#42

BTC ETFs, Sama 💍, GPT Store, Apple Vision Pro, OpenVoice transfer.zip, Novita's Img2Video, MailLayer, Smallest PNG, XY Problem and more

🖖🏻 Welcome to the 42nd (0x2A/*/ life, the universe, and everything) edition.
This one is special the nerds know Why?

🎧 Podcast version of this edition is available here → #42 | Recast

📢 Get access to bonus links and discuss with fellow Nibblers

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What’s happening 📰

• ✨ Starting with some OpenAI news:

  • 💍 Sama got engaged to his besto-frendo Ollie, oh! yes and the images are not AI-generated (trust me, bro!)

    

    oh! For the real images open the damn link. We will never post matrimony stuff on this blog.

  • 🛍️ GPT Stores are live (DHH rant coming soon on this one, lol). So, after two months of announcing GPTs, OpenAI finally opened stores. They already had 3M GPTs at the time of launch, and we are going to see some really cool GPTs in the coming days (though we know most of these would be just the plain ol’ GPT with some custom instructions, the real alpha would come from the Action integrations via their APIs like Wolfram’s). BTW if you are building a GPT, here’s a way to monetise your GPT.

  • 👫 ChatGPT for Teams: Ah! Shit, they know that we are sharing a single account (seriously don’t get how people expect us to pay more per seat in Team plans).

    

  • 🤖 OpenAI-backed 1x Technologies, the humanoid maker raised $100M. The company aims to build androids (humanoid robots, not the OS) to meet the world’s labor demands.

• 🥽 Apple Vision Pro is just around the corner. To be released in the US on Feb 2. (Wait, no release event? We were kind of expecting them to hold another cool one and give us a demo of the even enhanced possibilities the headset unlocks. Would you buy one?)

  

• 💰 Spot Bitcoin ETFs are approved by the SEC, and it led to $4.6B worth of shares trading hands on the first day of trading. Indian investors can also participate in this using LRS.

• 📈 Microsoft’s AI ride and Apple’s backseat days, led to MS taking over Apple as the most valuable company briefly.

• 😞 Ah! Authy is shutting down its Desktop App *sad dev noises* (somebody finally told Authy that MFA is when you have that on multiple devices). FYI, Nibbler A has been happily using this for 2 years now.

• 💔 Google said “HNY” and laid off the first set of employees as it cut hundreds of Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions. The lay-offs in tech are supposed to go throughout the year, people are expecting to get the Bull back in 2025.

• 🥹 Jio and Airtel are likely to withdraw their unlimited 5G data plans for premium customers and charge at least 5-10% more for 5G services compared to 4G in the second half of 2024.

• 🇮🇳 We have been seeing an increase in Indic LLMs with Ambari, a series of Open Source Bilingual Kannada-English LLMs being the latest addition to the list. They are 7b models trained on a dataset comprising 1 billion tokens. They share interesting insights on how they achieved this feat with the modest data that they had.

• 🐰 As we mentioned in the last edition, Rabbit Release their r1 an AI-powered companion device that can help you with basic tasks using AI. It works on Rabbit OS which uses a “Large Action Model” (which basically allows the LLM to interact with the device and take actions). Given its simple navigation, we think this could be of good use for kids and old people if we can have the kind of apps and tools that can be of potential use for them. But no it ain’t going to replace that smartphone in your hand anytime soon.

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What brings us to awe 😳

• ⚫️ World’s smallest PNG (ah yes! not smaller than the male ego) is 67 bytes. The linked article explains in detail, why we even need those 67 bytes.
  Fun Fact: The first 8 bytes of any PNG are the same and are called PNG signature, it’s 89 50 4E 47 0D 0A 1A 0A which in ASCII is .PNG....

• 📩 So, someone built an app called MailLayer, leveraging Amazon SES to send campaigns and show basic statistics, The interesting part is using this way it costs you less than $1 for 10k emails & you own the stack more or less.

• 💣 A few devs hacked around and built a fun npm package called everything, which will install every package when installed. This led to them accidentally breaking npm’s unpublish feature. They linked all versions as their dependencies & npm doesn’t allow unpublishing a package version which is a dependency of another package, lol. (GitHub flagged and removed their package, org & code.)

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Today I(we) Learnt 📑

• 🪙 The U.S. economic activity split in half is a good example of how “The Power Law” or “The Pareto Principle” works.

  

  Source: attached article

• 🤔 The XY Problem is when you help someone solve Problem Y using a solution X they have chosen, but it might not solve their problem. (also, when you eX don’t answer whY)

  

  Source: Simplanations

• 🙇🏻‍♂️ Two out of the three Perplexity AI founders are world-champion competitive programmers. IOI 2012, ICPC World Finalists [Source: Tweet]

• ⌨️ The keyboard Button clicks with space and enter behaves differently

  • Space clicks a focused button on release (keyup)

  • Enter clicks a focused button on press (keydown)

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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 🔖

• 🔂 transfer.zip: Free, fast, and encrypted real-time file transfer between browsers using peer2peer.

• 📰 Feedboard: Read all your favorite feeds in one place.

• 🧪 LumaLabs: tools to do Text to 3D & interactive 3D scenes. (their website is 🆒)

• ✍️ Trying to write stories using LLMs? Do not use an instruction-response tuned model or that style of prompt. Instead, start with the story and let it complete the rest for you. This works because instruction training typically uses relatively short, Q&A-style input/output pairs that heavily lean towards factual information retrieval. [Link]

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Builders’ Nest 🛠️

• 💻 ssh3: faster and rich secure shell using HTTP/3

• 🗣️ OpenVoice: Instant voice cloning by MyShell. (no I’m not saying it’s time you can record your own Mann ki Baat)

• 🧩 Nino: Someone built an app that consolidated 18 apps (doc, sheet, form, site, chat…), you can download it locally and use it for free.

• 📹 Novita's Img2Video: motion to your image with Image to Video - Motion API.

• ⊹ StabilityMatrix: A multi-platform package manager and inference UI for Stable Diffusion that supports Automatic 1111, Comfy UI, Fooocus, and more.

• 🌞 surya: Accurate line-level text detection and recognition (OCR) in any language

  

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Meme of the week 😌

Inglorious AI Engineers Source: Twitter

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Off-topic reads/watches 🧗

• 😵‍💫 The best way to get unstuck by Greg Gilbert: Do something. Anything. Take a short rest. Change momentum. Do something. Anything.

• 😶‍🌫️ The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit: Somebody said that the Internet in 2024 would have more AI-generated content than human-generated and it has already started to show signs in some places.

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Wisdom Bits 👀

“It’s hard to do a really good job on anything you don’t think about in the shower.” ― Paul Graham, serial essayist (also, computer scientist)

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Wallpaper of the week 🌁

A new section where we provide you with a cool wallpaper every week. Kicking it off with the OG.

🌌 Link to Wallpaper → wow.nibbles.dev

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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 keeps renegading his goal to timebox his life. Although he did try to touch some books this week, as fellow Nibbler sent “42nd Anniversary Edition of The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to Galaxy”. Shipped tons of code, and he drank more caffeine than he should have. Plans to relax and play 🏸 for the rest of the weekend.

• Nibbler P was busy working on new features and resolving bugs. He is constantly middle out between staying up reading One Piece late at night or waking up early for his driving lessons. It’s Makar Sankranti here in India so he plans to eat tasty food over the long weekend.
  

  

  see you in the next one!