#45
OpticID, dignifAI, Verkle trees, Crypto + AI, Frames, reCAPTCHA goes Lite, Bye Calibri, Circle to Search, React Native for visionOS, sparkly-text, Stellarium, Dubbing Studio and more
Welcome to the 45th! Itβs Feb already, huh? ππ»
Another happening week in tech, with every passing day increasing the chance of AI taking over our menial jobs and we increasing the challenge for AI by adding more bugs to our code.
π§ Podcast version of this edition is available here β #45 | Recast
π’ Get access to bonus links and discuss with fellow Nibblers
Whatβs happening π°
π The end of the ZIRP Era is here (* sad duck noises *), so no more (interest) free money in the market and we are already seeing the impact on the job market in tech especially. The good part is there will be fewer founders bullshitting their way to money and the bad part is there will be lesser funds allocated to R&D & trials in production.
π€ With the increasing use of AI the chances of these browsing agents visiting your web services increase more, which means naturally the use of reCAPTCHA will go brrβ¦. But Google said starting April 1st, reCAPTCHA free evaluations will drop from 1Mn to 10k (yup! 100x drop) and theyβll change the name of the free plan to βLiteβ. They will have two more plans βStandardβ which gives you 100k evals for $8/mo & βEnterpriseβ, where you pay $1 for every 1k requests post free 10k.
ποΈ With Vision Pro, Apple has a new biometric authentication βOpticIDβ (yeah Aadhar did it before it was cool). They seem to be leading this revolution with quality biometric locks, no doubt about it. (good news is now even our reptile friends can use biometrics finally! π₯³, some of them change integument every month.). Also, this might be the last biometric authentication, before it gets too invasive. It is also, interesting to note that eyes arenβt supposed to remain the same throughout your life.
Source: π βοΈ Pixel 8 & 8 Pro will have a βcircle to searchβ functionality. everyone is leading their kinda innovations.
π The Browser Company (the creators of Arc Browser) launched Arc Search for Mobile (iOS only currently) which strips everything else out of a mobile browser that makes it pretend like a smaller version of your PC browser and only retains the components that you use it most for - look something up quickly. We tried it and itβs super cool (especially the βbrowse for meβ feature) for looking up things quickly without foraging through the list of web pages. Reminds us of Perplexity.
π§ The first Neuralink chip has been successfully implanted in a human brain. WHATTTAA time to be alive!
Source: π β¨ AI Digest
ποΈβπ¨οΈ The folks at ByteDance (which BTW is on fire with their AI research these days) released Depth Anything some weeks ago that sets new SoTA in monocular1 depth estimation. In easier words, it does better at estimating the depth of objects in everyday images (that lack any depth information by themselves) than ever before.
Source: The website above π° Sama said, βAI will make it possible to have Solopreneur unicornsβ.
We are amidst a revolution. based on this meme π¬ Amazon launched Rufus, a new AI-powered conversational buying experience. It is aimed to help you with all the information on products & suggestions for you. (we donβt like it, a few friends who reach out to us for gadget recommendations, wonβt talk to us anymore now?).
π§βπ» We got a bunch of coding model releases this week with Meta releasing the Code Llama 70B family (base, instruction-tuned, and python-specialist versions) while DeepSeekAI released the DeepSeekCoder family with the base models of 1.3B, 5.7B, 6.7B and 33B sizes and the instruction-tuned models of 7B and 33B. If youβre curious, the DeepSeekCoder-Instruct 33B beats the Llama 70B Instruct model on the HumanEval benchmark and is your best bet for an open-source alternative to GPT-4βs coding capabilities.
π€ ElevenLabs introduced Dubbing Studio which lets you dub your audio and videos into different languages with even finer control on the transcript, translation, synchronization, and audio styles.
π 0x2 Digest
π Biggest backer of the crypto industry, Chris Dixon (who also leads a16zβs crypto fund) released his book βRead Write Ownβ. The book is said to be easily parsed by high school grads too. The idea is to convey βBuilding the Next Era of the Internetβ (surprise surprise using blockchain).
β¨ Vitalik (the alpha male behind Ethereum) posted a blog about Crypto + AI applications (sorry! If you are an investor, we should have warned you saying orgasm ahead!). While trying to find the intersections between AI & Crypto, he broke down the applications into 4 categories, explained them briefly, and ended up with a βwe still need to find a way to put the pieces together, so that it makes senseβ.
π Verkle trees implementation pushed to Osaka hard fork. hold βup we are explaining that one line. So, the Verkle tree is an optimized version of the Merkle Patricia tree (used to represent the Ethereum state right now). Vitalik proposed this back in 2021 to move to Verkle Tree. They rely on βVector commitmentβ. (if you think about it carefully, itβs gonna be the decade of vectors.)
Why Verkle tree? β TL;DR they are faster to construct and will reduce the time complexity from
\(O({n^2})\ to \ O({k*n})\)where there are
nleaves andkis a branching factor.What on godβs green earth is βOsaka hardforkβ (also known as EIP 7607)? β Itβs a branch of the main chain which will be released after the next version.
