#50
#50
North is up?, Claude 3, AI x Elections, Open robotics, Nuclear Powered AWS, CEO Fights, Sony's SFT, Shet Coins, Free cloud-exit, is-tailwind, Once Tools, Pan, ente, LegalGaurdian, raycast-ui, and more
Welcome to the 50th!! Yup! it’s been 50 weeks, feels like y’day. We got a shiny new custom domain, nibbles.dev integrated to this site so now you won’t see “substack” in any of our links from now on. How convenient!
Vamos!
📰 Read #50 on Substack for the best formatting
🎧 Podcast version of this edition is available here → #50 | Recast
📢 Get access to bonus links and discussions with fellow Nibblers on Discord
What’s happening 📰
⚛️ Jeff Bezos wasn’t sleeping, da! Amazon bought up a 100% nuclear-powered data center in Pennsylvania for $650M. This is a great move towards using clean sources to power the massive energy-hungry data centers, but, but… just purchasing clean energy is not the same as having a net-positive or even net-zero impact on the environment, I mean just look at what happened with Microsoft data center in Arizona. Meanwhile, Amazon is also investing in startups to improve recycling using AI so that’s some responsibility there, huh?
🪷 India’s Ministry of Electronics and IT issued an advisory that all significant AI firms need to make sure that their AI models do not permit any bias or discrimination or threaten the integrity of the electoral process. Also, basically get the approval from Govt before they can deploy it over the internet. This also started a debate over Twitter and the rules got a lot of criticism from leaders in SF as well as AI builders in India.
✨ AGI Digest
🤺 There is an interesting X-fight going on between Elon Musk, Samuel Harris Altman, Vinod (Khosla Ventures), and Marc Andreessen (from a16z) after the 35-page lawsuit Elon raised against OpenAI. The fight is getting messy, but if you had to team up, Marc & Elon want open-sourced AI, and the other two want to gatekeep it. If you want to explore the mess VK’s Twitter is the right place to start.
it’s all funny seriously | Source: Twitter 🤖 Hugging Face is starting an ambitious open robotics project (with a tongue-in-cheek tweet saying open as in open-source and not Open AI) and they’re hiring an Embodied Robotics Engineer for the team. Even Stability AI is rumored to be working with hardware to advent into the mixed reality world.
🥸
Jian YangLinwei Ding, a Google engineer had been stealing AI trade secrets to China, and man even faked attending office by making somebody else scan his badge at the door while he was actually present in China raising funds! Not to mention he worked for TWO companies in China 😭.
And while talking about China, they announced “Computing Vouchers” worth $140-280k for small AI startups, so that they are not hurt by the computing crisis of the world (Wow! Exactly opposite of how the Indian Govt. thought 🤷🏻♂️)
Question for you: What is better than an original AI startup idea? 🌉 Meta’s AI Watermarking plan is being called “Filmsy, at best”. If you remember back in February Meta said it would detect AI-generated content on Social Media and mark it so, and is talking to partner AI firms to help with that (well it might not work). Also, Google’s SynthID (covered in #23) wanted to solve the same.
📊 Anthropic releases Claude-3 family of models - Opus, Sonnet, and Haiku with the Opus beating GPT-4 on most benchmarks (guess who's the new fav model in town now?) Well, actually it goes so hard that when tested on its recall ability using the needle-in-the-haystack problem, it actually became meta-aware of the problem itself (therapists sweating in the corner). The ball is in your court now OpenAI.
🔐 0x Digest
💰 A whale from 2010 wanted to welcome the new ATH buyers to the space by dumping 1000 Bitcoin ($68M) in an hour. Dropping the prices of course. Although BTC did rally high again and is flirting with $69,000.
A funny co
-relationincidence “Every time a new ‘Dune’ movie comes out, BTC hits a new all-time high.” [Source: Milkroad]💳 Revolut now allows you to directly top-up your Metamask wallet eventually making losing your money in this bull market even easier.
🎮 Sony filed a patent for “Super fungible tokens” for Gaming. This is aimed at attaching value to the in-game items you purchase and maybe trading them later for real money or between games. (all those CS: Go skins you have might help you get land for real this time!). SFTs are bundles of NFTs attached to in-game assets and will be stored on a distributed ledger.
💩 Solana is getting truly DEGEN Memecoins, these are funnily spelled, poorly drawn celebrity-named coins & they are going 100x, FTW! It all started with “Jeo Boden”, but now we have like a family of this retarded coins and what’s worse is that it makes the chaos all the more unpredictable. (names of these shitcoins are like the names of players from EA Cricket 2007)
Source: Twitter 📉 Farcaster, the social protocol, which we thought wouldn’t lose its charm like the previous ones, actually lost 60% (16k from 40k) of the users in the last month. BTW, one old buddy Lens went permissionless on 27th Feb, and since then as per news, their engagement 3x-ed.
