Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned -  * OpenAI’s ChatGPT, GPT-4, is approaching human levels of intelligence—what is labeled “ artificial general intelligence .” GPT-4 already exhibits test-taking abilities generally well above the average human, scoring in the 99th percentile on the SAT Verbal and the 90th percentile on the LSAT. A primary concern is that the chatbots, as smart as they are, display erratic and autonomous behaviors. Risks abound when the internet becomes a playpen for thousands, perhaps millions, of artificial intelligence systems.Artificial Intelligence needs guardrails and global cooperation. - WSJ * Online tool to convert a video's VTT file to a transcript without any time codes, metadata, and extra lines.  * Skype wasn’t really founded by Estonians but it was four Estonians (Ahti Heinla, Priit Kasesalu, Jaan Tallinn, and Toivo Annus) who turned the founders' (Niklas Zennström from Sweden and Janus Friis from Denmark) vision into reality. Skype was first released in Augus

Microsoft Learn has Beginner series for many web & Cloud technologies  including the following: Beginner's Series to: JavaScript - 51 videos, 2020 T-SQL for Beginners   Python for Beginners - 44 videos, 2019 More Python for Beginners - 20 videos, 2020 Even More Python for Beginners - Data Tools - 31 videos, 2020 Azure SQL for Beginners - 72 videos, 2020-2023 Azure Database for MySQL - Beginners Series - 16 videos, 2022 Beginner's Series to: Serverless  - 16 videos, 2021 Beginner's Series to: Django - 24 videos, 2021 PWA for Beginners - 4-chapter, 17-video tutorial that walks you through building your own Progressive Web Apps that can run cross platforms and combine the best of web and native features, 2022 Beginner's Series to: Node.js - 26 videos, 2020 Java for Beginners  - 23 videos, 2022

This Week I Learned -  * Qwiklabs has a Google Cloud Infrastructure for Azure professionals learning path . It demonstrates Google Cloud solutions in comparison with Azure and guides professionals on their use.  * Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud (ROKS) is a managed application development and deployment platform. *  Open-Meteo is an open-source weather API with free access for non-commercial use. No API key is required. * Open-source, adaptable, and lightweight tools that are part of its innovative suite for media makers from The Northwestern University Knight Lab : JuxtaposeJS  - tell a story comparing two images TimelineJS  - to build visually rich, interactive timelines StoryMapJS - tell stories on the web that highlight the locations of a series of events Storyline - to build an annotated, interactive line chart Soundcite  - add inline audio to your story * Some of the most popular frameworks for creating APIs in Python are Django, Flask, and FastAPI .  FastAPI is a high-perform

Paraphrased notes from Pluralsight video course  Javascript: The Big Picture  by David Tucker  and other online resources - In 1995, Netscape wanted to integrate a dynamic and interactive element into the web, so they tasked Brendan Eich to create a new language for this purpose. This language was first called LiveScript & soon renamed to JavaScript.  JavaScript is a dynamic interpreted scripting language that can be used to create web applications. It can also be used to create: Desktop applications - Electron  Mobile application on both iOS and Android - React Native, IoT or Internet of Things - Many devices, like a Raspberry Pi, have the ability to install and run Node.js, and packages are available in npm to interact with different sensors and input devices. When JavaScript in the browser runs, it runs within an engine. There are three primary JavaScript engines: V8 JavaScript Engine  - Google’s open source high-performance JavaScript and WebAssembly engine, written in C++. It

Office 365 is now Microsoft 365 .  Source: Microsoft 365 YouTube Channel Microsoft 365 Copilot is powered by the “Copilot System”, a sophisticated processing and orchestration engine. It harnesses the power of three foundational technologies: The Microsoft 365 apps, that's Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and more. The Microsoft Graph, that's all your content and context, your emails, files, meetings, chats, and calendar. And a Large Language Model, or LLM, a creative engine capable of parsing and producing human-readable text. All accessible through natural language. You should also connect to the internet regularly to keep your version of Microsoft 365 up to date and to benefit from automatic upgrades. If you do not connect to the internet at least every 31 days, your apps will go into reduced functionality mode, which means that you can view or print your documents but cannot edit the documents or create new ones. To reactivate your apps, simply reconnect to the inte

