Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

Dan Go, a High Performance Coach to entrepreneurs points that an average person spends 4-5 hours a day on their phone . If they did this from the ages of 20 to 80 they would have spent a total of 10+ years of their lives on a screen. It's not the phones themselves that cause addiction. Addiction largely comes from the apps themselves. They are designed to capture your attention by altering some serious chemistry in your brain. He has the following suggestions to tackle phone addiction: Cultivate awareness by tracking screentime. Most smartphones come with a built-in feature that is usually called "Screen Time", "Digital Wellbeing" or a similar variation. Typical view on Vivo phones Typical view on Samsung phones Typical view on iPhone Remove triggers. Only keep essential apps on your phone. Make your phone ugly. Set your phone to greyscale/black & white. Change the environment. The best way to reduce phone time is to remove it from your environment entirely....

Thinking Like an Analyst is a 5-hour course for aspiring analytics & BI professionals looking to build the foundation for a successful career to understand what it takes to be a Data Analyst. It covers the following: Why Analytics? Data Analysis Workflow Measurement Planning Data Prep & Analysis Visualization & Dashboards The Analyst Toolkit These topics are well-explained with the help of frameworks & case studies. The key takeaways are highlighted at the end of each section.  Practical and engaging real-world advice, along with shared best practices, enriches the content.  The slide deck used during the course can be downloaded to follow along and also for future reference. I liked how the iterative process of designing and presenting the data on a dashboard is explained through progressive steps in a case study - Define the purpose > Choose the right metrics > Present the data effectively >  Eliminate clutter & noise > Use layout to fo...

This Week I Learned -  *  Azure Migrate application and code assessment tool for .NET (or AppCAT for short) allows you to assess .NET source code, configurations, and binaries of your application to identify potential issues and opportunities when migrating an app to Azure. AppCAT is available in two “flavors” – as a Visual Studio extension and as a .NET CLI tool.   *  On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models  - a 12 page report from the Center for Research on Foundation Models (CRFM) at Stanford University  *  The only way for paid subscribers to report an OpenAI issue is through their chatbot developed using GPT-3 at help.openai.com * The expanding use of artificial intelligence could also influence how we book online, what happens when flights are canceled or delayed and even how much we pay for tickets. * As of 2022, the number of developers on GitHub in India was more than eight million . More than 10 million software p...

From  The Executive's Guide to Generative AI  -  When evaluating projects, consider the feasibility, actionability, affordability, anticipated business value, and ultimate return on investment of each generative AI project. Commonly used generative AI Key Performance Indicators: Accuracy - Measure the accuracy of the generative AI model in producing relevant and correct outputs. This can be quantified using metrics such as precision, recall, F1 score, or mean squared error, depending on the nature of the use case.  Productivity - Assess the impact of generative AI on the productivity of the target persona or department. This could include metrics like the number of tasks completed per unit of time, response time, or reduction in manual effort required. Customer satisfaction - If the generative AI use case involves customer-facing applications, use customer satisfaction surveys or feedback to gauge how well the AI system meets customer needs and expectations. Cost sav...

Vertex AI is Google's end-to-end AI-ML Platform . Vertex AI Platform unifies the entire ML workflow from training to deployment. Source: Vertex AI home page Vertex AI provides several options for model training and deployment : AutoML lets you train tabular, image, text, or video data without writing code or preparing data splits. Custom training gives you complete control over the training process, including using your preferred ML framework, writing your own training code, and choosing hyperparameter tuning options. Model Garden lets you discover, test, customize, and deploy Vertex AI and select open-source (OSS) models and assets. Generative AI gives you access to Google's large generative AI models for multiple modalities (text, code, images, speech). You can tune Google's LLMs to meet your needs, and then deploy them for use in your AI-powered applications. Vertex AI offers the following Google proprietary foundation Gen AI model APIs : Gemini API - Multimodal da...

Guidance from Google's People + AI Guidebook about situations where an AI approach is probably better than a rule-based approach, and some in which it is not. When AI is probably better: Recommending different content to different users . Such as providing personalized suggestions for movies to watch. Prediction of future events. For example, showing flight prices for a trip to Denver in late November. Personalization improves the user experience . Personalizing automated home thermostats makes homes more comfortable and the thermostats more efficient over time. Natural language understanding . Dictation software requires AI to function well for different languages and speech styles. Recognition of an entire class of entities . It’s not possible to program every single face into a photo tagging app — it uses AI to recognize two photos as the same person. Detection of low occurrence events that change over time. Credit card fraud is constantly evolving and happens infrequently to...