→ 📆 ETH Global is hosting an async hackathon between March 22 – 24, 2024 called “Frameworks”. So, maybe this brings the Farcaster hype back?
🛠️ Dev & Design Digest
🚪 AWS, the biggest CSP makes it easy to exit from their platform by allowing free data transfer out to the internet. We feel they did it after receiving some criticism on exit-fee, since Google made it free on Jan 17th early this year.
🖌️ Interaction to Next Paint will become core web vital on March 12th. INP measures the elapsed time between a tap, a click, or a key press and the browser next painting to the screen.
What brings us to awe 😳
⬇️ Why does the npm’s “is-number” package have 59M weekly downloads? the download number is rigged as it counts all 200 responses on the tarball. Plus, transitively, “is-number” is for some reason a dependency on tailwind 😂
🌎 Our beloved 46 year-old-space probe, Voyager 1 is facing some glitches, this time a little serious ones. Scientists from NASA say that this time we might lose connection with Voyager 1. It was launched back in 1977 to capture images of Jupiter and Saturn, but it did much more and gave us the “Pale blue dot” image. The team is still trying to get hold of the probe. (but you see how difficult it can be to debug a machine more than 24.4 billion km away and where it takes 45 hours to communicate with it.)
Today I (we) Learnt 📑
🧭 Why is North up? by MapMen reveal that (spoiler alert!) the North was not always up
TL;DR: The East was the original upside, but then Europeans wanted to explore the world and used the North Star to navigate, so when they got their hands on a compass they also made sure the North was the easiest to find, and the rest is history.
Another interesting fact supporting this is that the word दक्षिण in Sanskrit means "South" as well as “to the right” 🤷🏻♂️🔃 RAS Syndrome expands to “Redundant Acronym Syndrome Syndrome”. It’s when an acronym is followed by a word that's also part of the acronym, e.g. ATM Machine, PIN Number, etc.
🍞 While doing a Duolingo lesson, were wondering why the word pan means “bread” in both Japanese and Spanish. After a little1 digging, we found out, that:
🚢 It’s not a mere coincidence, as the Japanese word パン (pan) comes from the Portuguese word "pão". The Portuguese introduced Western foods and methods in Japan (and also in India, courtesy of which we have the tasty “pav-bhaji”). All these words originate from the Latin word "panis" which means “bread”.
🔪 The same Latin “panis” is why the place where you make bread (food) is often called a “pantry”.
🍽️ Similarly if you decide to eat with somebody (break bread with them), then in an archaic sense, you are in their “company” and they are your “companions”. That’s how these words originated.
Etymology of Companion
🤝 You have read ~50% of Nibble, the following section brings tools out from the wild.
What we have been trying 🔖
🛍️ once.tools: Collection of software you only have to pay for once (seems like nobody likes SaaS except the ones building them)
📸 ente: Fully open source, end-to-end encrypted alternative to Google Photos and Apple Photos
👨🏻⚖️ LegalGaurdian: Simplified, legal services built for travelers, expats, immigrants, nomads, remote workers & companies start at $1 a day (Hey our NRI reader, do you need help? Try this!)
🦾 DSPy: The framework for algorithmically optimizing LM prompts and weights
Builders’ Nest 🛠️
✨ raycast-ui: Components and utils for Raycast Extensions
But why you ask? → Raycast provides a bunch of inbuilt legos to build extensions from and this package is an unofficial attempt to make reusable molecules out of those atoms by Raycast.🕵️♂️ web-check: All-in-one OSINT tool for analyzing any website (CISO-aa-S)
🤝 radicle: a sovereign P2P network for code collaboration, built on top of Git
🌕 moondream 2: A small vision language model designed to run efficiently on edge devices with lesser hallucinations than its predecessor.
Meme of the week 😌
Off-topic reads/watches 🧗
🌍 An explainer by
on why “transactional flows” can keep using English but “content-driven” flows are seeing a boom in regional languages.🫠 The Dumber Side of Smart People by Morgan Housel. “The more evolution you have, the more you should expect that expertise has a shelf life.”
Wisdom Bits 📿
“Do you want to take a leap of faith, or become an old (wo)man, filled with regret, waiting to die alone?”
― Inception (2010)
Wallpaper of the week 🌁
🌌 Grab this week’s wallpaper → here, yes you get new every week.
Weekly Standup 🫠
Nibbler A got a hardcover copy of “Read Write Own”, amid AGI around the corner. Also, Solo Leveling folks pissed him off with teasy episodes, so he started with Manga instead. He played some 🏸 and not much of ♟️ this week.
Nibbler P is spending some time with his grandparents while also handling new projects in his life. He is very close to finally catching up with the One Piece manga in the coming couple of weeks.
If you liked what you just read, recommend us to a friend who’d love this too 👇🏻
It was little until “Nibbler P” pitched in and bombarded me with fun facts about ‘pan’.