Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned -  * Nikhil Pahwa on  how to use AI to write without the slop : Step 1: Find something you want to write about and record a voice note (transcribe it) or collect information/news articles about it. Step 2: Feed this voice note / notes to AI, whether ChatGPT or Claude, and ask it to identify 20 questions for you. The rule: no questions to which the answer is yes/no or one of a few options. Step 3: Record a voice note answering the questions. you don't need to answer all the questions. Feel free to ramble, and anything above 10 minutes is good. Anything over 20 minutes is amazing.  Step 4: Give your voice note transcript to AI. Ask it to identify a structure from the questions you've answered or simply, ask AI to structure your talk into an article structure verbatin with subheads. Important instruction: "do not paraphrase, do not add filler or transition sentences". Step 5: once you have a structure you like, edit the transcript to tighten language....

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 -  * Moonshot’s Kimi K3’s weights were released on July 27 under a Modified MIT licence, making the 2.8-trillion-parameter model available for anyone to download, fine-tune and self-host. Giving weights away is a smart distribution strategy as it could potentially turn developers, cloud providers and enterprise IT units into resellers, and make it hard for anyone to under-price you as the base model itself is free. * Jot down annoying things . AI may have a solution. * findphone is a nifty app to locate a nearby Bluetooth device by signal strength, from the macOS command line — for when Find My Phone isn't available due to MDM restrictions * ProHance is a software platform that provides real-time visibility into workforce activities, helping organizations measure productivity, optimize costs, and improve operational efficiency. It tracks employee engagement through metrics such as time spent on applications, mouse and keyboard activity, and task durations, whil...

This Week I Learned -  * " Models learn from "exhaust," the prompts people write, the tools agents use, and especially the corrections people make when the model is wrong. Every correction is distilled into institutional know-how.  In consuming intelligence, you are creating intelligence. If learning flows in only one direction, economic value converges toward the owners of the learning infrastructure rather than the creators of the knowledge itself. In the cloud era, enterprises accumulated data. In the AI era, they accumulate learning. A company should be able to use a model without giving up the knowledge that makes it unique. " - Satya Nadella * Wire services such as PTI, ANI, Reuters, AP, and AFP provide verified facts to other outlets, which then adapt the content to their own style. Their business model depends on reader trust in the accuracy of the wire’s reporting and on receiving compensation for the verification work. While search engines direct readers t...

This Week I Learned -  * The OpenRouter Pareto Router is a dynamic model selection tool that allows users to select a coding model based on a minimum coding score preference. It maintains a curated shortlist of strong coding models ranked by Artificial Analysis coding percentiles. Users can set a min_coding_score between 0 and 1 to control the strength of the coder they need. The router automatically selects the cheapest model within the chosen tier or the fastest with the Nitro variant. This approach ensures that users receive a strong coder without overspending, as the exact shortlist evolves over time with new models and benchmarks. The OpenRouter API is compatible with most SDKs, allowing for easy integration into applications. * openrouter/auto-beta is a task-aware router. It classifies each request, routes it to the model teams are actually spending on for that kind of task, and filters that choice by the cost-quality tradeoff you set. The response is priced at the routed mo...

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 -  *  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...