Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned -  * From The Batch - - Alignment training teaches LLMs to behave like assistants, but it tethers them to that behavior only loosely. Beyond alignment training, system prompts act as behavioral guardrails, but motivated users can bypass them.  - The lengths of tasks completed autonomously by AI agents have doubled roughly every seven months, according to METR, an independent testing organization - LLMs' knowledge is still relatively limited with respect to infrastructure and the complex tradeoffs good engineers must make...finding infrastructure bugs — say, a subtle network misconfiguration — can be incredibly difficult and requires deep engineering expertise.  - Research involves thinking through new ideas, formulating hypotheses, running experiments, interpreting them to potentially modify the hypotheses, and iterating until we reach conclusions. Coding agents can speed up the pace at which we can write research code. - Meta has pivoted from its ope...

If you find videos playing automatically when you visit a webpage annoying, there is a browser setting in most browsers like Edge, Firefox or Vivaldi to block such videos.  Here's how you can enjoy a quieter browsing experience: For Firefox: Open Firefox and click on the menu button (three horizontal lines) in the top-right corner. Select Settings. In the Settings window, click on Privacy & Security in the left-hand menu. Scroll down to the Permissions section. Find the Autoplay setting and click on Settings next to it. Choose Block Audio and Video to stop videos from playing automatically. For Vivaldi: Open Vivaldi and click on the Vivaldi menu (Vivaldi logo) in the top-left corner. Select Settings. In the Settings window, go to the Websites tab. Scroll down to the Media Autoplay section. Choose Block to prevent videos from playing automatically. For Microsoft Edge: Open Edge and click on the menu button (three horizontal dots) in the top-right corner. Select Settings. Click o...

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...

This Week I Learned - *  Val Town is a social platform for writing and deploying JavaScript directly from your browser. You can create APIs and schedule functions, email yourself, and persist data. It offers a free tier * The Brave Browser is built on the open-source Chromium Web core and its own client code is released under the Mozilla Public License 2.0. *  In the last few weeks, AI coding really took off . Cursor, Cody, Replit Agents are FAR better than GitHub Copilot. *  Enterprise use cases that Pixtral 12B, the first-ever multimodal Mistral model can handle : 1. Image captioning 2. Image-to-Text Transcription (OCR) including Transcription of scientific content 3. Data Extraction and Processing 4. Analysis of complex images 5. Personal Assistants (visual assistance) 6. Information Extraction 7. Reasoning over input images * Users everywhere can view archived versions of webpages directly through Google Search, with a simple link to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Ma...

The Developer Console of your web browser (invoked through the keyboard shortcut F12) allows you to manipulate the Document Object Model (DOM) of any web page that you have loaded in your browser.  Microsoft Edge Developer Console This powerful tool enables you to explore, edit, and experiment with the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code of any web page, providing you with unprecedented control over the elements that make up a website. Let's say you want to remove the last 2 columns of a 3-column table using JavaScript in the browser's developer console, paste this code & see the columns vanish - // Select all table rows const rows = document.querySelectorAll('table tr'); // Iterate through each row rows.forEach(row => {   // Remove the last cell twice   row.removeChild(row.lastElementChild);   row.removeChild(row.lastElementChild); });

This Week I Learned -  *  Anita is a private, no-server, powerful and fully customizable data management solution, open source and free of charge. Anita is a Progressive Web App (PWA). * Progressive Web App (PWA) combines some advantages of traditional web pages, such as easily loading on any platform, with the speed, reliability, and functionality of modern desktop and mobile apps. * The specific code needed to convert a web app to a PWA is often a built-in feature of frameworks and libraries. Angular has a specific package for PWAs (@angular/pwa), and so does Vue (@vue/cli-plugin-pwa) and the same can be achieved with React (for example with create-react-app). * Anita supports SQLite , which means you can save your data in a local database on your device from a Progressive Web App. This is achieved by using the FileSystemAccessAPI, so the user only needs to choose where to keep the database once, and then the PWA can perform all CRUD operations it needs, with some cave...

