Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned -  * "Hallucination is a feature when you’re being creative." - S Anand * "AI doesn't have to be right to be useful. The goal is outputs you can iterate over time — not perfection on the first try." -  Agentic Thinking 101, Udacity * "...language models hallucinate because the training and evaluation procedures reward guessing over acknowledging uncertainty" -  Why Language Models Hallucinate * "Large language models (LLMs) do not work like databases, storing facts in neat rows and columns, and retrieving the right answer when asked. They are trained on enormous collections of text and learn statistical patterns in language. When prompted, they generate a response by predicting what will come next, one piece at a time. An LLM generates text one word at a time, each word a probability drawn from patterns it absorbed during training. A setting called the temperature governs how adventurous those draws are. If the temperature is l...

Cartoon co-created with ChatGPT. See more of my AI co-creations

With the growing reliance on AI-assisted coding, managing application security is more critical than ever, as humans ultimately have to own the code they are responsible for. As the authors of Software Security for Developers note early on: "While developers often focus on libraries, frameworks, and tools at the mid-level, true security stems from foundational knowledge of standards, protocols, and patterns, as well as adherence to corporate and industry security practices." The first section provides the big picture and does a good job of explaining the high-level security vocabulary of modern software systems, which is further unraveled in subsequent chapters. The following sections move into deep cryptography primitives (AES, RSA, ECC), implementing secure transport layers (mTLS, X.509 certificates), and mastering enterprise-grade identity patterns like OAuth2, OpenID Connect (OIDC), PKCE, WebAuthn, and microservice call-chain authorization. The code examples are Java-cen...