Nibble #20

M3 is here, Emirps, ✨ to the Jupyter, Google ships and kills, Slack is so back, type quietly, troubles.af, Cortana is going to meet Clippy, StableCode & FLAC & ALAC

👋🏻 Hello & welcome to Nibble #20 (wait, we are 20 already?)
If you are new to this place, don’t forget to Subscribe.

In case you want to read this later and listen to this article in a podcast form where Ben & Theo takes you through today’s Nibble.
You can do that here → Nibble #20 | Recast 🎧 (might be a little off as it’s AI-generated)

What’s happening 📰

• 🚀 Jupyter catches the AI (or should we say %ai) hype. The notebooks will now natively support reproducible generative AI playgrounds using iPython magic commands. Right in your editors. (btw ✨ has been the de-facto icon for genAI now and what a strange coincidence that the way it comes to Jupyter is through ‘magic’ commands)

  

  This is what the docs say. Pretty sick!

• 🆕 Apple’s M3 coming in October? (Hold up! What about the new M2 machine I just bought?! We feel sorry for you my friend)

• 🪦 Google Shutting down Firebase Dynamic Links, guess which serial killer is back?

• 🪟Talking about killing stuff, Windows shows Exit Doors to Cortana. It’s all Bing and Copilot everywhere on Windows now (Why not just rebrand Cortana? It was a cool name NGL. Long live the Cortana vs Siri battles 🤺)

• 👨🏻‍💻 Google announced Project IDX, a web-based workspace aimed to fully bring full-stack and multi-platform app development to the web and make it breezy using their new Codey AI model. (already in love with the color, typography, and landing page 🤞🏻)

• 🎨 Slack is coming up with its biggest redesign. (from initial screenshots it looks like a Barbie fancy version of Teams UI, this will be a big change considering the number of people in all industries who uses this app, now I think most orgs will opt out initially)

• ✨ General AI Wrap-up

  • ⚖️ Stability AI launched an LLM splitting code and it has a funny ironic name, wait for it, 🥁 StableCode.

  • 🧑‍🏫 ChatGPT “Custom instructions” are now available to all. What are your favorite ones?

  • 🔐 Biden announced the “AI Cyber Challenge” offering up to $20 Million in prizes. (with great LLMs, comes greater security risk, said Uncle Joe)

---

What brings us to awe 🤪

• 🎨 Earlier this year we had CSS Trignometric ƒ shipped to all browser engines, but they are the first ever bounded continuous function supported natively in CSS makes them even more amazing to play. See how Kacper leverages this function to generate better pseudo-random parameters and in turn cool UIs.

• ⌨️ The sound of you typing on your keyboard can leak your passwords

  TL;DR: Somebody can record you typing on your keyboard via only a mobile phone recorder or through a Zoom call if your microphone is on during the call. With some ML algo, they can determine with > 93% accuracy what you are typing (read passwords). How to prevent it? Change typing styles, use noise-producing software, or use biometrics/password managers.

  

  Some interesting insights from the paper

• 🤑 What a quarter for startups!! Both Uber & Zomato reported profits for the first time ever.

• Google unveils 'Downfall' attacks, vulnerability in Intel chips - The vulnerability, CVE-2022-40982, is caused by a memory optimization feature within modern Intel chip architectures and affects the company's Core processors, from the 6th to the 11th Gen chips.

• 📱 How does a Mobile GPU work? - Enjoy manga explanations? You’re going to love this short manga on how Mobile GPUs are much different from PC GPUs.

• 🗺️ You own domains with cool TLDs, like .af, .gg, .io, .tv and more? But do you know these are all country-associated TLDs? For eg: .af belongs to Afghanistan. But when it comes to Geopolitical tensions, the Internet is treated like cool toys for nerds and they might order you around to drop the domain. So, choose your domain wisely.¹

  

  Wes on Twitter X

---

TILs 🤯

• ⣽ Emirp - Name given to prime numbers whose reversal is a different prime number (and yes ofc, the word is reverse of prime, that’s why the last edition went out at 7:39 pm)

• 🐝 It was pretty obvious, but duh! Found a Science Daily article from 2010 on it that “Organisms grow larger in size in higher oxygen environments”. (sorry Delhi guys, I know, they wrote inches and all in the paper)

• 🕴️ Von Restorff effect (aka Isolation effect): use differentiation to stand out.

