution that is optimized for size and efficiency. Python 3.9-alpine is significantly smaller than the standard Python 3.9 distribution due to its use of Alpine Linux as the base image. It's important to note that this smaller size might come at the cost of some features or libraries that are not included in the Alpine Linux distribution.

* The Internet Archive website and its services experienced a cyberattack on October 8. Hackers disclosed archive.org email and encrypted passwords to a transparency website, and also sent emails to patrons by exploiting a 3rd party helpdesk system.

* Amazon and Google forged partnerships to build a new generation of small reactors.  In September, Microsoft signed a 20-year power purchase agreement with Constellation Energy, which intends to restart Unit 1 of Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island nuclear plant (which was not damaged in the 1979 partial meltdown) by 2028. The fact that tech giants are investing directly in nuclear power plants indicates the high stakes of competition in AI.

* Nuclear power provides around 18 percent of electricity in the United States and more in France and several other European countries. Its steady generating capacity and zero carbon emissions (after plant construction) make it an attractive way to power AI infrastructure. However, new nuclear plants have been difficult to build in the U.S. since a string of high-profile accidents at Three Mile Island in the U.S. (1979), Chernobyl in Ukraine (1986), and Fukishima in Japan (2011). 

* First-degree burns are those which cause minor damage to the top two layers of skin.

* "Priorities and skills needed for invention and innovation are quite different. Inventors are interested in breakthrough research. They are excited by those breakthroughs and may not always prioritize more mundane product and market development activities.  More often than not, the company or the researcher that produced these breakthroughs, they tend to underestimate, minimize the aspects of adoption and at market usage. Innovation is a new way of doing things, but still problem solving. And that's what makes it different from invention, which may not have a problem to solve as its fundamental goal." - Vish Krishnan, HarvardX LBTechX1, Technology Entrepreneurship: Lab to Market

* Andrew Ng is a member of Amazon’s board of directors.

* In an informal context, "I swear" is often used to express strong emotion, surprise, or emphasis. It's a common way to add intensity to a statement or exclamation.

Here are a few examples of how it might be used:

Surprise: "I swear, I just saw a ghost!"

Emphasis: "I swear, I'm telling you the truth."

Frustration: "I swear, this traffic is driving me crazy!"

* BRICS has now expanded its membership to nine with the addition of the UAE, Iran, Egypt, and Ethiopia. It will account for nearly 30 percent of the global GDP and half the world’s population. 

* Apple’s Mumbai and Delhi stores have 90-100 people at each store. They made around Rs 800 crore in revenue in their first year of operations, making them Apple’s top-performing retail stores globally.

* India’s import of noodles, pasta and other delicacies from South Korea went up eightfold in the past five years,

* An astronomer, a physicist, and a mathematician (it is said) were holidaying in Scotland. Glancing from a train window, they observed a black sheep in the middle of a field. 'How interesting ," observed the astronomer, " all Scottish sheep are black!' To which the  physicist responded, 'No,no! some Scottish sheep are black!' The mathematician gazed heavenward in supplication, and then intoned, 'In Scotland there exists at least one field, containing at least one sheep, at least one side of which is black.'

Even more rigorous than the ordinary mathematician is the mathematician who specialises in the study of mathematical logic. Mathematical logicians began to question ideas which other mathematicians had taken for granted for centuries. - Fermat’s Last Theorem by Simon Singh