#23

MatureBag?, AI in MS Paint & Photos, Deepmind's AZdb & SynthID, JioFiberAir, Google's AI launches, money from .ai domains, GradientAI, fix mac battery & more

and

Sep 02, 2023

👋🏻 Hola & welcome to Nibble #23
In other news, we are now over 💯 Nibblers strong! 💪🏻

So here’s another surprise for you, a shiny BlueSky invite code ✨:
- bsky-social-2nkrn-b6qbe

New here? Don’t forget to 👇🏻

What’s happening 📰

🎨 As if bringing AI into your sheets (Excel) wasn’t enough, Microsoft is now planning to go in your ~~pants~~ Paint, and Photos app.
Credits: The almighty Windows Central
🛜 JioFiberAir, Reliance in their AGM showed off something called Fiber-in-air. You get the same speed as JioFiber but without the hassle of wires. They are targeting high-pay households with this. (not a big fan of going wireless)
✨ Google’s Duet (AI Co-pilot) lands in Workspace and AI search (SGE) goes live in India & Japan. (News channels are worried about getting stale and some folks are worried about fake results.)
♟️ While humans keep making leads in Chess, don’t forget the fact that it’s a finite-state machine with limited states, and powerful machines can analyze them all. Deepmind’s AZdb (combination of multiple AlphaZero agents) beats AlphaZero at Chess.
💪🏻 Google shows off the first compute instances powered by AmpereOne (this is important because AmpereOne makes data-center ultra-powerful chips, for example up to 80 vCPUs & 100gbps networking)
🚫 The US makes sure that the sand (Silicon) doesn’t get out of hand. Extending its AMD & Nvidia chip export ban, now it bans Middle-east countries (earlier it was only the beloved China).
🎒 Microsoft patents AI Backpack (a bag with an AI Assistant that can help you answer random questions like “What is life?” on your way back from 9-5)
[Now this is what you call a “Mature Bag” IYKYK]
Source: Microsoft
🌌 DeepMind launched “SynthID”, a watermarking tool for AI-generated images.
The idea is to make it almost impossible to detect watermarks by the naked eye, but the tool should always detect them & this way we get to know if an Image is AI-generated.

What brings us to awe 😳

💰 I have been saying it on repeat, Domains are the real estate of the internet.
And the first country to become super rich (already $30M in revenue in 2023) by merely selling their TLD is Anguilla’s, a small island, home to .ai domains.
📲 An expert from Qualcomm explained how they are quantizing the GenAI models to fit & ship them to mobile phones.
What is Quantization, you ask?
→ TL;DR It's a way to reduce the size/bits of data or try to fit it into less space, optimizing it for storage and transmission, making it less compute-heavy.
🔓 Windows XP (the best OS to date, btw) is sadly still vulnerable behind a NAT and firewall.
Will I still use it? → YESSS!! to play my favorite DOS games.
✨ Jake Archibald (yes, the guy from "HTTP 203" podcast) showcases how CSS easing function linear() (which will soon be available on all browsers) will help us do easing other than cubic-bezier.
They create something called linear() easing generator.
An infographic from the Ken comparing the safety of different bike-taxi services in India

TILs 📑

🥙 In 1965, a 17-year-old and a nuclear physicist partnered up to launch a sandwich store — Pete’s Super Submarines. And this was how “Subway” started. (Finshots)
🗺️ You can create and visualize maps using ChatGPT's Earth plugin by prompting it something like "Create a map of Gurugram, Haryana in dark, satellite mode."
But there are some things that even ChatGPT can't build. (IYKYK, see this chat for reference)
🔒 You can use Web Crypto API to generate UUID in the browser natively.
🪞Remember when you accidentally show screen share on the screen share? That mistake has a name attributed to it (just like most humans), The Droste Effect.

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

What we have been trying 🔖

🏞️ Want to try Midjourney but don’t want to pay? Well, here comes IdeogramAI, not sure what they use, but it’s free for now.
⚙️ GradientAI - Spin up your own private LLM, with an exposed API, without any worries about the infra.

Builders’ Nest 🛠️

🔋 battery - Prolong your Silicon Mac’s battery by keeping it constant at 80%
✨ tabExtend: Tab Manager on steroids (unlike me in the gym)
#️⃣ hashing.dev - all required hashing tools for developers in one place.
🦅 npci/falcon: NPCI, the folks behind UPI Open Sourced Falcon: The Hyperledger Fabric Deployment Helper for Kubernetes

Meme of the week 😌

“Always be over-communicating” by **Work Chronicles**

Off-topic reads/watches 🧗

🔪 How to sabotage your salary negotiation efforts before you even start (salary negotiations are hard and not everyone can do it naturally, the best you can do sometimes is to not act.)
🛟 Recession Proofing My Career by Nirant K - he wrote this initially in 2019, but considering there is a predicted recession soon. He re-wrote it. (TL;DR → The only way to save money is to save money)
🤝 You can't fix core competency with a stern conversation by DHH - a quick read on handling when a new hire isn't working out.
🫂 Vibe Driven Development - "You can only build a great product if you care more for the vibes than for the data."

Wisdom Bits 👀

“The most important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying”
— Steven Pressfield

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What are we up to?

Nibbler A was busy working primarily, read some interesting stuff this week, and played (& lost by the time a lot) as usual. Planned to grab a chai and watch the India-Pak 🏏 match today (press F). I hope JJK's new episode won’t disappoint.
Nibbler P had been busy eating all the Raksha Bandhan sweets. Now he has to play some extra bouts to compensate for all those yumminess. His lazy self plans to take his bicycle out for servicing, so please check back with him next week to see if he actually did.
See you in the next one!

The Nibble

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