Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

The following line charts from ESPN Cricinfo visualize the trends over time showing how the action unfolded in the nail-biting final overs of the T20 World Cup Final between India & South Africa in Barbados.  Batting first, India set a target of 177 runs for the Proteas. Playing his last match before retirement from T20 cricket, Virat Kohli top scored with 76 runs in 59 balls. After a shaky start, Quinton de Kock & Tristan Stubbs build a good partnership that is finally broken after Axar Patel bowls out Stubbs in the 9th Over.  In the 17th Over, South Africa were cruising along well with Klassen poised to steer his team to victory.  The vertical axis shows percentages (ranging from 0% to 100%) indicating the likelihood of winning, while the horizontal axis represents the progression of the game in terms of overs completed. The red dots indicate the fall of wickets. Hardik Pandya took the first of his 3 wickets of the match, dismissing the explosive ...

This Week I Learned * Anthropic recently released its new Claude 3.5 Sonnet, which reportedly outperforms OpenAI’s best model, GPT-4o.  * LinkedIn Insights is a useful tool for job-seekers to research companies and understand the job market. Median tenure can indicate if a company is employee-friendly LinkedIn, with its vast and dynamic data on individuals and companies, serves as a barometer for the job market. * Airtel & Jio have hiked mobile tariff by 12-25%. Possibly as a sweetener, Jio will offer these applications (worth Rs 298/month) free for a year - JioSafe - Quantum-secure: Communication app for calling, messaging, file transfer and more (priced at Rs 199 per month) JioTranslate - AI-powered multi-lingual communication app: The app will be translating voice call, voice message, text and image (priced at Rs 99 per month). * Infosys is aiming to achieve 45% female representation in its workforce by 2030 as part of its ESG Vision 2030. * Akio Morita, who pioneered the Wa...

This Week I Learned -  * Google has launched the Gemini mobile app in India, offering support in English and nine Indian languages, including Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu. The app enables users to type, speak, or upload an image for assistance. For instance, taking a photo of a flat tire can provide instructions on how to fix it. Android users can access Gemini by downloading the app or opting in via Google Assistant, and activate it by corner swiping, pressing the power button on certain phones, or by saying "Hey Google." * Gemini Advanced, featuring a one million token context window, boasts the most extensive context capability among consumer chatbots globally. This feature enables it to process and comprehend a massive range of information, including documents as long as 1,500 pages, extensive email threads, and, potentially in the near future, hours of video content and large codebases. * Gemini Advanced has the capabilit...

Only 1.5% of Indians or about 2.2 crore citizens pay India's income tax in entirety. Source: Blume Ventures Another view of tax payers as a percentage of adult population - Source: The Times of India The share of personal income tax is higher than corporate tax Source: The Hindu The Goods and Services Tax, commonly known as GST, is an indirect tax that has replaced several other indirect taxes in India, including excise duty, VAT, and service tax. The GST Bill was enacted after its passage in both the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha in 2017. Subsequently, the GST legislation was implemented on July 1, 2017. The implementation of GST has contributed to the expansion of India's tax base . With GST as a unified national tax and a centralized monitoring system, the enforcement against non-compliance is faster and more effective. Sectors that were previously unorganized, such as construction, have now been incorporated into the tax framework.

This choropleth map illustrates what a brutal summer India is experiencing this year.  Source - Hindustan Times 14 out of 36 regions in the country have baked through over 15 heat wave days between March 1 and June 9 as per data from the India Meteorological Department (IMD).  Since normal temperatures vary across India, the criteria for declaring a heat wave also differs.   Generally, heat waves are declared when temperatures on the plains exceed 40°C, exceeding 37°C in coastal areas, and exceeding 30°C in the hills.  There's also a deviation factor involved, where temperatures must be 4.5 to 6.4 degrees Celsius above the average maximum for at least two consecutive days.  If the deviation is even higher (over 6.4 degrees Celsius), it's classified as a severe heat wave. The impact of these heat waves is further aggravated by factors like high humidity, high wind speed, and the duration of the events. 

This Week I Learned -  *  Oracle and Google Cloud have announced a Multicloud partnership to simplify cloud migration, multicloud deployment, and management * A nice comparison of AI tools by PashooTech *  How LLMs Work, Explained Without Math * The average hospital generates 137 terabytes of data daily.   *  AI Toolkit for Visual Studio Code simplifies generative AI app development by bringing together cutting-edge AI development tools and models from Azure AI Studio Catalog and other catalogs like Hugging Face.  * In an innovative approach, MIT Media Lab has developed a website where users can interact with a personalized digital representation of their future selves . This artificial intelligence-driven experience is meant to inspire more long-term thinking and behavior by allowing users to imagine and plan for their future. The future self, however, is not a crystal ball; it's simply a model generated from user-provided survey data and existing ...

