#54
Earthquakes, DALL-E Edits, Opera's LLM Browser, Bun 1.1, Jpegli, Solana's downtime?, BTC halving, unfork, Jevon's Paradox, WhatTheDuck, accel sort, dominos-action, Roche Limit, GPT explainer and more
👋🏻 Welcome to the 54th! The weeks are passing faster than ever.
Hoping you got fooled by someone this 1st of April, let’s talk about the real deal now.
📰 Read #54 on Substack for the best formatting
🎧 Podcast version of this edition is available here → #54 | Recast
📢 Get access to bonus links and discussions with fellow Nibblers on Discord
🚨 Gentle reminder to upgrade the package “xz” as it is backdoor/Remote Code Execution can lead to serious security issues.
→ 📆 Uber GenAI Meetup in Bangalore on Friday, April 19, 2024, from 9:30 AM to 3:00 PM IST.
What’s happening 📰
🍪 Quake on the chips, the seismic waves went frenzy last week across multiple places around Earth, one of the notable disturbances was one in Taiwan (their strongest earthquake in 25 years), which forced TSMC to evacuate their factories and put a halt on production for some time. With the whole world relying on one company for advanced chips, such events remind us how we are reaching a Single point of failure and taking nature with a grain of salt.
🗽 Meanwhile, New Jersey experienced a literal earthquake of a magnitude of 4.8 (hearing too much earthquake news, hope everybody is safe out there) and by the time people got over it, shops already got merch hanging. Talk about shipping speeds!
🛵 Ola on roll-a with its CEO Bhavish Aggarwal sharing a video of a self-balancing and self-driving Scooter which people thought to be an April Fools' Day prank but it turned out it was an actual prototype that was being tested by their team. It's pretty impressive how fast we are developing.
✨ AGI Digest
✨ OpenAI shipped some app changes recently allowing you to edit DALLE images in ChatGPT app/web natively and by edit, we mean a full-on generative in-painting all according to what you ask it to do! You can also use ChatGPT without signing in to it (yes, we see you going to the incognito tab - beware of the OpenAI content policy).
💻 The browser is probably the single most used application on PC and with LLMs becoming more accessible, it makes sense for companies to innovate and integrate them into their products. With Opera adding built-in local LLM support to its browser using Ollama as a part of its AI Feature Drops program, we can see a rising shift among companies large and small trying to ride the generative AI wave.
🏃Llamafile, the interface to run LLMs across multiple OSes using a single file just got between 30% to 500% faster on CPUs. The writer Justine Tunney writes about how she wrote new matmuls and multithreading to improve performance on multiple small and large hardware.
🔐 0x Digest
🚚 After shipping some big changes with Dencun hard-fork, Ethereum devs are back to focus on “The Purge” & Vitalik shared some notes on the next steps on the roadmap for the “Purge”.
🌗 The Bitcoin Halving is expected to be on around 4/20 (not kidding!) at Block height 840,000. This will lower the block reward from 6.25 to 3.125 BTC.
💰 The U.S. government has “reportedly” transferred 30,175 Silk Road Bitcoin1 (worth ~$2B). It’s been a year since the US Govt. moved the Silk Road BTC, this time it is said to be an alleged Coinbase wallet.
😞 After Solana’s SuperTeam dropped a banger taunt on Ethereum maxis, they have been seeing failure in ~75% of transactions.
🛠️ Dev & Design Digest
🌭 Bun
goes one point onev1.1 is live and it comes with 1000s of bug fixes, Windows support, performance, and more. The release includes ~1700 commits and some major improvements from v1.0. Don’t wait, just run:bun upgrade.🏞️ Google introduces Jpegli, a new JPEG coding library that can compress high-quality images ~35% more than traditional JPEG codecs.
What brings us to awe 😳
🌴 The Wi-Fi only works when it’s raining, an interesting debug story, highlighting how the real-world bugs might affect your expected engineering tools to work how they should(n’t?). Let’s not spoil this, read it yourself.
It’s similar to the “Cannot send email beyond 500 miles” (a story we shared in Nibble #1).🫠 Have you tried “turning it off and on” again? has a bad reputation for advice but is mostly the correct advice when it comes to software, as Programmers are bad at managing states. (don’t get me started on the Alpha particles again)
Today I (we) Learnt 📑
🍴 How to “unfork” a GitHub repository and keep your Issues, PRs, Action Runs, and Discussions with the repo?
TL;DR → Instead of the usual way of deleting the original repo and pushing to a new repo, you can simply go to https://support.github.com/contact and type "unfork". A Virtual Agent button would appear that would automatically remove the fork link for you in a few minutes.
This button only pops up when you type “unfork” in the subject box ⛽️ Jevons paradox: When a resource can be used more efficiently, we end up using more of the thing, not less2.
→ When technological advancements increase efficiency to reduce consumption of a resource, but that in turn increases the consumption of the resource due to increased efficiency. (it’s a paradox!)
🤝 You have read ~50% of Nibble, the following section brings tools out from the wild.
What we have been trying 🔖
🍒 Chrry: Let AI find you where to buy that must-have item!
🛝 slidev: Presentation slides for developers
🦆 WhatTheDuck: An open-source web application built on DuckDB, designed to allow users to upload CSV files, store them in tables, and perform SQL queries on the uploaded data.
Builders’ Nest 🛠️
📷 Cerule-v0.1: A tiny yet powerful Vision Language Model based on the newly released Google's Gemma-2b and Google's SigLIP.
🔦 js-torch: A JavaScript library like PyTorch, built from scratch. Different from torch-js.
✔️ accel sort: A high-performance sorting library for Javascript. Get up to 70x speedup when sorting ints and floats leveraging GPUs. (just when I thought no innovations would come in number sorting at least)
🍕 dominos-action: ORDER DOMINOS PIZZA USING A GITHUB ACTION!!! LMAO
Meme of the week 😌
Off-topic reads/watches 🧗
🍫 Chocolate Chaos, An explainer on why cocoa prices are hitting record highs (~3.5x rise in last year), how El Niño might have affected that, and more.
☄️ Answer to What is the largest fraction of Earth's sky that an astronomical object could take up (visually) before ripping Earth or itself apart? and the fantastic mechanics of Roche Limit.
🔢 3B1B Dropped a visual explainer of GPT, except - it’s not complete and hints at an entire series of future videos on this topic. Yay, more knowledge to the masses FR!
Wisdom Bits 👀
"The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are."
— Carl Jung
Wallpaper of the week 🌁
🌌 Grab the week’s wallpaper at wow.nibbles.dev
Weekly Standup 🫠
Nibbler A is barely reading emails, he is hard at work as important things are scheduled on that side. Nothing other than that from his side.
Nibbler P is finally consistent at his workouts and is getting to work on some interesting stuff. He had to do some banking stuff this week and the ease of the process restored his faith in the world.
If you liked what you just read, recommend us to a friend who’d love this too 👇🏻