What drawing lines on a football pitch taught me about the future of human-AI collaboration
How I used Codex, computer vision, and football intuition to measure a UEFA Champions League goal
Home on KAY SINGH
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Lord of War, meet Lord of Tokens: Torture-testing image models on design-agency grade work
Can AI compress decades of design expertise into a prompt? I gave seven models the hardest test I could think of.
Decoding Netflix's AV1 Streams: Here are 10 things I found
A weekend project that turned into discovering how Netflix is quietly revolutionizing streaming efficiency with AV1.
Taking Microsoft's Calibri replacements for a spin
How do Calibri’s replacements compare? See some real world examples.
Apple Silicon M1 Power Consumption Deep Dive Part 2: Local Playback
Apple M1 is an amazingly efficient piece of silicon. How much power do you think it consumes while playing 4K and 1080p videos in VLC player? Read on to find out.
Apple Silicon M1 Power Consumption Deep Dive Part 1: Safari vs Chrome
Apple M1 is an amazingly efficient piece of silicon. How much power do you think it consumes while streaming from YouTube or Netflix? Read on to find out.
Philips Brilliance 4K UHD 27" Monitor Review
Hello internet friend! If you’ve landed here from an internet search hoping to find more info on this Philips monitor, then let me keep it short and save you some time.
Netflix's Annual Reports (10-Ks) used to be a work of art. What happened?
Netflix put some serious design resources into its Annual Reports pre-2010. What changed?
Apple Silicon M1 supports "billion of colors" aka HDR 10-bit output
When most people hear Apple in a sentence, their next thought is likely the color. Does Apple Silicon M1 output “billion colors”?
How to get 4K 60 FPS working on an external monitor with Macbooks
Getting 4K 60 Hz output on a Macbook is more challenging than it needs to be. Here’s what to watch out for.
Fixing "sed: command i expects \ followed by text" error
I ran into a very weird error today. While trying to automate the deployment for this blog, I needed to replace a string in a file. The internet tutorials [ 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ] told me that sed would be perfect for this job and the following command should work: sed -i 's/search_string/replace_string/' filename The Error However, I kept getting tripped up by the following error: sed: 1: "i2.html" :…
Upcoming ARM Chip That's Faster Than Apple Silicon M1
The release of Apple M1 Silicon has laid to rest many questions about whether ARM CPUs can go toe-to-toe with the best of the bunch from Intel and AMD. Can others replicate this?
Apple Silicon M1: Black. Magic. Fuckery.
These are the words used by the user holdagold on reddit to describe their experience with the new Apple Silicon M1 Macbook Air. Rarely does a product leave people effusing to the extent Apple Silicon M1 has done this week.
How Spotify is Killing the Open Podcast Ecosystem
Earlier this year, when Spotify announced that “The Joe Rogan Experience” would stream exclusively on Spotify, it sent shockwaves throughout the podcast ecosystem. This deal – reportedly worth over $100 million – is one of the most lucrative podcast deals. The presence of this deal, let alone the magnitude, is rare for the podcast ecosystem, which is built on open…
AV1 Ecosystem Update: January 2020
January is usually a big month for tech because the Consumer Electronics Shows kicks off every year in Las Vegas. This year was no different as various manufacturers brought their latest products to showcase. Samsung and LG 2020 TVs to support AV1 decoding We have been waiting all of 2019 to see consumer devices that can decode AV1 and CES did not disappoint! Both Samsung and LG announced their…
AV1 2019: A Year In Review
Introduction It’s not often you see so many logos of tech giants on one page backing the same technology . In my experience, every enterprise has developed a case of NIH and come up with their standards. No surprise then that there’s an XKCD describing this phenomenon! But when the AV1 1.0.0 spec was finalized in 2018, with the backing of so many giants, the world knew AV1 would be a…
AV1 Ecosystem Update: December 2019
dav1d 0.5.2 ‘Asiatic Cheetah’ released dav1d ended the year with another performance improvement release. Dubbed the “Asiatic Cheetah” this release brings the following improvements: ARM32 optimizations for loopfilter, ipred_dc|h|v Add section-5 raw OBU demuxer Improve the speed by reducing the L2 cache collisions Fix minor issues, including compilation on some OSes Release…
How to Customize LinkedIn Android App Notifications
I recently discovered the importance of being in control of the notifications on your smartphone. When my recent LinkedIn post went viral , I received many comments and connection requests, which led to a constant buzzing of notifications from the LinkedIn app on my phone. This is never fun when you’re trying to concentrate 😊 Pre-Requisites Install the LinkedIn Android app . A fairly recent…
What Happens When Your LinkedIn post goes viral!