Confident yet cautious, AI assistants tuck away their disclaimers in minuscule fonts, often hidden in plain sight.  Did you spot the following small print while chatting with the digital helpers? ChatGPT can make mistakes. Check important info. Gemini may display inaccurate info, including about people, so double-check its responses.  Claude can make mistakes. Please double-check responses. Pi may make mistakes, please don't rely on its information. Groq - Accuracy, correctness or appropriateness cannot be guaranteed.  Perplexity & Cohere don't have any explicit disclaimers but that doesn't mean they are completely reliable either. AI assistants can also be opinionated, but they have the advantage of using disclaimers to play it safe. For the question which emoji can be used to convey a "high five", the playful gesture to celebrate a shared success or accomplishment, check the answers from the popular AI assistants - ChatGPT - people often use the folded hands...

India defied the odds and predictions, securing a victory over Pakistan by six runs in a T20 World Cup match in New York. Source - @Deedy Earlier in the match, Pakistan had bowled out India to 119. Bumrah (3/14) and Hardik Pandya (2/24) gave nothing away while defending a paltry 120, and India restricted Pakistan to 113 for seven. The data-driven point in time metric, Win Predictor gets it wrong AI and ML, despite their data-driven nature, struggle to fully capture the complexities of a cricket match, where a multitude of variables, from player form to weather, can significantly impact the outcome.

This Week I Learned -  * Microsoft 365 Education is a productivity cloud suite. Microsoft 365 builds on top of Office 365 apps such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook and provides enhanced management, security, and compliance tools. Microsoft 365 Education has three tiers of academic plans: A1, A3, and A5. A5 has the most comprehensive plan features [ PDF ]. Microsoft partnered with experts to develop Learning Accelerators tools Reading Progress and Reading Coach. *  DBRX is Databricks' Foundation Model * In Forrester's 21-criterion evaluation of AI Foundation Models for Language providers, Google, Databricks, NVIDIA emerged as Leaders in Q2 2024. * The first car was driven by a neural network in 1988. Twenty-five years later, Andrej Karpathy took his first demo ride in a Waymo. A decade after that, the company received its driverless permit. That’s thirty-five years of rigorous  engineering, testing, refinement, and regulatory navigation to go from p...

Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner,  Lydia Leong's point of view -   Image generated by Copilot An increasing number of cloud mass migrations are technical successes but business failures -- that is, the applications work, but organizations haven't gotten their desired outcomes. This trend is the result of multiple different types of shifts in the market, and both customers and vendors are at fault. But cloud repatriation (mass migration reversal) is not a thing -- no enterprises are deciding to bring their workloads back on-premises after exiting their data centers in favor of cloud. Instead, organizations endure, revisit or redo ("remigrate") their post-migration situation. The most common missing desired outcome is TCO reduction, and there are four key things to blame: 1. Poorly-conceived migrations (FOMO on provider migration deals, resume-driven migrations, etc.) 2. The deterioration of the cloud MSP ecosystem (useless cloud provider MSP partner badging program...

Wikipedia makes good use of images, illustrations, graphs and charts to highlight details visually and make information sticky. A two milligram dose of fentanyl powder (on pencil tip) is a lethal amount for most people. Combo chart, Line Chart, Choropleth Map in the article Opioid epidemic in the United States Also see - Data Science Competitions & Learning Resources

This Week I Learned -  * Microsoft will be phasing out GitHub Issues as the feedback mechanism for content and replacing it with a new feedback system .  * The OCI Generative AI Professional Certification and Course is available for free till July 31st, 2024 * Canva offers a free AI music generator . Songs generated by the AI music generator are 100% royalty-free. The maximum song length generated by the AI music generator is 5 minutes. * Physical representations of data have existed for thousands of years. Now, with advances in digital fabrication, actuated tangible interfaces, and shape-changing displays, a new area of research is emerging: data physicalization . * The term "meme" was first introduced in 1976 in "The Selfish Gene," where evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins likened ideas to genes, describing them as 'replicators' that transmit from person to person. A meme can represent an idea, a phrase, or even people. *  The densely populated city-st...