Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned -  *  JSONBin.io provides a simple REST interface to store & retrieve your JSON data from the cloud. * 10 Ways to Add Value to Your Dashboards with Maps  by Sarah Battersby, Research Scientist, Tableau [ PDF , 17 pages] *  IBM MQ was launched in 1993. It was originally called MQSeries and was renamed WebSphere MQ in 2002. It was renamed to IBM MQ in 2014. IBM MQ is a very successful product widely used in the financial sector.  * The AWS Solutions Architect – Professional certification exam covers the most services (around 98) while the Security - Specialty exam covers the least. *  State of AI Report 2023 *  Perplexity Lab's LLMs, pplx-7b-online and pplx-70b-online, are online LLMs because they can use knowledge from the internet, and thus can leverage the most up-to-date information when forming a response . These online models are accessible for free via Perplexity Lab's LLM playground. * Perplexity Lab's pplx-a...

These engineering blogs are great places to learn about creative ideas and gather insights: Netflix TechBlog   Uber Blog   Cloudflare Blog   Engineering at Meta   LinkedIn Engineering  Discord Blog   AWS Architecture   Slack Engineering   Stripe Blog   Canva Engineering Hotstar Blog DoorDash Engineering The Airbnb Tech Blog StackOverflow Blog OpenAI Blog Medium Engineering Also see: A bigger list of Engineering Blogs

I enjoyed the 45-minute MS Ignite talk GitHub Copilot and AI for Developers: Potential and Pitfalls by Scott Hanselman and Mark Downie as it revealed interesting insights in an entertaining way. I liked that the deck and transcript are also shared. What made the talk engaging to me - Anecdotes - Scott Hanselman is as much a gifted raconteur as he is a tech whiz. He can unscramble complex topics to both tech & non-tech audiences with empathy. His anecdotes have conversations peppered with thought provoking questions - Is the AI in the room with me now?  Is the AI going to hurt me?  Is it a virus?  Why is Alexa not smarter? Should you talk to your computer?  Should you treat it like a human?  Should you be kind to it?  Should we name them?  We have to ask ourselves, how does it know (about a recipe)? How does it know anything about food? How do I know that the recipe is not going to kill me?  Pop Culture References -   if you a...

This Week I Learned -  *  Grocy is a web-based self-hosted groceries & household management solution *  DuckDB is an in-process SQL OLAP database management system. It is free & open-source *  DuckDB is designed to support analytical query workloads, also known as Online analytical processing (OLAP). It leverages a SQL query execution engine capable of running complex queries on large datasets. * DuckDB is the SQLite for Analytics . It is great for interactive data analysis jobs, such as joining or aggregating multiple large tables.  SQLite is an embedded online transaction processing (OLTP), whereas DuckDB is an embedded online analytical processing (OLAP). * DuckDB  is truly serverless like SQLite. No server, no infrastructure needed to use. DuckDB can query CSV or Parquet files available on an S3 bucket or locally. * DuckDB is way more versatile than Polars or Pandas. DuckDB is generally faster than Pandas when it comes to execu...

This Week I Learned -  *  Mistral AI has released Mixtral 8x7B , a high-quality sparse mixture of experts model (SMoE) with open weights. Licensed under Apache 2.0. Mixtral outperforms Llama 2 70B on most benchmarks with 6x faster inference. It is the strongest open-weight model with a permissive license and the best model overall regarding cost/performance trade-offs. It matches or outperforms GPT3.5 on most standard benchmarks. It gracefully handles a context of 32k tokens. It handles English, French, Italian, German and Spanish. It shows strong performance in code generation. * Ola founder Bhavish Aggarwal unveiled its first large language model (LLM) 'Krutrim. It has the ability to use Indian languages and an Indian context. Krutrim in Sanskrit means 'Made artificially'.  * Microsoft Copilot Studio - Implementation Guide [ PPTX ] * OCI’s latest managed PostgreSQL service is featuring 3X faster performance compared to self-managed clusters and 60% less cost than Amazon...

Data Governance is the practice of creating processes, frameworks, and roles to manage an organization’s data. Used strategically, it can help bolster data trustworthiness.  What Data Governance means to different companies - Source - Salesforce  State of Data and Analytics Report compiled following a survey of Analytics and IT Leaders A Data Governance tool aids in the process of creating and maintaining a structured set of policies, procedures, and protocols that control how an organization’s data is stored, used, and managed. A Data and Analytics Governance Platform is a set of integrated business capabilities that helps business leaders and users evaluate and implement a diverse set of governance policies and monitor and enforce those policies across their organizations’ business systems. Examples include: Atlan OvalEdge Microsoft Purview SAP Data Intelligence Cloud IBM Cloud Pak for Data Informatica Cloud Data Governance and Catalog Informatica Axon Data Governance The ...

