#27

Spotify shipping, CRED's Fast and Curious, RaspPi 5, OpenAI on steroids, Lex Metaversed, Amazon out of bed, μDSV, AI Score my site, Live immediately and more

👋🏻 Hola & welcome to Nibble #27 (3³)
Last week we got love (some call it feedback) from lots of folks. We are focusing slowly on writing more classics than content. So grab that nice cup of coffee and dive in! (and if you’re reading this in your mail, we’d prefer if you click on the title and switch to the browser/app)

🎧 Listen to this via Recast → Recast of Nibble #27

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What’s happening 📰

• 🥁 Spotify Jam is finally here, a new, personalized way to listen with your entire squad. (Nibbler A - They are so late in bringing this feature, I still remember when I had code-only sessions with only4 and we used to Jam Spotify using Discord)
  You can invite your squad in one of 3 ways → Turn on Bluetooth, tap your phones together, scan the QR code, OR share the link.

  • 🤖 That’s not all. Spotify was in fact on a roll last week, and they also released an AI Voice Translation Pilot. This means that you can now listen to your favorite podcasts in your own languages. They have limited language support as of now and they promise to expand further. You can find the available ones here. (Lex made it there, but we’re personally rooting for Finshots to land in Hindi)

• 🏇🏻 In the race to make the JS ecosystem more performant (the code, not the devs, mind you). Bun vs. Deno vs. NodeJS has been happening for a while. Bun did some blazingly fast releases in the last few weeks. Ryan Dahl, the man behind NodeJS and now Deno, couldn’t lose the hype they built around Deno. So, they just released 🥁 Deno Queues. And yes, it is what you think it is. They also released DenoKV last month and it’s a natural upgrade to have native queues.
  It has enqueue and listenQueue functions.

• 🔪 It’s been a while since we talked about killings in tech. And when we talk about killings, it’s safe to place your bet on everybody’s favourite serial killer, Google. They are now planning to kill Google Podcasts, the only sane platform apart from Spotify which had all good podcasts. And just like us Google also thinks things are better in pairs, so they’ll also be killing Google Jamboard. (wondering if KilledByGoogle should really be treated as side project ideas at this point?)

• 🏎️ You might have seen videos of weird Cars coming out of the CRED’s Indiranagar office, and as always it all just pure clever marketing. They soon launched CRED Garage, a one-stop to manage everything (insurances, challans, fast-tag, PUC, etc.) related to your vehicles. (personally, I like it, as I almost forgot that my car had an insurance renewal due in 3 days).
  They basically built the CRED for Cards, before anyone else could. How about breaking even now?

• 🚀 Cloudflare launched Cloudflare Fonts, a new tool that allows sites to load Google Fonts from their own domain.  It improves the speed and privacy of the website. It streamlines the process by reducing the number of round trips by 8x. → The good part is that you can easily move from Google Fonts to CF Fonts.

• 🪅 Raspberry Pi 5 was announced with some pretty impressive It now features a 2.4GHz quad-core 64-bit Arm Cortex-A76 which is 2-3 times as fast as the Pi 4. Also features improved graphics and two 4Kp60 HDMI ports and a PCIe 2.0 for high bandwidth peripherals. TL;DR - it’s safe to skip the jargon, and just say that it’s harder better faster stronger (and hotter).

• ✨ AI Wrap-up

  • 🙈 OpenAI engineers are definitely working on steroids → ChatGPT can now see, hear, and speak. They call the model GPT-4V (Vision) and it was trained in a similar way as the original model using a text and image dataset. Before you get too excited, well, they did nerf it a lot as outlined in their well-hidden paper model card, so it would straight-up refuse to answer you if it thinks you sound sus. (Gandhi’s three monkeys are going to be irrelevant soon, every day we move a step closer to AGI) BTW, the OpenAI folks also made GPT browsing available again but mind you, it tries its best to maintain brevity in its responses.

    

    One of us used to be on Be My Eyes so seeing this made us so happy!

  • ☢️ Microsoft is possibly trying to power their Data Centers with Nuclear power now. So, expect bigger and bigger GenAI base models now. (don’t believe us? well, first of all, you SHOULD, second go check this job post)

  • 🎯 Mistral AI releases its 7B model that outperforms the Llama 2 13B on all benchmarks and their instruction fine-tuned 7B-Instruct model outperforms all 7B models on MT-Bench.

  • 🛌 Amazon didn’t have the first-mover advantage here but it certainly doesn't want to be the last one in this space. So it finally took AWS Bedrock, its generative AI offering out of Beta which offers foundational models from AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Cohere, Stability AI, and Amazon, with support for Llama 2 coming soon. Plus, it went over the top and invested $4B into Anthropic to “develop the most reliable and high-performing foundation models”. (One of us got the Bedrock access in beta and tbh Amazon’s Titan models were not up to the mark. I guess they realized that it’s better to leave this stuff to the ones who know it well and they handle the investment and platform part which they do well.)

