Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

Highlights from  a TED talk  by Angela Lee Duckworth, a psychologist who has studied kids and adults in different kinds of challenging settings to find out who is successful and why  - In all those very different contexts, one characteristic emerged as a significant predictor of success. And it wasn't social intelligence. It wasn't good looks, physical health, and it wasn't IQ. It was grit.  Grit is passion and perseverance for very long-term goals . Grit is having stamina. Grit is sticking with your future, day in, day out, not just for the week, not just for the month, but for years, and working really hard to make that future a reality. Grit is living life like it's a marathon, not a sprint.    Talent doesn't make you gritty. Our data show very clearly that there are many talented individuals who simply do not follow through on their commitments. In fact, in our data, grit is usually unrelated or even inversely related to measures of talent.  T...

This Week I Learned -  *  Visual Paradigm Online is an online tool to create Azure architecture diagrams. *  Minimal APIs are a simplified approach for building fast HTTP APIs with ASP.NET Core.  *  SvelteKit is free and open source web framework software released under the MIT license. * Figma is a collaborative web application for interface design, with additional offline features enabled by desktop applications for macOS and Windows. Like Chrome Dev Tools, Dev Mode is like a browser inspector for your design file, and it brings design concepts—shapes, layers, and groups—closer to developer concepts like code, icons, and tokens. By hovering and clicking around the Figma canvas, you can find and export all the information you need, like measurements, specs, and assets, and uncover additional context from your design system. * Microsoft Learn currently has 25 Practice Assessments for Microsoft Certifications * If you host a LLM based chatbot or API in AW...

Highlights from a 2018  TED talk by Kai-Fu Lee : Deep learning is a technology that can take a huge amount of data within one single domain and learn to predict or decide at superhuman accuracy. For example, if we show the deep learning network a massive number of food photos, it can recognize food such as hot dog or no hot dog.  Or if we show it many pictures and videos and sensor data from driving on the highway, it can actually drive a car as well as a human being on the highway.  Deep learning has become the core in the era of AI discovery, and that's led by the US. But we're now in the era of implementation, where what really matters is execution, product quality, speed and data. And that's where China comes in. Chinese entrepreneurs, who I fund as a venture capitalist, are incredible workers, amazing work ethic.  The Chinese product quality has consistently gone up in the past decade, and that's because of a fiercely competitive environment. In Silicon Valley, ...

Cassie Kozyrkov , Chief Decision Scientist at Google has the gift of simplifying complex topics and presenting them eloquently in a relatable way through her social media posts. Here is a compilation of  her observations that I found interesting: AI As AI gets better, decision-making is going to become one of the most important skills in the world. AI isn't a threat. Bad decision making is. Ultimately, AI should serve society's best interests. It must be transparent, understandable, and aligned with human values. We have a shared responsibility to develop AI in a way that benefits everyone, not just a select few. Jargon in machine learning usually doesn’t deserve the shock and awe the name inspires. AI can be a thoughtlessness enabler . That’s both why it’s awesome and that’s why it’s dangerous. It’s wonderful when it allows a person to get their personal project automated with less thought and effort but it’s dangerous when the project isn’t just personal. When it affects othe...

Hackers can use Unicode tricks to hide phishing URLs by replacing Latin characters with Cyrillic characters. This allows them to create visually similar domain names that can deceive users.  If you look closely at the screenshot showing a web page opened in Firefox, the URL in the address bar shows "аpple.com" with a Cyrillic "а" (U+0430) instead of the ASCII "a" (U+0041) and there is also a padlock icon. A security researcher named Xudong Zheng created this proof-of-concept domain & an accompanying security certificate to illustrate an internationalized domain name (IDN) homograph attack .  Although Chrome and Edge browsers may provide warnings about potential hacks involving homographic URLs, it is important to remain cautious of similar scams conducted through other methods.  How to fix this issue? Look for options through browser settings or extensions to disable IDNs or display them using Punycode so that the browser will render the URLs in a way...

This Week I Learned -  * Oracle is offering free access to the OCI and Cloud Applications Business Process training and certifications , and two free certification exam attempts valid through Aug 31, 2023. * Model is a fancy word for recipe - Making Friends with Machine Learning: The Entire Course (6h:22m), Cassie Kozyrkov * Prompt engineering...differs from ChatGPT-style prompting because the prompts generated through prompt engineering are usually meant to be used repeatedly in high-volume, diverse situations in order to solve a specific problem reliably for an application. * There is also a lot of skepticism about whether prompt engineering can truly be described as "engineering" or if it's just "witchcraft" spouted by hype-chasers. -  Mitchell Hashimoto , co-founder HashiCorp * "GPT-4 is a tool, not a creature. It's easy to get confused. ... GPT-4 and systems like it are good at doing tasks, not jobs." - Sam Altman *  Sample code and notebooks...

This Week I Learned -  * In the brave new world of Generative AI, English is the high-level programming language; prompts are the syntax and semantics of code; tokens are the intermediary language; the foundation models are the runtime. -  Janakiram MSV * AI is the new electricity. Cloud is the power grid that generates the electricity . * Chatbots can go rogue and manipulate users emotionally .  Source: The Verge *  “Attention is All You Need” is the title of the 2017 paper that demonstrated the use of a self-attention transformer method on which ChatGPT is based . It was written by a team at Google Brain. *  Oracle Open Data makes large data sets available to researchers around the world. * Christoph Schuhmann, a German high school teacher and two other co-founders met on a Discord server for AI enthusiasts. Catalyzed by the launch of OpenAI’s DALL•E in January 2021, they decided to build their own image dataset. The nonprofit group’s datasets — notably...

Key points from the 44-minute LinkedIn Learning course Introduction to Prompt Engineering for Generative AI  by Ronnie Sheer: 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.  Prompt engineering refers to constructing inputs that help us get the most out of generative AI, and language models in particular. Large language models are trained on huge, huge amount of texts, almost the entire internet, enormous amounts of books. And then on top of that, sometimes they're fine-tuned for particular tasks. GPT-3, or Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3, refers to a model, or really, an ecosystem of models, which have been trained on enormous amounts of data. These models vary in size and capability. Some are optimized for zero-shot learning or few-shot learning , which are two kind of ways of looking at prompt engineering. In generative AI, token refers to a small unit that can...

A compilation of my browser DevTools tips to aid in web application development: HOW TO turn off internet access for a single browser tab while testing a web application   HOW TO grab text from a HTML list or dropdown with JavaScript & Dev Tools   2 ways to copy tooltip text from a web page   HOW TO disable JavaScript in a browser after the page loads   HOW TO turn off copy-pasting restrictions on web form fields of annoying websites   HOW TO change the look of websites you don't own within your browser  

This Week I Learned -  * A  nice interactive visual summarizing the design principles and best practices in the six conceptual areas or pillars of the Well-Architected Framework . * Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) which was launched in 2016 had a 2.6% market share in the USD500 billion cloud market in 2022, according to global market intelligence firm International Data Corporation (IDC). * Oracle was founded in 1977 and the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was among its first DBMS customers.  * Oracle is the preferred vendor in banking, financial services, public sector, telecom, and manufacturing domains despite competition from its arch-rival, the German software major SAP which was founded five years before Oracle. * In 2022, Oracle and Microsoft entered into a pact for deeper integration of their clouds, helping customers use multi-cloud environments. Oracle's database users can connect directly to Microsoft's Azure cloud and have access to Microsoft tools...