Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned -  *  Vega-Altair is a declarative visualization library for Python.  Isotype Visualization shows the distribution of animals across UK and US, using unicode emoji marks rather than custom SVG paths.  * Pandas AI is a Python library that uses generative AI models to supercharge pandas capabilities. It was created to complement the pandas library, a widely-used tool for data analysis and manipulation. It can be used to summarize pandas data frames data by using natural language, plot complex visualization, manipulate dataframes, and generate business insights. *  Generative AI mirrors the levels of professionalism, clarity, and detail in the prompts you provide . *  Otter.ai aids in transcription by generating meeting summary & notes in real time *  OpenAI's Whisper is a general-purpose speech recognition model. It is trained on a large dataset of diverse audio and is also a multitasking model that can perform multilingual ...

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REST (Representational State Transfer) : Championing simplicity and ubiquity, REST stands as an architectural style that prominently leverages HTTP methods . Its design facilitates effortless interaction with resources, establishing it as a go-to model for numerous applications and contemporary APIs. SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) : As a heavyweight contender within the API landscape, SOAP thrives on complexity and potency. It employs XML to define structured communication. While it necessitates a SOAP client and server, it compensates with its resilience and robustness, akin to a well-constructed off-road vehicle conquering rugged terrains. GraphQL: Emerging as a luminary in the API cosmos, GraphQL offers adaptability and precision. It empowers clients to request precisely what they require, minimizing redundancy and enhancing performance. Think of it as a personal shopper—providing precisely what's requested, no more and no less. gRPC (Google Remote Procedure Call): Within ...

This Week I Learned -   *  Example of an LLM agent architecture for a product documentation chatbot * What made Netflix a success story?  A big part of it was luck, I’m not gonna lie: the right time, right place, right technology, right market, all coinciding. And a big part was a culture of experimenting and refining that let us turn an idea into a service that actually worked. But underneath all that was a critical tension. Reed (Hastings, co-founder of Netflix), applying relentless, unsentimental logic in evaluating every concept; and me, with an endless supply of new ideas and enthusiasm. And crucially, we were both OK with that. We debated, analyzed, revisited, and threw things out, and we still kept going. *  mSeva AppStore is an Indian government-owned mobile application hosting platform * Tata Sons has invested Rs 18,943 crore into digital and e-commerce businesses through Tata Digital. -0- * Hills are easier to climb than mountains. They are less ...

Patrick Winston's How to Speak talk has been an MIT tradition for over 40 years. Offered every January, the talk is intended to improve your speaking ability in critical situations by teaching you a few heuristic rules. Summary based on notes by @BoyInTech & other YouTube commentators - 00:00 🎖 Communication skills are vital for success in life; speaking, writing, and idea quality matter. 01:25 🏆 Knowledge, practice, and inherent talent influence effective communication; knowledge matters most. 02:20 📢 Learning various speaking techniques can significantly impact your success; a non-linear process. 03:17 📵 Avoid distractions during learning; laptops and cell phones off to engage fully. 04:39 🚀 Don't start with a joke, start with a promise, outlining what listeners will gain from the talk .  06:01 🔄 Repetition and cycling ideas can help ensure better understanding among the audience. 06:58 🧱 Build a fence around your idea to differentiate it from others and avoid c...

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More of my AI co-creations Two of the well-known problems in A.I. research are about maintaining “alignment” and avoiding “hallucinations.” Alignment involves an A.I.’s ability to carry out the goals of its human creators — in other words, to resist causing harm in the world. Hallucinations are about adhering to the truth; when A.I. systems get confused, they have a bad habit of making things up rather than admitting their difficulties.  One primary criticism of systems like ChatGPT, which are built using a computational technique called “deep learning,” is that they are little more than souped-up versions of autocorrect — that all they understand is the statistical connections between words, not the concepts underlying words.  -  ChatGPT Has a Devastating Sense of Humor  

This Week I Learned -  * HTML condenses whitespaces.  Whitespace is any string of text composed only of spaces, tabs or line breaks (to be precise, CRLF sequences, carriage returns or line feeds). The presence of whitespace in the DOM can cause layout problems and make manipulation of the content tree difficult in unexpected ways, depending on where it is located. Most whitespace characters are ignored by CSS, but not all of them. *  Periodic table  of Elements  created with CSS grid * For some time, containerization was a Linux-only feature. Windows applications could not benefit from containers. That changed with Windows containers and their subsequent support in Kubernetes and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). *  Free Datasets for Analytics Projects *  Open Government Data (OGD) Platform - India *  Mastodon is free and open-source software for running self-hosted social networking services.  * There are 15,048 public repositories whic...

To capture a screenshot of a frame of a video, you can store it in a canvas element using the drawImage() function using JavaScript & display it using img element or download it.  From the sample by Ian Devlin To capture the image using this technique, the video should be served through a < video > tag, not an iframe or object or embed.  // Get handles on the video and canvas elements var video = document.querySelector('video'); var canvas = document.querySelector('canvas'); // Get a handle on the 2d context of the canvas element var context = canvas.getContext('2d'); // Define some vars required later var w, h, ratio; // if you want to preview the captured image, // attach the canvas to the DOM somewhere you can see it. You need to set it to the size at which you want to save the resulting image. You  can have a fixed dimension or you can set it to a multiple of the video size. Just make sure you run that inside a 'loadedmetadata' event on the...

A nice example from the Machine Learning for Web Developers (Web ML) video course (47 videos) by Jason Mayes : A machine learning model is essentially an algorithm that transforms numerical inputs into numerical outputs used in applications.  On the left is a magnified image of a person. Now, as a human, you can probably make out where the face is pretty fast. But a computer cannot see objects like you and I can. It just sees numbers, as shown by the middle image. Here, numbers from 0 to 255 represent different shades of gray. And on the right-hand side is what would be fed into your Machine Learning model as an input. Do you still see the face in that? Well, as a human, it's nearly impossible to recognize in this form. But this is what your Machine Learning model must learn from and some how take these numbers to produce some output that represent how sure it is that a face is in those input numbers. And this is why the quality of training data is very important. Generally speakin...

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This Week I Learned -  * Magenta is an open source research project exploring the role of machine learning as a tool in the creative process. This Tone Transfer demo link shows how to generate audio and turn your voice into a musical instrument of your choice.   * Joshua Lochner (original creator of Transformers.js), now at Hugging Face, has released a legendary demo that can transcribe your audio recordings super fast right in the browser powered by WebRTC and Web ML tech. - Whisper Web *  Gorilla is an  open-source , Apache 2.0 licensed (use commercially without any obligations) LLM tailored to serve API calls for your stated tasks. It is trained on three massive machine learning hub datasets: Torch Hub, TensorFlow Hub and HuggingFace.  With Gorilla CLI , you can simply state your objective, and the tool will generate potential commands for over 1500 APIs, including Kubernetes, AWS, GCP, Azure, and many more.  * The Gunicorn "Green Unicorn" ...

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