This Week I Learned - Week #39 2023

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 Diffusion gives users more control over the generated images by specifying extra inputs and allows the creation of images or words inside other images.

* Robots may be getting better at proving they’re humans than even humans are - If your account is flagged for unusual activity, Twitter has opted for an unfamiliar form of verification to get you back in - with the Arkose challenge. The Arkose challenge is a bit like CAPTCHA in that it’s designed to separate the humans from the autonomous bots. 

* Wishful thinking - A map illustrating Christopher Columbus’s image of the world before his first voyage in 1492. 

Columbus ignored the (correct) measurements of Eratosthenes from some 1700 years earlier. Compounded by his own wishful thinking and wrong mathematical assumptions, he estimated Asia was about 2,500 miles west of Spain. He was mistaken by roughly 8,000 miles.

* Burkey Belser designed the ubiquitous nutrition facts label. His creation is celebrated as a triumph of public health and a masterpiece of graphic design. Millions of people use it every day.

* India consumes over 50% of the world’s lentil production. Canada is India's main import source of lentils. - Economic Times