#41
1brc, Rabbit's r1 SARA-RT, GPT-Store, DreamTuner, π Bland.AI, ποΈ Calligrapher AI, Copilot Key, 1D Pacman, Apple Store's monopoly, llmFarm, eSoil, Jan, huh and more
π Welcome to 2024 and the 41st edition of Nibble!
π§ Podcast version of this edition is available here β #41 | Recast
π’ Get access to bonus links and discuss with fellow Nibblers
Whatβs happening π°
π§ββοΈ ByteDance, the company behind TikTok is on a roll these days. They recently released DreamTuner which can do subject-driven generations (create different generations of the same subject) using just a single reference image. It performs better than past methods such as DreamBooth or Textual Inversion (TI) on some benchmarks. But the code is still yet to be released π
The day isnβt far when you can click a picture on your phone and you can generate its variations in different scenarios instantly. Please quote us when it happens. π€ Google Deepmind announced new tools in robotics research that bring us a step closer to this future. AutoRT (better data gathering for training), SARA-RT (faster transformers), and RT-Trajectory (better motion) build on top of their existing RT models. These will help a robot make decisions faster and better understand and navigate their environments. (need the same tools for humans?)
Source: Google Deepmind Blog π Rabbit Inc. will announce rabbit r1, their first pocket hardware to replace app-based operating systems and focus more on intention and complex instruction-based ones.
πͺ OpenAI is to finally open its GPT Store in the coming week. Yeah! after two months delay (Samβs firing/hiring & December Holiday Season). They might finally ship it in 2024. Also, did you know that GPT Builder is a GPT itself? LFG!!!
π° Perplexity raised $73.6M in Series B funding led by IVP with participation from NVIDIA, NEA, Bessemer, Elad Gil, Jeff Bezos, Nat Friedman, Databricks, Tobi Lutke, Guillermo Rauch, Naval Ravikant, Balaji Srinivasan. (look at these names, OMG! wow!)
π Big Layoffs at Duolingo as they onboard huge numbers of translation contractors. ( AI is replacing some jobs π«€)
π Microsoft added a new key to the keyboard in nearly 3 decades and is calling it the "Copilot key" for their AI Co-pilot, embarking on a new era of AI PCs.
Source: Microsoftβs Demo of the Key β‘οΈ MillionJS joins the YC Batch of W24, they became famous at the end of 2023, as they gave the option to optimize your React Apps with minimal changes and just by using Blocked Virtual DOM instead of regular VDom (blockdom diffs the data instead of DOM).
Now they are also working on things like MillionAI, which is a GitHub bot that can find and optimize the code in your existing React projects.π΅ Managing ESOPs is hard products like Carta created a way out, but they always played the Vendor Lock-in card & recently they got into more trouble when Linearβs CEO Karri found out that βCarta did a cold outreach to their angel investors about selling Linear shares to their buyersβ π€£. This is a trust breach as they are indirectly hinting at the obscure Valuation, and playing the game from both sides. (itβs time we get a section e-lafda1?)
ΙΈ Microsoft made its Phi-2 model MIT-licensed, which means you can use it for nearly anything, even for commercial uses. See for yourself.
What brings us to awe π³
β‘οΈ Gunnar Morling announced the One Billion Row Challenge (1brc), running from Jan 1 until Jan 31. It is a fun exploration of how quickly 1B rows from a text file can be aggregated with Java.
And it took off the internet quickly. It started with a baseline benchmark of 04m 13s to process 1B rows, and right now the top of the leaderboard is7.999s7.620s (it really got updated between writing and publishing).π² Fan of local models? You can run a local Mistral-7B (and several other models) on your iPhone or iPad using llmfarm. There is also a great step-by-step guide on getting started with Mistral.
π± Talking about farms, Scientists in Sweden are working on something called eSoil2.
