Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned -  *  The Executive’s Guide to Generative AI  - Google *  Google Cloud Collective is a subcommunity on Stackoverflow that has over 47.2K members and its own Leaderboard. Champion Innovators are recognized by Google with special benefits. * Open Food Facts has compiled the first-ever open dataset of food packaging images and made it available freely on AWS .  Open Food Facts AWS images dataset  contains all images uploaded to Open Food Facts and the OCR results on these images obtained using Google Cloud Vision. *  Chatbot Arena  is a benchmark platform for large language models (LLMs) that features anonymous, randomized battles in a crowdsourced manner. * The Python library Openpyxl can be used to read and write Excel files   *  Gaussian splatting  is a rasterization technique for 3D reconstruction and rendering. * A new AI technique named ControlNet allows users to produce optical illusions containing hidden, subliminal messages. AI image-generating tool Stable

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SRE adoption is greatly influenced by the organizational culture at hand. Westrum organizational culture is one of a set of capabilities that drive higher software delivery and organizational performance. These capabilities were discovered by the DORA State of DevOps research program , an independent, academically rigorous investigation into the practices and capabilities that drive high performance. Similar to Dr. Westrum's findings, DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) research shows that a high-trust, generative culture predicts software delivery and organizational performance in technology. Teams can identify helpful practices to create a generative culture that fosters information flow and trust by examining the six aspects of Westrum's model of organizational culture, focusing on those behaviors seen in the generative culture: High cooperation. Messengers are trained. Risks are shared. Bridging is encouraged. Failure leads to inquiry. Novelty is implemented. Related: SR

This Week I Learned -  * Flavio Copes has a lot of useful Web development resources on his website including a curation of sample app ideas . *  Azure Developers - Python Day   2023 *  Amazon Web Services released the Simple Storage Service (S3) on March 14, 2006 . Netflix was the first to publicly make the decision to go 100% cloud in 2010.  * Designed by Google to process large image databases, Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) are powerful hardware accelerators specialized in deep learning tasks.  *  promptfoo is a tool for testing and evaluating LLM output quality.  *  GitHub Skills teaches how to use GitHub with interactive courses designed for beginners and experts. * The IBM watsonx powered AI Draw Analysis is a first-of-its-kind tennis statistic for the US Open that utilizes both structured and unstructured data from IBM Power Index & Likelihood to Win to project the level of advantage or disadvantage of all players in the singles draw. Each player will receive an IBM AI Dra

Oracle is offering free training and certification testing on in-demand skills across Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), AI/ML, data management, and Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications.  The Race to Certification Challenge includes free access to the OCI and Cloud Applications Business Process training and certifications, and two (2) free certification exam attempts valid from June 1, 2023, (12:00 a.m. GMT) through September 30, 2023 (11:59 p.m. GMT) . Digital training for OCI will be available for free continuously . Oracle’s free curriculum is available to anyone, at any skill level, across various IT roles.  The following training & exam topics will be of special interest to those beginning their Cloud journey: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure 2023 Foundations Associate (1Z0-1085-23) Oracle Cloud Data Management 2023 Foundations Associate (1Z0-1105-23) Oracle Cloud Infrastructure 2023 AI Foundations Associate (1Z0-1122-23) These exams are of multiple choice format.

Mediapipe is an  open source project  by Google that offers cross-platform Machine Learning and AI solutions for live and streaming media to further customize the solutions code to meet your application needs. Mediapipe offers Mediapipe Solutions and Mediapipe Framework MediaPipe Solutions provides a suite of libraries and tools for you to quickly apply artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) techniques in your applications. Mediapipe Framework is a low-level component for building machine learning pipelines.  The hand landmark model bundle detects the keypoint localization of 21 hand-knuckle coordinates within the detected hand regions. The Face Landmarker uses a series of models to predict face landmarks. The first model detects faces, a second model locates landmarks on the detected faces, and a third model uses those landmarks to identify facial features and expressions. The following models are packaged together into a downloadable model bundle: Face detection mo

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This Week I Learned -  *  ZXing and QuaggaJS are two popular open-source alternatives to commercial barcode scanning libraries like STRICH . Both libraries are open-source and available under a permissive license. * The JavaScript library available at mebjas/html5-qrcode on Github allows users to add a QR code scanner in their web applications. It works cross-platform and across different devices like PC, Mac or smartphones. Try the end to end implementation at Scanapp .  *  ZXing Barcode Scanner sample by Florian Biebel on CodePen * Jupyter AI 1.0 and 2.0 are out, connecting Jupyter notebooks and JupyterLab with powerful #GenerativeAI language models. Jupyter AI connects Jupyter with large language models (LLM) from providers such as AI21, Anthropic, AWS, Cohere, and OpenAI. LangChain to support all popular LLMs and providers * Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed the field of Natural Language Processing. The improvement from one generation of LLMs to the next seems at the