Arrow functions were introduced in ES6 or ECMAScript 2015.  Source:  Javascript: The Big Picture They allow us to write smaller function syntax. Due to the reduction in characters typed, JavaScript size is lesser.  The => symbol in JavaScript is called the "arrow function" syntax, and it allows you to create anonymous functions (functions without names) more concisely than with the traditional function keyword. The syntax of an arrow function is as follows: (parameters) => expression Here, parameters are the parameters passed to the function (enclosed in parentheses),  => is an arrow operator and expression is the expression to be evaluated and returned by the function. For example, the following two code snippets are equivalent: // Traditional function syntax  function double(x)  {  return x * 2;  }  // Arrow  function syntax  const double = (x) => x * 2; In the case of single-line function definition or body, the return keyword and curly braces ({}) are optional

Paraphrased from ChatGPT answers - ELI5 (Explain like I'm 5) version  ^ - A model is like a computer program that has been trained to do a specific task. Just like how we humans learn from experience, AI models learn from data . Think of it like a game of "guess who". You have a bunch of pictures of people, and you want to guess who someone is based on some clues. An AI model can be trained to do this too! You give it lots of pictures of people and tell it who each person is. Then you give it some clues, like "has brown hair" or "wears glasses", and it tries to guess who the person is based on those clues. AI models can be very useful for solving problems and making predictions. But, they're not perfect and need to be trained carefully to avoid mistakes. You need an algorithm to create AI models.  Algorithms are like a set of instructions that tell the AI model what to do. Think of it like a recipe for baking cookies - you need to follow the recipe

This Week I Learned -  * CentOS is a Linux distribution that provides a free and open-source community-supported computing platform, functionally compatible with its upstream source, Red Hat Enterprise Linux.  * IBM has a market valuation of just under $120 billion. IBM is in the middle of a yearslong makeover, focusing on transforming itself into a hybrid-cloud and artificial-intelligence business. In recent years, it has spun off or divested businesses including Kyndryl Holdings Inc., a big player in IT infrastructure and data-center management.  - WSJ * A security playbook is a collection of procedures that can help Security Operations Center (SOC) engineers and analysts of all tiers to automate and simplify tasks and orchestrate a response. * Playbooks are what you would use when doing troubleshooting, investigations, and root-cause analysis, while runbooks are what you would use post-incident to recover and resume normal operations. *  Jupyter Notebook is an open-source web appli

Key Terms: Generative AI is a broad description for technology that leverages AI to generate data. This data can include text, images, audio, video, and even code. ChatGPT  is an  artificial-intelligence chatbot  developed by OpenAI and launched in November 2022.  It is built on top of OpenAI's GPT-3.5 and GPT-4   families  of large language models  (LLMs) and has been fine-tuned using both supervised and reinforcement learning techniques. When working with prompts, you will be interacting with the LLM via an API or directly. Prompt engineering (PE)  is the process of communicating effectively with an AI to achieve desired results. Prompt Engineering, also known as In-Context Prompting, refers to methods for how to communicate with Large Language Models or LLM to steer its behavior for desired outcomes without updating the model weights.  It is an empirical science and the effect of prompt engineering methods can vary a lot among models, thus requiring heavy experimentation and he

This Week I Learned -  *  Source code for Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm is now available on Github . Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm is a set of services and jobs that are responsible for constructing and serving the Home Timeline. * A well-run EA program can streamline cloud transformations using best practices developed from IT strategy, business policy, organizational planning, and stakeholder decision-making.  How a potential Enterprise Architecture Framework for Cloud Adoption may look like    * Amazon has a  Digital & Device Forum  for India * The search feature on Archive.org shows a Timeline histogram for the results. * A histogram is a chart that plots the distribution of a numeric variable's values as a series of bars. Each bar typically covers a range of numeric values called a bin or class; a bar's height indicates the frequency of data points with a value within the corresponding bin.  * New York City’s public school system in January banned the

This Week I Learned -  * Microsoft Data & AI services * OpenAI Whisper Transcriber creates a transcript from any media files. * From 2014 to 2021, Kite was a startup using AI to help developers write code. It folded up in 2022 because  according to Adam Smith its founder , it "failed to deliver our vision of AI-assisted programming because we were 10+ years too early to market, i.e. the tech is not ready yet". He further candidly admits - "We failed to build a business because our product did not monetize, and it took too long to figure that out. We took a chance that we could dramatically accelerate the rate of software development in the world. We ran the experiment, and despite great efforts on everyone’s parts, the experiment did not work." *  Amazon CodeGuru  is an AI-powered code review tool that uses machine learning to identify issues and suggest improvements in code written in Java or Python. It provides recommendations for performance optimization, res