π° Exploit via error in rounding in borrow function of contract costed Abracadabra, a sum of $6.6M. Now the usual negotiations on-chain are going on with the two accounts found with the money.
π SEC likely to approve spot Ethereum ETFs on May 23
π« Farcaster (the Twitter of crypto) launched Frames (interactive iframes of web3). This is a really exciting feature & a dev Cassie Heart built the classic game βDoomβ on it. A Twitter thread to help you make your own frames.
π οΈ Dev & Design Digest
π Aptos is now the default font for Microsoft, replacing Calibri, which had a good 15-year stint, but now will have to head back to the dropdown menu.
π New πππππππ API coming soon to React Native. yes, CallStack is building React Native support for visionOS. React is so back! Since the launch, React never had a bad day it seems. (and that my friends is what Atwoodβs Law looks like in production.)
π Typescript 5.4 beta was announced. Major things that got shipped are newΒ
Object.groupByΒ andΒMap.groupByΒ static methods &NoInferutility type to tell TS to not infer the type.
What brings us to awe π³
βπ» How a single typo almost cost $500M to USPS. A small story on how a series of small disconnected events led to USPS losing half a billion.
π€ Lowercase and uppercase letters chars use the same space surprise surprise β 1 byte. But swapping uppercase letters for lowercase letters saves data (think compression).
π₯Ό Some folks on 4chan have launched a new AI tool called dignifAI and its purpose is to put clothes back on e-girls and remove tattoos on their skin. Itβs always interesting to see when a group of anons comes together and builds fun stuff online.
Today I(we) Learnt π
𧫠Applying AI to Immune Cell Networks: One of the best takeaways from this article, apart from showing how simple text parsing can help understand relationships between cells is the value of domain expertise. If we leverage domain expertise with the current βcoreβ technological growth, we can unlock immense novel applications in various fields that could not have been solved by the scientists working on this tech alone.
π« Instagram allows you to block reels/posts containing particular words, phrases, or emojis. (was sick of Instagram giving me reels saying βThe person who has βaβ in their name owes you a pizzaβ, or β#GRWMβ Ew!)
Source: Instagram app itself.
π€ You have read ~50% of Nibble, the following section brings tools out from the wild.
What we have been trying π
πΈοΈ Navigate webpage layers, z-index, and DOM using the 3D View tool: Suck at CSS? Now you can suck in it in 3D! MS Edge now allows you to get a three-dimensional view of your webpage elements so now you can view exactly where your
z-index: -1;element is hiding.π₯ How to be a Phenomenal Rubber Duck by Dan, tells you about what 3 questions to ask to make your troubleshooting faster.
βΎοΈ A piece by
on how software engineering is more than writing code and why you should see beyond the code.
Buildersβ Nest π οΈ
π eslint-plugin-nestjs-orm: Set of (only one right now) ESLint rules to prevent guardrails and bad practices using NestJS Moongose or ORMs. (Nibbler A is a shameless plug, but heβs super proud of these 30 lines of JS)
π Stellarium: a free open-source planetarium for your computer.
β¨ sparkly-text: A small zero-dependency Web Component to add sparkles to text fragments. [Blog]
Meme of the week π
Off-topic reads/watches π§
β° Timebox your requests: on how to accept or raise work requests. [1 min]
π§ A hooking small piece on βWhy flawlessness is a faulty metric for human perfectionβ by
[10 min]π¦ ASAPScience released an interesting video discussing what happens if we kill every mosquito on Earth (or if we just eradicate the pathogen in them), the same pests that are the reason for millions of deaths every year. Reminds us of one of the earlier videos of Nassim Nicholas Taleb (the writer of Fooled by Randomness and Black Swan) discussing the same thing and connecting it to an earlier experiment that went horribly wrong. Pick the poison wisely scientists. [6 min + 6 min]
Friends of Nibble π
We know we cover many random topics here in Nibble, and we have it in chaos here like our little minds. π Unlike us, our good friend Stefan has a newsletter βWeb Weeklyβ focused solely on web development. He already has 4.6k active readers (including us) and we can guarantee youβll get a great information quality per word.
Wisdom Bits π
βI think I mostly got what I wanted by ignoring advice.β
β Sam Altman (in Lexβs podcast)
Wallpaper of the week π
π Link to Wallpaper β wow.nibbles.dev
If you liked what you just read, recommend us to a friend whoβd love this too ππ»
monocular = mono- +β ocular, where mono means βsingleβ and ocular means βpertaining to the eyeβ, or in a cameraβs context, the lens so monocular here means β(shot) from a single lensβ. This came in the footnote because the word reminded us of Metaβs Oculus Rift which means a rift (split) in your vision. A way richer named that βVision Proβ π
a new section for the cryptography world, we use 0x as its prefix to hexadecimal numbers, which is what is used everywhere in the space.