Traditional Predictive AI-ML is not going away and AI Capabilities & tools are evolving - Predictive AI Regression & Classification  Forecasting Sentiment Analysis Entity Extraction Object Detection Generative AI Text, Image & Code Generation Text & Code Rewriting & Formatting Summarization  Extractive Q&A Image & Video Descriptions Multimodal Generative AI Natural Image Understanding Video Question Answering Automatic Speech Recognition & Translation Spatial Reasoning and Logic Mathematical Reasoning in Visual Contexts Generative AI can also synthesize data to enhance a predictive model's training set to improve predictive capabilities. If the limit to a better model is more data, artificial datasets can be created that can train AI without compromising privacy or relying on scarce real-world data.  From Current state of Generative AI Also see:  Generative AI for Predictive Analytics A 15-day email course on Generative AI

This Week I Learned -  *  CodePen is a popular online platform where developers can easily create and share HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code snippets, known as ' Pens .' It's a social space for front-end designers and developers, offering features like embedding pens on other websites, creating Collections to organize related pens, and utilizing a powerful in-browser IDE called Projects , which includes automatic preprocessing, drag-and-drop uploading, live previews, and website deployment. * As DevTools is popular with hackers who may deviously ask unsuspecting users to make changes pertaining to web pages within DevTools, the Edge browser now  shows this warning and asks for & verification - *  Surya  is a multilingual document OCR toolkit * Ozonetel, a Hyderabad-based telephony company, involved with the Swecha Movement, took this as a challenge and developed a 7 billion parameter Telugu small language model (SLM) called ‘AI Chandamama Kathalu’. The team a...

I like mobile web apps more than smartphone apps . A while ago, I discovered Minhaz's amazing HTML5 QR Code & Barcode Scanner JavaScript library . Using that I built a minimal web page that can scan a product barcode through a smartphone's mobile browser and then redirects user to the equivalent product's Open Food Facts web page to display its nutrition information. I have now extended that sample to scan an EAN-13 barcode off a packaged food product and then fetch just its name, image, Nutri-Score & Nova details using the Open Food Facts REST API .   Screenshot of the output in the Microsoft Edge browser on an Android phone Try out the no-frills  NutriScan 🥫🔍  web app and please let me know what you think. Here's the code if you're interested - Typically, the JSON returned by an API call looks like this - {     "code": "8906005504395",     "product": {         "image_thumb_url": "https://images.openfoodfacts...

Paraphrased from the HBR article  How to Red Team a Gen AI Model  - A red team is a group that pretends to be an enemy, attempts a physical or digital intrusion against an organization at the direction of that organization, then reports back so that the organization can improve their defenses. Red teams work for the organization or are hired by the organization.  It is a process of testing your cybersecurity effectiveness through the removal of defender bias by applying an adversarial lens to your organization. The term was popularized during the Cold War when the U.S. Defense Department tasked “red teams” with acting as the Soviet adversary, while blue teams were tasked with acting as the United States or its allies.  In October 2023, Biden's AI executive order mandated "red teaming" - a structured hacking effort to uncover flaws in certain high-risk generative models. Red teaming generative AI is specifically designed to generate harmful content that has no clear ...

The  15-day Generative AI email course by Armand Ruiz , Director of AI at IBM, provides bite-sized lessons on essential topics. Whether you're new to Generative AI or desiring an informative refresher, this course maps out the key terms and ideas you need through sticky content and visuals. An index of all the keywords referenced in the series: Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) Artificial Intelligence AI Engineer Auto-GPT  Base model BERT  Chatbots ChatGPT Chinchilla Classification  Content Generation Conversational AI  Convolutional Neural Network (CNNs)  Data Scientist Deep learning Diffusion  Discriminative Models EleutherAI Embeddings Fine Tuning Few-Shot Prompting Foundational model Generative AI Generative Adversarial Network (GAN)  Generative Models Generative Question-Answering (GQA). GPT  Granite  Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) Hyperparameters Insight Extraction LaMDA LangChain Large Language Model (LLM) Llama Low-Rank ...

