Connect the following to the world of technology: 1. A pack animal from South America 2. A boy’s name of French origin 3. A Zodiac constellation 4. Sanskrit for something which is not natural 5. An invented word for the Martian language, meaning deep understanding
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These are various large language models or LLMs behind Artificial General Intelligence. 1. Llama - Meta 2. Claude - Anthropic 3. Gemini - Google 4. Krutrim - Ola 5. Grok - Twitter/X
Company X recently announced retirement of its product Y, especially at a time when its product category has seen a lot of coverage. This has been been due to the dated hydraulic architecture of Y. Known for doing choreographed dancing & being pushed around, the product is named after a mythical character holding the weight of the heavens.
Identify the company X & the product Y.
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Atlas the humanoid robot from Boston Dynamics. Here's a Goodbye Video from the company. Surprisingly, the company has released a new electric model the very next day. Watch the Video.
The Indian Government gifted a statue of Lord Shiva to be installed at a science facility. The statue is a metaphor for the cosmic dance of the God, which creates & destroys the world. The work of the scientific facility is also similar, which is trying to understand the forces behind creation of the universe. Which science facility is the statue situated in?
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CERN facility in Switzerland. The location studies the universe at a sub atomic scale. It was also involved in the identification of the Higgs Boson particle, which is responsible for giving 'mass' in the universe, also dubbed as the God Particle. Read More.
Anguilla is a small island in the Caribbean with a population of about 16000 residents. The island became a beneficiary of the recent AI tech boom, adding $32m or about 10% in its annual GDP. How did AI helping Anguilla?
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The Island's domain is .ai, which has in high demand by AI companies. This is similar to the trend seen with the tiny Pacific Island of Tuvalu, which became popular due to its domain name .tv. Read More about the story.
John X was a Scottish-Canadian farmer who is credited with discovering the X Y. Jef Raskin is credited with the naming of Y’s Z line of products, inspired by X Y.
The difference between X and Z is of spelling. Jef Raskin deliberately misspelled the name to avoid conflict with a high-end audio equipment manufacturer X Laboratories. Identify X, Y and Z.
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X - McIntosh Y - Apple Z - Macintosh (which was really inspired by an Apple breed
When started, this company initially had no name and the co-founders just named all their files NV, as in “next version”. When the company was being incorporated they chose the Latin word for “envy” for the company name. Identify the company.
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Nvidia, the $2 trillion software & fabless chip juggernaut. Watch their latest AI event for 2024.
The “X Meter” is a phenomenon where there was a sudden influx of business for providers of X in areas with concentrated US government activity (like Washington DC, where the White House and the Pentagon are located) just before major world events in the 1980s and 90s (notable examples being the first Gulf War and the US invasions of Panama and Grenada.)
This was first noticed in 1990 just prior to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, when CIA personnel gathered at the Pentagon to discuss the ongoing issue, and one Frank Meeks realized a lot of his business traffic during that time (especially at night) was directed at the Pentagon. Business continued to boom right into 1991, with business spikes very reliably tied to major announcements from the White House and the Pentagon, a series of events the public dubbed the “X Meter”. Similar trends were spotted in hindsight in the 80s.
Naturally, the powers that be weren’t too amused by this trend being publicized, and government offices were instructed to change their tactics to break this pattern.
Frank Meeks owned a chain of 45 Domino's restaurants in the DC area and noticed a surge in orders the night before a major announcement would be made the next day. The CIA realized this made for a pretty big operational security hole, so they switched to ordering from other outlets at randomly staggered times to throw curious observers off.
Borgholm Castle is a 13th century castle located in Sweden & is noted for its design. The same design can also be seen representing tourist attractions in Nordic countries. How is this design related to the field of technology?
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The Command Key (⌘) in Apple keyboards is inspired by this design. Read More about the history of the symbol.
Apeks, Atomic Aquatics, Cressi, Mares, Sherwood, and Zeagle are all popular brands of scuba regulators — but arguably the oldest and best known is another brand that shares its name with a famous 1971 rock “concept” album (and its title song).
What brand?
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Aqua-Lung, the first commercially successful scuba system that stemmed from a prototype designed and patented by none other than oceanographer Jacques Cousteau himself.
Aqua-Lung also lent its name to the seminal rock album (and song) Aqualung by Jethro Tull. According to frontman Ian Anderson, the inspiration for the name sparked when he saw a homeless man with breathing problems and likened him to the scuba-diving main character from the TV show Sea Hunt (who was wearing an Aqualung).
In 2003, electronic games company Radica released X, a handheld game device which is a hardware-based offshoot of a 1996 website with the same name that itself is, in essence, a computerized version of a much older, free-form party game. X (both the device and the website) has gained cult status in certain circles for being “scarily accurate”, owing to the way it was designed – the website is built upon an early AI neural network that actually enables it to learn and fine-tune its strategy as it plays, and the handheld device is loaded with a smaller version of the neural network that limits its ability to “learn”, but is very accurate regardless.
