Nibble #12

CoWIN loses data, Google killed domains & Picasa, OpenAI is now agent, Vision Pro is Sony Product? Is Reddit the moat? Quasars, Gadget Reccos and more

👋🏻 Hola & welcome to 12th Nibble. (yay! 12 weeks of continuous writing 🥹)

Look this week was quite happening, so we have written a lot, have patience and read our takes, you might not have to click a few links this time.

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What’s happening 📰

• 💥 An alleged CoWIN (India’s official vaccination platform) data breach happened last week, a Telegram bot was spitting Aadhar, PAN, and passport details of people based on phone numbers provided to it. Later a Govt official clarified that the data is from a breach last year and CERT-in is looking into it. (look Hermanos! Privacy is a myth and Democracy has been hacked.) [Also, the centre denied the breach]

• 🪦 While talking about disasters, Google sold its domain business to Squarespace.

  • Why worry?
    => For the uninitiated, it’s not very good news, since GDomains offered a lot of easy-to-configure services like 100 free email aliases, DNSSEC, and some more protections inbuilt for free. Plus, you can trust Google’s infra (I mean 8.8.8.8 is still the most reliable DNS).

  • What to do now?
    => Well, we advise you not to take any hasty decisions, and stay with it. Squarespace said it’ll honor the contract for at least 12 months, and later if it turns out to be PITA, we can switch our Registrar, DNS, or MX servers.

    
    Other registrars (Vercel) saw this as an open opportunity and are making migration guides. (yes, nibbles.dev is registered on GDomain as of now)
    
    Also, GitHub’s co-founders tweeted about this whole fiasco saying “That’s why we didn’t sell it to Google and sold it to MS”.

• 🔪 Talking about Google killing things, remember Picasa 🥹? Well, it’s going to go away, so pay your odes. (time to get your notes [*coughs*] extracted from Google Takeout service)

  

  Source: Picasa Homepage

• 💣 OpenAI dropped another series of bangers! Look let’s be honest, OpenAI is in such a great position right now, that every release can obliterate a lot of companies (LangChain) and code. Agent’s use case is real and with direct support of that in OpenAI calls, they will just kill it.
  Here’s a brief breakdown of all things they released:

  • Function calling support new models is called gpt-4-0613 and gpt-3.5-turbo-0613, both chat completion models. (bye bye! complex Langchain code)
    Also, this means OpenAI can now natively return good JSON (more like OpenAPI, lol!, also, FML)

    

    ELI5 → Well, right now you can chat with AI, right? But the data is limited and constrained by what it’s trained on. But now with this function call, you can define a function find_person(email): Person and basically, if you say to OpenAI “Tell me more about Puneet Superstar”, it’ll call your function when needed and get structured information from it” and then tell you in the plain text who about the person you searched for.

  • gpt-3.5-turbo, their fastest and safe-to-say-best model is now 25% cheaper on input token cost, and wait for it, it can take up to 16k tokens (~4.5k words) now.

  • The old models will be auto-updated to these (0613) models automatically on June 27th. (not sure if this has some significance like earlier models were released on March 14th, 𝛑 day)

  • Also, Sama said he is positive about the global coordination of AI, so regulations might come in any day now.

• 🎼 Well, Meta is also killing it with AI developments, in last 2 weeks they have released 2 audio models and a paper on a new general model architecture:

  • They open-sourced MusicGen, a music-generating tool that can turn a text description into about 12 seconds of audio.

  • Voicebox: first generative AI model for speech with blazingly fast responses.

  • I-JEPA: built on Yann LeCun’s vision, this is a vision model (they say they’ll expand to other domains as well) that understands the world through images differently than the present SOTA diffusion models

• 🧾 Congress is to bring two new bills on AI, guess who is worried about the advancements in AI, yup the house and they have only one card “REGULATE” and they’ll play it ASAP.

• 💁🏻‍♂️ While we are on AI stuff, remember how OpenAI & Google said we have no moat? Well, there are some rumors (we think almost true) on the web that “Reddit is OpenAI’s moat” (and actually, if you think about it, what’s better training data than the front page of the internet!)

• 🙄 Turns out the Apple of your eye (pun intended†) is powered heavily by Sony [Tweet]. We were so surprised that this story makes it to the “Meme of the Week” this edition. It turns out that it is not so surprising after all, since all iPhone cameras are already sourced from Sony. Logistics is one of the less appreciated things about Apple (much like their sky-high product prices here in India 😒).
  BTW, for folks like me with 2 kidneys, Apple is planning to release a more affordable version of Vision.

  

  Source: Tweet

• Uniswap 🦄 shares developments on Uniswap v4. While WIP has already got the web3 community hooked up by introducing its pool lifecycle hooks, creating custom pools using these hooks, and a singleton contract for all its pools which would reduce gas costs tremendously.
  Talking of web3, Vitalik has blogged The Three Transitions sharing his thoughts on what he thinks Ethereum needs to transition to mature and become more accessible to the community. (While we aren’t on a bull run, passionate builders have been quietly building useful stuff and shipping them nonetheless. Godspeed!)