This Week I Learned -  * Intuit's own Gen AI operating system orchestrates the large language model (LLM) activity across the entire company. GenOS is a full-blown operating system to support the responsible development of GenAI-powered features across its technology platform. *  Good data creates good models.  Evaluating models based on what they contain and what answers they provide is critical.  Anytime we look to implement GenAI features, we have to balance the size of the model with the costs of deploying and querying it. The criteria for an LLM in production revolve around cost, speed, and accuracy. Response times decrease roughly in line with a model’s size (measured by number of parameters). *  Model drift—where an LLM becomes less accurate over time as concepts shift in the real world—will affect the accuracy of results. The sweet spot for updates is doing it in a way that won’t cost too much and limit duplication of efforts from one vers...

E Sreedharan, also known as "Metro Man," is said to have installed reverse clocks in the offices and work sites of Konkan Railways and the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) to create a sense of urgency among team members and encourage them to work towards their goals without wasting any time. Inspired by this approach, I decided to create a Reverse Clock Bookmarklet to help me allocate time for my daily tasks and improve my ability to estimate how much time I need to complete them. By visually counting down the minutes and seconds, it would also cultivate a heightened awareness of the precious moments slipping away. To use this bookmarklet, create a new bookmark in your browser and paste the above code as the URL. Then, navigate to any webpage and click the bookmark(let) to activate the countdown.  You'll be prompted to input the number of minutes you want the reverse clock to run for. A reverse clock with a semi-transparent black background and white text will appear...

Do you often type the same text over and over again?  Snippets Bookmarklet saves snippets of the text you need, in your browser storage with names of your choice & retrieves them with a single click.  Just click the bookmarklet anytime you find something you want to save for later. Give your snippet a name, and it will be stored securely in your browser. To view your saved snippets, click the bookmarklet again and select the name you gave it. The snippet will be inserted in the input element where you need it. I employed  Anthropic's Claude  AI assistant to generate bookmarklet code by prompting my requirement: Here's the compact version of the same code: Here's how to use it: Create a new bookmark in your browser. Edit the bookmark and set the name to something like "Snippets". Paste the above code into the URL or Location field. Alternatively drag and drop this link (after checking and adapting the words-per-minute rate) to the Bookmarks bar or Favorites ba...

A compilation of my browser DevTools tips to aid in web application development: HOW TO turn off internet access for a single browser tab while testing a web application   HOW TO grab text from a HTML list or dropdown with JavaScript & Dev Tools   2 ways to copy tooltip text from a web page   HOW TO disable JavaScript in a browser after the page loads   HOW TO turn off copy-pasting restrictions on web form fields of annoying websites   HOW TO change the look of websites you don't own within your browser  

This Week I Learned -  * CentOS is a Linux distribution that provides a free and open-source community-supported computing platform, functionally compatible with its upstream source, Red Hat Enterprise Linux.  * IBM has a market valuation of just under $120 billion. IBM is in the middle of a yearslong makeover, focusing on transforming itself into a hybrid-cloud and artificial-intelligence business. In recent years, it has spun off or divested businesses including Kyndryl Holdings Inc., a big player in IT infrastructure and data-center management.  - WSJ * A security playbook is a collection of procedures that can help Security Operations Center (SOC) engineers and analysts of all tiers to automate and simplify tasks and orchestrate a response. * Playbooks are what you would use when doing troubleshooting, investigations, and root-cause analysis, while runbooks are what you would use post-incident to recover and resume normal operations. *  Jupyter Notebook is an op...

This Week I Learned - * Azure Private Endpoint is a network interface that that uses a private IP address from your virtual network to connect you privately and securely to a service powered by Azure Private Link . You can use Private Endpoints to connect to an Azure PaaS service that supports Private Link (like Azure Storage, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure SQL Database) or to your own Private Link Service. By enabling a private endpoint, you're bringing the service into your virtual network. A private endpoint connects to one Private Link Service. You can have multiple Private Endpoints in same VNet or subnet. They can connect to different services. Both Private Endpoint and Private Link Service need to disable network policies to function properly. Private Link Service over a Basic Load Balancer isn't supported.   *  Cloud Native Infrastructure with Azure  [PDF] by Nishant Singh and Michael Kehoe, 2022, 324 pages * The MITRE ATT&CK framework ...