What is LinkedIn? I have never really discovered the value of LinkedIn until about a year ago when I started using it seriously to search for a new job opportunity. I have always viewed it as a Facebook clone with a horrible and inconsistent UI. But I was surprised to discover that LinkedIn had updated their UI with a copy-paste job from Facebook. Using LinkedIn is now a much more pleasant…
AV1 Ecosystem Update: November 2019
The Tale of Two next-gen SOCs - Snapdragon 865 and MediaTek Dimensity 1000 Last month, we saw the release of SOCs expected to power next-gen flagship smartphones. Since the AV1 standard as formalized, the community has been waiting to see when SOC manufacturers add hardware support for AV1 decoding. It looks like we'll be waiting a lot longer for such a chip from Qualcomm. In what might come as a…
AV1 Ecosystem Update: October 2019
Let’s start this month’s roundup with a faster decoder! dav1d 0.5.0 & 0.5.1 release In October, dav1d saw two new releases with some fantastic speed improvements. Here is a summary: Large improvements in speed on SSSE3 CPU (up to 40% speedup) Speed improvements on AVX-2 (for 4-7%) Speed improvements on ARM64 (up to 10%) and ARM32. 0.5.1 is a minor release which brings improvements in…
AV1 Ecosystem Update: September 2019
Let’s start this month’s roundup with the release of two of our favorite encoders - rav1e and SVT-AV1! rav1e rav1e finally has a new weekly pre-release with the following updates: Improvements More API documentation Better error reporting Nicer error messages in the cli application Explicit validation of the encoder configuration The input Frame type can be expressed Added cargo-fuzz…
Part 3: Building a scalable 'shot-based' serverless AV1 video encoder in Azure
This is a 3-part blog covering how to build a scalable shot-based serverless video encoder in Azure. In Part 1, I explain what AV1 is and where we are in the video encoding space. In part 2, we create a logic app to upload and index the video. In part 3, we’ll need to split the video into its scenes and encode individual scenes. For reference, here are the links to all the parts:
Now Available: Weekly build of libaom AV1 + FFmpeg docker image
Motivation While trying to try out the latest features for the libaom AV1 encoder, I’ve been trying to figure out how to get a hold of the latest binary. As of writing of this blog, I haven’t come across any source on the web that publishes a binary of libaom AV1 encoder. Often while trying to get a hold of the latest changes in libaom, you have to build the source yourself which takes…
AV1 Ecosystem Update: August 2019
AVIF in Spectrum lib While browsing for AV1/AVIF updates, I noticed this commit to Facebook’s open source Spectrum library that adds support for AVIF format. https://github.com/facebookincubator/spectrum/commit/89b87bee831d3c7aabd0ad327fb118ce699df55d Spectrum is an image transcoding library for iOS and Android that is meant to be integrated into apps for image operations. Hopefully this…
AV1 Ecosystem Update: July 2019
If May and June were F1 race cars in terms of speed of AV1 development, then July would probably be a Honda Civic. After numerous exciting announcements in the previous month, July felt like everyone’s on vacation, which is probably true because summer months tend to be slow as the school’s out. So, this update will be a short one as I’m out on vacation as well :) Mile High Video…
Part 2: Building a scalable 'shot-based' serverless AV1 video encoder in Azure
This is a 3-part blog covering how to build a scalable shot-based serverless video encoder in Azure. In Part 1, I explain what AV1 is and where we are in the video encoding space. In part 2, we create a logic app to upload and index the video. In part 3, we’ll need to split the video into its scenes and encode individual scenes. For reference, here are the links to all the parts:
AV1 Ecosystem Update: June 2019
It’s been a pretty busy for me professionally which is why this month’s AV1 ecosystem update is coming in pretty late. It’s been one of the most exciting months for AV1 development and a lot to catch up on! With so much news this month, it is starting to feel like we’re at the cusp of something big! ( which we hope AV1 will be ) Youtube pauses AV1 rollout Currently, YouTube…
