#46
Ancient Scrolls, Gemini, $25M DeepScam, Bad PRs, Notion Workspace?, jQuery is so back, Deception Detector, Google ❤️ Rust, ERC404, GoDaddy 🤝 ENS, Arc Sync, Heyday, pgxman, Windows's sudo and more.
Welcome to the 46th!
👋🏻 It’s getting bigger with every edition (that’s what she readers said), if your email gets trimmed, feel free to go to the webpage directly.
🎧 Podcast version of this edition is available here → #46 | Recast
📢 Get access to bonus links and discuss with fellow Nibblers
🗓️ HackerRank is celebrating Pi Day as AI Day, join them on March 14th.
What’s happening 📰
🌋 The Vesuvius Challenge was kicked off to solve the ancient problem of the Herculaneum Papyri, a library of scrolls that were flash-fried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD has been completed and the first scroll (5% of it) has been deciphered to unravel text from the ancient world that has never been seen before. And we are just getting started.
💰 We know it’s all over the news, but we’ll still tell, Sama asked for $7T (7,000,000 million) fundraising to change the chip manufacturing ecosystem, it’s insane, right? (we added an easter egg in today’s cover 😉)
🤡 You might have already seen the buzz around useless PRs on the express & node repo created last week. It brings a lot of shame to the Indian OSS ecosystem and exposes the effects of “bhaiya-didi” culture here.
Some tweets showcasing those brilliant PRs are → [Theo phrasing it as an attack on OSS & a PR with curse words.
→ An important appeal here is to not take Indian devs in the light of what a set of misguided students did last week. There are a bunch of honest & hard working devs here, and none of them support what happened, it’s just so easy to manipulate students that it’s plain sad. Neither these influencers nor the students understand the long-term impact it’ll have on the Indian Tech Industry.💰 Talking of scams, a novel Deepfake scam happened in China, where the scammer generated the CFO & a few employees using Deepfake on a video conference with an employee and instructed them to wire $25M. (Money Heist Season 6?). Well, Vitalik read the news and suggested everyone implement “good old security questions, but IRL”.
🛍️ Notion’s shopping spree ain’t over, they acquired Skiff last week. Skiff is a platform (OSS too) that gives end-to-end encrypted storage, docs, calendar events, and email. They started as a secure alternative to Google Docs, but now have a bunch of other tools. We feel Notion Workspace is coming...
👋🏻 Google retries the cache links and now Wayback Machine is the only reliable Time Machine we have left. (why you ask? coz there are only two hard things in CS.)
🆕 Look out for the sign-in page Google is
killingimproving in the coming few days. We don’t know how that would look but we hope it allows us to selectively sign out of Google accounts without signing out of all of them at once 🥹
found when logging in 🗣️ Is Carpal Tunnel Syndrome giving you pain while typing? You can now talk to your VSCode window and it will pretty much do the work for you (we hope). Microsoft released their VS Code Speech extension that adds speech-to-text capabilities to the chat interfaces in Visual Studio Code. All your voice data is parsed locally and it needs GitHub Copilot Chat extension to work.
🔄 Arc introduced Arc Sync, a new secure sidebar sync, without the need for iCloud. Finally and slowly, they’ll move off from iCloud to their own servers.
Source: Arc itself, lol. ✨ AI Digest
🤖 Bard becomes Gemini and with it brings a whole lot of jargon (seriously, what were the PMs thinking). So, let us clear some of that for you:
Google’s LLM Powered Chatbot offering “Bard” becomes “Gemini”. This has a new premium offering called “Gemini Advanced” → This is the “product”
Gemini (the LLM models, not the chatbot) is still called by the same name and is a family of LLM models, namely, “Gemini Ultra”, “Gemini Pro” and “Gemini Nano” → These are the “AI models”
Only “Gemini Advanced” (akin to ChatGPT Plus), their newly-launched premium product has access to “Gemini Ultra” (akin to GPT-4), while the free plan which is just called “Gemini” (akin to ChatGPT) only has access to “Gemini Pro” (akin to GPT-3.5). 🫠
The Gemini Advanced subscription is bundled with the “AI Premium” plan of the Google One which also comes with 2TB Google Drive Storage and is competitively priced with the ChatGPT Plus, and you can try it for free for the first two months (btw Google One crossed 100M subscribers).
