Just Five Mins!

Another browser?  Well, a browser with some nifty tricks up its sleeves perhaps!  It also still uses the chromium engine, so no worries about another browser compatibility war!

The browser company has developed a new bundle of AI-powered features called Arc Max. The goal of Arc Max is to make the internet experience faster and easier for users. Some of the features of Arc Max include 5-second previews, which provide information on restaurants or other websites by simply hovering over a link; tidy tab titles that shorten and organize the titles of open tabs; automatic renaming of downloaded files to make them easier to find; and an AI-powered search function called "Ask on Page" that quickly finds specific information in articles or web pages.

I love their release video - brilliant lesson in marketing and to have some fun along the way, take a look here.

Until the next time!

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Okay, I am not sure they sell Wispa chocolate bars internationally, but worry not, this podcase has nothing to do with chocolate (sadly!).

Use Whisper AI to transcribe audio from video/different audio formats in any language and produce the text of the audio

We are talking Whisper AI from the good folks who brought (and totally destroyed our world! :) ) ChatGPT to the unexpected masses.

Read to the end to see how you can run Whisper AI as a docker container :)

The reason you might not have heard of it as much as ChatGPT is because you will generally need to run Whisper AI yourself or use a cloud service as an example.  I have played with Whisper AI via Python/PyTorch using the Google Collab service which you can use for free (need to check the actual info here!) to work with some of these types of use-cases.  In my case, this enabled a VM of sorts to actually run Python/PyTorch to interact with Whisper AI.

So, Whisper AI itself is pretty amazing but then add the fact you can of course now make the transcriptions searchable.  In my case I am already working with Microsoft Azure Cognitive Search for this type of thing however, you could also use something like OramaSearch which allows you to use JavaScript to perform powerful search capabilities to not only find the text but also time-link to the audio itself.  There is an example where a developer has used Astro (JavaScript framework) to stitch the UI side together - I will get a link to that.

But now the real golden nugget: you can run Whisper AI as a docker container!  oh yes, but make sure you have some decent PC performance :)  This opens up new opportunities of course not in the least being able to run on your own infrastructure.

Until the next time, take care.

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So, is it game over for Docker?  probably not!

What is Podman then?

"PodMan is a container engine that helps us with developing containers, managing both the containers and the images, and deploying containers."

On the surface, very similar to Docker i.e. Podman runs containers from images just like Docker.  However:

Daemon-less Approach

• PodMan uses a daemon-less approach, unlike Docker.
• Docker relies on a background daemon process, known as the Docker Daemon, to perform various container-related tasks.
• In contrast, PodMan performs all tasks directly from the client itself, using a fork-exec model.
• This architecture makes PodMan more efficient, lightweight, and secure.

Root versus Rootless

• PodMan offers a root-less approach, which adds an extra layer of security compared to Docker.
• Running applications as root can have security implications, as vulnerabilities could potentially affect the entire system.
• However, running applications as non-root within containers limits the impact of any exploited vulnerabilities to just the container itself.
• This difference in approach between PodMan and Docker enhances the overall security of containerized applications.

OCI Compatibility

• Both Docker and PodMan are based on the Open Container Initiative (OCI) standards.
• OCI sets standards for container technologies, ensuring compatibility and interoperability.
• This means that many of the commands used in Docker, such as pulling, pushing, and building images, are also applicable to PodMan.

So, until the next time, take care.

 

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Well, if you don't get the joke in the title gif/images, then perhaps this will help (yes, it is an old movie but still very funny!).  I the "Airplane" movie is still one of my favs!

So, vectors and what the heck they are all about.  Well, of late, vector databases have been getting a lot of visibility as well as established database vendors (Postgress etc.) adding vector database functionality.

Vectors appear in many AI/programming contexts, but one realm is text embeddings used in a lot of AI models to represent words/phrases etc. as arrays of numbers that can be used to find similar things.

Two great videos below will explain vectors, text embeddings and vector databases a lot better than myself!

A great 30 min intro to text embeddings

A quick dip into the world of vector databases (yes, the Fireship guy again!)

 

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Oh, I wish they had called this Bunee!

So, another week another framework!  But this one is clever, I think.  BUN is a drop-in style replacement for NodeJS.  Aims to be much faster and includes a lot of things out of the box including its own package manager/bundler along with native support for tests and SQLite.

Because BUN has pretty much full compatibility with NodeJS, you can use NodeJS modules and of course NPM - but for new projects, you could probably find most native API's have got you covered.

The next thing for myself is to try BUN with HTMX (the Javascript-less frontend library) as I can see (for some projects) some amazing productivity gains for a lot of my webapps!

No bunee's were harmed in the making of this podcast :)

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Yes! you can run (some!) Azure AI services locally!

Rather than repeat, I have a blog post here to explain a little more.

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So, you want to quickly build a web page or web pages?

You might be familiar with Squarespace, Wix, Webflow etc. all of which use these visual designers to help you quickly build the webpages you desire.

The only issue is you are locked in to their platform hosting and of course monthly/yearly subscription costs.

Webstudio is a really neat open source version - very much like Webflow and currently in beta (although very feature rich already!).

The visual editor is available as an online app or you can download the app for Windows, Mac, Linux.  I have a feeling (sorry! not investigated enough here!) it is based on or around something like Electron (I did a podcast a while ago about this).

But the other good news is you can take the hosting part of this open source project and host the web apps you build anywhere you like... locally, docker or your hosting platform of choice.

Webstudio do offer hosting themselves - actually they use CloudFlare workers which provide a serverless hosting model sort of like AWS Lambda/Azure Serverless etc.  They have a free tier too if you want to use their hosting to try things out.

As you can tweak/embed Webstudio in your own apps too, this really does make for an interesting option to not be locked into one platform and endless costs - obviously always check the licensing!

Open source = Awesame Sauce perhaps :)

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There really is no limit what you can do these days - even without JavaScript!

Once again, I have been inspired (aka stollen!) by a video from FireShip.io, this time about something called HTMX.  It is HTML on steroids (without the nasty side effects of JavaScript :) )

Sprinkle in a few HTML attributes and you have a new way to build modern web apps without touching a line of JavaScript.  HTMX even has a client-side router (boost) to enable the single page app (SPA) feel.

Would you still need JavaScript? perhaps, however, for a lot of apps and more so these days using headless CMS systems (builder.io is a fav of mine) to return snippets/islands of pre-rendered HTML, then this might be a useful tool in the magic dev tool box.

Here is the official link to HTMX.

If you want to read a little more too, please visit my blog post here.

 

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Blazor: The Microsoft framework to create web apps (and more!) without JavaScript (but you can have some if you like :) ).

I have already written a ramble that goes with this episode - take a look here if so

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50th Episode!  yeah!!  that hardly anyone listens to ;)  Hey, can't take yourself too seriously right?

 

Anyway, the end of Stackoverflow as we know... sort of similar to the classic REM song - you must know it!  unless you were born after the year 2000 possibly!

I wrote a little rambling blog post about a week or so ago about the rebirth of Stackoverflow.  I guess they had to pivot/innovate given their traffic stats and the introduction of ChatGPT and similar tools (not to mentioned GitHub Co-Pilot of course).

Anyway, the new breed of Stackoverflow (AI) has some interesting features... take a listen!  it really is about 5 minutes long this time!

OverflowAI link here

Just for reference, the announcement video is here too!

 

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