#33

Anthropic 🤝 TPUs, Samsung's Gauss, AI Pin, Global South, GitHub & OpenAI launches, RIP Omegle, We-Didnt-Work, Randoma11y, TravelWeatherMap, NewPipe and more

👋🏻 hey, you! welcome back.
It’s 33 (yes, the same as the number of deities in the Vedic Religion).

🪔 Wishing you a happy Deepavali!

A lot happened, but this weekend is busy so we’ll cover some important bits.
New here? Don’t forget to 👇🏻

🎧 Podcast version of this edition is available here → #33 | Recast

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What’s happening 📰

• ✨ OpenAI Dev Day happened on Nov 6th.

  • 🆕 GPT-4 Turbo & GPT-4 Turbo 128k are released; these are longer, cheaper, faster, stronger variants of GPT-4 (btw 128k is as big as a 300-page book, and here’s some pressure testing it to see how good it is)

  • Assistants API and Threads - now you can build custom assistants on the dashboard and every conversation can be a thread, keeping context from old chat to mimic RAG.

  • GPTs, Builder, and GPT Store. Yes, ChatGPT+ users can now build and submit their own GPTs, in fact, Nibbler P built some.

  • GPT-5 is rumored to be a multimodal (w/ videos) model codenamed “Gobi” (cauliflower finally getting the recognition it deserves 😭)

  • you might have guessed at this point that every time OpenAI announces something it kills a lot of undefendable startups (as Dharmesh Shah pointed out in his newsletter).

    

    Image from AI Tidbits

• 🌐 GitHub Universe happened on Nov 8 & 9. In short, the event was just like the Windows 95 launch, but instead of saying “DEVELOPERS”, imagine Steve Balmer chanting “COPILOT!!”.

  • Copilot Chat’s general availability in December and future support for JetBrains IDEs

  • Copilot enterprise plan that lets companies finetune the model for their codebase at $39/month expected in February 2024

  • Copilot Partner Program with third-party integrations and much more

    

    Source: GitHub Universe Blog Post

• ⚡️ Anthropic to Use Google Chips (TPU v5e) in Expanded Partnership. Google has been building TPUs for a while, specially designed to do ML tasks at speed. If this goes well, who knows maybe Anthropic can do more with less.

• 📍Humane released The AI Pin, another wearable AI-powered gadget. It will cost ~$700 and can more or less replace your smartphones. It can take voice commands capture photos, send SMS search the web, or ask AI for you. Oh! and yes it can also project the content over to your palm and you can control that using hand gestures. (just like Pranav Mistry’s Sixth Sense from 14 years ago. Thanks, Tanmay for reminding us of this.)

  

  Source: Humane

• 🪦 Omegle 2009-2023, it’s very less probable that you may not have heard of it. Leif K-Brooks the founder of Omegle, posted a long note on how it started and how they lost the battle to keep it alive. Also, it becomes unsustainable to run projects like this over time. Even Wikimedia bugs us for money, doesn’t it?

• 👀 Amazon finally catching up with old friends, they are reportedly working on an AI Model with the codename “Olympus”, an LLM with 2T params (at this point we all know quoting just the parameters doesn't tell much so let’s see of ).

• 🤝 OpenAI also announced Data Partnerships as a call to partner with organizations to produce public and private datasets for training AI models.

  

  “or video” caught our eye. Are they working on video now? Or would they just convert them to images and use them with GPT-4V?

• 🎥 YouTube is not holding back on AI anymore, the product is going to leverage generative AI (yes, Gemini). Two of such features are already in testing now:

  • Comment topics summarized by AI

  • An AI conversation tool on Video.

• 🤳 Samsung just threw its hat into the LLM ring at the company’s AI Forum, teasing a new generative model called ‘Gauss’, which boasts language, coding, and image generation capabilities.

• 📐 angular.dev is the new home for angular devs. With their latest announcement of the Angular v17, they released this new developer site that would house the updated docs, the angular tutorials, and a new playground with the help of webcontainers. (As somebody who worked with Angular in the past months, I am so glad to see the new control flow and loop statements in v17. I’m also very excited about the lazy loading and build time improvements.)

