This week, I learned:
- 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!
- 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.
- 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
- The quickest way to change the
fishprompt isfunction fish_prompt; echo '> '; end - At PyConf Hyderabad, about 3 people had read a PEP. 1 had used the
matchoperator. 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
- Soon, you’ll be able to send an LLM to a virtual meeting on your behalf. It will talk like you. Ethan Mollick
- 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
- Mermaid has an Architecture Diagrams Syntax (in beta) that’s capable of creating elegant architecture diagrams with icons.
- 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
- 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
- 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.
- LLMs are impacting not just data queries but geospatial queries as well. Here’s a good example of Natural Language Geocoding.
- 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 subscribed to ChatGPT Pro mainly for DeepResearch. Here are the first 50 reports I generated:
uvPackage Manager Overview- DuckDB Analytics Comparison
- Rust vs Python / JavaScript
- Modern Data Engineering Course
- LLM Code Migration Practices
- Cloud Cost Optimization Strategies
- LLM Coding Interview Tools Report (compare with Perplexity)
- Text To Speech Engines
- Customer Service in Indian Public Sector Banks
- LLMs in Software Development
- Old version 1: Gen AI in Software Development
- Old version 2: Gen AI in Software Development
- Leadership Training Content
- Open-Source HTTP Servers. Caddy wins.
- Deep Research Use Cases
- Nagpur No-Parking Violations
- Data Science in Food Services
- Deep Research Disruption to Research Firms
- LLMs in Design Thinking
- EU Taxonomy Report Clarification
- Shell Valuation Analysis Inquiry
- LLMs in DSLs Research
- Public API-Based Data Storage Options. Supabase wins.
- Front-End JS Frameworks Analysis
- Database Evaluation Guide
- CSS Frameworks Evaluation Guide
- CI/CD Tooling Ecosystem Report
- Color Names Count
- S Anand Biography. Meh, I know more about me, and it gets a few things wrong.
- 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.
- DBT course
- Future of Coding AI
- 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.
- 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
- Data Moats by Industry
- Attorney Profile Research
- Social Media Data APIs
- Adobe Software Alternatives
- LLM Hallucination Visualization Techniques
- API vs Self-hosting Cost Analysis: Always use APIs, avoid self-hosting models.
- 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)?
- 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
- Local LLM Search Tools
- Blog Post to research paper on copying - suggestions
- Linux Dev Migration Guide
- Raspberry Pi SIM options
- Linux Dev migration guide
- HTML to JATS conversion
- LLM context splitting strategies
- Strategy for AI services in Publishing
- Gemini multi model editing use cases by industry
- Pharma Conference Participation Guide
- 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
- 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.
- 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!)