Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned -  * Thomson Reuters launched its proprietary LLM "Thomson" built on Alibaba's open-source Qwen model, investing $40 million over two years with a final training run costing $450,000 using its legal data from Westlaw and Practical Law. This approach highlights how enterprises with strong proprietary datasets can efficiently create customized AI, pressuring premium API revenue models of companies like Anthropic by demonstrating viable lower-cost alternatives.  * Large language models are called “stochastic parrots” as they do not truly understand language or the world. LLMs are extremely good at statistically mimicking patterns from the massive amounts of text they were trained on. They can produce fluent, coherent-sounding text that looks intelligent but are essentially “parroting” (repeating and recombining) patterns without genuine comprehension, reasoning, or grounded knowledge. * All stochastic processes are non-deterministic because randomness me...

This Week I Learned -  * According to AI-ML guru Andrew Ng, these are the four most important AI engineering skills: Building and deploying AI applications Software engineering fundamentals Using coding agents Shaping the build * GitHub has rebuilt Copilot review around an agentic architecture that gathers broader repository context, uses tools, produces findings, and can hand fixes to another coding agent. This is substantially more than autocomplete added to old review. - The GitHub Blog * Shadow AI refers to consumer-facing AI applications and standalone agents deployed across your organization without IT visibility or approval. These agents can operate autonomously on user devices, creating blind spots in your security and compliance posture.  Microsoft now ships specific discovery, monitoring and governance for unmanaged AI agents. Shadow AI blocking currently apply only to managed Windows devices enrolled with Microsoft Intune. * AI can boost learning productivity,...

This Week I Learned -  * When unconstrained, the AI model can draw from numerous sources to assess its options on how to proceed in answering a prompt, thereby allowing widely varying outcomes. Any foundational decisions or other instructions—artifacts collectively known as “ provenance ” when properly preserved—which were formulated during the original context session and then cleared, are lost. This is the key deficiency of vibe coding which spec-driven development and context engineering seek to address. Context engineering moves a developer from a vibe coding technique to a structured approach to generating code that preserves provenance using key artifacts. This allows context to be restored by other developers, reviewed by other stakeholders, or retrieved at any point if someone wanted to audit the inputs that generated a given codebase or simply wanted to continue building upon them. Different methodologies have emerged that offer different perspectives on how to effectively...

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...

This Week I Learned -  * Vertex AI has been rebranded and evolved. Google officially replaced and expanded it under the name Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform.  This change marks a major structural shift for Google Cloud, moving away from a traditional MLOps platform (focused on training and deploying standalone models) toward an "Agentic AI" ecosystem.   * Turkey based HubX Studios used Gemma 4 to build BetterSpeak, an AI English tutoring platform that uses the Gemma 4 E2B model as the reasoning engine for its on-device pipeline — enabling private, low-latency tutoring without the need for an internet connection. HubX deployed the 4-bit quantized version of the model to handle tasks like grammar explanations and progress monitoring across languages. By using Gemma 4’s native audio input capabilities, HubX’s app is able to support direct speech-to-speech learning , while reducing costs and ensuring privacy. * Midjourney, the AI lab best known for image generation...

This Week I Learned -  * navigator.sendBeacon() method is used to quietly send analytics or telemetry data, often when a page is closing.  * P4RS3LT0NGV3 is a Universal Text Translator. Think of it as a universal translator for ALL alphabets and writing systems! It is a powerful web-based text transformation and steganography tool with 159 built-in text transforms spanning encodings, classical and modern ciphers, Unicode styles, formatting, and niche alphabets.  * When you see that Claude is "organizing its thoughts" during long conversations—it indicates automatic context management is working. * Fable 5 is now the most capable model of Claude and takes 2X the usage of Opus. Fable 5 is the same base model as Mythos but with cybersecurity guardrails. In the same week of its release, Anthropic has disabled Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all users after a US directive restricting foreign national access, citing national security concerns. * Meta chief product officer Chris Cox o...

