Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

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. But if you only need data for one country, downloading the full 7.64 GB file  (size at the time of writing) hosted on Hugging Face is overkill. 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_18392.csv with 16 columns, including a URL for each product. The same steps work for France, Canada, USA, UK, or any other country in the database. What You Need Before Starting A Google account to use Colab A GitHub account + an empty public repo where the CSV will live A Gi...