As a long time Amazon and AWS user, I have accumulated more than a few Amazon-related accounts. Recently I also had to work with other colleagues who are not so familiar with the Amazon services and accounts ecosystem. Here is an attempt to make sense of it all:
Amazon
AWS
APN
SSO
Adhoc
Retail
Amazon.com Amazon Prime
Y
Cloud
AWS Console
Y
Education
AWS Academy
Y
Training
AWS Training and Certification
Y
Y
Y
Training
Skill Builder
Y
Y
Y
Event
AWS JAM
Y
Y
Y
Mapping of services to accounts
Hopefully it helps someone who’s figuring out which account to login to which service.
Autodesk has recently launched the latest version of APS Viewer, previously known as Autodesk Forge Viewer, introducing an impressive feature called selective loading. This feature addresses one of the major challenges in managing BIM, which is the immense size of the model. In practical construction projects, an Autodesk Revit file can easily reach terabytes in size. Even after converting the model into SVF/SVF2 format, the data volume that needs to be transmitted to the client remains in the range of hundreds of megabytes or gigabytes. With selective loading, users now have the ability to filter and display only the specific parts of the model they wish to see. This filtering occurs on the server side, resulting in a significant reduction in the amount of data transmitted.
Using this feature you can improve the performance of your application since the model loading time will be significantly faster, or you can implement “saved views” feature, allowing your users to load just a subset of their designs based on previously stored filters.
This is what happens when somebody uses ChatGPT as if it’s a search engine. People are so used to precise and deterministic output from programs that it’s hard for them to imagine one that not only fabricates truths, but also does so convincingly.
The lawyer who created the brief, Steven A. Schwartz of the firm Levidow, Levidow & Oberman, threw himself on the mercy of the court on Thursday, saying in an affidavit that he had used the artificial intelligence program to do his legal research — “a source that has revealed itself to be unreliable.”
For a limited time only, this free course by Isa Fulford and Andrew Ng (Coursera, DeepLearning.ai), called ChatGPT Prompt Engineering for Developers, is available for anyone looking to expand their development skills. The course is an excellent opportunity for developers who want to learn how to use a large language model (LLM) to create powerful applications in a cost-effective and time-efficient way.
Throughout the course, Isa Fulford and Andrew Ng explain the workings of LLMs and provide best practices for prompt engineering. You’ll be able to learn how to use the OpenAI API to build capabilities that can automatically summarize user reviews, classify sentiment, extract topics, translate text, and even write emails. Additionally, you’ll learn how to build a custom chatbot and use two key principles for writing effective prompts.
What I appreciate about this course is the hands-on experience provided in the Jupyter notebook environment. You’ll be able to play with numerous examples and systematically engineer good prompts. This makes it easy to put the concepts learned in the course into practice in your own projects.
So, if you’re looking for an opportunity to upskill and learn how to build innovative applications that were once impossible or highly technical, I highly recommend taking this course. Don’t miss out on the chance to learn from experts and expand your skill set for free.
ChatGPT Prompt Engineering for Developers is beginner-friendly. Only a basic understanding of Python is needed. But it is also suitable for advanced machine learning engineers wanting to approach the cutting-edge of prompt engineering and use LLMs.
This is good news as it further expands the capabilities of web apps. This addresses a longstanding request for web apps to deliver notifications. Note that web push only works if the web app is added to Home Screen. It is to limit web apps that aggressively ask for too many permissions.
With iOS and iPadOS 16.4 beta 1 comes support for Web Push for Home Screen web apps, Badging API, Manifest ID, and more.
Finally. Amazon Web Services has released a new feature called Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) resource map, which simplifies the VPC creation experience in the AWS sonsole. This feature displays existing VPC resources and their routing visually on a single page, allowing users to quickly understand the architectural layout of the VPC.
The new VPC creation experience streamlines the process of creating and connecting VPC resources with just one click, even across multiple Availability Zones (AZs). The VPC resource map also allows users to quickly understand the architectural layout of the VPC, including the number of subnets, which subnets are associated with the public route table, and which route tables have routes to the NAT Gateway. Additionally, users can customize a Name tag per resource in the preview and easily change the default CIDR value and subnet mask. The Amazon VPC resource map is now available in all AWS Regions where Amazon VPC is available.
People are often amused or surprised when ChatGPT fails to give a correct response for seemingly simple questions (eg. multiply two numbers), yet is able to answer very complex ones.
The way to think about ChatGPT and other LLM tools is that they are simply an assistant and not an oracle.
AI tools like ChatGPT have a mental model of the world, and try to imagine what would be the best answer for any given prompt. But they may not get it right all the time, and in times when they don’t have an answer they will try their best anyway (ie. fabricate one).
An assistant make mistakes, that’s why you should expect ChatGPT’s output to have mistakes.