Having tried it ourselves, we think it’s not quite there to beat the GPT-4 yet, especially on coding and image understanding capabilities; Though it feels faster and has better integrations with Google Products. So, pick your poison carefully.
☁️ At the same time, the Google team released locallm, another way to run LLMs locally. If you’re somebody who uses GCP a lot, this might come in handy when you’re about to deploy your models there. You might also want to have a look at this Reddit post comparing the different ways of running LLMs locally.
A comparison of different ways to run LLMs locally | Source: Reddit post linked above 👩🏻💻 The Qwen team released a Qwen1.5, a family of base and chat models across six sizes: 0.5B, 1.8B, 4B, 7B, 14B, and 72B. It packs a punch and delivers excellent performance across a diverse set of benchmarks. The smaller models perform exceptionally in the sub 7B sizes as well. These models even come integrated with the
transformers>=4.37.0library with support from vLLM, SGLang, AutoGPTQ, etc.🍯 Bumble launched “Deception Detector", an AI tool to block spam and fake profiles automatically. It becomes crucial to consider the increasingly
hornylonely population out there. Also, more importantly, the FTC reported that romance scams cost people around $1.3B in 2022 🤡. Shows like The Tinder Swindler are a testament to that.😊 Goody-2 a new model in town and it’s deemed as “The world's most responsible AI model”, so much so that it won’t answer anything that could be possibly be construed as controversial or problematic. Its model card is even hilarious. Go check it out! (If you’re interested, somebody on Reddit posted its system prompt but you better play with Goody before looking at it.)
It can’t be unsafe if it doesn’t answer anything, right? 🏞️ BRIA AI released RMBG v1.4, a new State-of-The-Art Open-Source Background Removal Model and it’s probably better than the ones you’re used to using, plus it’s open-source! And did we mention that it can work on the web? Yes, it can work on the web too! Go host one on your own and show that long finger to the websites that limit removals behind their paid APIs haha.
🔐 0x Digest
🕸️ GoDaddy 🤝 ENS, now link any of your GoDaddy domains with your wallet as an ENS but
.ethundoubtedly remains the elite ENS TLD. (so, we ain’t sure what bro is yapping about?!?)🆕 EthereumJS release includes → Dencun hard-fork compatibility, Tx addSignature() API, Trie/SM Proof Functionality, WASM Crypto, and more.
👨🏻🚒 Earlier last week, Solana had a 5-hour outage after 346-day of “no downtime”. Max Keiser called it “centralized garbage.”
💸 February’s gonna be big, as tokens worth $800M will be unlocked.
🫠 ERC-404, (liquidity
notfound), a novel, ChatGPT generated 🤡 and untested RFC. This is a new & unofficial token standard that allows you to hold both fungible tokens & NFT under the same name. alright, let us explain:so, if you own 1x ERC-404 token, you get 1x fungible token (ERC20) and 1x NFT (ERC 721), you can either trade it like a token (the NFT gets burnt if you do so) or sell it like an NFT. (but not both, ofc!)
this combines the best of both worlds and solves the problem of liquidity that was faced by NFT projects. So, if you can’t sell it, burn it and get liquidated.
Pandora becomes the first token implemented on this protocol.
🛠️ Dev & Design Digest
🦀 Google has always been a big backer of Rust, and now is donating $1M to the Rust Foundation to improve C++/Rust interoperability. They have been internally making a lot of Android toolings and modules in Rust.
🧓🏻 Guess who’s back? jQuery, YES!!!! jQuery announced 4.0.0 BETA!
→$("p").text("shit just got real");👑 sudo comes to Windows as Microsoft brings Powershell a little closer to bash. It’s even open-sourced! Well, it’s not exactly a one-to-one port of Linux’s sudo but more of a way to bring the experience of running elevated commands in an unelevated shell using familiar syntax.
