Nibble #11

WWDC '23 Recap, Sama visits India, Sequoia's three-act, AlphaDev can sort faster than us, GPTCache, Vision Pro Max needs more than 2 kidneys, GPT Best Practices and more

👋🏻 Hello and welcome to The Nibble’s #11 Edition.

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What’s happening 📰

Apple’s WWDC ‘23 happened!

• Apple did its “One more thing” thing again and was it an ⚡️ instant hit among the folks watching (and most of them are die-hard fans, anyways)

  • Announced iOS 17, iPadOS 17, WatchOS, macOS Sonoma (TL;DR, stole the AoD from Android, Siri no more needs “Hey”, new sexy AirDrop animation 🥵, Journal app, Desktop Widgets are back, and normal hype built on decent features)

  • The ultra-blazing-fuckingly-ridiculously fast M2 Ultra chip is here and also, the R1 chip, a new chip made specifically to power VR Headset.

  • Password Manager, allows you to quickly share passwords among family members (RIP password managers.)

    

  • Apple Vision Pro is Apple’s new $3,499 AR headset (sad news folks, Kidneys aren’t going to suffice anymore)

    

    The only practical use cases of Vision Pro in Bengaluru. Source: We!

• Instagram might be working on an AI chatbot and apparently, it’s coming after Twitter. I believe any and every opportunity to build a platform that can give you more dank memes should be encouraged. Here’s a question to ask yourself: Where do you think this fits if we plot every social media on an intellectual v/s flashiness graph? Twitter is high on the intellectual axis, and Instagram is high on the flashiness axis. What would this try to be?

• Many popular subreddits would be going on a two-day blackout on June 12th. TLDR; Reddit raised prices for their APIs. Popular third-party apps such as Apollo use these APIs. Apparently, the new price would cost them millions every year. (Some pretty active and popular Redditors are willing to delete their accounts if Reddit doesn’t budge permanently. A huge loss for the internet if this happens.)

• Sequoia, the VC behind Apple, Google, Airbnb, DoorDash, and Zoom, splits into three [Tweet]. TLDR; EU/US, China, and S/SE Asia get their own separate VC that was once the “Giant Sequoia” (pun intended). Differences arose because of portfolio, regulatory, and brand confusion regions. One time, YC asked its startups to “be frugal”. Other VCs followed and we saw a bloodbath. Is this start of something too?

• So Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI) reportedly said, “It's hopeless to compete with us on foundation models”. And Indians took it seriously especially TechM's CEO [Tweet] aaaand, Sama had to reply back saying “It’s a misunderstanding” and, “I think it’s the wrong question” [Tweet] (it was nice drama for 2 days on Twitter after Sam visited India)

  

  Discussing how to use ChatGPT for the next Elections, jk! IT Cell already knows

• Bing’s chatbot can listen to you now on Windows & Cortana says “Sayonara 👋🏻” (MS is going to gain so much advantage over everyone else if they do it right and do it in Windows, they might serve more users than Browsers do, and reach and usability is what tech is all about.)

• Chrome launches new Side Panel API for Extensions. (this is an underrated and hidden market, the Chrome Extension is serving and generation billions)

  

What brings us to awe 🤪

• Guess who is now releasing guidelines for getting sound output out of LLMs?
  → OpenAI, yes! - GPT Best Practices (it might not be as good of a guide as it should be, earlier they created a course with Andrew Ng and there also, pointed out some similar practices to follow and people hacked their way out of those too. Overall, showing that nobody correctly understands these networks yet.)

• 14 Charts that show the state of AI right now by Eric Newcomer. (we like this one particularly, as you know both of us are domain enthusiasts)

  

• Chess Tournament Matches and Elo Ratings - What’s more interesting than Chess? Chess and Maths! Elo ratings are one of the most predictable ways of understanding how a match would turn out. And it has uses more than just that. Guess what was behind Facemash, the earliert version of Facebook? Elo Ratings!

• Ah! Talking about Chess, do you remember a game called Go, which was obliterated by Deepmind’s AlphaGo, well those rockstars are back and this time, they brought us faster-sorting algorithms than what we use right now using their new state-of-the-art agent called AlphaDev

• A nerd Redditor created a few working QR codes on top of existing images using Stable Diffusion (what a brilliant use case!!!) Generate parametric QR codes here & some more cute kitten QRs here 🐈

  

  Scan me, please!