  

  Source: our favorite Simplanations

• 🎶 You might have never listened to “real good” quality music before. Why you ask? What service do you use? Most of us use services that give us 320kbps mp3 (remembers the songs.pk era?) in the name of high-quality music. But that is actually low quality. Recently Mohit Senpai introduced us to tidal.com and shared some FLAC files² with MAX quality (& some wisdom on music).
  Even Spotify’s highest quality doesn’t give you FLAC and it might not ever will. But, but, quoting a comment in the discussion on Spotify support:
  > “99.9% of users can not hear the difference when comparing Spotify's 320 kbps OGG and FLAC/CD.”
  (us bro us 🫂)
  So, we don’t actually know if this was useful, but I think one should be aware of things out there.
  
  (apple-fanboi-nibbler here, Apple Music also provides streaming many titles in their library as lossless audio. Only, they use ALAC instead of FLAC because ‘F’ stands for ‘free’, which is technically the anti-thesis of everything that Apple does :P)

  

  Tidal’s Website

---

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

---

What we have been trying/reading 🔖

• 🎧 Recast - Turn your read-later list into bite-size audio convos w/ AI. So, less screen time & it’s better than every other product like this before, it’s not plain TTS, it modulates tones like it’s a podcast. (and OMG, we are loving it, the conversation makes it engaging, and I don’t know why I fall in love with products having R, E, A, C, and T in their names)

• 🤓 Bored of classic LeetCode DS/Algo problems? Try these Challenging algorithms and data structures

• 🐱 MeowLearning (CopyCat’s internal AI guidelines) - Prepping Sys Design with AI? (Golden Rule by Aasim - Focus on the speed at which you can run valid experiments, it is the only way to find a viable model for your problem.)

• 🥸 TypeScript’s own boy recommends using Types over Interfaces.

• 🎩 Fantastic Learning Resources and Where to find them

---

Builders’ Nest 💪🏻

• 🌊 Water flow visualization - if you have ever written transition: all 0.5s ease-out;. You know how freakingly hard it will be to build this.

• 📝 tl;dv - Meeting notes on the go with AI.

• 📧 pop - send emails using your terminal. (why? cause we can and it is really nice UX, go check out the repo)

• ┓ typograms - this project is Google’s take on drawing diagrams in docs using text, they introduced a new light-weight image format text/typogram

---

Meme of the week 👑

Source: Just watch the video below!!!!

And this comes from the video every second of which is a dank meme 🤌

---

Off-topic reads/watches 🧗

• 🪙 An explainer on Worldcoin by Finshots - "How OpenAI & Worldcoin are entangled? Is it UBI? It’s for the people who lost jobs to AI? Why do they want to scan my iris? and why crypto? what about privacy? oh wait let me get my aadhaa…
  This 7 min explainer will answer all these questions.
  FYI: Nibbler A might soon go to Mantri Square.

• 🍑 LOL, a fun read might be real: Electron Band Structure In Germanium, My Ass

• 🐂 Delayed Gratification - This is some really good advice from

  BowTiedOx
  about fitness and life in general. I’ve seen people (including myself) feel restless when not doing any immediately-dopamine-inducing activity. Mostly leads to hopping from one short-term activity to another randomly without any particular long-term goal or consequence in mind.

---

Ponder-worthy words 🤔

"I was ashamed of myself when I realised life was a costume party; and I attended with my real face"
— Franz Kafka

---

What we’ve been up to?

• Nibbler P was infected by the chess-o-mania from Nibbler A and quite unsurprisingly has been on a losing streak this entire week. Thankfully, he’s back at the gym too now, so his brain muscles³ are not the only muscles getting exhausted. Maybe it’s an indication for him to get back to X this week?

• Nibbler A continued his losing streak on Chess.com playing all-nighters and working in the daytime (rip eyes). Made some WhatsApp stickers after 2 months, and another curation list he operates. He is constantly juggling between going Inbox Zero and Jira Todos Zero. (& maintaining his duo streak)

see you in the next one! 👋🏻

1. this complete news was sourced from Stefan’s Web Weekly #108

2. in short, it’s lossless & studio-quality stuff

3. There is no such thing as “brain muscles”. I just made it up and now you had to read this entire sentence. Sorry, not sorry :P