• Talking of v4s, JupyterLab 4.0 is Here. This release promises much faster Jupyter when working with large notebooks, improved UI, a better editor, Real-Time Collaboration (wow), and extension manager improvements. Big fan of every improvement in dev tools to build even more AGI-y AGI :P

What brings us to awe 🤪

• Apple might have gotten you excited about Spatial stuff last week, but here comes a brilliant use case by Spotify for Spatial Navigation on TV

• Quasar, the GLOWWINNG (more than stars) black holes that kill galaxies by Kurzgesagt (on the good side, they are like cleaners, they eat up all the gases [~about 1 earth equivalent gas per second] from galaxies, preventing us from having a lot of stars and destroying planets.)

• Sir Paul McCartney (one of the Beatles) says artificial intelligence has enabled a 'final' Beatles song - Now, we have seen some really interesting unreleased Beatles songs and theories (like The Beatles Never Broke Up which btw is one of my fav. childhood conspiracy theory) but this time, it really is Something. Hope they Don’t Let Me Down.

• 🙂 Researchers say that ChatGPT prefers repeating 25 jokes over and over (eh!, I have an uncle and flatmate with the same habit, and they seem to enjoy it. Step over science folks and let ChatGPT enjoy itself)

• Adobe is so confident its Firefly generative AI won’t breach copyright that it’ll cover your legal bills which in other words means that they are big on their AGI safety and are confident with their research. Though this is limited to their enterprise customers, they must have assembled up a pretty good legal team too!

TILs 🤯

• How to cite ChatGPT? - We know you’re one of those people who used GPT-generated stuff in one of your reports but chose not to cite it. Don’t worry we are guilty too (The Nibble is 100% human written though! We building MOAT).

• C’s printf() is Turing Complete. Yes, the #include<stdio.h> one. Excellent!

• You can open up and fold a sphere in the 2D plane to better visualize the area. Things become better once you see the sine graph coming in (Love the 3B1B-esque simplicity here). [Source: LinkedIn]

What we have been trying 🔖

• Speechify - A complete suite of apps to make it easy for you to read articles in the voice you like. (try Snoop Dogg, it’s nice)

• BlogToTweet - Turn any blog post into a Twitter thread using AI (are we using it? Yes, trying for the first drafts)

• Vercel AI SDK - Well, you have to write JavaScript at the end of the day and Vercel knew it, so it build an SDK which handles everything from Streaming to Deployments and made it breezy for you to develop AI-powered stuff. Also, they have AI Project Templates now. (happy building!)

Builders’ Nest 💪🏻

• million.js - Ditch the virtual DOM and make React 70% faster.

• QR-designer - a web app that lets you design a QR code without losing accuracy.

• webauthn - Go passwordless with this easy-to-use library. You can use Bio-metric as authentication, but the best part is registering your mobile as a hardware key. (in love with this package, and I will be using this only in my following side projects, bye! passwords!)

• kv.js - Build and run in-memory cache the easy way (Redis is overkill most of the time if you are not using multiple instances and the information really doesn't need to be shared. So, use this.)

Meme of the week 👑

Ref: See News Section above; Credits: Us!

Off-topic reads/listens 🧗

• 🗣️ Opinions on weekly 1:1s - Ask HN

• 🔖 Mental Liquidity by Morgan Housel. That name should be enough for you to slap open that link and read it right now. No seriously, if you are still here reading this sentence, then that means you love reading us too! Why, thank you, dear reader!

• ✉️ Hacker Newsletter - Tough to keep up with everything on Hacker News? This is the perfect way to keep up your reading and keep down that FOMO.

• 🎧 Why MRF was the first one to reach the 1lakh mark and what now? - By Finshots (sentiments or strategic, well we don’t know yet. Peacock’s tail analogy)

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.

• Sr. Staff ML Engineer - Mozilla [Remote | Germany]

• Director, AI Science - Uniphore [Palo Alto | Hybrid]

• Senior Data Engineer - Data Bricks, Srijan Technologies [India | Hybrid]

• Mobile Fullstack Engineer - Expensify [Remote]

• Site Reliability Engineer - Expensify [Remote]

Gadget Reccos 📱

Well, a lot of people around us are looking for new phones, earbuds, and other gadgets and they asked us for recommendations. We dug up a little and we have few opinions (just onions without you folks). We have a decision tree sort of thing actually.

• Phone (it’s a budget game, honestly)

  • [~₹25k] realme GT 2 (if the brand preference is not your thingy)

  • [~₹25k] OnePlus Nord 2T 5G (if you trust OP!)

  • [~₹30k] Nothing Phone (1), also, if you can wait and spend 10k more until July 11th, go for Nothing Phone (2)

  • If you want to spend more go for iPhones or Samsung S23 Ultra 🫡 or go buy some real-estate, ChatGPT can’t replace that.

• Earbuds (if you want to get a wired one, go get a Miniso one from the store)

  • If you are hooked into Apple Ecosystem go for → AirPods (we know you have money)

  • Otherwise, there are two good candidates we found few good candidates

    • If you are usually a multi-devices person go for Nothing Ear (2) [~₹10k]

    • Another one in a similar range Beats Buds Plus [~₹13k]

    • If you still feel, eh! too cheap gimme something classy, go for Bose Sport Earbuds [~₹18k]

    • Seems like Galaxy Buds have some crazy prices on Croma right now!

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From the Author’s Lap(top)

You can reach out to us using our nests on the Internet.
- 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.
- Pushkar, Gujarati Bihari Dikra, loves languages (programming and otherwise) and can be a part-time meme-lord, and a part-time neural network whisperer.

👋🏻 See you later! *chirping instant transmission sounds*

† if thou wert compelled to descend hither to grasp the jest, I beseech thee, shame upon thee!