#57
#57
Google Layoffs, FireFly 3, Phi-3, SD3 API, Copy Trading, Stripe's Crypto, Node v22, Roadmaps, RapidLogo, goldene, dive, double prime, Wiio’s laws, Digital species, Punditry, XY Grid and more
👋🏻 Welcome to the 57th!
📰 Read #57 on Substack for the best formatting
🎧 Podcast version of this edition is available here → #57 | Recast
📢 Get access to bonus links and discussions with fellow Nibblers on Discord
What’s happening 📰
🔥 Google fires its entire Python team and its Flutter Team, the Python team was not only managing a repo inside Google, but was contributing actively to the upstream Python and was responsible for many features and fixes.
✨ AGI Digest
🏞️ Image Generation Models see improvements and better integrations
🪰 Adobe Releases Firefly 3 with Full AI Image Generation in Photoshop. Users can generate images from text directly in Photoshop using Firefly 3 and some quality improvements. They should honestly add some cool pics to the release page.
🤝 StabilityAI and TogetherAI joined hands to bring SD3 API that you can use by plugging in your Stability API key. They also added new Sketch and Structure Features that allow you to convert hand-drawn sketches to images and preserve structure in your images while changing styles (p.s. - they just used some cotrolnets inside hehe). Glad to see Stability making efforts towards profitability.
🙈 Alibaba Group releases FlashFace, a diffusion model to personalize your photos on the fly by providing one or a few reference face images and a text prompt. They boast higher-fidelity identity preservation and better instruction following and even ability to change the gender or age of a person in their photos.
Mike Tyson Tony Stark goes hard
🥽 Meta Rayban glasses just got Multi-modal, you can ask your glasses about what you’re seeing, and they’ll give you smart, helpful answers or suggestions.
🥤 The collaboration of the year goes to The Coca-Cola Company and Microsoft announcing a five-year strategic partnership to accelerate cloud and generative AI initiatives. What would a soft-drink possibly do with a generative AI initiative? We can only wonder.
🆕 We got some exciting Model Drops this week:
3️⃣ Microsoft introduces the Phi-3 family featuring three models of 3.8B, 7B and 14B sizes. For now they released the smallest of the bunch, Phi-3-mini, which is trained on 3.3T “high quality” tokens and outperforms the llama2-7b while being nearly half in size. Microsoft gladly releasing it under the permissive MIT license, allows the Open-Source community to fine-tune it for domain-specific tasks that would make it even more powerful especially on hobbyist devices.
😲 The Qwen Team released the massive Qwen1.5-110B that reaches Llama3-70B level in benchmarks. You know what’s sad about large models? So few people can test them locally on their machines and tinker with them (where lies the most alpha) that it takes time to get a consensus on how it really is.
🗣️ MyShell team released and open-sourced OpenVoice V2 (with MIT License), a tool to instantly clone your voice. You can try it online on their website or on Huggingface.
🔐 0x Digest
📑 Binance announces Spot copy trading bots starting from May, where traders can opt-in to automatically copy trades of “Lead Traders”, and Lead Traders get 10% profit share and 10% commissions. (market manipulation goes brrr!)
🔫 Blast brings the new “unruggable” NFTs, in this new type you get an ECR-721 smart contract for each NFT collection and the catch is that post-minting the ETH paid to mint gets locked in the contract for some defined time so that project is rug-proof and the creator earns yield from the money locked in form of Blast Points.
💸 After 6 years of pause since they disabled BTC support, Stripe is now back with USDC payment support coming in the summer. In a demo, they showed payments on Solana, Polygon, and Ethereum.
⚙️ RISC Zero will do a 4-phased launch of R0 zkVM 1.0, the world's first production-ready general-purpose zkVM. Aiming for a future where you can prove anything and verify everywhere.