Smartphone barcode scanners typically require installing a dedicated app. But what if your web app could access the camera and scan codes directly — no app required, just HTML and JavaScript? I tried Minhaz's nifty HTML5 QR Code & Barcode scanner and I'm bowled over by its simplicity. With hundreds of GitHub stars and forks , it's clear I'm not the only one impressed! I adapted Minhaz's sample code into a minimalist web page that scans a product barcode and redirects to Open Food Facts to display its nutrition information. Here's the code : You can also try it out live. Related:  *  Scanapp   *  HOW TO scan a barcode with an Android smartphone camera from a web page

This Week I Learned -  * StackExchange & Reddit host forums on niche topics like Reverse Engineering , Web scraping , open source products , social behavior . *  Web Dev Handbooks by Flavio Copes * Data gravity refers to the idea that as large amounts of data amass in a location or system, they attract additional applications and services, making data relocation more difficult and more expensive.  According to the Salesforce  State of Data and Analytics Report  Analytics and IT Leaders’ are taking a multi-pronged approach to address Data Gravity - * AI is like the trojan horse of Data Management - Wendy Batchelder, Chief Data Officer, Global Data Governance Leader, Salesforce * LongShot's GenAI product FactGPT fact checks your content and cross-references it with credible sources. *  Ninite.com curates popular & free desktop apps. It tracks software updates so when you have to install, you know you're getting the latest version. * Intere...

ipapi is an IP Location API that can fetch the location of a user - their city, country, Latitude / Longitude based on the IP address it detects from the browser making the function call. It can also get the Time Zone, Calling Code, Currency among other things.  Here's a minimal JavaScript code sample showing Geolocation with IPAPI API - Also see - Public APIs you can use

SWAYAM is a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) platform initiated by the Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India.  Courses delivered through SWAYAM are available free of cost. Learners wanting a SWAYAM certificate or the benefit of SWAYAM credit transfer to other Higher Educational Institutions have to register for the final proctored exams, pay a fee and sit for an exam at designated exam centers on specified dates.  The following nine National Coordinators produce and deliver the content for the courses:   AICTE (All India Council for Technical Education) for self-paced and international courses    NPTEL (National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning) for Engineering   UGC (University Grants Commission) for non technical post-graduation education   CEC (Consortium for Educational Communication) for under-graduate education ...

This Week I Learned -  * A permalink or permanent link is the address (URL) of a web page that is not expected to change throughout the lifetime of a page.  Permalinks are often rendered simply, that is, as clean URLs, to be easier to type and remember. Sometimes URL shortening is used to create them. * According to Jason Mayes' newsletter , there has been an exponential growth in the Web AI community (I feel like a proud father seeing his child grow up) due to a significantly huge push from folk even beyond Google's core Web ML teams ( TensorFlow.js , Chrome , MediaPipe Web ) who are really embracing Web AI thanks to commitment from companies like Hugging Face ( Transformers.js and HuggingFace.js ) and Microsoft ( Onnx runtime web ) investing in the web space giving Pytorch users a way forward to embrace client side web deployments in the browser too. He predicts that  in 2024 AI in JavaScript, client side in the browser, using technologies like WebGPU, WebAssembl...

IT consulting firm Gartner's Magic Quadrant is a tool that provides a graphical competitive positioning of technology providers in a complex and fast-evolving market.  These Magic Quadrant market research reports for different IT categories rely on proprietary qualitative data analysis methods to demonstrate market trends. The Magic Quadrant for Cloud Database Management Systems as of December 2023 recognizes & rates 19 companies: LEADERS Amazon Web Services Microsoft Google Oracle Alibaba Cloud MongoDB Databricks Snowflake CHALLENGERS InterSystems VISIONARIES IBM  Cloudera SAP  Teradata Redis Neo4j NICHE PLAYERS EDB Cockroach Labs Couchbase  Yugabyte 

From an article by Narasimhan Balasubramanian : Click on image to enlarge

Do you often type the same text over and over again?  Snippets Bookmarklet saves snippets of the text you need, in your browser storage with names of your choice & retrieves them with a single click.  Just click the bookmarklet anytime you find something you want to save for later. Give your snippet a name, and it will be stored securely in your browser. To view your saved snippets, click the bookmarklet again and select the name you gave it. The snippet will be inserted in the input element where you need it. I employed  Anthropic's Claude  AI assistant to generate bookmarklet code by prompting my requirement: Here's the compact version of the same code: Here's how to use it: Create a new bookmark in your browser. Edit the bookmark and set the name to something like "Snippets". Paste the above code into the URL or Location field. Alternatively drag and drop this link (after checking and adapting the words-per-minute rate) to the Bookmarks bar or Favorites ba...