Explained by Alex Xu  (copied here as LinkedIn posts are not easily searchable): Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) is an extension of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)  HTTPS transmits encrypted data using Transport Layer Security (TLS)  If the data is hijacked online, all the hijacker gets is binary code.  How is the data encrypted and decrypted? Step 1 - The client (browser) and the server establish a TCP connection. Step 2 - The client sends a “client hello” to the server. The message contains a set of necessary encryption algorithms (cipher suites) and the latest TLS version it can support. The server responds with a “server hello” so the browser knows whether it can support the algorithms and TLS version. The server then sends the SSL certificate to the client. The certificate contains the public key, host name, expiry dates, etc. The client validates the certificate.  Step 3 - After validating the SSL certificate, the client generates a sessi...

This Week I Learned -  * Google Cloud Whitepaper -  Google Cloud security foundations guide , December 2021, 98 pages * The height of outsourcing - Businesses that use the WhatsApp Business app can send unsolicited messages. Once the message is received, it will be subject to the business’s own privacy practices . The business may designate a number of employees, or even other vendors , to process and respond to the message. While Facebook will not show your messages with businesses in anyone's personal Facebook account nor automatically use your messages to inform the ads that you see, businesses will be able to use chats they receive for their own marketing purposes, which may include advertising on Meta. You can always contact that business to learn more about its privacy practices . *   Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) API standard can be significantly more verbose than REST and GraphQL , in part due to the usage of XML and because the standard incl...

Tables within web pages on the internet don't provide interactivity most of the times and data is presented through plain HTML tables unless developers of the website implement it through client-side functionality through something like a jQuery plug-in such as  DataTables to make data more accessible . In such cases, you cannot filter or sort unless you manually copy the table to a spreadsheet and then use the functions of a software tool like Excel.  To minimize the steps, it is better to use bookmarklets that can create a CSV file from an HTML Table. Below are such bookmarklets graciously shared by some good folks on the internet - Stoyan Stefanov's ReactiveTable bookmarklet Davin Studer Export to CSV bookmarklet ShareProgress' TableThis bookmarklet   The screenshot shows how ShareProgress' TableThis bookmarklet can inject code to make a table within a Wikipedia page to be downloaded as a CSV file Bookmarklet code needs to be relatively short because of browser lim...

This Week I Learned -  * " Inside look at modern web browser " by Googler & drawsplainer, Mariko Kosaka *  curlconverter.com converts curl commands to Python, JavaScript, PHP, R, Go, Rust, Elixir, Java, MATLAB, Ansible URI, Strest, Dart or JSON * Every Tuesday, Netflix publishes four global Top 10 lists for films and TV * If you're using messaging with existing applications, and want to move your messaging to the cloud quickly and easily, we recommend you consider Amazon MQ. It supports industry-standard APIs and protocols so you can switch from any standards-based message broker to Amazon MQ without rewriting the messaging code in your applications. If you are building brand new applications in the cloud, we recommend you consider Amazon SQS and Amazon SNS. Amazon SQS and SNS are lightweight, fully managed message queue and topic services that scale almost infinitely and provide simple, easy-to-use APIs. You can use Amazon SQS and SNS to decouple and scale microse...

by @manekinekko Alex Xu by @b0rk HTTP status codes -  IamLucif3r_

This Week I Learned -  *  Low-code is the evolution of rapid application development (RAD) to cloud and SaaS models. Note that Gartner defines a no-code application platform as an LCAP that only requires text entry for formulae or simple expressions. The LCAP market, therefore, includes no-code platforms. Furthermore, “no code” is not a sufficient criterion for tasks like citizen development, as many complex tooling configuration tasks are no code but still require specialist skills. * Temenos acquired Kony to bring low-code and world-class mobile development to its banking solutions. Temenos then exclusively licensed the Kony codebase to HCL Software to improve and market as a general-use low-code development platform in nonbanking industries. HCL has wasted no time in advancing the product, rebranding as HCL Volt MX. - Forrester Wave - Low-code development platforms, Q2 2021 *  Oracle Application Express (APEX) provides low-code application tooling ...