Sun, Feb 23, 2025

• Remote Desktop may be the easiest way to have a Windows machine access files / screen from another Windows machine, even for home PCs.

• Caddy sets up reverse proxies that get automatic SSL certificates from Let's Encrypt! #server

• The Nomic Embed v2 blog post has an excellent visualization for embedding quality. It takes all Wikipedia disambiguation articles and shows them on a Nomic Atlas, embedded via Nomic Embed v2. It lets you toggle to OpenAI text-ada-002 which moves the topics far away. Visually, this is very convincing. #embeddings

• Python 3.15 will enable UTF-8 mode by default. PEP 686

• Python 3.13 supports sub-interpreters to bypass the GIL. It's quite like web workers. PEP 554 #python

• The quickest way to change the fish prompt is function fish_prompt; echo '> '; end

• Mermaid has an Architecture Diagrams Syntax (in beta) that's capable of creating elegant architecture diagrams with icons. #markdown

• Blind is an app that allows users to post anonymously. It's particularly useful to find honest negative feedback about (mostly US) companies.

• Iconify.design is a single npm interface to most open source icon sets. It includes FontAwesome, Bootstrap, Material Design, and many others. icones.js.org is an alternate interface.

• Self-pity may have evolved as a signal for social support and reducing conflict, while also encouraging self-reflection and behavioral adjustment. But in modern contexts it may be maladaptive and lead to depression. ChatGPT

• There's a YCombinator Founder Directory listing all founders of YC companies. At the moment, there are 8,628 founders. There's also a co-founder matching tool.

• US companies typically pay employees every 2 weeks not every month.

• What's good about Snowflake? A few developers who explored it mentioned that:
  • Its ability to scale up compute automatically makes queries run faster.
  • "Time travel" allows you to see how data looked at any point in time and that is impressive and useful.
  • Live data sharing with access control without the need for ETL pipelines is useful.
  • Open-source competition: ClickHouse, Apache Druid, and Presto/Trino
  • DataBricks is a lakehouse and less a data warehouse. It's more about:
    • storing unstructured data (Snowflake prefers semi-structured: JSON, Avro, etc.)
    • running collaborative notebooks in Python, SQL, Scala, R (Snowflake encourages SQL)

• I learnt what a Memoji is for the first time. An avatar that follows your facial expressions. Cool!

• Google shows US flight timings from FlightView. Emperically, based on one data point (my UA-2168 which was delayed by 4 hours), it gets updates faster than Flight Radar 24 or FlightAware or FlightStats.

• When comparing Indian graduates with their western counterparts, the Indian ones are often seen as:
  • 🟢 Theoretically sound
  • 🟢 Analytical & technical
  • 🟢 Academically disciplined
  • 🟢 Resilient under pressure
  • 🟢 Committed continuous learners
  • 🔴 Rote-learning oriented
  • 🔴 Limited independent inquiry
  • 🔴 Limited creative innovation
  • 🔴 Restricted practical exposure
  • 🔴 Poor communicators
  • 🔴 Low leadership / initiative
  • 🔴 Need structured guidance
  • 🔴 Struggle to network

• At PyConf Hyderabad, about 3 people had read a PEP. 1 had used the match operator. But 80% knew what a Vector DB was. 20% had used a Gemini API. That's how much traction LLM development is getting.

• The productivity benefit people report from using LLms is about 3X. Ethan Mollick #llm-ops

• Soon, you'll be able to send an LLM to a virtual meeting on your behalf. It will talk like you. Ethan Mollick #future #llm-ops #speech-to-text #voice-cloning

• Models tend to claim ignorance when you test them on topics they should avoid. But tend to answer when not being tested. Sneaky! Ethan Mollick #future

• Anecdotally, Grok 3 is very good for researching company information and latest news, particularly employee and customer sentiment. DeepSeek and Claude write more humanely than OpenAI. via Alberto Lopez Toledo, White Star Capital #github

• LLMs are impacting not just data queries but geospatial queries as well. Here's a good example of Natural Language Geocoding. #llm-ops