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What brings us to awe 😳

• 🍎 Through the Ages: Apple CPU Architecture - With the M3 benchmarks making rounds with mixed reactions, it seems like a good time to see how far we have come, revisit how CPUs work, and discover Apple’s underrated competitive advantage.

• 📉 WeWork filed for bankruptcy, yes the same company that was valued close to $50 Billion. It doesn’t bring us to awe, but omg, people need to use the money wisely.

• 🍻 Drunk Post: Things I've learned as a Sr. Engineer. A gem. You don’t want to miss reading this.

• ☠️ Cloudflare had a 37-minute outage on 30th October, their Workers KV services became unavailable in prod and folks were getting 401 on their own servers.

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Today I(we) Learnt 📑

• 🐬 Ever wondered what AWS’s Python SDK “boto3” means? “boto” is the common name of a freshwater dolphin, which is native to the Amazon River [comment by the creator]. The “3” in “boto3” signifies the version of the library, indicating it’s the third major version of the boto library. We still do not know why the AWS SDK in other languages besides Python has so boring names.

• 💡 Git Tip: Rebasing is hard and it becomes harder if you have to resolve the same merge conflicts again and again. Git actually has a flag rerere and it stands for Reuse recorded resolution of conflicted merges. You can enable it in your repo by using git config rerere.enabled true.
  Found this while reading this banger from Julia Evans.

• 〰️ There is a buzzing word in news headlines called “Global South” and Finshots covered it in detail here. But, what is it you ask? It’s an imaginary divide between all the well-off countries and countries less developed. Some folks drew that line in the 1980s & called it the Brandt Line.

  

• 🗺️ Why does unsafe multithreaded use of std::unordered_map crash more often than unsafe multithreaded use of a std::map? Hint: Think about how these two maps are implemented. [LINK]

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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 🔖

• 🗺️ TravelWeatherMap - Seasonal weather at a glance for the globe. (really useful for travel enthusiasts)

• 🗒️ The Complete Guide of Mistral AI - A guide to the several fine-tuned models of the Mistral-7B

• 🎨 Randoma11y - AI-powered color pallets in compliance with a11y.

• 📖 Reading “It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work” by DHH & Jason Fried from Signal37.
  It’s a nice (somewhat too good to be true) read on how to keep your startups sane and work like the EU.

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Builders’ Nest 🛠️

• 🪜 ladder: a self-hostable alternative to 12ft.io. Bypass paywalls with a proxy ladder and remove CORS headers from any URL

• 🤖 YC Application GPT: A GPT¹ that fills in your YC application automatically based on your pitch deck.

• 📹 NewPipe: The lightweight YouTube experience for Android. (from the last Nibble you might know that YouTube is fighting against AdBlockers and mod apps, may this solve it all.)

• 🔊 Yi - A series of large language models trained from scratch by developers 01.ai (shit expensive domain). They released the 6B and 34B models trained on Chinese and English data and outperformed several larger models released previously.

• 🪄 Reactime - Developer tool for time travel debugging and performance monitoring in React applications. A developer tool for time travel debugging and performance monitoring in React applications.

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Meme of the week 😌

Source: Sam Atlman’s entry to “Tech Billionaire CEO Troll Fest”. ICYMI, Grok is X.AI’s Foundation model.

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Off-topic reads/watches 🧗

• 🧘🏻 Negative visualization in practice by DHH, be stoic basically.

• 💼 How to boss without being bossy by Jeff, he discusses tons of stuff but I don’t think if you are looking for a single answer this post will help, but it’ll compare the options.

• 📇 Identify by Paul G (from 2009). It’s a relatively small read w.r.t how much Paul writes and he ends it with something to remember, “The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you.”

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Wisdom Bits 👀

"If you spend too much time looking in the rear-view mirror, you will crash your car."
— Late Matthew Perry

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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 & Nibbler P both worked hard full week and are most probably busy with 🪔 Diwali festive chores & poojas while you are reading this.

  

  ba…bye! See you in #34

1. In case you think, we don’t know what a GPT is, jokes on you. OpenAI launched a marketplace and they are calling all these plugins now “GPT”