Nibble #18

G3PO, Aliens, LK-99 Dishbrain, LangSmith, RIP Larry, WorldCoin's Orbs, LiarLiarAI, Cloudflare Outage & GPhotos Backup

Aashutosh

and

Pushkar

Jul 30, 2023

👋🏻 Hello & welcome to Nibble #18 (yay! Nibble is an adult now. Still can’t marry or drink though).

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What’s happening 📰

🪙 Sam launched Worldcoin (WLD), You can now download World App, the first protocol-compatible wallet, and reserve your genesis grant. Post reserving your grant, you’ll have to verify that you are a unique human being with biometrics, for that you need to find your nearest Orbs (if you’re in NCR or BLR, they’re easy to find)

(Psst. Nibbler P reporting from NCR live. The people at the Orb Stations are calling this “a new trading app” over here to entice more users to signup 😓☠️ I was going to give them a lecture on the awesome ZKML and the computing this Orb uses but held it in and rode my metro. Hopefully, you’ll enjoy it as much as I did.)
📱ChatGPT Android app goes live! They are about to onboard the nastiest users alive (good luck Greg Chan! As we discussed in the last Nibble, GPT-4 is getting “dumber” in some aspects. Imagine what will happen if you get positive rewards on answering “how to make money?”)
🦜🛠️ LangChain releases LangSmith (Postman for LLMs), a unified platform for debugging, testing, evaluating, and monitoring your LLM applications
🐣 Twitter → 𝕏~~itter~~ (RIP Larry, the bird).
Elon loves the limelight when Threads tried to weakly capture the attention of people on the internet. Elon had to make a move. (Some say the guy had planned this long ago and he never moved on from the idea of X.com ruling the world.)
Tweet by Kurzgesagt, claiming that their birds are now among the most famous birds on Twitter after Larry got replaced by 𝕏
🤖 StackOverflow AI - Not long ago, when developers had the cumulative knowledge of the internet available in a Chat window, they stopped bugging users on our fav StackOverflow. MAU declined. So now StackOverflow is making a comeback with StackOverflow AI. They are bringing in a better contextual search (vector DB enthusiasts are smiling right now ✨), better tools for SO Teams, Slack, and VSCode Integration (omg!), and a new Gen AI Stack Exchange forum!
🔓 OpenAI’s G3PO AI reportedly might release an open-source LLM and it has a code name “G3PO”. Llama 2 might get some quality friends out there. The name might change and the release date is not announced yet though.
🪄 “Room Temperature, Ambient Pressure” Superconductor Drama. A non-peer-reviewed paper dropped in the wild last Saturday (22/7). Claiming a material called LK-99, which is potentially the first superconductor that can be used in normal conditions. (for the uninitiated superconductors are materials that allow the flow of electrons without any resistance, in a result not wasting any energy in the form of heat. Eg: no more fans required in CPUs). But why do we call it drama? because there is a good chance that the paper won’t pass the review.
📃 Frontier Model Forum - Guess the folks at OpenAI remembered the famous “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer” quote and went ahead to form the Frontier Model Forum. They aim to advance AI safety research and share the best practices for responsible AI development. They would also work toward supporting leveraging AI to tackle society's major challenges. (And since FB is in love with OSS nowadays, have they not considered a threadt anymore, huh?)
Love the DeepMind position here | Source: Tweet by @untitled01ipynb

What brings us to awe 🤪

🐍 Zuck (Meta) commits to dedicate three engineer years to remove Python performance bottlenecks (they basically will improve threads, IYKWIM 😏) [Tweet]
🐛 A massive bug in the heart of npm allows invalid/fake metadata on the package’s page. (basically, the tarball is never verified against the code/tarball) and this opens the npm packages to a new set of vulnerabilities and malicious activities. (had a discussion with a co-worker, who said yarn has 0 dependencies and I was like what?!?)
🧠 Dishbrain - Computer chip with built-in human brain tissue gets military funding. (this semi-biological device was able to learn Pong within 5 minutes)
👀 Turnkey announced Dev’s got EXTRA-talent, Devs get paid to show their other artistic skills than writing code.
👾 A glitch in the SEO matrix - A curious study into SEO, AI-generated content, SERP, keywords, and “A comprehensive ecosystem of open-source software for big data management”
🛸 It's a Bird... It's a Plane... It's UFO! (Yes! maybe you were right that fine evening, maybe the stuff wasn’t hitting hard and it was actually a flying saucer).
👽 aLIEns? - Former US intelligence official David Grusch testified before Congress under Oath that the US government is under the possession of UFOs and ‘'non-human’ technology. Wild stuff. We are advocating for “pictures or it didn’t happen” 🫣 (it’s really interesting how less fucks we as humans gave on potentially finding aliens. Was it continuous hype cycles that ruined our appetite for hypes?)
It did stir up some interest in alien searches though

