Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned -   * "India continues to remain a super important market for Meta globally. It’s one of the largest user markets for us and the trends that we’re seeing here are definitely about continued growth and engagement across all our platforms. It’s not just Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp, but even for the recently launched Threads, India is one of the largest markets globally with over 200 million downloads. We’re seeing continued momentum and growth, across the board. Also, we are witnessing an equally strong adoption of newer products such as AI platform Llama. India provides the largest user base for Meta’s platforms. I think we are almost sort of using India as the playbook, you know, for global. Consider this: India was one of the first countries to test and launch (Instagram) Reels in 2020. Today, it’s one of the strongest products that we have globally. India is also the first country where we launched Payments on WhatsApp Business. Also, India is the b...

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Irwin Jacobs is the founding Chairman and CEO Emeritus of Qualcomm, a company that played a crucial role in the development and commercialization of digital wireless technology.  The HarvardX course, " Technology Entrepreneurship: Lab to Market ," includes an interview where he offers valuable insights into how innovation drove Qualcomm to industry leadership. Jacobs's journey began in academia. He spent seven years as a faculty member at MIT, teaching a senior-level communications course and co-authoring a book on communication theory. While teaching, Jacobs realized the potential of applying his theoretical knowledge to real-world problems. This led him to co-found Linkabit, a company that focused on applying communication theory to develop practical products. Linkabit's success, achieving consistent profitability and growth without relying on venture capital, demonstrated Jacobs's ability to bridge the gap between academia and the business world. After Linkabit...

If you love the "For Dummies" series of books, you'll enjoy the chat between Kirupa and Dan Gookin , prolific author (100 books and counting) and the creator of the "For Dummies" series. The conversation centers on Gookin's career, focusing on his revolutionary approach to technical writing, which prioritised humour and personality over traditional, dry instructional styles. He discusses his writing process, including the importance of outlining and taking breaks, and reflects on the evolution of the publishing industry and the rise of digital content. The interview highlights Gookin's enduring influence on technical writing and his ongoing passion for creating accessible and engaging content. Interesting trivia from the hour-long free-wheeling interview - Dan Gookin  drew inspiration from Mad Magazine  when developing the series'  humorous and approachable style . He loved Mad Magazine as a kid and aimed to combine its humour with informative conten...

This Week I Learned -  * Anthropic's Claude models on Vertex AI offer fully managed and serverless models as APIs. To use a Claude model on Vertex AI, send a request directly to the Vertex AI API endpoint. Because Anthropic's Claude models use a managed API, there's no need to provision or manage infrastructure. *  How to choose the right LLM for your needs * Hugging Face's DataSet Viewer features an SQL Console powered by DuckDB WASM (WebAssembly), allowing users to execute SQL queries on datasets directly within the browser. DuckDB has full SQL syntax support, along with many built in functions for regex, lists, JSON, embeddings and more. DuckDB syntax is similar to PostgreSQL. You can embed the Dataset Viewer in your own webpage using an iframe. * While DuckDB WASM is very powerful, it doesn't have full feature parity with DuckDB. * Google and Meta recorded ad sales in India of Rs 31,221 crore and Rs 22,730 crore, respectively, in FY24.  * In 1994, Shri...

Creating clear and effective charts is a crucial skill for presenting data visually. Here's a list of chart types - Arc Diagram Area Graph Arrow Chart: Displays the range and direction of change between two values. Bar Chart: A standard chart for comparisons, rankings Box & Whisker Plot Brainstorm Bubble Chart: Compares a value against a target and ranges using a "bar-in-a-bar" design. Bubble Map Bullet Graph Calendar Candlestick Chart Chord Diagram Choropleth Map Circle Packing Column chart: The vertical version of a bar chart. Connection Map Density Plot Donut Chart: Similar to a pie chart, but with a central space for additional information. Dot Map Dot Matrix Chart Error Bars Flow Chart Flow Map Gantt Chart Gauge Chart Grouped Bar/Column Chart (Clustered Bar/Column Chart): Bars or columns from the same category are placed together in a group. Heatmap: Shows data variations using colour, hue, or intensity. Histogram Icon Chart: Compares variables using different ic...

Climate change refers to long-term shifts in temperatures and weather patterns. Human activities have been the main driver of climate change, primarily due to the burning of fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas. While individual actions & awareness are important, addressing climate change requires a unified and concerted effort from local communities, cities, and nations working collaboratively to tackle its challenges. The first climate COP meeting was held in Berlin, Germany in March, 1995. The Paris Agreement, adopted at COP21 in 2015, is a landmark international agreement on climate change.  Its main goal is to limit global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius, preferably to 1.5 degrees Celsius, compared to pre-industrial levels.    In the 2023 COP28 summit in  petrostate   Dubai, all that participating countries could do was commit to "contribute" to "transitioning away from fossil fuels". At a time when fossil fuels should have been significantly r...

Gartner defines strategic cloud platform services (SCPS) as standardized, automated, public cloud offerings integrating infrastructure services (e.g., computing, network and storage), platform services (e.g., application, data and value-added services such as AI/ML) and transformation services (resources to help customers adopt cloud-oriented IT delivery models). Image - Gartner Insights I found interesting from the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Strategic Cloud Platform Services report: The eight SCPS providers & global hyperscalers featured in this Magic Quadrant control over 97% of the total CIPS market. While AWS has maintained profitability and a leading global infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) market share of over 42%, its growth rate relative to its key competitors slowed in 2023. Azure public cloud market share is 26%. GCP's overall market share stands at 11.5%. Oracle's strategy of positioning OCI as the top cloud for Oracle software i...

