Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned -  * "Vibe coding" is about fully giving in to the creative flow with an AI (high-level prompting), essentially forgetting the code exists. It involves accepting AI suggestions without deep review and focusing on rapid, iterative experimentation, making it ideal for prototypes, MVPs, learning, and what Karpathy calls "throwaway weekend projects." This approach is a powerful way for developers to build intuition and for beginners to flatten the steep learning curve of programming. It prioritizes speed and exploration over the correctness and maintainability required for professional applications. With "AI-assisted engineering," AI acts as a powerful collaborator, not a replacement for engineering principles. In this model, developers use AI as a "force multiplier" to handle tasks like generating boilerplate code or writing initial test cases, but always within a structured framework.  Crucially, the big difference here is the h...

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This Week I Learned -  * Jonathon Ross has been building AI chips since 2012. He is the founder & CEO of Groq * Noticed a new feature on Reddit that shows AI-generated answers related to a user posted question. It consolidates answers from other Reddit posts & also links to them . * In the constantly evolving world of generative AI, the ability to prototype quickly is a significant competitive advantage. Teams that can show working demos and iterate fast influence roadmaps, shape decisions, and win resources.  Fast Prototyping of GenAI Apps with Streamlit course on Deeplearning.ai teaches how to quickly build and refine GenAI apps fast. Streamlit is an open-source Python library that turns a few lines of code into interactive, data-driven web apps in minutes, no front-end skills required.  *  Peeksy began as an open-source side project has now evolved into an app. It is an automation tool that screenshots contextually the moment they're taken—making t...

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See more of my AI co-creations

Gartner defines cloud-native application platforms as those that provide managed application runtime environments for applications and integrated capabilities to manage the life cycle of an application or application component in the cloud environment.  Cloud-native application platforms are designed to facilitate the deployment, runtime execution and management of modern cloud-native or cloud-optimized applications without the need to manage any underlying infrastructure. LEADERS Amazon Web Services Microsoft Google Red Hat  Salesforce (Heroku) Alibaba Cloud CHALLENGERS Cloudflare Huawei VISIONARIES Netlify Platform.sh Render NICHE PLAYERS Vercel Interesting insights I gathered from the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Strategic Cloud Platform Services report: Alibaba Cloud launched one-click AI application templates with ModelScope and Hugging Face integration, and introduced an AI gateway for unified, multivendor LLM orchestration and API key management. AWS recently introduced ...

This Week I Learned -  *  Google Cloud Generative AI Leader certification exam is meant for anyone in any job role, with or without hands-on technical experience. The exam is MCQ type and has a validity period of 3 years. * Comet is an AI-native browser launched by Perplexity in July this year. It combines traditional web browsing with real-time AI assistance that can read, summarise and act on live data. Currently, Comet is available to Perplexity Max customers on an invite-only basis. * Perplexity offered to buy Chrome, Google’s web browser, for $34.5 billion. * Humanize AI can transform your AI-generated content into natural, human-like text. This AI-to-human text converter converts output from ChatGPT, Bard, Jasper, Grammarly, GPT4, and other AI text generators into text indistinguishable from human writing. * Like a human brain, artificial neural networks take some kind of input (words, say) and produce outputs (other words). For the human brain, what happens in the...

See more of my AI co-creations A child leash or as it’s also called, a child harness , tether, walking harness, or walking reins—has been around since before the 1900s. By the 1940s in the UK, they were practically a toddler fashion statement. Character harnesses even add a soft toy to the mix, so it’s part safety gear, part cuddle buddy. Of course, opinions differ—some see them as a lifesaver, others as a mini leash on childhood freedom.

Here are quite a few ways to view large CSVs from a GitHub repo without downloading them locally -  1) Flat Viewer is a free online viewer for CSV, JSON, and other tabular files stored in public GitHub repos — it displays them in a sortable, filterable table without you having to download them. The FlatGithub URL format is: https://flatgithub.com/OWNER/REPO?filename=PATH_TO_FILE If your file is: https://github.com/ mvark/indiafoodstats/blob/main/Brands/Amul.csv The FlatGithub link will be: https://flatgithub.com/ mvark/indiafoodstats/blob/main/Brands/Amul.csv What you can do with Flat Viewer - View the CSV as a table (no GitHub size preview limit) Sort columns Search in the dataset Download the filtered view as CSV or JSON 2) GitHub + Raw + CSV Explorer Go to your CSV in GitHub Click Raw Copy the URL (it will look like https://raw.githubusercontent.com/.../file.csv) Go to CSV Explorer  (requires sign up) Import the data using Raw CSV file  3)  Through your own D...

