Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned -  * Nikhil Pahwa on  how to use AI to write without the slop : Step 1: Find something you want to write about and record a voice note (transcribe it) or collect information/news articles about it. Step 2: Feed this voice note / notes to AI, whether ChatGPT or Claude, and ask it to identify 20 questions for you. The rule: no questions to which the answer is yes/no or one of a few options. Step 3: Record a voice note answering the questions. you don't need to answer all the questions. Feel free to ramble, and anything above 10 minutes is good. Anything over 20 minutes is amazing.  Step 4: Give your voice note transcript to AI. Ask it to identify a structure from the questions you've answered or simply, ask AI to structure your talk into an article structure verbatin with subheads. Important instruction: "do not paraphrase, do not add filler or transition sentences". Step 5: once you have a structure you like, edit the transcript to tighten language....

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...

This Week I Learned -  * Jupyter notebooks are great for experimentation, but they don't translate well into production-ready applications. Building AI applications requires more than just good models: it requires solid architecture. - Jeremy Arancio * Opencode is an open-source AI coding agent designed for terminal use, providing assistance in code generation, debugging, and project management. opencode + GLM 4.6 is basically Claude Code, but insanely cheap + better TUI. And you can use it with your Hugging Face token now  * "The hardest part of AI isn’t the tech. It’s getting people to change how they work." - Satya Nadella  * Whitney Wolfe Herd is cofounder of Bumble, which operates online dating apps Bumble and Badoo. She is a co-founder of Tinder and was previously its Vice President of Marketing. In 2012, at age 22, Wolfe Herd joined the startup Cardify, a project led by Sean Rad through Hatch Labs IAC incubator. The project was later abandoned, but Wolf...

This Week I Learned -  *  Confluent Cloud is a fully managed, cloud-native Kafka service that provides features like on-demand cluster creation, data generation, real-time stream processing, and account management. It is deployable within seconds, accessible across all major public clouds, and offers a free start with cost-effective pay-as-you-go pricing that scales with your growth. * Azure Local, formerly Azure Stack HCI, is a comprehensive, Azure-integrated hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solution that leverages Hyper-V as a component within a broader, cloud-centric framework.  * Data centers and cloud computing are responsible for 1 percent of the world’s energy-related greenhouse gas emissions * OpenAI has become one of the world's biggest renters of cloud servers * Roo Code is an AI-powered autonomous coding agent that lives in your editor. It gives you a whole dev team of AI agents like coding partner, a system architect, or specialized roles like a QA e...

This Week I Learned -  * Jonathon Ross has been building AI chips since 2012. He is the founder & CEO of Groq * Noticed a new feature on Reddit that shows AI-generated answers related to a user posted question. It consolidates answers from other Reddit posts & also links to them . * In the constantly evolving world of generative AI, the ability to prototype quickly is a significant competitive advantage. Teams that can show working demos and iterate fast influence roadmaps, shape decisions, and win resources.  Fast Prototyping of GenAI Apps with Streamlit course on Deeplearning.ai teaches how to quickly build and refine GenAI apps fast. Streamlit is an open-source Python library that turns a few lines of code into interactive, data-driven web apps in minutes, no front-end skills required.  *  Peeksy began as an open-source side project has now evolved into an app. It is an automation tool that screenshots contextually the moment they're taken—making t...

This Week I Learned -  * Gemini CLI is an open-source AI agent that brings Gemini directly into your terminal, with MCP support for extensibility and Human in the Loop for oversight.  * Prompting only changes how the model responds. Fine-tuning changes the weights—but it’s costly, brittle, and still static. Neither gives the model new knowledge in real-time. With Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) , you “Retrieve” the most relevant data for the user’s query from your database, use this data to “Augment” the prompt you send to the LLM, and then let it “Generate” a response based on the user query + prompt + retrieved data. RAG doesn’t modify the model; it modifies the input. It retrieves relevant context (docs, tickets, policies) and feeds it into the prompt at inference time. No retraining. Just better answers, grounded in your own data. *  Google Apps Script Web Apps can act as powerful servers for open protocols like Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Agent2Agent (A2A)...

The two islands,  Little Diomede (Yesterday Island, USA) and Big Diomede (Tomorrow Island, Russia) are a mere three miles apart. Yet, they lie on opposite sides of the International Date Line, creating a remarkable 21-hour time difference! This means that when it's noon on Big Diomede, it's 3 AM the previous day on Little Diomede. This unique situation makes the islands seem like two different worlds, despite their close proximity.  Imagine being able to celebrate your birthday twice or experience two different days within a short trip.  This geographical anomaly is a fascinating example of how time can be bent by the International Date Line. See more of my AI co-creations

This Week I Learned -  * Microsoft's recent estimates show that the Crowdstrike outage impacted 8.5 million devices. The issue stemmed from a Crowdstrike cybersecurity software update that included a configuration change. This faulty configuration file stopped Windows machines from starting up. Although the outage was not triggered by a cybersecurity breach, malicious actors exploited the situation. Numerous phishing campaigns, masquerading as IT support or CrowdStrike, sent out harmful links or solicited funds to fix the issue. This event starkly illustrates the critical need for delivering high-quality software. * Modern artificial intelligence (AI) systems are powered by foundation models.  Llama 3 is a herd of language models  [PDF] that natively support multilinguality, coding, reasoning, and tool usage.  * Mistral Large 2 is not entirely open source like Llama, since developers are required to acquire a license for commercial use of Mistral's model. * The ...

