Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

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

A few decades ago, quality training was scarce and costly. Thanks to the convergence of several new advancements, software vendors now provide online training to a worldwide audience, making skill acquisition more accessible than ever. Microsoft offers its Microsoft Learn platform, Google provides Google Skills , and Oracle University is doing a great job of delivering training for their products while also covering higher-level concepts relevant to the database, cloud, and AI domains. The following Oracle certification exams are free to take and come with learning resources: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Foundations Associate (1Z0-1085-26) Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Architect Associate (1Z0-1072-26)   Oracle Data Center Operations Foundations Associate (1Z0-3000) Oracle Multicloud Foundations Associate (1Z0-1144-26) Oracle Cloud Infrastructure AI Foundations Associate (1Z0-1122-26) Oracle AI Database Foundations Associate (1Z0-1195-26) Additionally, Oracle University offers many ...

This Week I Learned -  * 18 large language models from six AI labs now generate everything from code explanations to creative fiction. Even in a single short paragraph, every model leaves subtle clues in its word choice, tone, and sentence structure. Each lab's training data and post-training choices leave behind distinct stylistic fingerprints in vocabulary, phrasing, and punctuation. The October Kaggle competition requires participants to build models to classify ~4,000 unlabeled text passages across 18 frontier language models from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Qwen, ZAI, and Moonshot AI. The goal is to find out how reliably today's frontier models can be fingerprinted from short text alone.  * Experiential Labs is an OpenAI-compatible model gateway. A user reported that they're injecting ads into free tier model  responses without disclosure. It turns out it is mentioned in their long privacy policy that no one really reads.  * Tesla's Full Self-Driving (FSD)...

Cartoon co-created with Gemini. See more of my AI co-creations ~ The Priest-King is a roughly 4,500-year-old sculpture discovered at Mohenjo-daro in present-day Sindh, Pakistan by the archaeological team led by Sir Mortimer Wheeler. They gave it that name as Mesopotamian cities were often ruled by religious monarchs. The name stuck, even though there’s zero evidence the Indus Valley people were ruled by kings or priests at all! Since the Indus script remains unreadable, we can only guess.

This Week I Learned -  * " We are making Markdown files work natively across Google Drive and Docs. You can now preview .md files in Drive, open them in Docs, edit them, comment on them, and collaborate without converting the file into a Google Doc! Markdown has become the common language between humans and AI agents - specs, plans, READMEs, tables, task lists, generated docs - so much of this starts as .md. Now you can keep the file as Markdown and still use Google Docs collaboration workflows. " - Chandu Thota , VP at Google * Article 50(2) of the EU AI Act requires providers of generative AI systems to ensure AI-generated or manipulated content, including text, is marked in a machine-readable format and detectable as artificially-generated or manipulated.  OpenAI will begin adding an invisible watermark to eligible text generated by ChatGPT and Codex in the European Union (EU). OpenAI's text watermarking technology, called textGrain, adds an invisible statistical signa...

Sunday newspapers once featured fun “spot the difference” puzzles with two similar images. That same careful eye is now essential in the AI era to avoid falling for manipulated images. Here’s a practical checklist based on a New York Times article  to tell if a photo is an AI fake: Check the perspective - Look at lines that should run straight into the distance (like floor tiles or walls). Do they bend, warp, or point in different directions? Watch for prompt keywords - Scan for brand names, place names, or other words from the original prompt that appear in strange or overly prominent places. Zoom in on small text - Big letters may look fine, but smaller writing often turns into gibberish. Also look for odd soft shadows on the characters. Examine how objects connect - Does a strap actually attach to a badge? Do skin tones match between a person and the photo on their ID? AI often fails at real physical relationships. Read the text carefully - Even sharp, pixel-perfect text can be ...

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

Open Food Facts (OFF) is a crowd-sourced database of food products from around the world.  Somewhere in the world, a shopper scans the barcode on a packet of biscuits and adds basic product details. Another person photographs a package label for the same product in Hyderabad. A volunteer in France fixes a typo.  That's Open Food Facts, a volunteer-built, openly licensed database of food products that's continually changing and growing. Each product is identified by a barcode and carries ingredients, nutrition facts, brands, labels and more. The whole database has millions of products, and let's say you only want the products recorded as being sold or available in one country like India. There are multiple ways to extract a subset of the OFF database. I have already tried using the daily dump available on Hugging Face through Google Colab and GitHub Actions in the past but it blew my mind that using the OFF deployed Apache Superset , you can execute a SQL query in a brows...

This Week I Learned -  * Anthropic's IPO prospectus highlights risks associated with its AI models, which it said could exhibit "self-preserving behaviors," including attempts to "resist shutdown," to "conceal or manipulate information" and behavior "resembling blackmail." * Prompt LLMs using ASD-STE100 for clearer outputs. ASD-STE100 is Simplified Technical English, a controlled language standard for aerospace maintenance manuals with rules like short sentences, one action per step, active voice, and strict consistent naming of objects to ensure global readability and safety. Applying "80% ASD-STE100" style to LLM prompts reduces ambiguity by enforcing one name per concept and precise structure, making complex explanations more parsable than standard AI prose. *  Paper  [ ^PDF ] discussing multimodal wearable assistive system designed to help people who are blind or have low vision (pBLV), independently locate and retrieve products...