Navigating the World of Finance: Banks, Investments, and More
It’s surprising how many people want to invest without fully understanding how banks, brokers, stock exchange, fintechs works. Let’s break down some key concepts:
Author Archives: George Valentin Voina
Coffee, Flip-Flops, and AI Overlords: Maybe We Can Relax?
I had a bit of an epiphany today. Picture this: me, sipping coffee at some decadent resort in a warm country, contemplating the great existential dread of our time – AI taking all our jobs. It’s the big scare, right? Skynet’s coming for our spreadsheets and our artisanal cheese-making gigs. But you know what? It… Read More »
Clean #Oracle schema used space after an archival
When archiving a big database it is very important to free up space after that. After running the archival scripts that basically deleted old data from the production database, some extra steps were necessary to actually clean up the used space in the database. To first check how much space we still use after deleting… Read More »
#Firefox took a wrong time-zone when resistFingerprinting is on
Some websites require to obtain the time-zone from the client browser in order to correctly display some information. This is not always critical but in case you are using some web hosted e-mail or calendar account this is important. One day I noticed that suddenly all my tutanota.com mail calendar events were completely off by… Read More »
Read text content of a blob in #Oracle SQL
Sometimes you need to inspect the content of a text blob in Oracle. Yes, if the content is not a text then this does not make sense, but often times we insert in a blob field a really long text like an XML content or JSON content of a document. What we need to do… Read More »
Be your own media company, do not let others sell your work
Lately I have seen several good Twitter thread that resonated very well to my own conviction. Traditional media is dead. The printed press, the TV news, the traditional news agencies are all now just chasing the clicks, the sensational, the tabloid news. The quality of reporting is abysmal, the angle of the news is always… Read More »
Sales tricks I learned from #banking world
I was reading lately some materials about sales in banking and it struck me that there is also a “language” specific to selling stuff to premium customers, both companies or individuals. Some of them I knew without knowing that I new them: that is called experience 🙂 Basically avoid all the words related to money,… Read More »
My #Trip to #Meseru in #Lesotho
My only trip to Africa in 2024 came as a last minute request almost at the end of the year. As I was starting to prepare mentally for the end of the year, I got a request to help out another team. You know that kind of request you get on Thursday asking you if… Read More »
How to force locally run Ollama AI models to use all your CPU or GPU cores
Experimenting with different Ollama sourced AI models I discovered that sometimes in a very strange way my CPU or GPU resources are not used efficiently. By looking at the way Ollama models are packed we see that they are basically very similar to docker images where a full environment is specified. For example we can… Read More »
AI take on: Top 10 reasons why IT sucks in Europe
In my previous post https://blog.voina.org/gold-reddit-comments-top-10-reasons-why-it-sucks-in-europe/ I already presented the best Reddit post about the hot topic of EU lagging behind in innovation and technology due to red tape and over-regulation. Just for fun I asked the new AI model from Nvidia, the open sourced “nvidia/Llama-3.1-Nemotron-70B-Instruct-HF”, what is its opinion about the topic. The result top… Read More »