Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

A few decades ago, quality training was scarce and costly. Thanks to the convergence of several new advancements, software vendors now provide online training to a worldwide audience, making skill acquisition more accessible than ever. Microsoft offers its Microsoft Learn platform, Google provides Google Skills , and Oracle University is doing a great job of delivering training for their products while also covering higher-level concepts relevant to the database, cloud, and AI domains. The following Oracle certification exams are free to take and come with learning resources: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Foundations Associate (1Z0-1085-26) Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Architect Associate (1Z0-1072-26)   Oracle Data Center Operations Foundations Associate (1Z0-3000) Oracle Multicloud Foundations Associate (1Z0-1144-26) Oracle Cloud Infrastructure AI Foundations Associate (1Z0-1122-26) Oracle AI Database Foundations Associate (1Z0-1195-26) Additionally, Oracle University offers many ...

This Week I Learned -  * 18 large language models from six AI labs now generate everything from code explanations to creative fiction. Even in a single short paragraph, every model leaves subtle clues in its word choice, tone, and sentence structure. Each lab's training data and post-training choices leave behind distinct stylistic fingerprints in vocabulary, phrasing, and punctuation. The October Kaggle competition requires participants to build models to classify ~4,000 unlabeled text passages across 18 frontier language models from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Qwen, ZAI, and Moonshot AI. The goal is to find out how reliably today's frontier models can be fingerprinted from short text alone.  * Experiential Labs is an OpenAI-compatible model gateway. A user reported that they're injecting ads into free tier model  responses without disclosure. It turns out it is mentioned in their long privacy policy that no one really reads.  * Tesla's Full Self-Driving (FSD)...

Cartoon co-created with Gemini. See more of my AI co-creations ~ The Priest-King is a roughly 4,500-year-old sculpture discovered at Mohenjo-daro in present-day Sindh, Pakistan by the archaeological team led by Sir Mortimer Wheeler. They gave it that name as Mesopotamian cities were often ruled by religious monarchs. The name stuck, even though there’s zero evidence the Indus Valley people were ruled by kings or priests at all! Since the Indus script remains unreadable, we can only guess.