This Week I Learned -   * According to YouTube, over 500 hours of video content is uploaded every minute, and approximately 694,000 hours of video content are streamed per minute. High-level design of a YouTube-like system - Educative.io *  yt-dlp is an open-source and free command-line utility that facilitates downloading videos from a variety of platforms, including Twitter . * With the JavaScript Web Share API, web apps can use the same system-provided share capabilities as platform-specific apps. * Docs as code is a method for creating software documentation with largely the same tools that are used in software development, including : Issue Trackers Version Control (Git) Plain Text Markup (Markdown, reStructuredText, Asciidoc) Code Reviews Automated Tests Microsoft , AWS , Open Food Facts are some organizations that use this technique . * Prometheus was first used in-house at SoundCloud, where it was developed, for monitoring their systems. * Claude swi...

 A compilation of learning resources on System Design: ByteByteGo Engineering Blogs of Top Tech Product Companies Dr Milan Milanović High Scalability Educative.io System Design School Dev.to Book:  Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems (2017) by Martin Kleppmann  YouTube has plenty of videos on this topic

Kaggle and Google are running a 5-day Gen AI course with daily assignments and lectures from November 11 to 15. The recordings are available on YouTube as a playlist. Curriculum: Day 1: Foundational Models & Prompt Engineering - Explore the evolution of LLMs, from transformers to techniques like fine-tuning and inference acceleration. Get trained with the art of prompt engineering for optimal LLM interaction. Resources - *  “Prompt Engineering” whitepaper   (65 pages) * Code Lab -  Day 1 - Prompting Day 2: Embeddings and Vector Stores/Databases - Learn about the conceptual underpinning of embeddings and vector databases, including embedding methods, vector search algorithms, and real-world applications with LLMs, as well as their tradeoffs. Resources - * Listen to the summary podcast episode (created by NotebookLM).  * “ Embeddings and Vector Stores/Databases ” whitepaper (52 pages).  * Code labs on Kaggle:  Build a RAG question-answering system ove...

This Week I Learned -  *  How does ChatGPT-like system work?  *  AI storytelling is a pivotal shift in the creative process.   * In July 2023, Google Labs unleashed NotebookLM , an AI assistant that chews through a buffet of up to 50 sources, from documents to YouTube videos and even whole books. It then cooks up summaries, dishes out study guides, and serves follow-up questions on a silver platter.  In September, a new feature was launched that transforms source material into a podcast so realistic, you'd think the AI hosts might just invite you over for coffee after the show. * Mukesh Ambani - Jio is the largest data company in the world. Its volumes are equivalent to AT&T mobile and Verizon combined. Jio delivered approximately 16 exabytes of data in this year. * Your bathroom geyser consumes only 2kW. It takes about five to 10 kilowatts (kW) to power a single rack of servers in a typical data centre, but a rack filled with advanced AI computing...

In the Maven Crash Course " Learn Power Query, Power Pivot & DAX in 15 Minutes ", Chris Dutton walks through a hypothetical business case while showcasing the power of modern Excel tools like Power Query, Power Pivot and DAX. Power Query is used to extract, transform, and load data from external sources like SQL databases, PDF and CSV files. A relational model is created to join the tables without writing a single formula. Exploratory analysis is done using Power Pivot and Data Analysis Expressions (DAX). Data Analysis Expressions is the language that we can use to define new calculated columns and measures to enhance our Data Model instead of the traditional cell formulas that we'd typically use if our data was stored in worksheets. Pivot Charts and slicers are used to design a simple interactive report that the sales managers can use to analyze revenue trends and product performance.

Grok-2 is the latest AI model from Elon Musk's xAI company. This jack-of-all-trades model has impressive capabilities in chat, coding, and image generation. Unlike the more restrained AI models out there, Grok-2 seems to operate with fewer ethical guardrails. This has some folks worried, as the ease with which it can create convincing fake images and potentially misleading content is pretty alarming.  In an age where telling fact from fiction online is already a challenge, tools like Grok-2 could exacerbate the spread of misinformation and further divide us as a society. This approach is classic Musk - innovative, controversial, and sure to keep the tech world talking.  Image: X Grok-2 is currently available to X (formerly Twitter) Premium subscribers, so you'll need to upgrade that account if you want to play around with this AI wild child. Just be warned - it has a bit of a cheeky, "edgy" personality that some might find incredibly cringeworthy. Grok-2's API ...

 

This Week I Learned -  *  The Turing Way is an online handbook – and global community – dedicated to fostering gold-standard reproducible research. It’s a cultural movement with the potential to transform data science *  Binder is a service that takes a GitHub repository containing Jupyter Notebooks and spins up a cloud-based server to run them. You can start experimenting with the code without having to install anything on your machine. Mybinder.org is a public service. It can only access public repositories.  How it works  - BinderHub (the backend of Binder) fetches your repo from GitHub.  Analyses the contents Builds a Docker image based on your repo Launches that Docker image in the cloud Connects you to it via your browser *  jupyter-repo2docker is a tool to build, run, and push Docker images from source code repositories. repo2docker fetches a repository (from GitHub, GitLab, Zenodo, Figshare, Dataverse installations, a Git repository or a loc...