After taking the ACE Renewal Lab Exam on August 31st, I was notified today that my Google Cloud Associate Cloud Engineer Certification ( that I achieved in 2020 ) has been renewed! Back in June, I was pleased to receive this email that went like this - Google Cloud invites you to a Public Preview of a free, open-book, non-proctored lab to renew your Associate Cloud Engineer (ACE) certification.   What’s new? The ACE Renewal Lab Exam is a no-cost, non-proctored, hands-on lab exam. You can consult documentation and access the GCP search bar within the Google Cloud console, just as you would in a real-life setting. Who is eligible? All Associate Cloud Engineers whose certifications expired in 2023 or will expire in 2023 are eligible. Successful completion of the lab exam will renew your ACE certification for three years. When is it available? You can take the lab exam anytime during the three day window from August 29 to 31. If you’re not available during that window, more opportunities a

This Week I Learned -  * Traditional AI vs Generative AI  - Traditional AI systems are trained on large amounts of data to identify patterns, and they’re capable of performing specific tasks that can help people and organizations. But generative AI goes one step further by using complex systems and models to generate new, or novel, outputs in the form of an image, text, or audio based on natural language prompts . Generative AI uses a variety of techniques—including neural networks and deep learning algorithms—to identify patterns and generate new outcomes based on them. AI researchers have been able to train generative adversarial networks (GANs) to produce text that models human-like speech . A prime example is OpenAI’s application ChatGPT. Creating new data—which is called synthetic data —and augmenting existing data sets is another common use case for generative AI.  Natural-language understanding (NLU) models combined with generative AI have become increasingly popular to provide

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Browsers like Chrome, Edge & Firefox can open PDFs but I've made Edge my default PDF viewer as it comes with several advantages: It has useful annotation tools to add Text & Comments. You can also underline or draw and highlight text within a PDF.  Dictionary and Search are available through in-context menu  The Read Aloud feature lets you listen to PDF documents while multitasking. You have a range of natural sounding voices to choose from and the reading speed can be controlled through the " Voice options " menu from the toolbar at the top of the page. It's like having your own audiobook narrator. PDF browsing is secure from any attacks that plan to use compromised PDFs as an attack surface. Navigation features like Table of Contents & Page view make it easy to jump to different parts of long PDF files like ebooks. To change the default PDF viewer to Edge, follow either of these methods: Right-click on a PDF file and select Open with > Choose anoth

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There are several useful online courses to get started with AI & Generative AI.  Short Courses - Microsoft Learn learning path: Introduction to Generative AI  - 2 hr 33 min AI For Everyone  by DeepLearning.AI on Coursera (paid but content can be audited), Instructor - Andrew Ng, ~10 hours Generative AI for Everyone - Andrew Ng, 3 hours Generative AI Overview for Project Managers  - Project Management Institute (PMI)    Exploring Generative AI Learning Path , Janakiram MSV, 10 part course as  YouTube playlist   The AI Bootcamp 75 lessons, 5 hr 2 min Intro to Large Language Models  - Andrej Karpathy, 1 hour   Using Your Own Data with Large Language Models (LLMs) aka Making JohnBot! - John Savill, ~1 hour AI for Good Specialization by DeepLearning.AI on Coursera (paid but content can be audited) - 16 hours Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback - Nikita Namjoshi on DeepLearning.AI, 1 Hour Making Friends with Machine Learning: Cassie Kozyrkov - 126 videos, ~6 hours Generative

This Week I Learned - * In terms of speed and rendering quality SumatraPDF ranges at the top among free PDF-viewers since it has changed its library basis to MuPDF. PyMuPDF provides access to many important functions of MuPDF from within a Python environment.  * Ghostscript was first released in 1991 as a freely available open source (GPL) alternative to Adobe’s PostScript. Ghostscript became highly sought after by OEMs who wanted to license it for their own products. Artifex was created in 1993 to facilitate licensing of Ghostscript under commercial licensing terms. *  The latest IMDb data is available on-demand through a GraphQL-backed API via AWS Data Exchange . * Azure Form Recognizer is now Azure AI Document Intelligence . Azure Document Intelligence now supports Aadhaar and PAN card. Document Intelligence Identity document (ID) model combines Optical Character Recognition (OCR) with deep learning models to analyze and extract key information from identity documents. The API ana

If you want to get hands-on experience with Google Cloud, Qwiklabs / Google Cloud Skills Boost Labs and  Google Developers Codelabs are great resources to follow. While Qwiklabs / Google Cloud Skills Boost Labs are free for Partners, other users have to purchase credits. The labs give you temporary credentials to actual cloud resources, so you can learn Google Cloud using the real thing. There are a few free labs that don't require credits to use. Here's a list: A Tour of Google Cloud Hands-on Labs 30 minutes Understanding and Analyzing Your Costs with Google Cloud Billing Reports Provision Services with Google Cloud Marketplace  30 minutes BigQuery: Qwik Start - Console  30 minutes Using BigQuery in the Google Cloud Console  40 minutes BigQuery: Qwik Start - Command Line   30 minutes Getting Started with BigQuery Machine Learning  45 minutes Exploring NCAA Data with BigQuery  45 minutes Weather Data in BigQuery  35 minutes Troubleshooting Common SQL Errors with BigQuery  50