Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

" We can assist with anything  buddy ... except paying your taxes! "  Image source - WSJ

This Week I Learned -  * Microsoft's recent estimates show that the Crowdstrike outage impacted 8.5 million devices. The issue stemmed from a Crowdstrike cybersecurity software update that included a configuration change. This faulty configuration file stopped Windows machines from starting up. Although the outage was not triggered by a cybersecurity breach, malicious actors exploited the situation. Numerous phishing campaigns, masquerading as IT support or CrowdStrike, sent out harmful links or solicited funds to fix the issue. This event starkly illustrates the critical need for delivering high-quality software. * Modern artificial intelligence (AI) systems are powered by foundation models.  Llama 3 is a herd of language models  [PDF] that natively support multilinguality, coding, reasoning, and tool usage.  * Mistral Large 2 is not entirely open source like Llama, since developers are required to acquire a license for commercial use of Mistral's model. * The open source Llam

I was happy to learn about the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure 2024 Generative AI Professional Course with video tutorials and the Certification Exam (1Z0-1127-24) from their newsletter. I found it extremely useful, timely, and relevant. The course, with about 6 hours of videos, provided me with a comprehensive view of what it takes to build a Generative AI application. Although some parts reference OCI services, much of the course remains vendor neutral. Rohit Rahi and his team at Oracle have done a great job of structuring the beginner-friendly yet comprehensive course so well, covering all the essentials across four modules. The curriculum strikes an excellent balance between depth and accessibility.  While Gen AI output is typically non-deterministic, I was surprised to learn that they can be made completely deterministic under certain conditions. Specifically, in the OCI Gen AI service, setting the temperature parameter to 0 produces consistent, deterministic output for a given prom

In his insightful talk " We Are All in Sales " at SQLBits 2024 , Nick Harshbarger emphasizes that we unknowingly sell something every day, highlighting how developing the ability to promote our ideas and skills within our organizations can significantly advance our careers and propel us to new professional heights. Having spent time in technical pre-sales, the content resonated with me. Slides from his session - What is a SalesPerson? Traits - • Loud. • Pushy (borderline obnoxious), • They fill my Inbox with SPAM. • Call at the worst times possible. • Waaaaaay over-confident. • Did I say Loud? Expanded Definition • a person whose job is to sell a product or service in a given territory, in a store, or by telephone : a salesman or saleswoman  • A person whose job includes selling ideas, concepts, vision, direction, change, etc., up and down the org. What makes a SalesPerson According to Forbes Oct 5, 2021 Practices active listening. Finds emotional connection. Understands the

The Times of India carried a data story titled "The Job Report" on 20-07-2024 by Atul Thakur & Richa Gandhi  who also contribute to the paper's data analysis articles & its  Data Dive  section. It has good insights on India's employment landscape supplemented with charts - Bar chart from the report shows that a majority of employed Indians are self-employed (57.3%) followed by regular salary (20.9%) and casual labor (21.8%) In the total workforce of 621 million (62.1 crore), just 15 million ( 1.5 crore ) or 2.4% are Government employees Government data indicates that from 2014 to 2022, 220 million (22 crore) individuals applied for federal positions, with 722,000 being successful. While many applications were likely repeated attempts, a significant number of young Indians continue to pursue government employment annually, despite a flourishing economy and a growing private sector. The choropleth maps of India graphically show the unemployment data for youth u

This Week I Learned -  *  Discourse is an open source platform for community discussion & an alternative to Slack. Open Food Facts uses Discourse, Slack & Wikis for community discussions. *  Guidance for writing text descriptions (alt text) for digital images when creating HTML content *  pyspark.ai  is an English SDK for Apache Spark. It takes English instructions and compile them into PySpark objects like DataFrames. Its goal is to make Spark more user-friendly and accessible, allowing you to focus your efforts on extracting insights from your data. *  Enterprise Architecture on a Page v2.1  [PDF] * IBM's watsonx.ai supports open-source models from Mistral, Saudi Data and AI Authority (SDAIA) & Meta. It includes Mistral's popular Mixtral series of open-source mixture-of-experts models * Claude is now available as an Android app. * Many conversational AI platforms and chatbots require the use of voice datasets. The Vaani project by Bhashini, led by IISc-ARTPARK a

All things big and small, The good God made them all. Each one had its place, Until humans came into the race. Now, from rhinos to bees, Each species we displease. By destroying habitats and breaking the chain, We're driving countless creatures to the brink of pain. Image source: Reuters, The Times of India The first two lines are based on the poem by Cecil Frances Alexander (1848). I extended it with the help of Pi.ai

