Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

The Data Formulator tool from Microsoft Research blends natural language and visual interfaces to help analysts explore and visualize data with AI agents. With AI agents recommending exploration ideas, transforming data and presenting results in interactive visual interfaces, users can deep dive into data in control without coding expertise.  The research prototype is open source  and there’s a demo available to explore its features.  It currently supports generation of the following chart types -

I create AI-generated cartoons to capture ideas, observations, and memorable moments from my reading and daily life. Sometimes it's simply a word or phrase that catches my attention and feels worth preserving, much like a selfie captures a moment in time. I've long admired the lyricists who adapt A. R. Rahman's songs into different Indian languages. Their task is not just translation. They must match the actors' lip movements while crafting lyrics that remain meaningful and hummable. When I create cartoons, I often reshape a scenario to fit an idea or joke. It reminds me of the same creative challenge: working within constraints while trying to produce something that feels natural. In that sense, my cartoons are a form of improv. Since the ideas are sometimes forced into shape rather than discovered organically, the result doesn't always work as intended. They don't always land as jokes for readers. Sometimes they end up feeling more like puzzles that need to be...

This Week I Learned -  * Sci-Hub boasts the largest collection of full-text scientific papers, with over 88 million documents available for free. It began in 2011 as a simple PHP script created by founder Alexandra Elbakyan, using basic and affordable infrastructure. * JAX is the open-source library behind Google's Gemini. * Deepseek V4 is roughly 7-9x cheaper than frontier models. * When you call an LLM API, you are not just "running a model." You are orchestrating a 14-layer pipeline across networking, security, distributed systems, custom silicon, and billing. * Bing announced (through the Create tab) that after serving creators well, DALL·E 3 will be retiring in the coming weeks. * From The Batch : - Agentic capabilities emerged as large language models gained the abilities to plan across multiple steps, reflect on earlier outputs, and use external tools to perform actions online. Coding agents such as Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex gained traction among ...