This Week I Learned -  * OpenAI's open weight models gpt-oss 20B and gpt-oss 120B support advanced reasoning and tool use. Open models are more easily customizable to build AI that can reason over your enterprise data and domains, providing a powerful option alongside proprietary models. gpt-oss can be used alone or alongside models like GPT-4o, Claude, or Llama. Built with a Mixture of Experts architecture gpt-oss delivers low-latency performance for use cases like search, chat, and real-time decisioning. It features a 131k context for long documents and RAG and it is provided under an Apache 2.0 license. * A typical software-application startup that’s not involved in training foundation models might spend 70-80% of its dollars on salaries, 5-10% on rent, and 10-25% on other operating expenses (cloud hosting, software licenses, marketing, legal/accounting, etc.).   Many of Meta’s properties rely on user-generated content (UGC) to attract attention, which is th...

Jeremy Howard is the co-author of the popular book Deep Learning for Coders with Fastai and PyTorch: AI Applications Without a PhD . He founded fast.ai  with Rachel Thomas and created FastHTML. In this 7-minute video, Jeremy Howard introduces FastHTML, the Python framework for building web applications entirely in Python with minimal code and no separate frontend JavaScript. Highlights - - Entire web apps can be written in one Python file with no separate JavaScript or scaffolding. - HTML components are created programmatically using Python functions. - HTMX enables dynamic server communication without heavy JavaScript. - Supports database integration (SQLite shown) and full CRUD operations. - Built-in live reloading for fast development feedback. - Authentication can be added using standard browser mechanisms. - Compatible with any CSS or web frameworks and deployable with a single command. - Designed to simplify web development for Python programmers, scaling from simpl...

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This Week I Learned -  * GitHub released its latest coding agent to its Enterprise and Pro+ users: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent. Pipeline/headless agents like GitHub Copilot Coding Agent are built for scale. They integrate with CI/CD pipelines or scheduled jobs, enabling tasks like enforcing standards, migrating code, or updating infrastructure across repositories. While they demand stricter guardrails and detailed specifications upfront, they excel in delivering consistent and repeatable changes without requiring constant oversight for every prompt. *  CrewAI is a Python framework for orchestrating role-playing, autonomous AI agents. It is built entirely from scratch—completely independent of LangChain or other agent frameworks. * "LLM system design is its own engineering discipline. We’re past the point where prompt engineering and model fine-tuning are enough. What matters now is composition; how models, tools, memory, and decision logic are structured and or...

I always found Indian history and mythology far more engaging in Amar Chitra Katha comics than in school textbooks, which rarely had illustrations or photographs. Later, I got hooked on MAD magazine. It became my quirky friend, philosopher, guide, and even therapist in its own odd way. I’ve realized I learn best through visuals and light-hearted humor, not from dense textbooks packed with serious, endless text. After being exposed to such high-quality artwork, I couldn’t help but develop the urge to draw - or more specifically, to cartoon. But inspiration only goes so far. It takes practice and patience to actually get good at something. I often felt disappointed with what I drew and as a result I ended up drawing even less. Impedance mismatch is an engineering term that generally refers to a disconnect or incompatibility between two components that are meant to function together. Years ago, while reading about impedance mismatch , I realized I was experiencing it firsthand.  I cou...

In 1739, David Hume put forth the view that emotions drive choice and well-being. Recognizing the need to map out the emotions that animate thought and action, Hume also proposed a taxonomy of over 16 emotional states, but lacked scientific evidence. In 1872, Charles Darwin surveyed human emotion and presented his findings in his third major work,  The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals . Charles Darwin described similarities and differences in over 20 facial, bodily, and vocal expressions across species, cultures, and stages of life. He lacked statistical methods to test his hypotheses about human emotion. But 150 years later, studies are confirming many of Darwin’s observation. In 1969, American psychologist, Paul Ekman documented six facial expressions that are universally recognized - anger, happiness, sadness, disgust, fear and surprise. By focusing on a narrow set of behaviors, Ekman was able to use the statistical methods available to him to confirm some of Darwin...