Nibble #14

AI commentary, Cred's acquihiring, YouTube's native dub, Google's sus move, Apple Cards in India, Inflection's Pi, SeeFood 👀, Machine Unlearning Challenge, Regex to check primes and more

Pushkar

and

Aashutosh

Jun 30, 2023

👋🏻 Hola & welcome to Nibble #14
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What’s happening 📰

Wimbledon to introduce AI-powered commentary to Highlight clips on the internet. (I remember discussing with my flatmate if we could do the same with Cricket commentary, but I think we settled on that “LLMs can’t beat Akash Chopra’s alliteration & Ravi Shastri’s tracer bullets”)
🛍️ Kunal went shopping and CRED acqui(hi)res YC Backed Spenny, a platform that invested the change (i.e. if you buy something for ₹18 🌚, so if your round-off setting is to nearest tens, change is ₹2) on your spending to Mutual Funds. (we tried it when it was in beta 2 years back). Manifesting that we’ll be able to invest CRED coins into MFs 🥹🤞🏻
Google is diving head-first into AI and one of the most innovative changes is YouTube getting AI-powered dubbing. It’s a team from Aloud, which was part of Google’s Area 120 incubator. If this becomes a full product, creators would be able to reach a much wider audience. Good work here! (I know what to do when I want to get a video dubbed now hehe :P)
We cannot talk about Google without talking about them killing some of their most-loved stuff, can we? (We’re talking free ads-free viewing on Youtube 😛) YouTube is apparently testing disabling videos for people using ad blockers. So if you’re still blocking ads after watching three videos, you won’t be able to watch any further. Duh! That would leave a lot of users like us in a bummer.
Remember last week when Mark and Elon expressed their intent to fight? Well, it seems both Musk and Mark have been checking their reflexes and after Mark’s previous podcast with Mr Fridman, Mark’s and Lex’s fights are out on Lex’s Youtube Channel. However, Musk’s mom is not happy about this and had to cancel their fight as mentioned in her tweeted about it. No matter how old you get, moms are always right! (we were this 🤌 close to witnessing one of the greatest *literal* fights in tech history though!)
Source: Twitter
GitHub released an action-permission tool that analyzes the last n builds and tells you the minimum permission required to run the action so that you can fine-grain the access.
OpenAI quietly lobbied for weaker AI regulations after Sam Altman testified before Congress for stricter regulations some weeks ago. Basically, they want regulations that heavily favor the company and have worked to weaken proposed AI regulations.
On the other hand, OpenAI had its first international expansion with a new office in London. This adds OpenAI to the leading AI companies such as Stability AI, Palantir, Deepmind, and Anthropic, Inflection AI which have their offices in London. Rishi would be happy, innit?
A16Z, the VC that’s backing a lot of AI startups (including OpenAI) currently has published a blog on the Emerging Architectures for LLM Applications and it’s pretty solid (If you’re trying to become AI-native [we nibblers are trying too] then this is a good LLM system design for you).
Time to refresh system designs ft. LLMs
Apple is reportedly in Discussions With Banks to Launch Apple Card in India as Tim Cook met with HDFC Bank CEO in his last trip to India in April (Rupay branded Apple cards, anyone?) UPI is still an untapped potential by international brands. If this happens with a Rupay card, would this take UPI to the international recognition it deserves?
Inflection AI, The Year-Old Startup Behind Chatbot Pi, Raises $1.3 Billion and this is one of the most significant investments raised by any AI-first company. Guess who’s one of their investors? Nvidia. Guess what they need this investment for? Nvidia GPUs (like obviously).
BTW, their Pi Chatbot (🤌🏻✨, you can talk to Pi on WhatsApp too) is brilliant, we didn't feel for a second we were talking to a bot (or maybe we haven’t fully explored it yet, one of the authors might save some money on therapy, yes, it’s that good).
Google announced the Machine Unlearning Challenge 2023, a proposed way to remove data about something on demand. That’s what they are researching. The important point being it should not only remove the data from the training data but also its influence on the output and weights. (GDPR is really something)
Remember Jian Yang’s Hotdog app? The thing is real. SnapCalorie, Shazam for Food is here now and it raised $2M. Now you can capture a picture of food and check out the calories in it for real. (so much scope for memes here, we’ll just hold them all for now)

What brings us to awe 🤪

Google (yes, the mass murderer of products we like) Search added “Reddit” & “Meme Template” as a tab/category of search results. Crazzzyyy times!
Workspaces - If you are a workspace enthusiast and like to keep that setup of yours ultra pro max optimized to squeeze out every level of productivity (or even if you’re normal), you’ll definitely enjoy seeing what other creative people are doing with their workstations. Maybe it’ll give you an inspiration or two to improve yours, eh?
To be clear these workspaces! Not your Slack workspaces 😛
🤡 Outlook now ignores the default browser on Windows and opens up the link in Edge directly (I remember the days, it used to prompt you to not set any other browser as default, but now it’s the direct intrusion of rights! If we have any, whatsoever)
Buildspace - It’s simple. You have an idea, you get six weeks. Do your thing overnights and weekends in those six weeks and the best ones would be showcased to the public at an IRL event in SF and Dubai.
The Twelve-Factor App - The twelve-factor app is a methodology for building SaaS apps that includes ideal practices for app development, with attention to the dynamics of the app’s growth, the collaboration between developers, and avoiding the cost of software erosion.
Fast machines, slow machines (shared by Ashutosh Singh) - Remember the times of good ol’ XP when applications used to load faster? A lot of hardware and software advancements happened since then but does your favorite app load any faster?

