#29

The FIRST word, Adobe's Primrose, OpenAI Residency, GPT-4V, Tetration, using in TS, FireFox's 22y/o bug, State of AI, Jamais vu, Computer Time, Nobody Cares and more

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Oct 15, 2023

👋🏻 hola! and happy Sunday. Welcome to a PRIME (#29) Nibble.
🪔 Happy Navratri! May this Navratri bring new bits of joy and laughter into your life.

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In case, you are in a hurry and will read it later, you can quickly hear it in Podcast form using Recast → Nibble #29 | Recast 🎧

What’s happening 📰

🤖 Si14 is the new Au79? After OpenAI said they’d make chips last week, Microsoft (secret BFF) will release chips in November. Everybody’s trying to get the gold from silicon made in-house and not relying on Nvidia that’s already running on a shortage. (now I am really really curious about what they’d announce in the OpenAI DevDay)
🌋 The FIRST word was discovered in an unopened Herculaneum scroll by a 21-year-old computer science student. The Versuvius Challenge is a Computer Vision challenge that aims to decipher the Herculaneum papyri (wish we had something like this for India as well), scrolls of text that were buried in ashes when Mount Vesuvius erupted (went brr..) in 79 AD. Nat Fridman, the former CEO of GitHub is one of the people driving this. The word that they discovered is “πορφυρας” which means "purple dye" or "cloths of purple."1
☄️ LLaVA comes up as OSS and a free option for GPT-4Vision Image Interpreter. It’s a CLIP-ViT strapped to a Llama model and fine-tuned with vision-language data. You can go and try it for free, right now, unlike OpenAI’s closed-source private beta.
👀 BTW ChatGPT engineers go brrr!! A lot of us with ChatGPT Plus finally got access to GPT-4V(ision) & the DALL-3 integration. They also launched a TTS so you can talk with ChatGPT and it will reply to you in the language you spoke. Works well with a mix of Hindi and English as well.
🎨 Bing gives you DALLE-3? well, Google ain’t lagging behind and now can draw images right there in search for you. This one is rolling out slowly, so let’s wait and see. This will be powered by Google’s own Imagen Model Family.
Source: Google’s Image Search with SSG
🦾 In case you are interested in reading, State of AI Report 2023 is out. Some major takeaways are:
- GPT4 outperforms all other foundation models
- Vibes-based outputs are still an issues
- AI Safety rules & regulations are now a big debate across the globe, but big players are yet to converge on it.
- OSS models are trying even harder to surpass the performance and quality brought by enterprise models.
- NVIDIA chipping to the moon, with this new AI boom and surge in GPU demands, Microsoft might also enter the business.
- Just like Web3 in 2019-20, "AI" saved the startups in the last 2 years, as VC funded tons of AI startups.
🎓 OpenAI launches a 6-month Residency program for brilliant minds to transition into AI. And if you were thinking, no it’s not one of those in-person kind of apprenticeships. Rather, they want people from fields outside of deep learning, such as mathematics, physics, or neuroscience to come over and potentially do research with them. (Nibbler P is a big stan for interdisciplinary works) The program’s start date is flexible and pay is a whopping $210k/annum.
⛓️ EU wants the same global rules for AI, and South Asian countries say okay if govt make some rules meanwhile US Space Force says to pause the use of GenAI.
🧪 So, just like bugs in your code, viruses (like COVID) mutate and evolve fast too. It was a big issue in medical science for a long time, that drugs can’t get software updates remotely.
But now with a new AI tool, you can predict future virus mutations and prepare your drug in advance for that. (on-prem products are hard to manage.)
👷🏻‍♂️ DHH is saying to stop promoting the build (as in code build) step and write direct JS. As you can’t go faster than that.
👗 Adobe just revealed Project Primrose, an interactive dress that can change the design on command. And they showcased that in their recent event.
🔥 In other news, Adobe also released Firefly 2, the latest version of its text-to-image generative model earlier this week and a suite of other tools for Photoshop and Express such as style transfer and generative fill. People tried it out and its image-generation capabilities are quite good. What we saw though is that it’s not quite right there with generating text in images (we get it though. that’s not what the primary users of Photoshop would be most interested in anyways.) What’s interesting is that even with common words like “ghibli-style”, it refuses to process the prompts because it detects it as some foreign language for which it is not ready yet. Hope this gets fixed soon.