Part 1: Building a scalable 'shot-based' serverless AV1 video encoder in Azure
This is a 3-part blog covering how to build a scalable shot-based serverless video encoder in Azure. In Part 1, I explain what AV1 is and where we are in the video encoding space. In part 2, we create a logic app to upload and index the video. In part 3, we’ll need to split the video into its scenes and encode individual scenes. For reference, here are the links to all the parts:
AV1 Ecosystem Update: May 2019
May was another amazing month for the AV1 codec! We saw great progress in the SVT-AV1 encoder, Android update news and some surprising news out of China! SVT-AV1 is making strides! Let’s start with SVT-AV1 encoder, the current encoder of choice for Netflix , being developed by the folks at Intel. In May, version 0.5.0 was released with the following features: 8 bit / 10 bit 4:2:0 up to 4K60p…
AV1 Resource Central: Videos, Tools, Presentations, Comparisons, Research Papers, Encoders, Decoders
Bitstream spec https://aomediacodec.github.io/av1-spec/ Encoder Implementations SVT-AV1 Homepage https://01.org/svt Source repo https://github.com/OpenVisualCloud/SVT-AV1 User-Guide https://github.com/OpenVisualCloud/SVT-AV1/blob/master/Docs/svt-av1_encoder_user_guide.md Roadmap Trello page Microsoft Azure whitepaper https://01.org/sites/default/files/documentation/svt_azure_wp.pdf Amazon Web…
AV1 Ecosystem Update: April 2019
It’s been an exciting time following the progress of the royalty free video codec AV1 over the past year and April might just be the most exciting active month in the amount of news we got about AV1! It’s not every day that media industry giants such as Netflix, Google, Mozilla, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, ARM, Facebook, Nvidia, Intel, Cisco and many others agree on the same technology…
How to identify boot, temp and data disks in Azure Linux VMs
In Azure, every VM has a persistent OS Disk that is used for booting the VM and contains the operating system. In addition to an OS disk, each VM also has a temporary disk that is present on the compute cluster hosting your VM. Why is my OS disk not @ /dev/sda? In most cases the OS disk is /dev/sda but in some odd cases it is not. This is not an Azure specific issue but a default Linux behavior.…
It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video!
It is 2019 and we need to make a decision about GIFs ( no, not that one! We’re never going to be able to decide that one! ). GIFs take up a massive amount of space (often multiple megabytes!) and if you’re a web developer, then that’s completely against your ethos! As a web developer, you want to minimize the bits your users need to download so that your website loads fast. That’s why you minify…
Detect Rolling Credits with Azure Video Indexer
Azure Video Indexer is one of my favorite services! It provides some amazing features such as: Identify faces and celebrities Extract text and objects (e.g. cat, table, car etc.) Detect scenes and shots Emotion and sentiment detection Audio effects such as clapping, silence & speech The full list of features can be viewed at https://vi.microsoft.com/en-us/ Get the credits rolling! Recently, Video…
The "Other Chromes": A Chromium-based browser market analysis
We’re living in a golden age of web browser choice. But before I begin this story, I need to take you back to 2006. You see back in 2006 as a young technologist, my choices of a web browser were limited. It was either Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox. But then one day while browsing through PC World magazine, I discovered an alternate option – Opera. Opera had many differentiated features such…
Microsoft Ignite 2018: VM Scale Sets + Shared Image Gallery = Infrastructure at scale - BRK3339
When you need to create a lot of instances from a custom VM image, VM Scale Sets and Shared Image Gallery are the services you need to use. In this session we walk through how to combine the power of VM Scale Sets & Shared Image Gallery to build infrastructure at scale.