TILs 🤯

XSL - The CSS for XMLs. Have you ever wondered if XML/RSS feeds can be styled to look a little less ugly? [Source: Tweet by Stefan Judis] (to be honest I learned about TIL as a concept from Stefan and his newsletter and still learn from him every day, if you don’t follow him, he runs a newsletter Web Weekly and it’s one the few masterpieces I get in my inbox)
You can check Prime Numbers using Regex, based on the fact that a number shouldn’t be divisible by a number 2n or 2n+1 other than itself. (Basically, you write the number as 1s repeated the number of times the number is.
Here’s the Regex: /^1?$|^(11+?)\1+$/ )
An America-less Internet - Ever wondered what’ll happen to the Internet if you blocked all your US-based incoming/outgoing traffic?
Some macOS-specific cli-commands - the one that stuck in my head is “say” - It’s a macOS native text-to-speech engine and you can read out loud any text/file using this command. (how to get a refund from Speechify? asking for a friend)
Counting the Hard Way - Being in tech, we all have counted in base 2 at some time or the other. Have you thought about counting on other bases? Bases that are not positive? How about bases that are not rational? Bases that are not real?

What we have been trying 🔖

Boring Report: remove sensationalism from the news.
Password Game - a fun game by Neal mocking the password restrictions. (We could go till level 16 max. How was your day?)
EmbedAI - Quickly train and embed your own chatbots with the custom knowledge base. (We built one by keeping Nibble #11 & #12 as a knowledge base. Try here)
EmbedAI powered Chatbot with Nibble #11 & #12 fed as knowledge

Builders’ Nest 💪🏻

NestJS released v10 - A NodeJS framework for building efficient, reliable, and scalable server-side applications (iostreamer introduced it to us, and many others).
The good thing about NestJS is it has clean patterns, DI, Validators, Transformers, annotations, and more from Springboot world but with the goodness of TypeScript.
SuperAGI - A dev-first open-source autonomous AI agent framework. Enabling developers to build, manage & run useful independent agents quickly and reliably (Does the average developer even know this is possible? I mean just look at how far we have come!)
Docer - Chat with pdf, docx, txt, java, python & C files.
openai-functions-god-app - an opensource app with a single input field, you enter your request and it can generate text, images, video & music using LLMs (well, we saw this one coming, the logic is we take the request and tell GPT4 to choose among the 4 functions to generate image, video, music or text)

Meme of the week 👑

at least one of the authors felt attacked by this meme | source: tweet

Off-topic reads/watches 🧗

📺 Road to EM, planned sabbaticals & life by Siddharth Sharma (
svs
), Ex - CTO, Shaadi.com (he talks about how he got into computers, burnouts, “How to take sabbaticals?” and his day as Engg manager. We have 3 pages of notes from this one, but better if you watch it by yourself).
BTW, almost all the Scaler Pods are great. Go check’em out.
📺 What the F happened to IEX? by Finshots (if you were an active investor anytime in the last 3 years, you might have heard about IEX, the Indian Energy Exchange, it was one of the stocks with dream numbers, everything perfect and ~80% margin game, sustainable business space, environment friendly and what not! But recently the stock dropped 18% in value in 3 days. The video explains some plausible reasons.)
🔖 Why You Believe The Things You Do by Morgan Hosel - “What you think is true is heavily based on what you’ve experienced, and you remember the parts of your experiences that make good stories, confirm stereotypes, and connect dots between other experiences.” (this is just an excerpt, go read it all in full)
🎧 Cost to Company and Daybreak from The Ken - Both of these podcasts from The Ken are one of the most well-researched ones out there. Daybreak is about business stories that are significant. Cost to Company is where you’ll hear how your workplace is changing before you hear it on Slack.
BTW, check out the latest Cost to Company story: The youngest startup talent doesn’t have deep skills. Interesting, no?

Ponder worthy words

"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so."
― Mark Twain

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.

Python Software Engineer I - JP Morgan Chase & Co [18-25 LPA | Hyderabad]
Backend Engineer (Go) - Inferless.com [Hybrid | 30 -90 LPA + ESOPs]
Technical Mentor - Data Analyst - Udacity [Remote]
Frontend Developer - Unlimit [Gurugram | Onsite]
ML Engineer - Fold [Remote | Bengaluru]
Data Engineer - Emotive.io [Remote | US]

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 at the next one!

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