  • 🕶️ New Ray-Ban x Meta Smart Glasses in town. Starting at $299 and available from 17th October, you can pre-order them right now. (RayBan just got zucced and also your annual reminder of how ahead of its time the Google Glasses were)
    What’s new you ask?
    1. You can query anything you are seeing by saying “Hey Meta!”
    2. You can capture photos and share them.
    3. You can live stream what you see through your glasses on Meta apps.|
    
    Well, Meta actually revealed a lot of stuff in their MetaConnect event including their Meta Quest 3 Mixed Reality Headset and AI characters modelled after real celebrities.

    

    Source: Meta

  • ❤️ Oh and talking about Zuck and smart glasses, Wake Up Babe, Lex’s new Video with Mark dropped in the Metaverse (we don’t know how they recorded their faces and all but it does give a sick peek into what’s coming in the future)

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What brings us to awe 😳

• 🛩️ UK Air Traffic Control meltdown - Who says software engineers are not engineers? We bet you can’t tell us any other field where the engineer can apparently cancel 2000 flights just sitting at their desks doing their job.

• 🧧 Russian zero-day seller offers $20M for hacking Android and iPhones

• 🐍 Our beloved friends Snake game was recreated in assembly just in 69 bytes (this game is so small that it can fit in a QR Code)

• 😌 The Joys of Maintenance Programming but yeah, you should also know how to develop stuff.

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Today I(we) Learnt 📑

• 🏨 Hotel Drying Technique - when you take a single backpack for a trip.

  

• 🔗 A Link’s Download Attribute Won’t “Just Work” for CORS

• ❤️‍🔥 If you were a tinkerer in your early years, you must have used a lot of CD/DVD/USB writing/burning tools (hi Nero). And if you use Windows, then Rufus has been quite a popular and reliable option in recent years. Well, we recently came to know that the author calls it Rufus because “Reliable USB Formatting Utility(S)”.
  [Nibbler P geek alert: THIS DOES NOT MAKE ANY SENSE TO ME. I HAVE AN ALTERNATIVE EXPLANATION NO MATTER WHAT ITS AUTHOR SAYS AND YOU CAN FIND IT IN THE FIRST PINNED COMMENT. THANKS. READ ON.]

• 🪐 Uranus is called “Green Planet” not coz it’s green (actually it’s #B2D6DB, i.e. ~equal G&B), in fact, it’s closer to Blue. But because Neptune is more “bluish” than Uranus. Uranus got the “Green Planet” nameplate.

• 🛺 Were you stuck in the recent BLR jam? With all that time in your hand, did you notice that the Namma Yatri logo spells N and Y disguised as a reload/refresh/to&fro symbol?

  

  Source: Rahul on Twitter

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

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What we have been trying 🔖

• 🧞‍♂️ TripGenie for Booking.com - Show flight prices in Booking.com

• 🛝 First Issue - a curated list of accessible issues from popular open-source projects, and helps you make your next contribution to open-source.

• 🔎 WiFi QR Code generator based on qrGPT, Generate your next AI QR Code in seconds

• 🪦 EoL.date, is a simple and useful database of software with their End of Life dates.

• 🧲 Magnet - Seamlessly integrate LLMs as Python functions (basically a decorator over a function that would actually do a GPT API call)

  

  Source: GitHub

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Builders’ Nest 🛠️

• 💾 RecoverPy: Recover overwritten or deleted data using the terminal.

• ✨ μDSV: a fast JS library for parsing well-formed CSV strings

• 🦖 rex.fit: Your personal AI workout and nutrition coach [NEW LAUNCH]

• 💬 FreeChat: Chat with Meta’s Llama 2 on your MacBook without installing any other software. Every conversation is saved locally, all conversations happen offline.

• 🫠 AI Score my site: SEO is ever-changing, find out if your website can be discovered and ranked by AI-powered search engines and what you can do to improve it.

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Meme of the week 😌

Source: @MarkCrtlC’s post

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Off-topic reads/watches 🧗

• 🔧 Maker v/s Manager - This explains why engineers prefer WFH while managers want everybody to come to the office and do meetings together, and a lot more interesting stuff. (inspired from PG’s original essay)

• 🤝 My Reflections on My Summer in India’s Silicon Valley by Ashu Garg from Foundation Capital (BLR LGF!!! 🚀)

• ❁ Live immediately - Seneca (yes, the stoic guy)

• 🎥 All-In Summit: In conversation with Vinod Khosla (watch this and find out why Nibbler A is simp for the highest elo VC)

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Wisdom Bits 👀

"I love mistakes because it's the only way you learn."
— Jane Fonda (also, many fathers who love their children)

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If you liked what you just read, recommend us to a friend who’d love this too 👇🏻

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Weekly Standup 🫡

• Nibbler A was occupied this week at home, he did a lot of reading and hence random big blocks in this Nibble. Also, the good news is he played badminton just like he used to when he was young.

• Nibbler P had a busy but interesting week. He played some badminton, went cafe hopping, watched some dramas, read some books, and slept a lot. (basically a jack-of-all-trades plebian)

See you in the next one