Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned -  * Microsoft's Phi-4 Mini is widely regarded as one of the most capable models under 4 billion parameters. It punches significantly above its weight class, outperforming older 7B and even 70B models in specific reasoning tasks. It runs at a smooth 13–18 tokens per second on flagship devices with 8 GB+ RAM (like the iPhone 16 Pro/17 Pro or Galaxy S25/S26 series). * From The Batch : - PrismML, a Caltech spinout backed by Khosla Ventures, publicly released compressed versions of Alibaba’s Qwen model on Tuesday, shrinking it from 54 GB to under 4 GB so all 27 billion parameters run on an iPhone (15 or newer). PrismML achieves the compression by reducing the models to ternary or binary quantization, reducing each value from 16 bits to just two or three possible values.   - Two people asking the same model for business feedback, one in Hindi and one in Russian, may receive substantively different advice not because they’re using different models, but because th...

Cartoon co-created with ChatGPT. See more of my AI co-creations

Cartoon co-created with Copilot. See more of my AI co-creations

Cartoon co-created with ChatGPT. See more of my AI co-creations

A pangram, or holoalphabetic sentence, phrase, or word, uses every letter of a given alphabet at least once. The Pangram AI detection tool from Pangram Labs on the other hand identifies AI-generated content with high accuracy. Pangram's detection model takes a comprehensive view of a document and uses a deep-learning based detector that synthesizes millions of signals about a particular text.  From its extensive research it has identified nine patterns that occur frequently - Markdown formatting inserted into plain text contexts Overrepresented AI Phrases like "delve into" that appear far more often in AI-generated text Overuse of em dashes where human writers typically would not Bullet lists used to organize information systematically Triads like "past, present and future", grouping ideas in threes, a common AI rhetorical pattern "Not just X but Y" type of word choices and constructions common in AI writing - the best-known tic of AI writing  ...

This Week I Learned -  *  arXiv offers HTML papers alongside the existing PDF to improve accessibility . * " Students need to learn how to work with AI, recognize weak output, think through choices, test results and decide what is worth doing. I described my own approach as “delegate maximally”. Instead of keeping a fixed list of AI-proof skills, keep giving AI everything it might be able to do. Whatever remains is the human role for now. " - S Anand * " The reason I dislike this emphasis on term “LLM Visualization” or “Claude Viz” or even “Agentic Viz” is the focus on the tool. No one goes out and says “Excel Viz” // “PowerPoint Viz” // “Figma Viz”. The tool is there to augment the human and has never been the important part.  The craft and skill of the  human using the tool is what we should acknowledge and celebrate. " - Amit Kapoor * Draw with Data by Schubert De Abreu   * Bharat Atlas is a lightweight open-source visualiser for India administrative boundar...

If an image on a site is flashy, animated, and distracting, and you inspect it only to see this as its HTML source: src="data:image/webp;base64,UklGRiQAAABXRU..." There is no image file to block. That's a base64 image embedded directly in the page. You can still hide it in Firefox with no extensions, using a built-in feature called userContent.css . What really is a Base64 Image? Normally, an image is a file. Your browser downloads logo.png from a server. A base64 image is different. The image data is converted to a long text string and pasted directly into the HTML. Instead of this: <img src="/images/logo.png"> You get this: <img src="data:image/webp;base64,UklGRiQAAABXRUJQ..."> Sites do this to load a small icon a bit faster, or to hide tracking pixels, or to inline ads without a separate file request. The downside is you can’t block it like a normal file. It’s not a URL you can block in your hosts file. It’s baked into the page itself. B...

Open Food Facts has data on 4.6+ million food products worldwide. There are multiple ways to access that data but the simplest way to get a subset of the data with chosen parameters is to  download it as a CSV file  through the website's search interface. But if you need entire data for one country, you can filter the  7.64 GB file  (size at the time of writing) hosted on Hugging Face.  Hugging Face acts as a CDN for large ML datasets — it not only stores the full Parquet file but also handles versioning, caching, and fast global downloads. This guide co-written with Meta AI shows you how to use Google Colab to filter the dataset for just one country, add direct product links, and save the result to a public GitHub repo. Takes < 30 minutes total based on your familiarity with these tools & file size. No software installs needed. What you’ll end up with: A CSV like india_products_18613.csv with 16 columns, including a URL for each product. The same st...

GitHub has grown far beyond a place to host code — today it's an entire ecosystem covering CI/CD, AI-assisted development, security, package management, and team collaboration. Whether you're new to the platform or just want a single reference point, here's an alphabetical list of GitHub's major products and features, each linked to its official page - GitHub Actions GitHub Advanced Security GitHub Apps GitHub CLI GitHub Code Review GitHub Code Security GitHub Codespaces GitHub Container Registry GitHub Copilot GitHub Copilot Business GitHub Copilot CLI GitHub Copilot Enterprise GitHub Copilot Extensions GitHub Dependabot GitHub Desktop GitHub Discussions GitHub Education GitHub Enterprise Cloud GitHub Enterprise Server GitHub Gist GitHub Importer GitHub Innovation Graph GitHub Issues GitHub Marketplace GitHub Mobile GitHub Models  (retiring July 30, 2026) GitHub Packages GitHub Pages ...

Cartoon co-created with Meta. See more of my AI co-creations

This Week I Learned -  *  Intensive Vibe Coding Course With Google - self-paced Kaggle Learn guide * Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs) bridge internal development and real-world deployment by embedding with enterprise clients to build solutions while guiding the product roadmap.  FDEs are the "Technical Special Ops" who bridge the gap (The Delta) between a core product and a client’s messy, real-world reality. * Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and researcher John Jumper won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for their work on the company’s AlphaFold model, and DeepMind has also made major contributions to meteorology, materials science, and a variety of other disciplines. John Jumper is leaving DeepMind for Anthropic.  * Like Claude Code, Claude Science can autonomously carry out meaningful work when given concise, high-level instructions, and it has access to tools that make it particularly useful for research in computational biology and drug development. C...

Did you know you can link directly to a specific word on a webpage and have the browser automatically scroll down and highlight it? It’s called Scroll to Text Fragment, and it's a game-changer for sharing quotes, data, or proof.  This is especially useful when the content you want to link to doesn't have a standard HTML anchor (like #heading). This feature lets you link directly to any specific word or text block on a webpage, highlighting it for the user automatically. I was amused to find that  La Opala Crockery is 100% Vegetarian  and it proudly sports on its packaging the green dot logo that's typically used by food products. They also mention this claim on their blog in a long article. I wanted to share the link on a forum that mentions the exact sentence so that readers can jump to the specific point. Here’s how the link can be constructed to highlight "100% vegetarian" - https://www.laopala.in/blog/what-sets-laopala-cup-set-apart #:~:text=100% vegetarian Th...