#21

MTFE - another crypto ponzi, Spotify's DJ, Faster content moderations, Chrome all the way AI, GDocs support MD, BrowseAI, Postgres and it's coolness and lot more

and

Aug 19, 2023

👋🏻 Ohayo gozaimasu! & welcome to Nibble #21 (Yeah! We made it, it’s a habit now.)
Also, if you noticed the BG isn’t white enough, yup we moved to → #FAFAF2 and changed to a nerdy font.
Also, we are incorporating feedback that we got from some peers1 🫂

New here? Don’t forget to 👇🏻

🎧 TL;DR in form of podcast → Nibble #21 | Recast

📆 BTW, GitHub Universe is back and you can avail of the 30% early-bird discount if you register now (Not sponsored by GitHub but open to you sponsoring our tickets :P)

What’s happening 📰

🪩 Spotify’s AI-powered DJ goes world-wide. They released a feature earlier this year, which let AI be the DJ and curate a playlist for you to dance to all night. Apparently, it was not enough for folks in the US to dance, so they went all out.
🚨 MTFE, another crypto ponzi scheme took all the money from users and ran away. It’s 2023 and people still get all too excited and invested when someone says “I can double your money in 21 days”. (FYI: they had $1B from investors/n00bs)
🍢 WhatsApp starts testing AI-generated stickers - If you’re suddenly seeing all AI stuff around, we don’t blame you. Companies are pushing AI integrations like hotcakes (as they should)!
Source: Site
🛍️ OpenAI acqhires Global Illumination, Inc (a digital design company, having 8 nerds). Something is definitely cooking, the terms of the acquisition weren’t disclosed, but they said: “They’ll work on core products”.
PS: This is OpenAI’s first acquisition ✨
✨ AI Wrap-up
- 🏴‍☠️ MetaGPT arrives to automate complete companies, give it one-liner requirements and it’ll return PRD, Design, Tasks, and Repo.
  (ah! *coughs* 10x engineer *coughs*)
- 🏄‍♂️ Google and Chrome expand GenAI ability so now you can get a (better) summarized and highlighted context information when you browse.
- 🔬 Follow Anything, a multimodal (i.e. which can take multiple kinds of inputs) model which can track/follow anything described to it, even if it was not part of training data. (more like some folks I know on Instagram)
- 😶‍🌫️ ChatGPT drifting to stupidity? a drift here means behaving in unexpected ways, away from configured parameters. It’s not a secret anymore that ChatGPT got dumber, but why? (TL;DR basically tuning some parts of it, is unintendedly making the others worse)
- 🐟 Sakana.ai (魚 - fish) led by two Google AI researchers is making a new kind of foundation model by combining multiple smaller models (just like a group of small fishes).
- Using GPT-4 for content moderation - OpenAI is using GPT-4 for content policy development and content moderation decisions. Enables more consistent labeling, a faster feedback loop for policy refinement, and less involvement from human moderators.

What brings us to awe 😳

😭 If you feel JavaScript is all easy, try this test. This test has “25 quirky expressions” and if you can answer them all, seek therapy please 🙏🏻 (and god bless you!)
🔍 Zoom is what you need - It turns out that if you set the frame of the image (or zoom) correctly, the regular image classifiers can lead to the correct classification of “98.91% of ImageNet images”. (turns out the self-help books I was reading were scientifically accurate too, they kept saying it’s about perspective and shit)
⚖️ Load Balancing: The Intuition Behind the Power of Two Random Choices - TLDR; Rather than distributing your load using a uniform random() function that puts the load in a normal distribution on the balancers because of LLN (not LLM lol), you get two random load balancers and choose the one with less load. The difference is tremendous. See for yourself!
🕷️ GPTBot - GPTBot is OpenAI’s web crawler (yeah you read that right and no, they aren’t building the next search engine using vector databases and all). Because of ethical considerations, they are now identifying themselves when they scrape and you can ask it to not crawl on your site by changing your robots.txt.
and that’s how we ~~roll~~ crawl
📸 AI Has Already Created As Many Images As Photographers Have Taken in 150 Years
Source: Original Link

TILs 📑

📹 What happens if you don’t put your phone in airplane mode? by Lindsay DeMarchi (TL;DR you are not only protecting yourself but also energy & everyone else by doing it)
🔗 How to write custom eslint Rules by Daria Doronina, I had an idea to make an eslint rule to enforce .flatMap whenever we see .map.flat on Array in JS.
This article is a great read takes you through how to explore AST and it’s actually pretty easy to make one. (although in the process I found one for flatMap already)
🌊 While reading DHH’s piece “Turns out nobody cared about panel gaps”, I came to know about Blue/Red Ocean Strategy terminologies. (blue ocean industries are those which set the rules in their space and had no fear of competition when they lay foundations. Eg: Tesla)
✅ Google Docs and Slides support Markdown natively - Why did I not know it all this while!!??
💣 Canonical URLs - Helps with SEO stuff. TLDR; A canonical URL is the URL of the best representative page from a group of duplicate pages, according to Google. For example, if you have two URLs for the same page (such as example.com?dress=1234 and example.com/dresses/1234), Google chooses one as canonical.

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

What we have been trying 🔖

💿 State of DB 2023, Databases are apparently the most essential and exciting tech that is powering the complete tech industry right now (the second one being DNS). This survey deep dives into “how many” of them we do have and who uses what? (TL;DR it was pretty obvious, but yeah Postgres is #1)
📺 Enjoy the OG days of TV - 90sTV (teleport back to when it was nice to watch TV)
SquareX - an extension built to promote your privacy online. It gives you a “Disposable Browser, File Viewer, and Identity” all in one place. (so, my friends using incognito all day can try this out too.)

Builders’ Nest 🛠️

PruneR - Simple Chrome extension that lets you focus on PRs by fellow humans. (shameless-plug, Nibbler A’s self-promotion)
UploadThing - File upload thing for NextJS devs
BrowseAI - Extract and monitor data from any website, it also has some pre-built recipes.

Meme of the week 😌

Off-topic reads/watches 🧗

⚡️ Moving Faster by Jamie Brandon
💿 When Did Postgres Become Cool? proly the most reliable database on this planet.
🔢 Be skeptical of your own work by Terry Tao - “If you unexpectedly find a problem solving itself almost effortlessly, and you can’t quite see why, you should try to analyze your solution more skeptically.” (btw Terry is a winner of the Fields Medal)

Wisdom Bits 👀

“Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator. But among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.”
— W. H. Auden

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.

Staff Software Engineer - ML at Coinbase ( ) [Remote]
Growth Engineer at Substack [Remote]
Full-stack Engineer at Localize [Remote (within North America)]
SDE III at EasyPost (YC - S12) [Remote]
Product Designer at TipTop [$150k – $200k • 0.25% – 0.5% | Remote]
Sr. Software Engineer at Atlassian (Jira) [Bengaluru]
Product Engineer at Nooks [$120-200K | Remote]

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What are we up to?

Nibbler A finally watched “Spider-Man: Into & Across the Spider-Verse” and for a change won some chess games (I ~~hope this ages well,~~ it didn’t). He touched some grass & real books.
Nibbler P was very high on caffeine and very low on sleep this week (strictly not recommended). He was also seen “grinning” the entire week after optimizing his portfolio a little. Also played badminton btw.
See you in the next one.

The Nibble

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