Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

The English language is full of surprises, especially when it comes to pronunciation. With more than 19 vowel sounds represented by just five vowels (plus sometimes “y”), English can be a challenge—especially for non-native speakers. Many words contain silent or extra letters that make pronunciation tricky. If your native language follows phonetic spelling (where words are pronounced as they are written), you might instinctively apply the same logic to English. This can lead to unexpected mistakes—like pronouncing the “t” in ballet or being puzzled by why colonel is pronounced ker-nil . To help with this, I started compiling a list of such tricky words in a Google Spreadsheet. Then, I learned that Google Sheets can function as a read-only database , so I built a simple web app using the Google Sheets API and JavaScript to display the list online.  Check it out ! The pronunciations are from Google & WordWeb (created by a physicist, Antony Lewis).  Switching to Datasett...

This video is part of a "general audience series on large language models". It aims to show practical applications of LLMs and how to use them. It includes examples , different settings, and personal usage demonstrations. Key points: Language model is essentially a self-contained entity, like a "one terabyte zip file," which contains knowledge from pre-training and style from post-training. It's important to be mindful of the specific model being used, as different models have varying capabilities and pricing. Deep Research  combines internet search and thinking for in-depth analysis

A good way to understand commercial software products is to check features for its different pricing plans.  Here is the list of the 50+ GitHub Copilot features from its Pricing page - Chat Messages and interactions Access to OpenAI GPT-4o [Preview] Access to OpenAI GPT-4.5 [Preview] Access to Anthropic Claude 3.5 Sonnet [Preview] Access to Anthropic Claude 3.7 Sonnet [Preview] Access to OpenAI o1 [Preview] Access to OpenAI o3-mini [Preview] Access to Google Gemini 2.0 Flash Context-aware coding support and explanations Debugging and security remediation assistance Access to knowledge from top open source repositories Generate tests, docs, and more with slash commands Answers about issues, PRs, discussions, files, commits, etc. Web search powered by Bing [Preview] Explain failed Actions jobs [Preview] Multi-file editing in VS Code [Preview] Switch between models [Preview] Add images to prompts Code completion Real-time code suggestions [Preview] Next edit suggestions Comments to c...