Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

Over the years, I've relied on digital dictionaries like WordWeb  which is great as a desktop app and the hip & modern  Vocabulary.com to look up meanings or the right words. Of late, I've been using and finding the Google online dictionary service through the "define" operator very useful as it provides: pronunciation aids: audio in different accents (British, American and sometimes Indian English), " non-phonemic pronunciation respelling " which literally "respell" words making use of well-known English words and spelling conventions instead of using formal phonetic transcriptions. word origin chart: helps in knowing a little about the background of the word to better remember and pronounce it. I was pleasantly suprised to know that the word "cushy" is derived from the Urdu word kushi and it now makes sense why it is pronounced as such. a chart showing the word's popularity or usage over time  Google licenses English dictionary

Paraphrased notes from the HBR article " The Elements of Good Judgment " -  Judgment—the ability to combine personal qualities with relevant knowledge and experience to form opinions and make decisions.  6 components that contribute to good judgment & how to improve them:  Learning - Listen attentively, read critically Trust - Seek diversity, not validation from colleagues & advisors Experience - Make it relevant but not narrow. Challenge assumptions. Detachment - Identify and then challenge biases. Understand, clarify, and accept different viewpoints. Options - Question the solution set offered and debate all the options. Delivery - Factor in the feasibility of execution and risk mitigation plans. Leaders with good judgment skills typically have these qualities: They are good listeners and readers—able to hear what other people actually mean, and thus able to see patterns that others do not. They ask questions which are designed to draw out interesting responses.  Ha

This Week I Learned -  * Announced at Microsoft Build : All ChatGPT plugins work w/ Bing or Copilot Bing is the default search experience for ChatGPT Azure OpenAI Studio Windows Copilot Microsoft Fabric, a new platform for analytics *  GitHub builds GitHub with GitHub - GitHub builds GitHub using the full range of capabilities from GitHub Copilot to GitHub Projects, from GitHub Codespaces to GitHub CodeQL. * Microsoft Graph enables you to integrate with the best of Microsoft 365, Windows, and Enterprise Mobility + Security services in Microsoft 365, using REST APIs and client libraries.  * Password spraying is an attack that attempts to access a large number of accounts (usernames) with a few commonly used passwords. Traditional brute-force attacks attempt to gain unauthorized access to a single account by guessing the password. * Spear phishing is a specific and targeted attack on one or a select number of victims, while regular phishing attempts to scam masses of people. In spear ph

To provide hands-on experience to users to try their platform, popular Public Cloud Providers offer most services for free during a limited time period and some services for free always but with limits. This list has links to the free offerings provided by Public Cloud Service Providers: AWS  - When an account goes over the free tier limit, the standard AWS service rates will be billed to your credit card. Azure Google Cloud Oracle Cloud IBM Cloud Alibaba Cloud

This Week I Learned -  *  Azure service principals vs. managed identities - Service principals and Managed identities are forms of security identity in Azure. They provide an identity to applications that access Azure resources. Both service principles and managed identities enable fine-grained, programmatic access to Azure infrastructure without having to put passwords into scripts . The key difference between Azure service principals and managed identities is that, with Managed identities, admins do not have to manage credentials, including passwords. Managed identities can be system-assigned or user-assigned . With system-assigned managed identities, admins create the identity as a part of a specific Azure resource, such as a VM. That identity shares a lifecycle with its associated resource. Meaning, when admins delete the resource, they also delete the identity. User-assigned identities, on the other hand, are not tied to a specific resource. They have their own lifecycle and can

This Week I Learned -  * Google's next-gen LLM PaLM 2 is already powering 25 Google services. * PaLM 2 models are significantly smaller than GPT-4, with 400M to 15B parameters compared to 175B for GPT-3 and ~1Trillion for GPT-4. This allows the smaller PaLM 2 models to be run on phones with roughly 17 tokens per second, similar to Chat GPT *  Jupyter AI , an open-source project, brings generative AI functionalities, that help generate, debug, explain, answer questions on source code, and can even populate entire notebooks from natural language prompts. * Google has launched Duet AI , an always-on AI collaborator that offers assistance to users with all skill levels on building secure, scalable applications. Duet AI uses state-of-the-art generative-AI foundation models and is personalized and intent-driven, offering expert guidance. * Microsoft recently developed a Responsible AI Toolbox that encompasses interpretability, fairness, counterfactual analysis, and causal decision-maki

I love food and all aspects related to it. I participate in online forums like Seasoned Advice (which provides great insights on food safety, cuisines, hacks etc) have completed a 7-week course on Nutrition on Coursera , and keep exploring ways to eat healthy. I was happy to find recently the " Wikipedia of food " - OpenFoodFacts.org   Launched in 2012 by Stéphane Gigandet, the website crowd-sources food information from across the globe (over 145 countries). OpenFoodFacts has a system to assign scores to information about food products uploaded to its site through their app . This is useful for foodies & nutrition buffs to make the right eating choices and see how a product compares against a global database of similar items. As it is open data, anyone can re-use it for any purpose. It has been featured on Kaggle .  Open Food Facts has been a mentor organization for Google Summer of Code in 2018 , 2022 . Having both used & contributed to the database, I'm impre

This Week I Learned -  *  Flowchart to select a candidate Azure managed data store * Most Google Cloud services have Cloud Logging built in, such as App Engine Flexible and Standard Environments, Kubernetes, Istio, Cloud Functions, and Dataflow.  Admin Activity audit logs are kept for 400 days while Data Access audit logs are only kept for 30 days . * Nutanix is running an email campaign projecting itself as a VMware-friendly alternative. It starts with "vmWhere? Concerned about TCO, service levels, and more, due to Broadcom’s recent acquisition of VMware?" *  FreedomGPT is an uncensored and private AI chatbot launched by Age of AI, LLC. It makes use of Stanford's Alpaca models.  FreedomGPT Desktop App works even if you are completely offline * There is an AI Tutor "model" that can be configured based on a learner's requirements. It amazed me to know there are so many choices to how we can choose to learn  * IIT Madras offers an online B.Sc. course in Pr

I was amused to find that ChatGPT can not only translate between languages but also transliterate - OpenAI cofounder Greg Brockman in his TED talk says its good to be polite (to chatbots). I added "please" in my question as these bots may become our masters some day ;-) I provided a joke in Telugu script to ChatGPT and added in English - "explain this joke". Although it missed the punch line, it did a fair job understanding a question in mixed language and explaining some of the elements of the joke.