Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

I cleared the  GitHub Copilot certification exam today! While preparing for the exam, I stumbled upon several lesser-known GitHub Copilot settings and features. It’s been fun exploring them and I’ve already started putting my knowledge into action . I found the following resources helpful for preparation - MS Learn Modules: Microsoft Learning Path: GitHub Copilot Fundamentals Part 1 of 2  (2 hr 39 min, 6 Modules) Microsoft Learning Path: GitHub Copilot Fundamentals Part 2 of 2   (3 hr 10 min, 6 Modules) Microsoft Learning Path: Accelerate app development by using GitHub Copilot  ( 7 hr 7 min, 5 modules) Practice tests with answers and reasoning Video tutorials: GitHub Copilot Study Guide Series 1: GitHub Copilot plans and features GitHub Copilot Study Guide Series 2: Developer use cases for AI with GitHub Copilot GitHub Copilot Study Guide Series 3: Testing with GitHub Copilot GitHub Copilot Study Guide Series 4: Prompt Engineering 300

This Week I Learned -  * Gemini CLI is an open-source AI agent that brings Gemini directly into your terminal, with MCP support for extensibility and Human in the Loop for oversight.  * Prompting only changes how the model responds. Fine-tuning changes the weights—but it’s costly, brittle, and still static. Neither gives the model new knowledge in real-time. With Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) , you “Retrieve” the most relevant data for the user’s query from your database, use this data to “Augment” the prompt you send to the LLM, and then let it “Generate” a response based on the user query + prompt + retrieved data. RAG doesn’t modify the model; it modifies the input. It retrieves relevant context (docs, tickets, policies) and feeds it into the prompt at inference time. No retraining. Just better answers, grounded in your own data. *  Google Apps Script Web Apps can act as powerful servers for open protocols like Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Agent2Agent (A2A)...

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See more of my AI co-creations Can you believe it? There was a time when controversy was organic, and most people stayed informed without constant outrage.

See more of my AI co-creations The idea for this cartoon was inspired by a line from a New York Times article : "...perseverance is a defect. If you have to struggle, it means you’re not good enough."

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This Week I Learned -  * ScyllaDB Team's Database Benchmarking for Performance Masterclass - Best Practices for Running Your Own Tests *  OpenRefine is an open source tool for working with messy data: cleaning it; transforming it from one format into another; and extending it with web services and external data. * A.I. text generation — which is what chatbots do — used 10 times as much energy compared with simple classification tasks like sorting emails into folders. People looking for facts are better off just using a search engine, since generative A.I. can “hallucinate” false information. Longer answers and those that use a reasoning process generate more emissions. - NYT *  There are three major areas where humans either are, or will soon be, more necessary than ever: trust, integration and taste . - NYT *  Y Combinator AI Startup School Highlights When asked about qualities he looks for in people, Satya Nadella outlined three non-negotiables: Clarity builders...

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Andrej Karpathy's keynote at AI Startup School in San Francisco (39m 31s) |   Slides   Talk Summary Andrej Karpathy asserts that software is undergoing fundamental changes, for the third time in recent years, after largely remaining consistent for 70 years .  He categorises this evolution into three paradigms:  Software 1.0 : Traditional human-written code (e.g., C++, Python). Software 2.0 : Neural networks programmed by their weights, tuned via data and optimisers (e.g., AlexNet image recognizer, Hugging Face as its GitHub equivalent). Software 3.0 : Large Language Models (LLMs) programmed by natural language prompts, effectively making English a programming language. Karpathy illustrates this transition with the Tesla Autopilot, where Software 2.0 (neural networks) progressively replaced Software 1.0 (C++ code) by absorbing functionalities like image stitching across cameras. He posits that LLMs behave like new kinds of computers and exhibit properties akin...

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  See more of my AI co-creations An em dash (—) is the long punctuation mark used to signal a mid-sentence shift, add emphasis, or highlight a detail too important to sideline . It's called an "em" dash because it’s roughly the width of the letter "m". According to Gen Z , the em dash is now a telltale sign that a piece of writing came straight from ChatGPT—some even jokingly call it the “ChatGPT hyphen”! The shorter en dash (–)—about the width of the letter "n"—is most often used to show number ranges (like dates and scores). It's also used to express conflict, direction, or relationships between groups or concepts. Em dashes can also substitute for commas and parentheses . Hyphens (-), the shortest of the three, are used to connect words in compound nouns, verbs, and adjectives.

