Nibble #13

Tiktok hoards GPU, Googlers no Bard, 8xGPT3 == GPT4, Figma Dev Mode, SAM is faster, Elon v/s Mark showdown, BigDay for Text2Image Models

👋🏻 Hola & welcome to Nibble the 13th (so, we shipped it on Friday, you know! 😉)
Also, we don’t know if you noticed but the time is special too.

At the time of writing this, we crossed 50 subs (by a good margin), all thanks to the love and support of YOU, our dear reader (Nibblers?).
We’ll continue doing what we best do (create memes and write the next nibble). Pssttt, we have a lot of things on plans over the coming weeks, so watch out for some new stuff dropping!

Imagery as described by people in Pushkar’s room

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What’s happening 📰

• Yann LeCun (one of the three among the holy trinity of AI) said out loud that “AI is not going to take over humanity and calm down you freaks”. (basically, he said the same thing as everyone, some jobs will be replaced, but new ones will be created, and accept your fate mortals.)

• Today also happens to be a big day for Text to Image models. Stability AI, the team behind Stable Diffusion launched SDXL 0.9 and this looks soo good. I mean just look at the fingers!

  

  Source: Stability AI Blog

  Meanwhile, Midjourney 5.2 released their Zoom-out feature which lets you outpaint any generated image that makes it look like you zoomed out of the frame to see what’s around. Look at that would ya? [Tweet with examples] (we are literally screaming right now! aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!)

  

  Source: Tweet

• Tiktok (Bytedance) just ordered 100k GPUs in just one year [Tweet]. For context, OpenAI used up to 10k GPUs in 2020. We recently covered how NVDA 0.00%↑ reached a $1 trillion market cap (tres commas club) and this deal becoming public must be the icing on the cake on the Nvidia brand appeal now. (well, what may not be so appealing for you though would be what TikTok does with this much compute power because that would directly translate to you getting even more hooked to their algorithm and keep scrolling the app. RIP screen time ☠️ & eyes.)

• DHH says You can't trust Google (after killing two more products last week, he basically tells you that, Google ain’t a company that excels in products/services incapable of catering ads, also I think he meant that Android users should have a backup iPhone just in case.)

• Talking of not trusting Google, Google warns its own employees: Do not use code generated by Bard. They say that it is because it produces “undesired code suggestions" (experienced personally when ChatGPT was better at writing Google Sheet functions than Bard 🤷‍♂️ Why don’t they just make a publicly available API and let the Open Source community do its thing and build useful solutions on it? Update: They’re rolling out MakerStudio access this week! Both of us got that 🤩)

• Microsoft (yup, yup! creators of legendary XP) launched Azure OpenAI Service On YOUR Data so you (businesses, to be precise) can now easily run OpenAI models on their data without any training or fine-tuning. (Under the hood, this is basically a ChatGPT plugin for using external data that is clubbed in the Azure service; which is a very smart move by Microsoft to attract more customers to Azure. And killing few startups in the process.)

• Remember those trillion-parameter comparisons b/w GPT-3 and the unreleased GPT-4? Turns out GPT-4 actually uses the same 220B model, just that instead of one model, they trained 8 of them and are doing multiple inferences!

  

  the future is multi-headed

• Brian Chesky (CEO of Airbnb) said, “I think anyone can do what only a software engineer allowed you to do five years ago — it's going to be awesome for many people." (no, matter what everyone says, we all know that the software engineering veil has been lifted.)

• Zuck and Musk are gonna get into a cage fist-fight (I mean literally) and this is not a new fight, to begin with (plays *तेरा मुझ से है पहले का नाता कोई*). Both this near to humanoid tech billionaires have a history of fights. It starts with SpaceX’s launch failure destroying Meta’s satellite (lol) & then Elon taking down SpaceX and Tesla pages from Facebook. (related Meme)

• Figma announced “Dev Mode”, Plugins for GitHub, Jira, etc. Also, the VSCode extension in their recent conf Figma Config (it allows you to quickly view Figma pages in Code editors, export designs to code and code to design, and all sorts of Dev x Design things)

  

  While everyone was turning against us, only the Designers said out loud that “We’ll only draw rectangles”, but No! Figma didn’t like it.

• Apple Vision Pro Developer Tools Now Available With New visionOS SDK (so all the devs who pivoted to *Spatial Computing* recently can build really cool stuff with it) and people are all over Twitter with what they gave been building (oh and they dropped some visionOS design resources on Figma as well!)

What brings us to awe 🤪

• Remembers SAM (not Altman, Segment anything Model by Meta), well some folks in Wuhan, China created something called Fast SAM. (TL;DR, the paper says it’s 50x faster than SAM, guess what this is a case where “simple is better than complex”, they are using CNN with some tuning over Transformer, which is used by SAM)

  

• What the heck is Vector Databases? If you’re working with LLMs and Databases (and even if you aren’t) Vector DBs are a new way of storing semantic information and they are here to stay. This is one of the most easy-to-read explanations of what they are and we already love it.

• AWS and Blockchain - Why AWS decided to add Blockchain to its cloud offering. TL;DR They say every use case could have been just a database but who says no to some fat easy VC Money 🤑

• LLMs can label data as well as humans, but faster. Is anybody old enough to remember MTurk? 😛 Won’t it overfit when it’s all LLMs? Like when LLMs ask LLMs to label data generated by other LLMs and some other LLMs verify if the LLM output LGTM?