This Week I Learned -  *  Streamlit is an open-source app framework for Machine Learning and Data Science teams *  FoodData Central is an integrated data system that provides expanded nutrient profile data and links to related agricultural and experimental research. It provides nutrition data of ~500K branded food products. The FoodData Central API provides REST access to FoodData Central (FDC). USDA FoodData Central data are in the public domain and they are not copyrighted. They are published under CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) * Gemini succeeds PaLM 2, the current foundation model from Google. * Internal tests showed that Q, Amazon's AI-powered assistant that enables employees to query documents and corporate systems, could leak confidential information from Amazon such as internal discount programs, unreleased features, and locations of AWS data centers. Amazon spokespeople called such scenarios hypothetical and denied that Q had leaked such information. Amazon ...

ChatGPT Plus Custom instructions feature allows you to add preferences or requirements that you’d like ChatGPT to consider when generating its responses. The model will consider the instructions every time it responds, so you won’t have to repeat your preferences or information in every conversation.  For example, a teacher crafting a lesson plan no longer has to repeat that they're teaching 3rd grade science. A developer preferring efficient code in a language that’s not Python – they can say it once, and it's understood. The always-innovating brainiac & Data Scientist S Anand considers ChatGPT to be his favorite team member. He generously shares his creative tricks and hacks. Recently, he blogged about how he has been able to get ChatGPT to work better with him through the following ChatGPT Custom Instructions: Be terse. Speak directly.  Avoid unprompted advice or clarifications. Do NOT hedge or qualify. Do not waffle. Never apologize. Suggest follow-up prompts for ope...

This Week I Learned -  * HTTP/3 builds on the foundations laid by HTTP/2 but introduces significant changes, primarily by shifting from TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) to QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connections) as the underlying transport protocol. - The Valley of Code * From the Chrome Developer Tools Network panel, you can override HTTP response headers and web content , including XHR and fetch requests, to mock remote resources even if you don't have access to them or the web server. * A VSIX package is a .vsix file that contains one or more Visual Studio extensions, together with the metadata Visual Studio uses to classify and install the extensions.  *  Replicate lets you run machine learning models with a few lines of code, without needing to understand how machine learning works. *  Chatbot Arena lets you chat with any two models among these side-by-side: GPT-3.5: GPT-3.5 by OpenAI GPT-3.5-Turbo-1106: GPT-3.5-Turbo-1106 by OpenAI GPT-4-Turbo: GPT-4-T...

I had the pleasure of attending the "AI/ML for Developer Productivity" talk at the Swecha DevDay multi-track event at the ServiceNow office in Knowledge City, Hyderabad.   Shashikanth & Dhiraj spoke about the Chandamama Kathalu project . Students from 25+ colleges and software engineers from 10+ companies  participated in an AI Datathon on November 16th, 2023 to create a dataset to train a SLM . One of the valuable insights I gained was about  VSCodium , a community-driven, freely-licensed binary distribution of Microsoft’s editor VS Code and the Hugging Face extension. Shashikanth's engaging talk on "Using Language Models for Software Development" addressed common challenges faced by developers. Through relatable examples, he demonstrated how Language Models like ChatGPT can assist in various aspects of software development, including code generation, documentation, testing, refactoring, debugging, and business communication. He humorously emphasized how L...

There is a French food item that I'm embarrassed to admit I didn't know about. (I'm also embarrassed that I could not spell embarrassed and the browser spell-checked it for me). Thankfully we now have LLMs to ask the stupidest of questions without being judged (I think...right?). I created  Global Cuisine Explorer to help me fill my knowledge gaps. Type a food item you want to know more about it and within seconds you can get a tidy description of that item and an image. The results may sometimes be wrong and the images hilarious but hopefully they'll get better with time. There is a chat interface to ask questions such as: How many calories are in a typical serving? What is the preparation time? While testing I discovered new things - Having only eaten regular Sandesh, I got to know there are many variants including Nolen gur sandesh which the chatbot tells me is made with palm jaggery and has around 120-150 calories per piece. Hope it is not bluffing! The chatbot a...