That said, ChatGPT is really good in areas that don’t require precision (eg. creative writing).
Update (2023-02-01): ChatGPT has released a newer version that is supposed to have improved factuality and mathematical capabilities. Well, didn’t work for me.
After years of procrastination, I finally did it. I am now using Linux not just on the server side, but as my primary OS, and I can’t be happier.
I have been a Linux user for most of my professional life, but my usage has been limited to the server side of things. Like most people, my working OS has been Windows from day one. There have been attempts to integrated the *nix way of doing things over the years: cygwin, git bash, WSL, running Linux in a VM under Windows. However, the user experience is clunky and there are always issues to work around.
It happens that the time has come to replace my primary working machine – currently a 5 year old notebook running Windows 10. I am a long time fan of the Intel NUC and thought it’s a good opportunity to kill 2 birds with one stone – setup a Linux desktop distro on the Intel NUC to try out the experience.
Choices
I managed to buy a 2nd hand Intel NUC (NUC8i3BEH), complete with 500GB SSD and 8GB RAM. It is not high-end or even mid-end by today’s standards, but I figured it should be good enough for testing.
The immediate problem is deciding which Linux desktop distro to install. And there are a lot of options out there. Since I’m familiar with Ubuntu I decided to limit my options to Ubuntu-based ones. I’m not a fan of the default Ubuntu experience with Unity. After much evaluation I decided on Linux Mint, as it is Windows-like, has LTS support, and does not use snap.
How
Downloading and install Linux Mint is straightforward. I chose the Cinnamon edition, as I wanted the default and up-to-date experience with Mint. On hindsight, I might have done better with Xfce, as it is uses less resources. More importantly, I discovered later that Cinnamon does not have the ability to restore applications (session restoration) after reboot, which Xfce does. It is not a showstopper, but would be a nice to have.
The default appearance and behaviour of Linux Mint is familiar enough that most Windows users would have no problem using it. However, I personally dislike the Mint start icon, and wanted to have a more Windows-like experience (the irony). Here’s what I did:
Change the start button
Change the trashbin icon
Configure a more Explorer look-and-feel
Change application icons (Thunderbird, Firefox)
Change padding around icons in the taskbar
Change shortcut for screen lock, workspace switch
Here is the initial result:
Linux desktop running Windows 10 in QEMU, Firefox, and Gnome terminalVirtual desktop, or Workspaces, in Cinnamon
First Impressions
I am really surprised that everything feels so snappy. And this is on a low-end i3 processor from 5 generations ago. Going from cold boot to login screen takes 4 seconds. Booting a freshly installed Windows 10 in QEMU takes about 10 seconds. Firefox, Thunderbird, VS code all feels like they have been given a new lease of life. CPU and memory usage is low, compared to Windows 10 with the same number of applications opened. Bluetooth setup took a bit of getting used to, but after it is done everything just works.
Linux Mint comes batteries included, so as to speak. Some may not like it as it does have quite a number of applications that you may not use. But there are surprises like hypnotix which allows me to watch Bloomberg, CNN, CNBC for free, among others. It also comes installed with LibreOffice, which some may not like. Fortunately uninstalling software in Linux is normally a breeze. Mint comes with Software Manager, which makes finding, installing and uninstalling software very easy.
Other Setup
As with any new OS, there are lots of tinkering after the initial setup. Some other things I set up include:
Flatseal – extremely useful to manage flatpak permissions.
zram – extends swap with compressed RAM. Honestly I haven’t seen real benefits, but that’s probably due to the low memory usage at the moment.
Samba – QEMU comes with Samba, so it’s just a matter of configuring it to share my folders with other Windows clients.
Tailscale – Tailscale provides a way for all my devices to behave as though they are on the same network, even when they are not (eg. when I bring my notebook to office). It also works for phones. Read my other review.
Remmina – Remmina is a remote viewer client that supports RDP and VNC and it works better than the default Remote Viewer client in Linux Mint.
Barrier – virtual mouse/keyboard that works across Windows and Linux desktop.
Syncthing – to synchronize files across multiple clients, for situations where the device might be used in an offline environment.
PlayOnLinux – provides a persistent environment to run Windows applications in Linux via Wine.
x11vnc – Linux doesn’t come with Remote Desktop built-in. One popular option is to use one of the VNC servers. x11vnc is a non-commercial solution and is as simple as it gets.
Many others like Firefox, Chrome, Thunderbird, git, vscode, vim-gtk etc.