• Psychedelics Unlock Learning Windows in the Brain - Recent research shows psychedelics have the ability to reopen developmental windows that close after childhood. Who’s cooking mushrooms today?

• Use an HDR <video> to show up to 7% brighter whites on Apple Devices. Seems like a new ad-tech toy now for all the startups splurging that VC money to grab your eyeballs (and no, it still is bright in dark mode. we tried)

  

  Source: Tweet | Inspiration: Tide ads

• Hashing - It was the Load Balancers last time and this time, Sam Rose is back with an excellent visual explainer on Hashing. His blog's interactivity makes it much more pleasant than simply reading/watching a video about this. (I think it’s the era of Sam’s ruling the world, keep your friends close and Sams closers)

• Maps Distort How We See the World - This is the mother of all the “you’ve been seeing the earth wrong” articles. Plus it comes from “Uncharted Territories” (cool name ain’t it?) which is one the most profound substacks I’ve ever found.

• HTML gets a new tag for semantics search, <search> (nothing beats native functionality, right? There might still be tons of HTML tags you don’t know about)

TILs 🤯

• How do QRs work? TL;DR → Some image recognition to determine the orientation using position markers, some path traversal along the black and white grid, and some really good Information Theory applications for error correction to remain robust even if the image is a little damaged. Lord Shanon would be proud 😌

  

• How to install and try multiple macOS versions together? (why? I mean why not? It’s Ubuntu-Windows 10 era again!)

• How VS Code Made Bracket Pair Colorization 10,000x - Didn’t know Bracket Pair Customization could have so much to it! (max we know is that we can keep a stack to track the bracket pairs 😭 *cries in C++*)

• Cake wreck is a metaphor for literal misinterpretation (hello! Devs and PMs, too close to home?)

  

  Source: Sketchplanations

What we have been trying 🔖

• QR Code AI Art Generator - Now as easy as it gets, give the content for the QR code and prompt for the image to lay over it. Done!

• The Y Combinator Database - Everything you ever wanted to know about YC companies, organized and served to you in a neat little dashboard 🍦

• Playground AI - A free-to-use online AI image creator. (allows 1,000 images per day for free, look we know Midjourney is completely on a different level, but this one is worth it for free)

• Day Progress - Time remaining today in your menu bar. (you know what Andrew Grove says only Paranoid founders survive, well don’t ask us who made this we already preach Sindre Sorhus a lot)

  

  A quick peek into this macOS application

• fold [invite-only] - an application (w/ web app support) to get a clear picture of your finances. (if you are in any way like me and love to micromanage your expenses, go try to find some invite code for this.)
  This is built by folks from 2586 Labs [prev. Devfolio] and they are known for shipping awesome stuff. (if you don’t trust us, just go through anything they have built.)

Builders’ Nest 💪🏻

• broz - A simple frameless browser for taking screenshots (great use case, dead simple)

• rad-event-listener - Adding and removing EventListerners is a pain in the arse! and you keeping track is even harder, this package basically makes addEventHandler return the cleanup function (because why not!)

• gpt-engineer - Specify what you want to build in plain text and this little LLM-powered project will ask some questions and build it for you (Satan’s development arc is live now, FML, also if someone has a farm, please hire me as a farming intern.)

• The Cryptopals Crypto Challenges (as in cryptography, not the other thing) - A collection of exercises that demonstrate attacks on real-world cryptography functions.

• esm.sh - Global CDN for modern web dev, now quickly import packages from URLs in JS (more like deno & go style, welcome faster prototypes)

  

  A quick example of a React app using esm.sh

Meme of the week 👑

Reference: Tweet

Off-topic reads/watches 🧗

• 🔖 Everything Must Be Paid for Twice - Do you also have that book that you bought impulsively lying dormant in some corner of your room? Guess you only paid for it once 🙆

• 🎥 How To Change Your Mind - One of us got sucked into a rabbit hole of knowing more about the medical wonders of psychedelic treatments and stumbled into this four-episode short series on “scientific research” about this stuff. If you are concerned, we won’t go any further, promise 🤞.

• 🎥 Black Clover: Sword of the Wizard King is out, watch it on Netflix, if you are into animes. (also Kimetsu no Yaiba Swordsmith Village Arc’s last episode was a hit too)

Ponder worthy words

“Most companies fail not because they miss their goals. They fail because they hit all their goals, but it takes them right off a cliff.”
~ Some Sr. Engineer on “why sometimes you should pause and reflect on where it all is going”

Source: Pratik’s Blog

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.

• Product Designer - TipTop [Remote | $150k – $200k • 0.25% – 0.5%]

• Software Engineer (Django, RoR, JS) - WaveHQ [Remote]

• Frontend Developer - Supabase [Remote] (Super cool folks)

• Principal Sales Engineer - Extrahop [Remote]

• SDE 2 - Node & React - Pluralsight [Remote | India]

• Sr. Software Engineer - GoDaddy [Remote | India]

• SDE I Frontend - DP World [Bengaluru]

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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!