I recently got a webinar reminder with a pretty neat link to check the timing in my local timezone: 👉 https://time.is/compare/1100_13_Jun_2025_in_Los_Angeles This link shows what 11:00 AM on June 13, 2025 in Los Angeles translates to in your own time zone - automatically! The best part? You can easily tweak the link: Change the time ( 1100 ) Update the date ( 13_Jun_2025 ) Swap out the city ( Los_Angeles ) For example, to check 8:30 PM on July 5 in Seattle, you’d use: 🔗 https://time.is/compare/2030_5_Jul_2025_in_Seattle It’s a simple tool, but super helpful for global meetings, webinars, or virtual events. Bookmark it - you’ll thank yourself later. Fun fact - United States (incl. dependent territories) has 11 time zones!

This Week I Learned -  *  Reddit, “the front page of the internet” has turned 20  -   It is one of the last outposts for that old internet – hobbyist, collaborative, more than a little eccentric . Almost 100 million people actively use the site every day * Google Brain invented the transformer network and OpenAI scaled it up *  Archive.today takes a 'snapshot' of a webpage that will always be online even if the original page disappears. It saves a text and a graphical copy of the page for better accuracy and provides a short and reliable link to an unalterable record of any web page including those from Web 2.0 sites. * Nvidia has unveiled a new generative foundation model that it says enables simulations of Earth’s global climate with an unprecedented level of resolution. The model, branded by Nvidia as cBottle for "Climate in a Bottle," compresses the scale of Earth observation data 3,000 times and transforms it into ultra-high-resolution...

  What’s the difference between generative AI and agentic AI?  Martin Keen explains how generative AI powers content creation and image generation, while agentic AI uses LLMs and chain of thought reasoning for proactive tasks like personal shopping and conference planning. Discover the future of intelligent AI collaboration!

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Andrews Ng , Founder and Executive Chairman of Landing AI, explores the rise of AI, agents, and the growing role of unstructured data. He also discusses how this convergence will shape automation and application building across industries.  Topics - Intro - AI as the New Electricity: 00:00:00 The AI Stack and Opportunities: 00:00:54 Faster ML Model Development: 00:01:48 Gen AI vs Supervised Learning: 00:02:05 Consequences of fast development: 00:03:12 Agentic AI Workflows: 00:06:32 Agentic Reasoning Design Patterns: 00:09:56 Reflection With LLMs: 00:10:31 Tool Use: 00:12:23 Planning/Reasoning: 00:12:53 Multiagent Collaboration: 00:13:31 Demo: Agentic Workflow and Video Q&A App - Visual AI Applications & Demos: 00:15:08 Vision Agent Demo Applications: 00:20:00 AI Stack and Agentic Orchestration: 00:22:30 Four Important AI Trends: 00:23:25 Conclusion and Next Steps: 00:25:56   Insop Song , Principal Machine Learning Researcher at GitHub Next, introduces the concept of ag...

See more of my AI co-creations What my AI angels think about the cartoon - For those who frequently encounter “robot-literalism” jokes, this concept may feel somewhat expected rather than fresh. The "robot takes command literally" or "technology over-complicates simple task" is a well-worn comedic trope. 

The lectures on Data Visualization course of the IIT Madras - B.S. Degree Programme are delivered by Venkatesh Rajamanickam who heads the Information Design Lab Key points & takeaways: "Visualization gives you answers to questions you didn't know you had" -  Ben Schneiderman Good visualizations optimize for the human visual system Besides discovery & presentation, data visualization combined with exploratory data analysis help to identify the optimum path in machine learning solutions In more complex steps of ML solutions such as hyper-parameter tuning, data visualization plays a critical part to group together the variables that should be focused the most. Books referenced: W. E. B. Du Bois's Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America W.I.P

This Week I Learned -  *  Jules  from Google Labs, is an asynchronous, agentic coding assistant that integrates directly with your existing repositories. * With Chain-of-thought reasoning, AI sacrifices speed for depth and better answers by sharing the intermediate reasoning steps with the user before arriving at a final answer. *  How People are Really Using Generative AI Now (PDF, 104 pages, March 2025) * To list your app on Google Play Store, the largest Android app store, costs a one-time fee of $25. To get your app onto Apple’s App Store costs a $99 annual fee. Service fees Both charge 30% on apps and in-app purchases. This drops to 15% after your first year and if you earn less than $1M. *  Indian High Court Judgments dataset - This dataset contains judgements from the Indian High Courts, downloaded from ecourts website. It contains judgments of 25 high courts, along with raw metadata (in json format) and structured metadata (in parquet format)....

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You want to watch a movie, but you're not sure which OTT subscription has it available. Wouldn't it be nice if we had info about ratings & availability readily available? I discovered that sites like The Movie Database (TMDB) ,  MovieOfTheNight or Watchmode have streaming availability APIs to check for availability of movies on popular streaming services in different countries . Having used TMDB in the past, I created a barebones code sample using the TMDB API to verify the streaming availability of movies on popular Indian OTT platforms like Netflix, Prime Video, SonyLIV, Hotstar, and Zee5. 

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