Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned -  *  DevDocs combines multiple API documentations in a fast, organized, and searchable interface. DevDocs works offline, on mobile, and can be installed as web app. DevDocs is free and open source. *  Playwright is a framework for Web Testing and Automation. It allows testing Chromium, Firefox and WebKit with a single API. *  Little guide to building Large Language Models in 2024 by Thomas Wolf   * The development of advanced prompt engineering techniques and patterns has resulted in longer prompts for large language models (LLMs). These extended prompts can lead to increased API response latency, surpass the context window limits, and potentially cause higher API costs. LLMLingua utilizes a compact, well-trained language model (e.g., GPT2-small, LLaMA-7B) to identify and remove non-essential tokens in prompts. This approach enables efficient inference with large language models (LLMs), achieving up to 20x compression with minimal pe...

This Week I Learned -  *  Hard and soft skills for developers coding in the age of AI : Prompt engineering Code reviews  Testing and security  Communication  Problem solving  Adaptability  Ethical thinking  Empathy * With AI gathering context of legacy code and processes within your repositories, GitHub Copilot Enterprise can help maintain consistency and best practices across an organization’s codebase when suggesting solutions. * Parts of a URL - Source: url-parts.glitch.me *  briefsky.app is a free, open source frontend to a weather app that can be configured to use a variety of weather providers *  piped.video is a privacy-friendly YouTube frontend *  Emoji Combiner is an online tool to combine any two emojis to form an entirely new emoji. * Google Cloud was the first hyperscaler to eliminate network data transfer fees in a move to support an open, interoperable ecosystem in January 2024. Two months later, AWS responde...

This is the first in a series I've planned to document unusual and quirky sightings on the Weird Wide Web. While most websites have a disclosure in the footer in small font that they place cookies on your device, Ogilvy generously lists out the exact varieties of cookies they use, like chocolate chip and oatmeal raisin 😉 - As a wise movie character in a recent movie pointed out, the environmental changes we're seeing aren't just a case of global warming - they're a global warning ! A funny exchange in "Murder Mubarak" I was intrigued to see weather info and alerts on the Microsoft Edge browser Start page that led me to interesting graphics and visualizations that I've not see before for local weather.  I feel these type of visualizations are a great way to inform the general public about weather conditions rather than plain numbers.

This Week I Learned -  *  Anthropic’s Claude 3 models are now available in Google Cloud Vertex AI . The Claude 3 family joins over 130 models already available in Vertex AI Model Garden. Claude models are offered in Vertex AI as managed APIs — meaning customers can concentrate on building groundbreaking applications instead of worrying about backend complexity or the management overhead of underlying infrastructure.   * All Claude 3 models boast improved fluency in non-English languages, as well as vision capabilities that unlock tasks ranging from image metadata generation to insights extraction across PDFs, flow charts, and a diverse range of other formats. * The New Stack Better, Faster, Stronger: How Generative AI Transforms Software Development eBook  (2024, 45 pages) by Janakiram MSV *  Cassie Kozyrkov on current state of AI - " The truth is, no one knows exactly where we're headed. We are building the plane while it's taking off.  Wh...

David Perell , writer, founder & instructor, Write of Passage explains his idea of Personal Monopoly - The Internet rewards unique people. Find your unique combination of skills, interests, and personality traits.  I call this a Personal Monopoly. Become the only person in the world who does what you do.  Then, tell the world by sharing your knowledge. Visual summary by Carole Alalouf Below are some of his thoughts on this topic, taken from his bite-sized tweets: We are often blind to our own Personal Monopolies. Like fish in water, we don't know how to explain what we do so we depend on others to define our work for us. Listen to others describe your work. Then, double down on the best summaries . As you build your Personal Monopoly, listen for C.U.E.S: 1) Complementary: Greater than the sum of its parts. 2) Unusual: A combination of skills rarely seen. 3) Experiential: Inspired by unique events in your life. 4) Specific: Niche topic where you have lots of knowledge. Whe...

Popular AI Assistants/Chatbots that you can conditionally use for free - ChatGPT - powered by OpenAI's GPT LLMs. Prompt examples & guidance Copilot  - built on a combination of advanced large language models at Microsoft. Gemini  chatbot was upgraded to the Gemini LLM in December 2023. Check Google AI  Prompt best practices  to make the best out of it. NotebookLM is built using the standard Gemini 1.5 Pro and 1.5 Flash models without any specialised fine-tuning. Perplexity   - choose from GPT, Claude, and Perplexity models. Groq - choose from Gemma ,  Llama & Mixtral LLMs  Claude  is powered by the mid-range Claude 3 Sonnet. The free version uses Claude Haiku in case of increased traffic. Claude Prompt Library  has 60+ examples. Cohere Coral  is powered by Command , an English-only model Pi  is powered by "Inflection-1", a proprietary large language model developed and trained by Inflection AI entirely ...

This Week I Learned -  * MERN stack is a popular JavaScript framework used for building web applications. It is an acronym for MongoDB, Express.js, React, and Node.js. *  Postman Student Programs are programs designed to promote API literacy amongst students and educators. * While in technical parlance the “Cloud” might refer to the pooling of computing resources over a network, in popular culture, “Cloud” has come to signify and encompass the full gamut of infrastructures that make online activity possible, everything from Instagram to Hulu to Google Drive. The Cloud now has a greater carbon footprint than the airline industry. A single data center can consume the equivalent electricity of 50,000 homes. -  Steven Gonzalez Monserrate , anthropologist and PhD candidate at MIT * Copilot GPTs let you customize the behavior of Microsoft Copilot on a topic that is of particular interest to you.   * Soon, Copilot Pro users will also be able to create their own Copilo...

A mnemonic is a word or phrase that helps you remember something by using the first letters of each item. For example, Indian students are taught the mnemonic “VIBGYOR” to help them remember the colors of the rainbow. I asked Bing Copilot for a mnemonic with the letters A, I, I, T, F, B, and D to remember something I was reading. It came up with these: All Indians Invest Time For Better Development: A sentence that encourages Indians to work hard and improve their skills. Anna Is In Trouble For Breaking Dishes: A sentence that tells a story about a girl named Anna who broke some dishes and got into trouble. Apple Ice-cream Is Too Freezing But Delicious: A sentence that describes the taste of apple ice-cream. Always Include Interesting Topics For Blog Design: A sentence that gives advice for creating a good blog. The responses were quick and impressive!

This Week I Learned -  *  Globe Explorer  by Brian Machado is a visual way to breakdown any topic. It uses LLMs to understand your query, and generate an exhaustive page on that topic visually, allowing you to explore information in a way that search engines can't understand. It allows you to go from big picture ideas to the knowledge you need. * Multi-modal LLMs as a watchman - " Act as a security camera watching entry door , the owners are not at home, there should be no person on the property. Do you see any suspicious activity on this image?" *  LLaVA is a vision language assistant using Llama. * In designing the Great Seal, Thomson placed the Latin words "Novus Ordo Seclorum" beneath a pyramid of 13 steps to represent the 13 colonies that laid the foundation of American democracy. It means "a new succession of ages" and signals the beginning of the new American era in 1776. The phrase Novus ordo seclorum is one of two Latin mottos on the reverse...