TL;DR β stimulating a plantβs roots electrically can help it grow faster. Regular soil requires too much land, hydroponic farms require water, are energy intensive, and are non-biodegradable, while eSoil is when you use cellulose instead of wool as substrate3 & itβs energy efficient.π§ Australian Researchers introduced a novel framework, DeWave, that converts silent thoughts to text (EEG to Text) with better accuracy than earlier. This also is the first work that decodes EEG without word-level order markers like eye fixations. (omg itβs getting hard to lie, bullish on clean thots)
π PostgreSQL is the Database of the year 2023, seems like, after 2 years of Snowflake βοΈ, we are back to the OG.
π³ We know youβve been hearing this a lot since your computer classes in school, but we are now at a time when you should REALLY be skeptical of what you see online because the fakes are coming at you now that they are just an endpoint call away.4
Today I(we) Learnt π
π UCIL (Union Carbide India Limited), the company leak in whose factory back in 1984 caused the Bhopal Gas Tragedy is now selling batteries actually as it was renamed to π₯ βEveready Industries Indiaβ. [Source, technically Wikipedia]
π Austin wrote about how Bun supports Tail Call Optimizations as it uses JavaScriptCore (Safariβs Engine) over V8 (Chromeβs Engine). Also, Bun supports
console.tablenow in the latest release.
β TCO is when your engine/compiler can support reusing the last stack frame (instead of pilling them up), when calling a recursive function, with one catch though, your recursive call should be the last thing in the AST of the function.
π€ You have read ~50% of Nibble, the following section brings tools out from the wild.
What we have been trying π
π¬ movie-web: A small web app for watching movies and shows easily. It also finds movies from different sources for you. (loving it π»)
ποΈ Calligrapher.ai: Convert text to handwriting using an in-browser RNN.
π Bland.AI: Experience theΒ fastest conversationalΒ AI ever. (crazy one! you give it a number, it calls and answers your query)
π Emojiton: an AI-powered emoji search engine, with minimal UI to copy-paste.
Buildersβ Nest π οΈ
π§ Lumalabβs Genie: A foundational text-to-3d model accessible via Discord. It even generates the
.stlfile for you.πΎ 1D Pacman: someone built a one-dimensional Pacman, because why not?
π§ huh: Build terminal forms and prompts.
π¬ Jan: OOS alternative to ChatGPT, run AI models on your local with Messages interface.
Meme of the week π
Off-topic reads/watches π§
π Apple rejects the HEY Calendar from their App Store by DHH, he talks about how Apple's review process is still a PITA, how they give any BS reasons to reject apps & how they'll not pay 30% cut to Apple just to be left alone. (on that note, remember Apple said FB is bad for privacy and then started its own Ad Network. π€·π»ββοΈ)
π« New Year is always a good time to rewatch this video, 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice (that makes it 136 nibbles!)
π 27 Years Ago, Steve Jobs Said the Best Employees Focus on Content, Not Process. Research Shows He Was Right, and hit us when he said, ββ¦ and they're a pain in the butt to manage. But you put up with it because they're so great at the content.Β And that's what makes great products. It's not process. It's content.β because we personally know so many people who are exactly like this and achieved great things in life.
Wisdom Bits π
βYou can never cross the ocean unless you have the courage to lose sight of the shore.β
β Christopher Columbus
If you liked what you just read, recommend us to a friend whoβd love this too ππ»
Weekly Standup π«‘
Nibbler P had a small family reunion and spent the week enjoying time with family. This year, he started learning to drive and got back to lifting some metal in the gym.Oh, and he watched the One Piece live-action series on Netflix and it got him so hooked that he started reading the manga (already 4 volumes in).
Nibbler A had a New Yearish week and spent the first few days with his collected gems π«Άπ» from undergrad, other than that tons of work by the end of the week. He has so much going on right now, so taking a deep breath & going back to life chores after writing this. (he seriously needs to timebox his life now)
Be safe on the internet. Know what an e-lafda is.
Article by Finshots
a surface that roots can attach to
So the question is, should you be skeptical even of The Nibble? Come on, we have been writing to you for so many weeks now. That makes us friends, right? Oh, itβs only one way you say? Why donβt you write back to us some time at hi@nibbles.dev and let us know what you feel?