This Week I Learned -  * Anthropic and OpenAI have launched their own services companies, challenging traditional IT firms and service providers. Anthropic's joint venture with Blackstone, Goldman Sachs, and Hellman & Friedman is valued at $1.5 billion, while OpenAI's venture, The Development Company, is valued at $4 billion.  * "Google which is cash surplus, just announced an additional capital raise of $80 bn. Google annual profit is $160 bn, last quarter $62 bn, and market cap $4.5 trillion. That is close to total profits and market cap of all Indian listed companies put together.  It’s a wake up call to all companies  to invest into the future, whatever the present maybe." - Uday Kotak * "One reason that the atrophy of coding skills is concerning is the “paradox of supervision” ... effectively using Claude requires supervision, and supervising Claude requires the very coding skills that may atrophy from AI overuse." - Anthropic * “People who go all i...

Nothing definitive is known about Shakespeare but Bill Bryson’s brilliant research and laugh-out-loud writing makes you feel like you’re actually strolling through Elizabethan England, dodging questionable street food and dodging the plague, while reading the Bard of Avon’s biography. Shakespeare is believed to have been born in 1564 and died in 1616, but many records of his estate vanished in the Great Fire of London in 1666.  More than 80 different spellings of his name have been recorded. The one we all use isn’t even the Oxford English Dictionary’s top pick (they prefer Shakspere). It was fun to know that over 50 candidates have been proposed as the “real” Shakespeare. Some people just can’t accept that one guy achieved so much. By his early thirties, Shakespeare was earning a comfortable 200 to 700 pounds a year – solidly upper-middle-class for the time. He married Anne Hathaway, who was eight years older (a man ahead of his time).  Shakespeare wasn’t just a writer – he w...

This Week I Learned -  *  web.py was originally published while Aaron Swartz worked at reddit.com, where the site used it as it grew to become one of the top 1000 sites according to Alexa and served millions of daily page views. Reddit was rewritten using other tools after being acquired by Condé Nast in 2006. * Markdown is used widely by websites including Reddit, GitHub and Discord using it, as well as LLMs such as Claude using it to format the files that store accumulated memories. * Grok Build is xAI's coding agent for the terminal, serving as a direct competitor to Claude Code and the OpenAI Codex CLI. * Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google all raised effective prices in the last six months. Enterprises that built workflows assuming AI costs would keep falling are now watching annual budgets evaporate in months.  * Uber's CTO sent an internal memo warning the company burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in just four months. American AI software prices have jumped 20% t...

This Week I Learned -  * Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft all reported impressive quarterly earnings on Wednesday, surpassing Wall Street expectations thanks to booming demand for AI and cloud services. AI continues to be the main growth engine, with the four companies projected to invest around $650 billion in AI infrastructure this year. * SpaceX & XAI will provide Anthropic with access to Memphis-based Colossus 1, one of the world’s largest and fastest-deployed AI supercomputers, to provide additional capacity for Claude. The supercomputer is powered by 220,000+ NVIDIA GPUs. * Palo Alto Networks, a US-based cybersecurity firm, is set to acquire AI infrastructure startup Portkey to strengthen its AI security stack for enterprise use of autonomous agents, at twice its estimated $60–70 million valuation. * Portkey’s AI gateway sits between applications and large language models, helping companies monitor, manage and secure AI traffic. Palo Alto Networks plans to fold...

This Week I Learned -  * From The Batch - - Alignment training teaches LLMs to behave like assistants, but it tethers them to that behavior only loosely. Beyond alignment training, system prompts act as behavioral guardrails, but motivated users can bypass them.  - The lengths of tasks completed autonomously by AI agents have doubled roughly every seven months, according to METR, an independent testing organization - LLMs' knowledge is still relatively limited with respect to infrastructure and the complex tradeoffs good engineers must make...finding infrastructure bugs — say, a subtle network misconfiguration — can be incredibly difficult and requires deep engineering expertise.  - Research involves thinking through new ideas, formulating hypotheses, running experiments, interpreting them to potentially modify the hypotheses, and iterating until we reach conclusions. Coding agents can speed up the pace at which we can write research code. - Meta has pivoted from its ope...