Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

Cartoon co-created with Bing Image Creator (GPT-4o) . See more of my AI co-creations

Cartoon co-created with Copilot. See more of my AI co-creations  

This Week I Learned -  * In 2024, the combined cloud computing revenue of AWS, Azure, and GCP exceeded $200B .  * AI battles - Anthropic has blocked xAI from using its Claude AI models after xAI accessed them through the Cursor coding tool, citing rules against aiding competitors.  * France’s armed forces ministry has signed a framework agreement with Mistral AI, giving its armed forces, directorates, services, and affiliated public entities—like the Atomic Energy Commission, the National Office for Aerospace Studies and Research, and the Navy’s Hydrographic and Oceanographic Service—access to AI models, software, and services developed by Mistral AI. * An AI-altered image, uploaded to social media in the immediate aftermath of a minor earthquake across Lancaster, England, convinced Network Rail that a local bridge had been badly damaged, halting travel on the line. In other fake-image news, criminals are doctoring pictures they’ve found on social media and using them as ...

Scott Adams (1957 – 2026) is well known for the Dilbert comic strip (first published in 1989) that poked fun at office life in 2,000 newspapers at its peak. In this video, Scott Adams, presents a framework for "authoring your own reality" rather than being a victim of it, introducing what he calls the "user interface" (UI) for reality which have been explained in more detail in his books Loserthink , Win Bigly and How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big .  The "Buttons" of the User Interface Adams identifies several psychological and practical "buttons" that individuals can press to shape their environment and personal outcomes: • Accept the Frame (Subjective Reality): Humans do not have access to "base reality". Instead, we should accept that reality is subjective and treated as a series of filters. If a filter makes you happier and predicts the future better, you should use it, even if it is not a perfect approximation of...

Cartoon co-created with Gemini. See more of my AI co-creations

Cartoon co-created with Grok with inspiration from the book Salt, Sugar, Fat - because apparently the secret ingredient in processed food marketing is a healthy disregard for pesky things like 'facts.'   See more of my AI co-creations

This Week I Learned - * The Open Access book Data Center as a Computer, Designing Warehouse-Scale Machines  [^PDF]by Googlers Luiz André Barroso, Urs Hölzle  and Parthasarathy Ranganathan examines how Warehouse Scale Computers (WSCs) treat the data center itself as one massive computer designed at warehouse scale, with hardware and software working in concert. The term Warehouse-Scale Computing was coined by Luiz André Barroso. Warehouse-scale computers (WSCs) power cloud computing and all the great web services we use daily, including recent advancements in Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML). The 343 paged book has around 120 illustrations including this one - * Researchers at International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad used visual learning models to analyse video recordings of the cooking processes of Biriyani to conclude that there is a systematic and detectable difference among the variations. The paper titled ‘ How Does India Cook Birya...

Vibe coding is a term popularized by Andrej Karpathy and the developer community to describe a shift where the "coder" focuses on high-level intent, design, and iterative prompting (the "vibe"), while the AI handles the syntax, boilerplate, and implementation. Vibe coding is a popular choice for prototyping, building MVPs, and driving fast-paced innovation, but the industry still has reservations about its code quality and security. That's not stopping AI Provider companies from targeting their products at vibe coders with their official documentation providing helpful guidance. In 2025 and 2026, "Vibe Coding" moved from a Twitter/X joke to official documentation. * Google: Now has a dedicated " Vibe Code with Gemini " landing page in AI Studio, explicitly using the term in their marketing. Google Cloud offers several tools for vibe coding .  * Replit: Officially calls itself the "#1 Vibe Coding Platform" and features engaging artic...

Cartoon co-created with ChatGPT. See more of my AI co-creations

SWAYAM is a Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) platform launched by the Indian government through the Ministry of Education (formerly the Ministry of Human Resource Development).  SWAYAM runs two main semesters each year, in January and July, while also offering many courses year-round or at a self-paced schedule. Enrollment is free, and courses usually last 8–12 weeks, kicking off shortly after the semester starts. If you’re aiming for certification, keep in mind that proctored exams are optional and require separate registration and a fee later on. List of a few courses available in January 2026: *  From Developer to Entrepreneur by Sramana Mitra   |   One Million by One Million | Self Paced *  Introduction to Graphic Design by Prof.Mohammad Shahid, Prof.Saurav Khuttiya Deori   |   IIT Hyderabad | Duration : 8 weeks * Arduino by Prof Kannan Moudgalya  | Indian Institute of Technology Bombay | Self Paced *  Found...

This Week I Learned -  *  Rishikesh Sreehari has created NPSNAV.in  website that hosts India's NPS Fund Database & API. You can access the latest NPS NAV and complete historical data for free. You can use the API programmatically or integrate live fund values into Google Sheets, Excel, or other tools. I needed an easy way to check the 52-week high and low of some schemes, so I vibe-coded a sample using the NPSNAV.in API which can be re-used for any NPS scheme. * Similarly, I used the free MFAPI.in API by Yuvaraj Loganathan to visualize the multi‑year NAV history of any Indian mutual fund scheme. The code sample shows seasonal patterns and the 52‑week high/low levels for any MF scheme at a glance. * These ChatGPT prompts can help you learn a new language. *  Nitter.net is an open-source alternative Twitter front-end   *  Invidious is an open source alternative front-end to YouTube   *  Adafruit IO is a cloud service by Adafru...

Cartoon co-created with Gemini. See more of my AI co-creations