What brings us to awe 😳

🦟 Holy mother of god: 3D asset baked into a video is becoming indiscernible from reality. This is cool stuff but more importantly, this means it’ll be almost impossible to differentiate between fake and real videos and I’m not sure the world is ready for that.
🐛 Firefox’s tooltip bug was finally fixed after 22 years. Some bugs just take time.
💰 The Domain name jackpot for 10 countries/regions that had the TLD owned/reserved. Countries with .ai, .vc, .gg, and .tv might have had no idea they were sitting on top of future gold mines. For reference, Anguilla the proud owner of .ai TLD is making $3M/month in revenue by just selling domains.
🕸️ React 18 had some hard times with WebComponents, well, not anymore. Google’s Web Component framework is lit released @lit/react, which fills in the void and now you can use it well with React, TS, and reactive paradigms to generate web components and be a local spider person.
☕️ How Netflix Really Uses Java - Paul Bakker, Java Platform at Netflix, debunked myths about Netflix's tech stack at the 2023 QCon San Francisco. He also discussed JDK 17's active role and future plans for JDK 21 and virtual threads.

Today I(we) Learnt 📑

📐 Pythagorean Theorem was discovered 1,000 years before Pythagoras, Babylonian mathematician, Euclid, and some other folks kinda proved the theorem before Pythagoras was even supposed to exist. Also, we don’t have any proof that Pythagoras gave the theorem.
He founded a school called “Semicircle of Pythagoras” and it is known for contributing a lot to mathematics as we know it today. The people in that school were called “Pythagoreans” and now recall the name of the theorem. So we don’t know who created it from those Pythagoreans.
🕰️ Where does your computer get time from? I wish the answer was easy but it’s pointer pointing pointers and eventually, you’ll know it’s better to just say “NTP” is where my computer gets time from 🤣. (good were the times when stars were telling time.)
🆕 With TypeScript 5.2, you can now use the using keyword, which is used to auto dispose of resources you use, like file handles, DB connection, etc. Making it breezy and anti-rust. A hot take I have here is that just like GC2 abstracts the complete memory management for us, this feature will abstract out connection-closing things for future devs. Not sure if sad or not.
🫨 Jamais vu (not veja du 🫠) is a phenomenon operationalized as the opposite of déjà vu, i.e. finding subjectively unfamiliar something that we know to be familiar.
😴 Impacts of Lack of Sleep - LOL we know this, alright? But something about stating it so bluntly makes it more impactful to read.
‼ Tetration is, for the most part, another name for iterated exponentiation. & Why you did not learn tetration in school?

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

What we have been trying 🔖

🔥 BlazeAI - another AI-powered Marketing copy generator, but this one has quite a landing page.
📷 PhotoShift - Shift your product into the mid-journey scene
📦 Icon Bundler - Export SVG icons to React, Vue, and Svelte.
🥊 LLM Boxing - Remember the Mistral 7B model last time? It’s getting competitive with the Llama 2 13B. And this time, it’s in for a fight in the ring!

Builders’ Nest 🛠️

🤖 autogen: a framework that enables the development of LLM applications using multiple agents that can converse with each other to solve tasks.
✨ chatgpt-history-export-to-md - A Python script to effortlessly extract and format your ChatGPT conversations data export from JSON to MD & others
⚡️ lite-youtube-embed - A web component that can replace YT embeds, looks just the same but is approximately 224x faster.

Meme of the week 😌

Off-topic reads/watches 🧗

👀 Nobody Cares by Ben Horowitz (the 8 in a16z).
🐢 Nice ~~men~~ Teams finished last, a good read on why clarity is important over being nice and what a good balance as a manager/executive on being clear and nice.
📉 VC Returns Are at a 10+ Year Low, the times are bad but also booming. Hard but also easy. Confusing times overall.
😶‍🌫️ Jargon comes and goes by Seth, if you think about it jargon is usually internal references that aren’t valuable unless the outsiders are there.
🧗‍♂️ Career Advice by Moxie (the guy who created the Signal Protocol) - If you want to take away just one line from this article, then it is this - “Be careful not to discover a career before you’ve discovered yourself.”
⛓️ Amid the war on this planet, it’s a good time to know How Israel was created & how they turned Gaza into the world’s biggest prison.

Wisdom Bits 👀

"Don't fear failure. Not failure, but low aim, is the crime. In great attempts it is glorious even to fail."
— Bruce Lee

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Weekly Standup 🫡

Nibbler P needs some scolding and public embarrassment for not keeping his promise of publishing his personal blog. What does he even think of himself? What’s keeping him so busy? When is he going to publish? I think he should take a retirement from making promises already.
Nibbler A again had a suppa busy week, so busy bro ~~barely played chess, or watched any anime~~ Update: lost 3 games, and watched 3 episodes. But sure he read some stuff, did some good things at work, and spared some time to write this and help some friends.
See you in the next one!

Nibbler P Nerd Note: In ancient times, purple dye was extremely extremely expensive. The only natural way to extract it was from a rare fish. This is the reason why the colour purple came to be associated with royalty because only the ultra-rich could afford it. Same reason why you’d probably never see this colour on the flag of any nation, because well, flags are mass-produced for the public. The reason why I am telling this you is that that particular scroll *may be* talking about something related to the royalty of that period or the particulars of this dye. It could unlock so much hidden information for us. We’ll have to wait and see.

Garbage Collector san!

The Nibble

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