This Week I Learned - Week #51 2024

This Week I Learned -  

* Addy Osmani open-source web app lets you upload your image and let AI remove the background instantly. It uses Transformers.js which has enabled a whole class of client-side AI apps to come to the web. This is free for unlimited use (Canva is free for first-time) and does all processing locally and privately (nothing is uploaded to anyone’s servers). All of the processing happens client side. This means outside of just the bandwidth to serve the page itself there’s no cost to the person hosting it.

* AI assistance in Chrome DevTools is now available with Chrome 131

* Instagram recently moved from Python 2 to Python 3. Dropbox also recently upgraded fully to Python 3

* OpenAI whistleblower Suchir Balaji's article on how generative AI products violate copyrighted material.

* AI Tier will replace backends - Satya Nadella

* Azure AI Agent Service is a fully managed service designed to empower developers to securely build, deploy, and scale high-quality, and extensible AI agents without needing to manage the underlying compute and storage resources.

* There is a growing sentiment in the tech industry that while AI may not replace programmers, programmers who don’t use AI will be replaced.

* "If you care about your audience, think through their journey from start to finish. Do not bury them in multiple layers of navigation, and do not send them chasing after information they should have been given upfront. Whether it is an event ticket, a product purchase, or a simple inquiry, the goal is to respect the user’s time and simplify their path.

In short, good UI and UX are not about flaunting technical complexity. They are about empathy—putting yourself in the user’s shoes and ensuring they get where they need to go with minimal effort." - Venkatarangan

* Nordic countries are the highest coffee-consuming nations when measured per capita per year, with consumption in Finland as the world's highest. Brazil is the biggest exporter of coffee.

* "Democracy no longer ends with a bang—in a revolution or military coup — but with a whimper: the slow, steady weakening of critical institutions, such as the judiciary and the press, and the gradual erosion of long-standing political norms." - How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future (2019) by Levitsky, Steven and Ziblatt, Daniel 

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