Tag tech
An MCP server for this blog
Caus, why not ? There are north of 6300 MCP servers out there in the wild ! If you don’t know what MCP is, you can read about it here It’s a way for AI applications(e.g. LLMs, AI Assistants etc) to tie into your own tools, workflows etc. AI Apps do a great job of reasoning / articulating, but it needs data for this. Data that is often siloed, on which it did not train and does not know about.
The killer use case for GenAI
In the next few years, approx $2T will be invested in AI !(For comparison, the entire US economy is around $30T). One of the reasons for this exuberance is that there are probably many many areas in which AI can be applied, in theory. We just may not have found a compelling narrative for them all. One use case which I find personally extremely useful is that of a Personal Assistant(PA).
AI and the coming inequality
A lot of focus thus far on AI has been on safety. And rightly so. Safety of any new technology is critical before it should be made available to mass markets. But how about societal inequality? Inequality today is quite stark. The wealthy 1.5% own 48% of the world’s wealth. The fundamental premise of AI is to boost productivity. What happens when rich nations / corporations (who also happen to own the means of producing these models) get boosted productivity by AI ?
Vector DBs for Data Protection
I was reading up some information on vector embeddings recently and started thinking about different use cases of it. One interesting use case was for Data Detection and Response. The thought exercise I had was that if we are able to track data access patters or data lineage and represent them as embeddings, then the embeddings of any anomalous / nefarious access pattern would have very little similarity with other embeddings.
Using External Functions with OpenAI
An easy way to boost the capabilities of AI models is to provide it with external information that it may not have. e.g. maybe your company has some proprietary data that would never be included while training the models. But if you could provide the model with this info during inferencing, it would be able to provide more accurate results. One way of doing that with OpenAI is via function calls.
Having Fun with OpenAI
AI is all the rage these days. New capabilities, that seemed impossible just a few months ago, show up almost weekly. So I decided to take it for a spin and see what different tasks I could code up quickly. I chose OpenAI, but you should be able to replicate these using any of the other models as well. Printing the text of a html page Book Recommendations Converting csv to json using json_schema Printing the text of a html page The first quick task I tried was to ask AI to print out the text of a html page i.
Will AI take my job ?
Whenever a new technology becomes commonplace, there will be disruptions. Technology and their associated disruptions have occurred throughout history. e.g. The monks / clergy were primarily responsible for making books (by hand). This restricted the flow of knowledge. Then the printing press came along. In the 1920s, telephone companies employed thousands of folks as operators. Today algorithms have largely taken over. Essentially any manual / repetitive task was automated out of existence.
Setting up a private network with Tailscale
I came across Tailscale recently. It’s a tool that lets you build a private mesh network between your devices easily. My use case was to transfer data from my laptop(macbook) to my android phone. Many times I have a pdf doc that I have on my laptop that I wish to read on the go. I usually just email it to myself and download it to my phone, but wanted to see if I can use Tailscale for it.
End to End Deployment on GCP
Table of Contents Disclaimer Introduction Assumptions Architecture Create a Project Enable APIs Create VPC Create Subnets Create Firewall Rules Create Private connection to DBs Create NAT Router Create DB Populate env vars Push container to gcr Create Instance Template Create Managed Instance Group (MIG) Create IPv4/IPv6 address Create Backend Service Setup Load Balancer Cleanup Disclaimer This tutorial is provided “as-is” without any representation or warranties, express or implied.
BioHacks
I recently read a book called “The Gene” (by Siddhartha Mukherjee). It gives a great introduction to the history of our understanding of the human genome. That got me curious and I started playing around with DNA Sequences (in the software world !). I wrote simple functions to do things like DNA transcription, DNA Reverse Complement etc. It is available for anyone to use at: biohacks.jimmyislive.dev/ The backend is AWS Lambda functions.