TILs 🤯

Named Element IDs Can Be Referenced as JavaScript Globals (*screaming window.whatttttttt in JS*)
yup! This code does, exactly what it shouldn’t
CIDR (Classless Inter-Domain Routing) blocks are used to allocate IP addresses heavily now. On how to read a CIDR block → a.b.c.d/x for this IP, x represents the number of fixed bits suffixes for the allocated range.
For eg: 192.168.1.1/24 → it means that the first 24 bits are fixed, and since every number is a byte here, it means 192.168.1.0 to 192.168.1.255.
You can visualize the same and play around with CIDRs here → cidr.xyz
You can use DNS TXT to share information - You can base64 encode an image, split it to TXT records, and send it over the Internet. Useful in certain circumstances. Like when one of the communicating parties is under severe censorship (just run the following command in your terminal to see it yourself).
So, this is how Google Tag Manager, Keybase & GitHub, and more verify your domain ownership.
dig +short TXT youpay.govorenefekt.com @1.1.1.1 | fold -s

🤝 You have read ~50% of Nibble, the following section brings tools out from the wild.

What we have been trying 🔖

IconBuddy - Download, Customize, Edit, and Personalize.Over 100k+ open-source icons.
anytype - Local, P2P, Open Source Notion alternative. (trying this in place of Obsidian)
google-photos-backup - Vendor locked-in with Google Photos? Use this playwright script to get a snapshot of your Google Photos Data.

Builders’ Nest 💪🏻

beachball - A version bumper by Microsoft, which does all the things around moving fast and bumping faster.
Source: Beachball Docs
llama2.c - Karpathy Ji just ground it out in a weekend and created a single 500-line file in C for inferencing a Llama 2 model.
Rewind for iOS - Rewind was already killing it with macOS and now with their personalized AI, they join iOS and lets you literally search through anything you ever saw. (this is going to be your secondary brain now?!?)
LiarLiarAI helps you detect lies in real-time in meetings (good luck with fake standup updates)

Meme of the week 👑

Off-topic reads/watches 🧗

🏚️ Stick to boring architecture for as long as possible by Addy Osmani
🎵 Finshots Recommendations - The folks at Finshots drop some pretty sick music reccs in their Sunday editions. There are many playlists of all these reccs on Spotify but no good ones for YT Music. So we made one ourselves 😎
🎥 MrBeast Shares His Best YouTube Advice - Love him or hate him, Mr. Beast is THE largest YouTube creator right now. This video is a collection of everything he has said about creating which applies to ~~YouTube Videos~~ basically anything. The key is to get obsessed with improving and remaining consistent.
💣 How One Line of Code Almost Blew Up the Internet (also, on why not to use the ++ syntax, ESLint has been telling this for my whole life now)

Read full post on Substack

Ponder-worthy words 🤔

"The family is a microcosm. By knowing how to heal the family, I know how to heal the world."
— Virginia Satir

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.

Research Engineer (Prototyping) at GitHub Next [Remote - UK]
Frontend Engineer at Merj [Remote | $80k-100k]
Senior SDE (DevX) at Remitly [US - Remote | $210k]
Senior Backend Engineer - NodeJS at HackerRank [Remote]
Senior Backend Engineer at Fold [Hybrid]
Sr. Full Stack Engineer at Lemon.io [Remote | $70-100k]
Software Engineer, Security/Privacy at Google Cloud [Pune | BLR]

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!

The Nibble

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