This Week I Learned - Week #30 2024
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 Llama 3.1 with 405 billion parameters is comparable to OpenAI’s GPT 4, which is rumoured to have over a trillion parameters.
* The search-focused AI chatbot firm Perplexity is backed by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and semiconductor giant Nvidia.
* SearchGPT from OpenAI is an artificial intelligence-powered search engine with real-time access to information from the internet.
* Singapore's Government Technology Agency (GovTech) hosted the first GPT-4 live prompt engineering tournament "Prompt Royale".
* Chatbots such as Open AI’s ChatGPT can write poetry, summarize books and answer questions, often with human level fluency. These systems can do math, based on what they have learned, but the results can vary and be wrong. They are fine-tuned for determining probabilities, not doing rules-based calculations. Likelihood is not accuracy, and language is more flexible, and forgiving, than math. - Steve Lohr
* The cool & colorful Github home page of Sadukie, the couple nickname of Sarah Dutkiewicz, a Microsoft MVP.
* OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Meta’s Llama have started showing enterprise grade support for Hindi, Marathi, Kannada and other Indian languages across text and voice.
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| Source- @tomaspueyo |
* Mexico is so huge it’s hard to comprehend. You can fit 30 European countries in Mexico and still have room to spare
* “The Greenwich Meridian is not the first prime meridian. There were others in the past. In fact, many centuries before Europe, India had a prime meridian of its own! It was called Madhya Rekha (or middle line) and passed through the city of Ujjayini (today Ujjain), which was a reputed centre for astronomy over many centuries. Varahamihira, a famous astronomer, lived and worked there some 1,500 years ago. Indian astronomers were aware of the concepts of latitude and longitude, including the need for a zero or prime meridian. The Ujjayini meridian became a reference for calculations in all Indian astronomical texts.” - the newly-revised Class VI NCERT social science textbook
* Bogg Bags are made from EVA, the same material as Crocs, and feature a customizable design with perforated holes for attaching charms.
* WHOOP is an American wearable technology company headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts. Its principal product is a health & fitness tracker tracker, which measures, among other things, heart rate variability (HRV).
* Taylor Swift is the first billionaire ($1.3 billion as of May 2024) with music as the main source of income, and the highest-grossing female touring act.
* In 18th- and 19th-century German philosophy, a Zeitgeist is an invisible agent, force, or daemon dominating the characteristics of a given epoch in world history.
* Research from Harvard University and Google in 2010 estimated that there are 1,022,000 English words, and this number is expected to increase by about 8,500 each year. This figure includes various forms of the same word and archaic words that are no longer in common use. The Oxford English Dictionary defines approximately 600,000 word forms, of which 171,476 are considered currently in use.
* English Grammar through YouTube Shorts -
* Amazon anticipates lower sales for the next quarter, blaming consumer distractions due to major events like political unrest and the Olympics.
* “Sleep is our competition.” - Reed Hastings, Netflix Co-Founder
* “In nature there’s no blemish, but the mind. None can be called deformed but the unkind.” - Shakespeare
* A fine is a tax for doing wrong. A tax is a fine for doing well.
* "Modern attention spans are like a browser with too many tabs open" -#BrainstormedWithBots
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