What are we talking about here?
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20Q, an updated version of 20 Questions that learns from its entire player base to constantly refine its responses.
Prior to his most famous match, X announced that he would win by a margin of 5-0, or 4-1, in the 5 game series. The match did end up with a 4-1 result, only it was in favour of X’s opponent. He later said of the match (after his win in game 4) “I don’t think I’ve ever felt so good after winning just one match. I remember when I said I will win all or lose just one game in the beginning. If this had really happened ― I won 3 rounds and lost this round ― it would have had a great bearing on my reputation. However, since I won after losing 3 games in a row, I am so happy. I will never exchange this win for anything in the world. I, X, lost, but mankind did not.” Id X.
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X is Lee Sudol who played 5 games against Google's AlphaGo, the computer trained to play the strategy game of Go. Even though the player lost 4 games, he was impressed to see how well the computer played the game. Read More about the match.
The name of what casino, famous in its own right, took on another use in work by mathematicians John von Neumann and Stanislaw Ulam at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the 1940s?
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The Casino de Monte-Carlo in Monaco lent its name to Monte Carlo methods, a type of computational algorithm that enables mathematicians to counter-intuitively use randomness to solve problems that do not involve any randomness. Ulam and von Neumann's work on these algorithms was classified at the time and required a codename, so they used the Monte Carlo, where Ulam's uncle was an avid gambler.
In the early to mid 19th century, multiple advances in the field of agricultural machinery were made more or less in parallel by inventors in Scotland, the US, and Australia, all working (mostly) independently of each other. These developments coalesced into a single large, complex, and massively convenient piece of farming equipment that went through several stages of evolution, first horse-drawn, then steam-powered, then tractor-drawn, and eventually fully self-propelled and self-contained, complete with cameras and sophisticated yield monitoring and field mapping systems.
At its core, this machine merges the farming tasks of reaping, threshing, gathering, and winnowing grain into a single activity, and is commonly known by a deceptively simple name.
In the 1800s, with Britain’s Industrial Revolution in full swing, English workers and craftsmen began to find themselves in increasingly tight competition with the advanced mechanization and factories that enabled mass production of goods, combined with underhanded labor practices implemented by the top bosses in control of those factories to squeeze out as much product as possible.
Naturally, some of them expressed their resentment by going on a violent rampage against the machines that were destroying their livelihoods. Most legendary of these was “X”, who as the tale would have it, smashed two knitting frames in “a fit of passion” — an action that would result in his name being used for the entire movement. The name is still used today to refer to individuals who find themselves particularly opposed to modern technology and its ubiquity.
Who is X?
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"Ned Ludd", a mythical figure most likely based on a weaver called Edward Ludlam who probably did actually smash up some textile machinery.
Disaffected members of the 19th-century English working class banded together to protest unfair working conditions and rapid industrialization without labor protections (notably, they were not against industrialization itself), and the movement came to be known as the Luddites.
There is a trend of, technology reaching a larger audience faster. One way to measure this is to look at the time taken to reach 100 million users. Which service launched in 2023 broke all previous records & reached 100M users in just 5 days?
Rank
Platform
Launch
Time to 100M Users
1
?
2023
5 days
2
ChatGPT
2022
2 months
3
TikTok
2017
9 months
4
WeChat
2011
1 year, 2 months
5
Instagram
2010
2 years, 6 months
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Threads. The app launched on the back of Instagram to complete with Twitter/X. Here's a Cool Infographic on the journey of some of these technologies.
1879 turned out to be a damn good year for chocolate, when chocolatier Rodolphe Lindt supposedly (possibly accidentally) left a chocolate mixer running over a weekend and came back to realize he’d created a chocolate that tasted far smoother and richer than ever before, owing to the cocoa butter mixing evenly over granules of cocoa.
What is this process called (and why’s it called that)?
Program tapes of early computers had an option of creating holes and especially pasting paper sections to tweak the programs according to the needs. What terminology did this coin?
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Patches, as in computer patches. In early days, Software suppliers distributed patches on paper tape or on punched cards, expecting the recipient to cut out the indicated part of the original tape (or deck), and patch in (hence the name) the replacement segment.
In its latest environmental report, Microsoft disclosed that its global water consumption spiked 34% from 2021 to 2022 (to nearly 1.7 billion gallons, or more than 2,500 Olympic-sized swimming pools), a sharp increase compared to previous years. Google reported a 20% growth in water use in the same period. What is the cause of this sudden spike in water consumption for these tech companies?
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Generative AI In a paper due to be published later this year, a research team is estimating that ChatGPT gulps up 500 milliliters of water every time you ask it a series of between 5 to 50 prompts or questions. The range varies depending on where its servers are located and the season. The estimate includes indirect water usage that the companies don’t measure — such as to cool power plants that supply the data centers with electricity. Read More