Microsoft Ignite 2018: What's new in Managed Disks - THR2263
Managed Disks make the managedment of disks a breeze in Azure. In this session I talk about the updates we’ve introduced to Managed Disks since Ignite 2017.
Microsoft Ignite 2018: Migrating your IaaS infrastructure from ASM to ARM without downtime - THR2265
Azure Resource Manager stack has been released for almost three years now. In those three years many features have been added that are exclusive to Azure Resource Manager. In this session, I demonstrate the process of migrating your existing infrastructure to Azure Resource Manager without downtime. See a list of all the benefits here:…
Microsoft Ignite 2018: Share custom VM images with Shared Image Gallery - THR2264
Sharing custom images within an organization to different subscriptions globally has been a long standing ask from Azure customers. With Shared Image Gallery we’re making this dream a reality! Read more about Shared Image Gallery https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/shared-image-gallery-now-in-limited-public-preview/ In this session, I present how customers can get started with Shared…
Testing x265 encoder scaling on a 128 core Azure VM for 4K HDR
Video encoding has always been a fairly compute intensive task. With every new generation of video encoders, more computational power has been required to achieve the compression benefits. HEVC/H.265 is the latest state of the art video compression standard with x265 being the most popular open-source encoder used for encoding into the HEVC/H.265 format. In comparison to AVC/H.264 (the previous…
How do I discard unstaged changes in Git?
Often when I’m working on this blog, I work over multiple days and end up working on multiple devices. The blog is written in markdown and tracked in a Git repo on Azure Devops . The other day a scenario arose where I was customizing the theme of the blog but not getting anywhere. I decided to have another go at the customization few days later but this time on another device. Luckily, I was able…
Vertical Scale Runbooks Updated with the latest Azure VM Sizes
In the world of cloud, horizontal scaling is well understood these days. It is easy to use applications like Kubernetes to automate the scale out your containerized applications based on workload demand. For applications running on VMs, we have cloud native services like VM Scale Sets that make scaling in and out a breeze. However, for an on-prem application going through a lift & shift to the…
Understanding the Azure B Series and CPU credits
Azure recently introduced its first burstable VM size - the B-series. This VM type is meant to compete directly with AWS’ T2 instances. In the below few words (or more :smile: ) I try to explain what this means and why you should care. If you still have questions after reading, hit me up on Twitter or leave a comment below. So why do I need a burstable size anyway? If you have applications…
Integrating Azure Automation Runbook Output with Logic Apps
Problem One of the challenges I have come across the last few days while working with Azure Automation & Logic Apps is how to integrate the output of the Automation Runbook in the Logic Apps workflow. Here’s the scenario, I have been trying to solve - Given an AzureRM resource Id, I want to parse out the name of the subscription, resource group & name of the resource. Here’s an example…
Azure Cloud Shell + Solarized Dark = ❤️
I’m a big fan of typography! Clean and beautiful typography can make the experience of coding or reading an article so much better. It’s no wonder if you search for “best programming font”, there’s no shortage of font comparison articles. However, one of the things that is universally agreed upon is how terrible Courier/Courier New is. Azure Cloud Shell is a great…
About Me
Hi! My name is Kay Singh and I am a Product Manager at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Previously I worked at Azure on the Compute team. In my free time I’m either experimenting with various ideas and side projects which will end up on this blog or travelling and putting my camera to good use. Some things I’ve worked on Azure Ultra SSD Disks Launched Shared Image Gallery service for…
Contact Me
If you’d like to reach out, I can be found at the below links. DMs are open on Twitter. Twitter - @singhkays LinkedIn