This Week I Learned -  *  Leaflet is an open-source JavaScript library for creating mobile-friendly interactive maps. At just around 42 KB of JS, it serves as a great alternative to Google Maps, offering all the essential mapping features most developers need. Initially created by Volodymyr Agafonkin, Leaflet is now maintained by a large community of contributors.  *  OCI Supercluster  allows the deployment of up to 32,768 GPUs per cluster, utilizing RDMA cluster networking and local storage for swift training and inferencing of extensive AI models. Companies such as Adept, Modal, MosaicML, NVIDIA, Reka, Suno, Together AI, Twelve Labs, and xAI utilize OCI Supercluster for training and inferencing next-generation AI models.  * The new " Chat with Documents " is a no-code RAG feature in watsonx.ai that allows AI developers to enhance a large language model's (LLM) knowledge base by grounding it with documents. This helps reduce the risk of the model generating incorrect o

I got know how the open source  GPT4All  can be used as an AI assistant for personal documents that cannot be shared over the internet from open-source champion & Data geek Nikhil VJ 's  notes . With GPT4All , you can chat with models, turn your local files into information sources for models (LocalDocs), or browse models available online to download onto your device. On similar lines, Google's NotebookLM is a new, conversational research tool designed to help you organize and explore your ideas and research. It allows you to upload multiple sources like web pages, documents, and transcripts and search through them by asking questions in a natural language format. This software is best used on a desktop computer and is currently available for personal Google accounts and enterprise Google Workspace or Google Workspace for Education users. However, since NotebookLM is proprietary and not self-hostable, it may not be ideal for working with sensitive or private documents.  Ol

If you're interested in keeping track of updates in Large Language Models (LLMs), consider bookmarking this page on the Information is Beautiful website . The interactive visualization there offers an excellent visual summary - Forrester has identified the most significant LLMs and researched, analyzed, and scored them . 

The Developer Console of your web browser (invoked through the keyboard shortcut F12) allows you to manipulate the Document Object Model (DOM) of any web page that you have loaded in your browser.  Microsoft Edge Developer Console This powerful tool enables you to explore, edit, and experiment with the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code of any web page, providing you with unprecedented control over the elements that make up a website. Let's say you want to remove the last 2 columns of a 3-column table using JavaScript in the browser's developer console, paste this code & see the columns vanish - // Select all table rows const rows = document.querySelectorAll('table tr'); // Iterate through each row rows.forEach(row => {   // Remove the last cell twice   row.removeChild(row.lastElementChild);   row.removeChild(row.lastElementChild); });

Tableau from Salesforce recognizes Tableau community leaders and data champions by awarding them the title of Tableau Ambassadors  for a one-year term. Nominations are invited every year for these seven branches: * Community Forum Ambassadors * Social Ambassadors * User Group Leader Ambassadors * Public Ambassadors * Academic Ambassadors * DataDev Ambassadors * CRM Analytics Ambassadors Many tech companies operate community initiatives. Microsoft's  Most Valuable Professionals (MVP)  program  has been celebrating technical community leaders for over three decades, and Google launched its  Google Developer Experts program  in 2012 to recognize outstanding contributors in the tech community.

This Week I Learned -  *  Business use cases featuring interactive demos, architectural diagrams, and code samples developed with watsonx .  *  How Andrej Karpathy is playing around with generative AI tools to build visual stories * The OCI Generative AI Certification course has some great learning material. A slide from the OCI Generative AI Certification course * Ola, the ride-hailing platform has discontinued its app’s integration with Google Maps and replaced it with in-house Ola Maps. According to its founder and CEO Bhavish Aggarwal, the move has enabled the company to save Rs 100 crore annually. Ola has also transitioned away from Azure. * IMDb has shared a selection of its massive dataset on Tableau Public, which allows users to explore, create, and share data visualizations online . * Raj Bhagat has hand-drawn a map representing every Indian city * Try to know more than the client about their own product or service - "Research. Research. Research. Find out as much about

The BSE SENSEX , also known as the Stock Exchange Sensitive Index, is like the VIP list of the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE), featuring 30 of the most stable and prosperous companies. Sensex stands for Stock Exchange Sensitive Index. The tile grid visualization shows the 30 companies that are part of Sensex and their performance as on 4th July 2024. Source: bseindia.com The BSE SENSEX is India’s most tracked bellwether index. It was launched on 1st January 1986. It has changed its nature over the years, from being full market-cap weighted to free-float market cap weighted. On July 25, 1990, the SENSEX closed at 1,001, marking its first venture into four-digit territory. It then crossed the 10,000 threshold on February 7, 2006, achieving this milestone over a span of 20 years.  Remarkably, it only took 8 months and 139 trading sessions for the SENSEX to climb from 70,000 to 80,000 points, gaining 10,000 points in the process as the line graph below shows. Source: Bloomberg, NDTV Profit In