Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned -  * Message queues (Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS) solve problems but also introduce new ones (ordering, deduplication, backpressure). Nothing is more abused than Redis as a primary database. Understand trade-offs .  *  Roboflow provides the means to label, train, and deploy computer vision solutions. It offers a Free Plan with 15 credits per month to try it and get started. * Currently 45+ services are available in the AWS Free Tier  to both existing and new AWS customers indefinitely unlike some others that are free for the first 12 months. * Skype Joins Windows Phone in Microsoft's Graveyard of Forgotten Innovations -Founded in 2003, Skype’s cheap audio and video calls quickly disrupted the landline industry in the early 2000s. Microsoft bought Skype in 2011 for $8.5 billion after outbidding Google and Facebook. Microsoft will retire the two-decade-old internet calling service in May 2025. * Dark Patterns & Dirty Tricks in Smartphone Apps - The Di...

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 -  *  Langflow is a low-code app builder for RAG and multi-agent AI applications. It’s Python-based and agnostic to any model, API, or database. *  Andrej Karpathy's review of Grok 3 - As far as a quick vibe check over ~2 hours this morning, Grok 3 + Thinking feels somewhere around the state of the art territory of OpenAI's strongest models (o1-pro, $200/month), and slightly better than DeepSeek-R1 and Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking. Which is quite incredible considering that the team started from scratch ~1 year ago, this timescale to state of the art territory is unprecedented.   *  Thirukural dataset on Huggingface * To search on GitHub Communities for a user's posts - category:Copilot author:username * The Sydney-headquartered company Canva has more than 200 million users worldwide. India is Canva’s fourth largest market.  * Speed-watching is basically listening or watching content at accelerated speeds. YouTube updated c...