Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned -  * According to AI-ML guru Andrew Ng, these are the four most important AI engineering skills: Building and deploying AI applications Software engineering fundamentals Using coding agents Shaping the build * GitHub has rebuilt Copilot review around an agentic architecture that gathers broader repository context, uses tools, produces findings, and can hand fixes to another coding agent. This is substantially more than autocomplete added to old review. - The GitHub Blog * Shadow AI refers to consumer-facing AI applications and standalone agents deployed across your organization without IT visibility or approval. These agents can operate autonomously on user devices, creating blind spots in your security and compliance posture.  Microsoft now ships specific discovery, monitoring and governance for unmanaged AI agents. Shadow AI blocking currently apply only to managed Windows devices enrolled with Microsoft Intune. * AI can boost learning productivity,...

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

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

This Week I Learned -  * When unconstrained, the AI model can draw from numerous sources to assess its options on how to proceed in answering a prompt, thereby allowing widely varying outcomes. Any foundational decisions or other instructions—artifacts collectively known as “ provenance ” when properly preserved—which were formulated during the original context session and then cleared, are lost. This is the key deficiency of vibe coding which spec-driven development and context engineering seek to address. Context engineering moves a developer from a vibe coding technique to a structured approach to generating code that preserves provenance using key artifacts. This allows context to be restored by other developers, reviewed by other stakeholders, or retrieved at any point if someone wanted to audit the inputs that generated a given codebase or simply wanted to continue building upon them. Different methodologies have emerged that offer different perspectives on how to effectively...

Claude recently helped a techie find his misplaced iPhone although the Find My iPhone feature was disabled by his organization's Mobile Device Management (MDM) policy.  Claude generated a Bluetooth RSSI meter in about one minute & by tracking the phone's Bluetooth signal strength he was able to locate the phone. Commenting on AI's growing role in enabling instant, bespoke software creation for immediate practical needs without traditional development, he  tweeted : " Apparently, you can just create the tool you need now. " That line stuck with me. As a weather enthusiast, I wanted a simple web app to see how the weather differs between localities in my Hyderabad neighbourhood, side by side, before deciding whether to step out. So I built it with the help of Claude & the WeatherUnion API . The visual template came from an unlikely place — ICFOSS's IoT-based Micro Climate Monitoring System for Kerala . It's a public dashboard tracking humidity, tempe...

This Week I Learned -  * Moonshot’s Kimi K3’s weights were released on July 27 under a Modified MIT licence, making the 2.8-trillion-parameter model available for anyone to download, fine-tune and self-host. Giving weights away is a smart distribution strategy as it could potentially turn developers, cloud providers and enterprise IT units into resellers, and make it hard for anyone to under-price you as the base model itself is free. * Jot down annoying things . AI may have a solution. * findphone is a nifty app to locate a nearby Bluetooth device by signal strength, from the macOS command line — for when Find My Phone isn't available due to MDM restrictions * ProHance is a software platform that provides real-time visibility into workforce activities, helping organizations measure productivity, optimize costs, and improve operational efficiency. It tracks employee engagement through metrics such as time spent on applications, mouse and keyboard activity, and task durations, whil...

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

Cartoon co-created with Gemini. See more of my AI co-creations While flammable and inflammable mean the same thing, safety regulators encourage “flammable” to avoid dangerous misunderstandings. The true opposite of flammable is nonflammable (or non‑inflammable). Flammable comes directly from Latin flammare (“to set on fire”), while inflammable entered English via French, which itself borrowed from Medieval Latin inflammabilis.