What brings us to awe 😳
😂 <html> has 97.34% support on CanIUse.com, yup! you read it right.
“Can I use?” measures support and adaption of particular HTML or JS features. It is probably an outcome of a funny rounding error here leading to a 2.66% lack of support for HTML tags. (similar are reported of a & p tags, it’s funny).Thoughts: We are still very early in the AI boom and there are a lot of novel use cases (no pun intended) that are yet to be explored and still yet to be proliferated among the masses. The barrier of entry is the lowest it has ever been and will go even lower with time. This is a great opportunity to grab it and make the best use of it.
Today I(we) Learnt 📑
👨👧 Scientists used to believe that taller people lived longer, but more recent data suggests this isn't the case (so, technically they shouldn’t call it longevity anymore). The reason is that your body requires more intake and has more surface area/cells to go rogue if you are tall. (*happy 5’8” noises*)
🧈 In JS if you split string by characters using
String.split(''), the emojis would be split into two characters. Instead, use the spread syntax.
// Do not do this
console.log('split 🫵'.split('').map(x => `_${x}_`))
// Output: ['_s_', '_p_', '_l_', '_i_', '_t_', '_ _', '_\uD83E_', '_\uDEF5_']
// Instead, do this:
console.log([...'split 🫵'].map(x => `_${x}_`))
// Output: ['_s_', '_p_', '_l_', '_i_', '_t_', '_ _', '_🫵_']🤝 You have read ~50% of Nibble, the following section brings tools out from the wild.
What we have been trying 🔖
🔐 Juha wrote a rant post about “Don’t force me to log in for everything”. This has really been a problem lately and will be in the future too. But wait we have something one of our fellow builder Avi Aryan curated a list of web apps that don’t require you to log in. (he did it way before it was cool, like 8 years ago 🤷🏻♂️).
📂 ArchiveButtons: Aggregated buttons for removing the paywalls.
👋🏻 Heyday: an AI copilot that transforms your documents, notes, and conversations into quotes, shareable content, and a queryable database.
Builders’ Nest 🛠️
🧩 pgxman: npm for Postgres. Making it easy to discover, implement, and manage Postgres extensions.
🗂️ humanfs: A modern filesystem API for JavaScript. Nicholas is rethinking the FileSystem APIs to make it easier to use them for the most common ops in 2024.
🗞️ GPT Newspaper: An autonomous agent designed to create personalized newspapers tailored to user preferences
Meme of the week 😌
Off-topic reads/watches 🧗
💪🏻 I Have All the Problems I Want to Have by David Cummings; about how “challenges are frequent” but it’s an achievement to be able to choose yours.
👷🏻♂️ A good read suggested by our friend Joey (e/λ). It talks about leveraging sheer grit if you are a dumbass (like us).
🤔 Multiple Discovery: The Curious Case of Simultaneous Invention, on the lines of “you can’t stop things from happening”, and “ideas find their owners”.
Wisdom Bits 👀
“Colors fade, temples crumble, empires fall, but wise words endure.”
― Edward Thorndike
Wallpaper of the week 🌁
🌌 Link to Wallpaper → wow.nibbles.dev
Weekly Standup 🫠
Well, we removed it for the last 2 editions and got a handful of DMs yelling (in a lovely way) to add it back or face the wrath of a few friends. So, here we go.
Nibbler A had a packed week, working the whole week, and becoming kinda of regular at badminton (broke a few racquets), and has settled that it’s max he can do for his body. He rewatched some episodes of Haikyu!! and rethinked life, slacked off
abitover the weekend, NGL. oh! And he’s getting some new gadgets 🛍️.Nibbler P attended to his usual work, but more than that, he attended to his health and started working out after a hiatus. Still got some post-workout muscle cramps but not bad enough to stop him. He finished watching Love Death + Robots; loved it and thought you’d love the stories and animations too!
If you liked what you just read, recommend us to a friend who’d love this too 👇🏻
Loved the meme 🤣