🛠️ Dev & Design Digest
🚀 Node 22 is available now! The major highlights are below:
require()ing ESM graphs → BIG and TRUE
WebSocket client
New
node --run <cmd>220ms faster than your good oldnpm run cmd
🔼 Vercel reverts Edge rendering back to NodeJS. The company advocated for Edge functions for a while now. They explained in a tweet why moving back makes sense. The main reasons are:
Edge didn’t make much sense when Databases aren’t edge friendly as Global Data Replication is needed for this.
Node 20 has significant improvements which turn out to be faster in most cases and the trade-off of keeping compute on Edge to using a minimal runtime than Node, made much sense.
And a video below by Theo explaining the same.
🛣️ Kamran curated roadmaps for quite some years now and they recently released AI Roadmap Generator.
What brings us to awe 😳
🧑🧑🧒 The software industry is more fragile and dependent on fewer folks than you think it is.
Two people maintain the TZ database, which is critical for time zones across the world.
SQLite, another critical database, is maintained by three people.
Corporations often rely on unpaid volunteers to maintain software without providing much financial support.
🛟 Backing up my life with a Synology NAS (private NAS-based cloud). Nicholas shares how his computer (and mostly ours too) is just an empty shell until we start pulling content from Google Drive, GitHub, etc. And with all these services having policies over your data, he extensively went and did a 3-2-1 backup on Synology DS920+ for peace of mind and data security.
⚜️ Scientists have managed to create sheets of gold only a single atom layer thick and it is named goldene.
👏🏻 Apple’s overnight filesystem migration to millions of devices is what we call exemplary “Engineering”.
Today I (we) Learnt 📑
📏 The Inch symbol is a double prime (
″), not apostrophes (‘) or quote marks (“)👜 scikit-learn, an open-source ML library, has only one Platinum sponsor and it is 🥁 Chanel (yup! the one with a fancy bag!)
💬 Osmo Wiio’s laws of communication are the human communications equivalent of Murphy’s Laws. [Read: Communication usually fails, except by accident]
🗺️ How triangulations by 4 generations of the same family over 120 years made an accurate map of France. (we are absolute fans of Carte Hommes)
🤝 You have read ~50% of Nibble, the following section brings tools out from the wild.
What we have been trying 🔖
🔖 SaveDay: app to save links from every place & never open them again.
☎️ Stumble back into Ye Olde Internet (those dial-up noises brought tears, ngl)
✨ RapidLogo: Create your dream logo in seconds. (still remember how hard it was before AI to ship a good logo with side projects)
🖼️ ImgSys: A generative image model arena by fal.ai (read lmsys but for image models)
Builders’ Nest 🛠️
🎨 Guess my RGB: An interactive RGB color guessing game
⬇️ MarkdownDown and LLM-Scraper: Turn any website into structured data, such as Markdown
🤿 dive: A tool for exploring each layer in a docker image. (a pretty neat favorite of this edition)
🧹 Pearcleaner: A free, source-available, and fair-code licensed Mac app cleaner.
Meme of the week 😌
Off-topic reads/watches 🧗
👨🏻💻 Generational Shifts in Punditry by Seth Godin, talks about how the experts are not more than 50-70 year-olds and how the barrier to entry has reduced in the last few decades to be a “pundit”.
📹 Mustafa Suleyman gave 20 min TED Talk scaring the shit outta AI’s potential. Calls the AI “a new digital species”
🔎 The grid of inquiry by Seth Godin, gives a neat and simple XY grid to help us choose where to sit at whatever table we’re invited to.
Wisdom Bits 👀
"All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us."
— J. R. R. Tolkien (through Gandalf)
Wallpaper of the week 🌁
🌌 Grab the week’s wallpaper at wow.nibbles.dev
Weekly Standup 🫠
Nibbler P made sure to close his rings EVERY SINGLE DAY this week while being overworked. Now that calls for a celebration, right? NO. NO CELEBRATIONS FOR HIM UNTIL HE CAN RUN 5K UNSTOPPED!
Nibbler A was mostly busy working this week and had a crazy big week (like any other, tbh). He might take some time off-screen (read Chess, SHASN, and friends) to stay sane. Let's see how it turns out for him.
If you liked what you just read, recommend us to a friend who’d love this too 👇🏻