#53
Gemini Ecosystem, NodeJS Movie, xz's backdoor, DBRX, Android x AI, Amazon pumps into Anthropic, Starlinkmap, NK's ETH Blast, JS Engines & Runtimes, Latency Numbers, OpenAlternative, jnv and more
👋🏻 Welcome to the 53rd!
It’s the end of the Financial Year, wishing you a tax-free new FY (in a good way).
📰 Read #53 on Substack for the best formatting
🎧 Podcast version of this edition is available here → #53 | Recast
📢 Get access to bonus links and discussions with fellow Nibblers on Discord
What’s happening 📰
✨ AGI Digest
🤝 Amazon invested an additional $2.75B in Anthropic increasing their total investment to $4B and deepening the long-standing relationship between the two companies. Claude was already rocking it on Amazon Bedrock and with Claude 3 beating GPT-4 in many tests, it makes sense for Satya to take a double dip on Anthropic.
🗺️ Gemini can now navigate by opening Google Maps whenever you ask it for directions. Also, they are bringing Gemini to Messages Beta. Guess who’s in for AI Ecosystem now? Talking about the ecosystem, check out Perplexity’s hot new integration with Android!
👨💻 We saw some new OSS model drops this week:
The hottest one certainly is Databrick’s DBRX which was trained on a massive size of 12T tokens and is better than GPT-3.5 while being an MOE with 132B total parameters having 36B parameters active on any input.
Stability released Stable Code Instruct 3B which is one of the good small (<3B) coding models. Convenient for quick local debugs.
And we had QwenLM ship Qwen1.5-MoE-A2.7B, a 2.7B “active” parameter model, after seeing MoEs gaining quite a lot of interest especially the Mixtral-8x7B released by Mistral last December.
🎙️ OpenAI showed some of the Voice Synthesis experiments it has been working on for the last couple of years which were also used in their text-to-speech API as well as ChatGPT Voice and Read Aloud.
🔐 0x Digest
💰 Munchables, an NFT game launched on Blast chain, which allowed users to stake crypto in exchange for perks (NFT & points), hired a developer (later found to be a hacker), and the dev hacked 17,500 ETH (~$62M).
That's not all, later after investigation it was found that the dev has ties with North Korea and some people started talking about National Security.
The fun doesn't end here the developer later returned all the private keys and funds and Munchable got all the money back.
But in the meantime, Blast was criticized by Crytpo Twitter for not having "Chain Rollback" (decentralization, eh?) in place and not doing it.🐒 Bored Ape sold for 83% less than what Kevin Hart paid. Kevin got the NFT in Jan 2022 for 79.5 ETH, worth over ~$200,000 at the time, which was sold earlier this week for around 13.26 ether (~$46,200).
🙌+🔗 SBF got sentenced to 25 years in prison and was charged with 7 crimes, no more cute frauds in shorts looking to scam people out there.
💿 L2s on Solana might be a reality soon as more and more people are talking about it.
🛠️ Dev & Design Digest
🚨 While all of us were busy building, a maintainer-planted vulnerability (CVE-2024-3094) was shipped in xz (a utility package for compression format xz). It is a core part of many Linux distros and Unix. An engineer at Microsoft accidentally discovered this when they were benchmarking SSH and found a “500ms lag” (wtf!!). The vulnerability opens a backdoor, allowing the malicious party to bypass
sshdauthentication & get access to the server remotely. [The whole story by Evan Boehs]
→ TL;DR: This can lead to system compromises, so please upgrade your xz.
We came to know about this from this tweet.
The image might look weird, but this is what happens when bad OSS maintainers takes over. 🥽 3D DOM has some JS code that you can paste into your browser console and visualize the DOM topographically.
This is how the Nibble editor looks like 🎬 The Node JS Documentary by Honeypot is out, taking you on a fun ride from writing raw scripts to full-fledged and most used JS Runtime.
What brings us to awe 😳
🛰️ You can visualize every Starlink satellite (5601 at the time of writing) in real-time using Starlinkmap. Trust us, it’s therapeutic
😴 The memes were not far off. Working late nights and losing sleep can make you feel old, as per research done by psychologists in Sweden. The secret to feeling young is unironically, getting proper sleep (the joke’s on us as we type this out at 3 AM 🤡).
#️⃣ Latency Numbers Every Programmer Should Know, a Visualization by Sam, based on the work of Colin Scott.
Today I (we) Learnt 📑
🤔 What's the difference between JavaScript engines and JavaScript runtimes? (also, ECMAScript & JS) by Nicholas C. Zakas
⏲️ You cannot edit a message for longer than 15 minutes (like writing blog posts) in WhatsApp. Don’t ask me how I managed to find this out.
280 chars15 mins limit on WhatsApp msgs edits.🖨️ The Space Shuttle1 had a large teleprinter onboard, which weighed ~27 Kg to help astronauts receive text documents. And it was possibly the best option available back in the 1980s.
🤝 You have read ~50% of Nibble, the following section brings tools out from the wild.
What we have been trying 🔖
🎨 Penrose: Create beautiful diagrams just by typing math notation in plain text.
⎇ OpenAlternative: Discover Open Source Alternatives to Popular Software.
🔺 ArkThinker’s Image Up-scaler: Upscale your images up to 4k for free.
☮️ AreTheyMadAtMe?: a place with crowd-sourced wisdom telling you “It’s okay to be not okay?!?”. (reminds me of my chats with a senior Russian co-worker)
Builders’ Nest 🛠️
🧭 jnv: a tool designed for navigating JSON, offering an interactive JSON viewer and
jqfilter editor.✍️ sqlite-schema-diagram: A small standalone app to visualize your SQLite database
🚜 LLM: A CLI utility and Python library for interacting with Large Language Models, both via remote APIs and models that can be installed and run on your machine
Meme of the week 😌
xz backdoor fiasco | Source: @jordantwitt on 𝕏Off-topic reads/watches 🧗
😣 Boyle’s Law by Seth Godin, is a short take on Work-life balance’s existence.
👍🏻 A neat and small write-up by
on how “Confidence helps you up your game”, more on the lines of “fake it, if you want to make it”.
Wisdom Bits 👀
"It’s your road, and yours alone, others may walk it with you, but no one can walk it for you."
— Rumi
Wallpaper of the week 🌁
🌌 Grab the week’s wallpaper at wow.nibbles.dev
Weekly Standup 🫠
Nibbler P had to revive some old open-source docker images of a random Taiwanese guy this week so that his project dependencies can get resolved :/
Nibbler A had a busy week as usual and took some time on Saturday to finish some adulting chores in hopes of starting with more energy when you are reading this.
If you liked what you just read, recommend us to a friend who’d love this too 👇🏻
The Space Shuttle is a retired, partially reusable low Earth orbital spacecraft system operated from 1981 to 2011 by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration as part of the Space Shuttle program.