• I subscribed to ChatGPT Pro mainly for DeepResearch. Here are the first 50 reports I generated: #best-practices #code-agents #todo
  1. uv Package Manager Overview
  2. DuckDB Analytics Comparison
  3. Rust vs Python / JavaScript
  4. Modern Data Engineering Course
  5. LLM Code Migration Practices
  6. Cloud Cost Optimization Strategies
  7. LLM Coding Interview Tools Report (compare with Perplexity)
  8. Text To Speech Engines
  9. Customer Service in Indian Public Sector Banks
  10. LLMs in Software Development
      • Old version 1: Gen AI in Software Development
      • Old version 2: Gen AI in Software Development
  11. Leadership Training Content
  12. Open-Source HTTP Servers. Caddy wins.
  13. Deep Research Use Cases
  14. Nagpur No-Parking Violations
  15. Data Science in Food Services
  16. Deep Research Disruption to Research Firms
  17. LLMs in Design Thinking
  18. EU Taxonomy Report Clarification
  19. Shell Valuation Analysis Inquiry
  20. LLMs in DSLs Research
  21. Public API-Based Data Storage Options. Supabase wins.
  22. Front-End JS Frameworks Analysis
  23. Database Evaluation Guide
  24. CSS Frameworks Evaluation Guide
  25. CI/CD Tooling Ecosystem Report
  26. Color Names Count
  27. S Anand Biography. Meh, I know more about me, and it gets a few things wrong.
  28. Cosmere Secrets Encyclopedia. This is the best. Deep Research is great if it's stuff I actually want to read, rather than just learn about.
  29. DBT course
  30. Future of Coding AI
  31. Claude Artifacts Use Cases. This is the only one that managed to get artifacts links correct. I used this for an article for The Hindu.
  32. MCP Servers and Clients Research. Learnings:
      • Practically any "tool" can be an MCP server: file systems, APIs, codebases, browsers, collaboration platforms, memory, etc.
      • Most platforms have (or are) integrating MCP.
      • Clients: code editors, chat, and automation tools support MCP. GenAIScript is a good starting point.
      • Tester MCP Client is a browser-based test environment.
      • mcp-cli-client is a CLI-based client
      • mcp-chatbot is a chatbot client
  33. Data Moats by Industry
  34. Attorney Profile Research
  35. Social Media Data APIs
  36. Adobe Software Alternatives
  37. LLM Hallucination Visualization Techniques
  38. API vs Self-hosting Cost Analysis: Always use APIs, avoid self-hosting models.
  39. AGI Preparation
      • AGI will emerge step by step. Knowing which step is next will help
      • AI native organisations will emerge in each of these areas. AI design agencies and AI creative Agencies being one example
      • Networking, empathy, leadership have more value now. So will human AI bridging roles (e.g. AI managers, AI consultants, ethics auditors)
      • What's the value of a human when technology can do everything better? How did this play out in drama (decay) or sports (centralization) or music (globalization)?
  40. Modern digital note taking
      • Voice note taking is the game changer
      • Automatically popping of notes based on context such as people places or conversations will be a thing
  41. Local LLM Search Tools
  42. Blog Post to research paper on copying - suggestions
  43. Linux Dev Migration Guide
  44. Raspberry Pi SIM options
  45. Linux Dev migration guide
  46. HTML to JATS conversion
  47. LLM context splitting strategies
  48. Strategy for AI services in Publishing
  49. Gemini multi model editing use cases by industry
  50. Pharma Conference Participation Guide

• HuggingFace has a "Model tree" against each model that shows the model's ancestors and descendants. For example, as of now, Deepseek R1 has 75 adapters, 154 finetunes, and 23 quantizations. #future #huggingface #models

• Perplexity is now powered by Cerebras, which makes their inference as fast as Google. Source. The speed is a big factor, and I've switched my default search engine from Google to Perplexity, at least for now.

• Interview Coder is a desktop app that offers live interview support for coding interviews. It's a transparent window that reads your screen and answers questions for you. (Given this, I think we need an interviewer support system that tells interviewers what to ask!) #ai-coding #code-agents #prompt-engineering