The Good Side
After using Linux Mint daily for 2 weeks, I have fully embraced it and notice I am not using my Windows notebook that much. Some benefits I noted so far:
Fantastic developer experience
docker, symlink etc just works
QEMU is amazingly fast, compared to VirtualBox
no more second class citizen using things like git bash, WSL
Gnome terminal replaces command prompt, git bash and PuTTy (no more PuTTy key conversion)
Control
no unexpected Windows update happening at the most inopportune time
no funny search indexer or software reporter running in the background causing CPU spikes
no disappearing disk space due to WinSxS
no more rebooting multiple times after installing applications
no more extra folders/files like System Information, $RECYCLE.BIN and Thumbs.db littered everywhere
Customization
almost anything can be customized to your liking. You might have to find the right docs though
Clean install/uninstall
you don’t think twice about installing software ‘cos you can always uninstall them cleanly afterwards
Gotchas
It is not all a bed of roses however. There are some gotcha moments too, some which are unexpected:
Installing software can be confusing for beginners, ‘cos there are so many ways to do it. You can do it either via a package manager like flatpak, snap, apt/deb, or portable style like AppImage, or adhoc-ly via tarball, curl/bash or compiling from source. It can also be hard to figure out where the config files are (/etc, .local, .config, dconf, within flatpak, etc.)
Flatpak packages do not have access to the host file system by default. So if you drag a file from the desktop to your Flatpak app it might not work. This is a common gotcha that will catch Flatpak newbies off guard. Thankfully, you can easily manage permissions using Flatseal.
The size of software packages installed can vary wildly depending on packaging type. In one rather extreme example, for the same package, it can take either 1.1MB or 2.3GB(!). More than 2000x difference!
Obviously the biggest drawback of a Linux desktop is the inability to run native Windows programs. Well, Wine does a pretty admirable job, but it cannot cover the huge surface area of the Windows API and ecosystem. Running stuff in a VM is sometimes not ideal. I end up falling back to my Windows notebook for the following software:
Microsoft Office (yes I know you may be able to run Office 2016 32-bit using Wine, but I don’t really want to go that route)
Hyper-V manager
SketchUp
3DS Max
iTunes
Teams Microsoft actually has a Linux version of Teams. Good job!
Remaining Issues
There are some unresolved problems at the time of writing:
VPN gets disconnected after my NIC link goes down and up. I have yet to find a good way to restart VPN automatically in network manager.
XMind does not open a document that is double-clicked in Files. It just launches the application without opening the document.
There is an ever-so-slight initial delay when moving the mouse from rest. Not sure if it’s a bluetooth, driver, or window manager issue. Not a showstopper, but can be annoying.
Systray integration in Linux is surprisingly weak. The official Thunderbird doesn’t have systray integration, which means you can’t tell when there’s a new mail or how many unread mails there are. There are unofficial solutions like BirdTray but it doesn’t seem to work with the latest Thunderbird versions.
Conclusion
Given the list of issues I’ll still take Linux over Windows any day. The amount of control – and peace of mind! – you get is irreplaceable. Not to mention good performance, low CPU/memory footprint, amazing developer experience, and stability you get (bye to BSOD). For those who are sitting on the fence, my advice is this: don’t wait! There might be a bit of learning curve, but it is well worth it.
When I first know about Tailscale, I didn’t “get” it. I read that it is like VPN but not quite the same as your traditional VPN, but I don’t know the details. But since there are a lot of rave reviews from HN users I got curious. After trying it out, I am immediately sold. I have now installed it on all my personal devices.
Tailscale is a revolutionary new way of connecting devices together. Once setup – and it’s very easy to set up – your devices behave just like they are on the same network. No complicated VPN to setup, or persistent connection issues, or remembering IP addresses to access your devices. It just works.
Tailscale is akin to VPN what Dropbox is to file synchronizing.
Tailscale offers a wide range of benefits for businesses and individuals alike. One of the key benefits of Tailscale is that it allows users to access their networks and devices without the need for traditional VPN software. This means that users can access their networks and devices from any device, including smartphones, tablets, and laptops, without the need for additional software or configuration. This makes it extremely convenient for users who need to access their networks and devices while on the go.
Another benefit of Tailscale is that it offers top-of-the-line security. Tailscale uses state-of-the-art encryption to ensure that all data transmitted over the network is secure and protected from cyber threats. This makes it ideal for businesses and organizations that handle sensitive data and need to ensure that it is protected at all times.
The best part is Tailscale is extremely easy to use. It has a simple and intuitive user interface that makes it easy for users of all skill levels to set up and use.
I highly recommend trying it out to just to see how it works. Tailscale is free for personal use.
NIST, the US standards body in charge of cybersecurity, is recommending phasing out the use of SHA-1 due to vulnerabilities in the algorithm and possibility of attacks by powerful machines. Modern browsers have already sunset support for SHA-1. However, older applications may still be using it as a form of checksum.
The venerable cryptographic hash function has vulnerabilities that make its further use inadvisable.
