AI Bubble, bubbles burry's worries away.
Newsletter for the week of Nov 09
Derivative hot takes
A section where I repeat hot takes that resonate with me.
Take #1: Microsoft will transition from an end users tooling business to an infrastructure + context business for user + ai systems. That’s why it’s putting its bet on copilot.
Take #2: Shadow markets of AI toolkits for cyber espionage and first inter-continental framework for agentic AI will become a reality within the next 8 months.
Useless things that I love
Now You See Me Now You Don’t was a good intended, misperformed tragedy that you keep rooting for, wanting it to get better. They are jumping into a new universe of magicians.
I invented a fusion noodle recipe. this week. I am calling it Malai Thai. Get it? Mai Tai! come on! Anyways, I cooked noodles with a malai mutter base and it was GOOOOOOD. HMU for deets.
Interesting corners of the internet
OnePlus 15 is AMAZING. To give you context, the last phone they launched was 10 months ago. And this one goes mega on all specs that I care about. ALL. Except cameras. They are decent. BUT familiarity curse. My small sample set of existing OnePlus users were not impressed. They expect this high level of execution from the company on a regular basis. PS: Don’t go finding the OnePlus 14. If you do find it, I will gift you one myself. Offer valid in US only.
Speaking of bombs from China, here’s another one. https://www.anthropic.com/news/disrupting-AI-espionage The attackers ‘jail broke’ claude code and used it as the core engine of an automated hacking framework. For those who know about this, I GTG, 1002 bots are on my ass.
I found https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/machine-learning-powered-search-ranking-of-airbnb-experiences-110b4b1a0789 very interesting, in my pursuit of becoming a complete ML Engineer. For any of you interested in such blogs, feel free to share more of them! I will be writing up detailed notes on them.
Experiences with Azure
What is pain?
Azure functions can be painful. Ask me. I struggled at finding host keys for my Azure Function for a week. That is 60 hours of helpless tinkering.
The only hint I had, was https://github.com/Azure/Azure-Functions/issues/1080#issuecomment-530046535
SPOILER ALERT, I contributed to the same thread with my experience https://github.com/Azure/Azure-Functions/issues/1080#issuecomment-3536623969
podcasts corner
I heard some repulsive opinions on H1B and other parts of the economy on the All In Podcast. I recommend it for anyone that is a big fan of capitalism and loud mouth debates.
Nerd Corner
Details on the Azure fiasco
It turns out, that an old azure function VS code extension, when asked to create an azure function template, was, for some reason, naming the queue, which I had selected as the trigger for AzureWebJobsStorage’s value instead of actually putting in the storage connection string.
Another interesting observation is that - there were threads that asked me to add 2 more environment variables - azure-webjobs-secrets and azure-webjobs-hosts or something like that - but the azure function extension deleted them while deploying to my storage account.
Lastly, if you have not created the azure function on the azure account, but try deploying it, instead of giving a helpful hint, the extension would simply say function ‘XYZ’ not found. The same error that is displayed when your host.json file does not direct to the file containing your main function with azure function annotations.
This piece realy made me think about the accelerating pace of AI development. Your insight on Microsoft's Copilot strategy is particularly sharp. From a pedagogical standpoint, the 'shadow markets' and AI espionage highlight the urgent need for robust ethical AI frameworks and security education. It's a complex landscape.