• Remember, Valve’s Proton? a tool that allows you to play Steam Games on Linux easily. Well, Apple now has something similar to that which allows you to play Windows Games on macOS

TILs 🤯

• 💪🏻 It’s more of one day we built. So, Twitter used to block the Substack URLs and now it somehow de-prioritizes the tweets with Substack URLs & URLs that forward (301 or 302) to Substack.
  We were facing a really hard time sharing Nibble on the blue bird app.
  So we did a small hack & we think it’s working. (basically, we dynamically fetch the latest post URL and wait for 1 second before forwarding it to Substack, lol!)

• 💽 Indexes are a great (and the only one we know) way to make Database queries faster, but do you always need them? For us it was like once we learned about them, we over-used it. But you don’t always need Indexes

What we have been trying 🔖

• Where can I watch this - A service that lets you find easily where you can watch the movie or the tv show of your choice in your country. (if you are in India, let me make it easy for you, the answer is JioCinema)

• Ten Years Ago - See what the internet looked like 10 years ago from the date your land on this site.

• Pessimist Archive - A collection of every time when we have been doomers on an upcoming revolutionary tech (this recommendation and WWDC both happening this week is purely a coincidence, *wink wink*)

Builders’ Nest 💪🏻

• ⚡️ GPTCache - Semantic cache for LLMs. Fully integrated with LangChain and llama_index. (well, there is not easy way to cache LLM responses and save money on OpenAI bills, unless you do semantic caching)

• 🧰 WebExtension-toolbox - kickstart your cross-browser extension journey faster. (this really helps in moving things faster and trust me Chrome Extension has tons and tons of nuances linked with them, Firefox, Safari & Chrome never agreed on few specs)

• ⏰ chrono - A natural language date parser in Javascript (this one solves a real pain, nobody (US) likes the same date formats, and people do weird things with dates, I mean DD-MM-YYYY date 🌚, and this package makes it all easy to parse)

• gpt-engineer - a tool to which you can specify what you want to build and it’ll clarify with other agents and then build the thing itself. (LLMs were okay but this E2E pipeline with agents is really scary, smol-ai’s developer did something similar)

Meme of the week 👑

Apple might kill the ChatGPT wave, or maybe not. ChatGPT ain’t Modiji after all. Source: Tweet

Something to think about 🤔

“Amass what you need, but ignore even more. Kill overkill”
~

Jason Fried

Off-topic reads/watches 🧗

• 🎥 A Sherlock Holmes Story You've Never Heard Of - An exciting story about Arthur Conan Doyle, an Indian man, racism, the Court of Appeals, and human emotions. (basically rollercoaster rides of emotions and plots)

• 🙃 An Exploration into Envy, Jealousy, and Comparison by

  Sankalp

• 🤌🏻 On being selective by

  Isabel
  (a little too real writing, covers the importance of being selfish for ironically, the greater good)

• One of our favorite writers Julia Evans breaks down the myths about blogging.

Job Posts 💼

PS: This section is not sponsored, we hand-pick stuff by ourselves, from the week-long scrolling of the web and email reading. We will usually post Global or India-based opportunities.

🆕 Job Hunt is hard, well worry not, here comes a tool which helps you get matching job posts given your Resume → Resume to Jobs

🆕 Want an easy way to track cover letters, write cover letters with AI, and optimize yourself (& LinkedIn) for a job hunt? Try this excellent Extension → Careerflow.ai
(one more thing to add, so that you trust them, their OAuth Screen name is faang-path.firebaseapp.com)

• Senior/Staff Software Engineer at Motion (YC W20) [Remote]
  (in case you are wondering, Motion prioritizes tasks for teams using AI)

• Browser Engineer at Brave (yup! Web3’s Chrome) [Remote | $60k-100k]

• Senior Software Engineer at Rippling (YC W17) [Bengaluru]

• Senior Software Engineer at Pluralsight [India]
  (yes, the same folks who allow one free course a week to make it easy for you to upskill)

• Backend Developer at Coupl [Remote | ₹10-18L]
  (quite a nice name here, it’s a banking app for couples, yes that’s Base 5! 😜)

• Backend Engineer at Turing [Remote]
  (what’s a better way to get hired to build stuff that helps people get hired?)

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From the Author’s Lap(top)

You can reach out to us using our nests on the Internet.
- Pushkar, Gujarati Bihari Dikra, loves languages (programming and otherwise) and can be a part-time meme-lord, and a part-time neural network whisperer.
- Aashutosh - Rajasthani Baniya, has a craving for memes, loves *-wares (soft, hard, middle, ALL), can talk in italics, is a part-time cat-whisperer, and can tirelessly work towards the bloom doom of humanity.

👋🏻 See you at the next one!