This Week I Learned -  *  Business use cases featuring interactive demos, architectural diagrams, and code samples developed with watsonx .  *  How Andrej Karpathy is playing around with generative AI tools to build visual stories * The OCI Generative AI Certification course has some great learning material. A slide from the OCI Generative AI Certification course * Ola, the ride-hailing platform has discontinued its app’s integration with Google Maps and replaced it with in-house Ola Maps. According to its founder and CEO Bhavish Aggarwal, the move has enabled the company to save Rs 100 crore annually. Ola has also transitioned away from Azure. * IMDb has shared a selection of its massive dataset on Tableau Public, which allows users to explore, create, and share data visualizations online . * Raj Bhagat has hand-drawn a map representing every Indian city * Try to know more than the client about their own product or service - "Research. Research. Research....

This Week I Learned -  * The original sources of MS-DOS 1.25, 2.0, and 4.0 are available for reference purposes on Github * While India generates about 20 per cent of the global data, its share in data center capacity is just 3 per cent. * TimesFM from Google Research is a time series forecasting model pre-trained on an extensive corpus of 100 billion real-world data points. It is open-source under the Apache-2.0 license and can be utilized commercially, offline, on a local computer or an engineering laptop. * India is fast emerging as a hub for data annotation services with flexible workers, mid-tier business analysts and even skilled data engineers contributing to build high-quality datasets. Data annotation, or simply data labelling, is the most crucial and foundational step for building high-quality datasets to train AI models, enhance accuracy, curtail hallucinations and build safety guardrails against inappropriate or harmful content - ET *  YTVideoTranscript  is ...

This Week I Learned -  * IBM has bought HashiCorp. HashiCorp Cloud Platform (the hosted Terraform, Vault, etc that HC manages themselves, their nominal secret sauce) runs on AWS today. * Venture capital firm Sequoia estimated that the AI industry spent USD50 billion on Nvidia chips used for training advanced AI models last year. But, in return brought home only USD3 billion in revenue – a concerning cost-to-profit ratio. - ET *  Teachable Machine is a web-based tool that makes creating machine learning models fast, easy, and accessible to everyone. The first version of Teachable Machine from 2017 can be used if you just want to quickly demo how machine learning works and don’t need to save anything. *  Google Family Link is a parental controls app that helps you keep your family safer online. If you're a parent, you can find your child's Android device location in Family Link once device location sharing is turned on. *  Sticker Mule 's Trace tool can e...

The DataIsBeautiful SubReddit serves as a platform for users to share and exchange ideas on their data visualizations. The community actively engages in providing valuable feedback, which frequently offers fresh perspectives and stimulates critical thinking . To provide options for the question and related location related queries, Sophia Hodson  shared an interactive map she created using Plotly that provide data-driven responses . In order to address the query, " Where Should You Live and Travel Based on Your Ideal Weather? " along with other location-specific inquiries, Sophia Hodson developed an interactive Plotly-based map . This map offers data-backed recommendations. Some of the interesting points that came out of the discussions -  After members pointed out that considering plain average temperature is misleading, the Original Poster (OP) included options to consider average maximum temperatures and average minimum temperatures to provide a more accurate si...

This Week I Learned -  *  The Executive’s Guide to Generative AI  - Google *  Google Cloud Collective is a subcommunity on Stackoverflow that has over 47.2K members and its own Leaderboard. Champion Innovators are recognized by Google with special benefits. * Open Food Facts has compiled the first-ever open dataset of food packaging images and made it available freely on AWS .  Open Food Facts AWS images dataset  contains all images uploaded to Open Food Facts and the OCR results on these images obtained using Google Cloud Vision. *  Chatbot Arena  is a benchmark platform for large language models (LLMs) that features anonymous, randomized battles in a crowdsourced manner. * The Python library Openpyxl can be used to read and write Excel files   *  Gaussian splatting  is a rasterization technique for 3D reconstruction and rendering. * A new AI technique named ControlNet allows users to produce optical illusions con...

This Week I Learned -  * Traditional AI vs Generative AI  - Traditional AI systems are trained on large amounts of data to identify patterns, and they’re capable of performing specific tasks that can help people and organizations. But generative AI goes one step further by using complex systems and models to generate new, or novel, outputs in the form of an image, text, or audio based on natural language prompts . Generative AI uses a variety of techniques—including neural networks and deep learning algorithms—to identify patterns and generate new outcomes based on them. AI researchers have been able to train generative adversarial networks (GANs) to produce text that models human-like speech . A prime example is OpenAI’s application ChatGPT. Creating new data—which is called synthetic data —and augmenting existing data sets is another common use case for generative AI.  Natural-language understanding (NLU) models combined with generative AI have become increas...