#59
#59
Zomato's Weather, iPad's bAd, AI Overflow, AlphaFold, SpecRules, PTP, EIP-7702, L3s on OP, Multi-dimensional Gas, Markdowner, Globe, atuin.sh, SeQueL, nrr, YellowDot, Separation, AI in 2025 and more
👋🏻 Welcome to the 59th!
Ah! This one is packed with content, we’d advise to slowly consume it throughout the week.
And this new schedule is not something we intended, hopefully, we’ll go back to shipping on weekends soon. (let us know if you think otherwise)
📰 Read #59 on Substack for the best formatting (if you email trims)
🎧 Podcast version of this edition is available here → #59 | Recast
📢 Get access to bonus links and discussions with fellow Nibblers on Discord
What’s happening 📰
🍎 Apple Event rundown - an ultra-fast chip optimized for AI (M4), iPad Pro’s diet was fruitful, Pencil Pro now provides
vibrationshaptic feedback and iPad got a little cheaper (no kidneys were hurt during this event).
A comparison with previous chips | Source: 9to5Mac 😳 and.. while talking about them, they did a weird iPad ad, and the internet went batshit crazy, DHH wrote about “Hating Apple goes mainstream”, and Seth Godin made a video in reverse, changing the perspective or as he says “Fixing it”.
🌦️ Zomato’s CEO Deepinder Goyal unveils Weather Union, India's first crowd-supported weather infrastructure. This is a proprietary network of 650+ on-ground weather stations, freely accessible to all institutions and companies in the country and open to volunteers to install on their premises aiding with more crowd-sourced data. This can aid multiple institutions and organs with real-time weather info to boost the productivity of our economy. Hell yeah!
✨ AGI Digest
🧬 Google DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs announced AlphaFold 3, a state-of-the-art AI model for predicting the structure and interactions of not only proteins but all life’s molecules. You can play with it on their AlphaFoldServer right in your browser.
📂 OpenAI dropped a mouthful of announcements this week:
🚀 OpenAI is teasing the launch of something magical on May 13th, Monday, 10 am PT. They’ll be streaming on openai.com, meanwhile Microsoft, among others is preparing to launch their new models before OpenAI drops that piping hot GPT-5.
→ “Not gpt-5, not a search engine, but we’ve been hard at work on some new stuff we think people will love!” tweeted Sama.💻 OpenAI and StackOverflow announced their partnership that gives AOI access to SO’s data and SO access to OAI’s model in its OverflowAI stack. Some users are sad and don’t want their answers to be “dataset for the AI” and are changing and deleting their answers, which in turn is resulting in the blocking of a few users perhaps due to unusual activity from their accounts. We think a nice opt-out option for the users won’t hurt anyone, would it?
📃 OpenAI released a first draft of their ModelSpec that specifies how they want their models to behave in the OpenAI API and ChatGPT. This information could add to the model alignment and safety awareness discussions and discourse. They also mention that they are exploring ways to allow users to generate NSFW content. Sus.
⚓️ Some new model drops this week:
🎢 DeepSeek AI released DeepSeek-V2 an open-sourced MoE that offers some very promising performance on benchmarks with 236B total parameters, of which just 21B are activated! While released as a general chat model, it beats its coding-specific DeepSeekCoder-33B-Instruct at coding tasks.
Performance on Coding Tasks | Source: DeepSeek-V2 on GitHub 🥌 IBM open-sources Granite Code Models in sizes of 3B, 8B, 20B, and 34B of both base and instruction-tuned variants. The models boast impressive function-calling abilities on the Berkeley Function-Calling Leaderboard. We think the 8B variants could benefit from more comparisons with other leading models in the range to find the best model for one’s needs as that’s the most lucrative range for decent local models.
Performance on Berkley Function Calling Leaderboard | Source: IBM’s Announcement
🙆♂️ And some more product updates from companies and organizations:
📢 Anthropic introduces a prompt generator using Claude on its console that would generate/improve production-ready prompts for you. Waiting for companies to update their job portals to include “Meta Prompt Engineer for Prompt Engineering” roles.
📊 Lmsys does an analysis of Llama-3 on its Arena. Top insights?
Llama-3 beats top-tier models on creativity but takes the short end on technicals
Llama-3 starts losing as the prompt gets more complex and challenging
Llama-3 outputs are friendlier which might also influence its preference over other models
⚖️ Stability AI (finally) goes after Midjourney by launching a direct competitor via a Discord Bot called Stable Artisan. It can take text prompts to generate images or videos via SD3, Stable Image Core, or Stable Video Diffusion. In addition, it also offers Search and Replace, Background Removal, Creative Upscale, and Outpainting, all available in its Discord Server. Will this be a path to Stability’s financial stability?
🔐 0x Digest
✍🏻 EIP-7702 proposed by Vitalik (fun fact, bro came up with this proposal in 22 minutes, right before a call to discuss EIP-3074), which allows you back-compatibility 4337 & allows you to upgrade existing EOA & make them smart.
TL;DR → converts the signing account (not necessarily the same as thetx.origin) into a smart contract wallet for the duration of that transaction⛽️ Vitalik was on a proposal spree this week, he wrote about Multidimensional gas pricing, mainly covering how the current one-dimensional gas pricing merges multiple resources like storage and computing into one virtual resource called gas. As if they are interconvertible, which leads to inefficiencies.
It discusses how EIP-4844 (Proto-dank sharding) was one step towards Multi-dimensional gas & how stateless clients in the future might lead to more advancements on the same.🤝 Optimism allows Layer 3 chains to now build on OP Stack (& be part of the Superchain ecosystem). They implemented two new features to allow L3s to:
design their transaction fees (custom tokens)
and pick their DA1 layer.
🛍️ Zora acquired mint.fun placing creators with curators making cash flow easy.
🛠️ Dev & Design Digest
📐 Chrome’s Speculation Rules API, a new API in Chrome that allows you to pre-render webpages (ah!
<link rel="prerender"is deprecated before you ask, also only a few of us used it).
The API is more advanced than just pre-render, it lets you define things like eagerness and conditions like on-hover on when to trigger the pre-render. You do all this by defining a JSON in your HTML inside<script type="speculationrules">.
If you use Chrome, they built a cool demo you can try here. DevTool’s Application Tab has a Speculative Loads section to debug this feature.🫠 React 19 will "fire refs" twice under StrictMode, similar to useEffect (and every other hook if you are brave enough)
💓 Developers can fight all day on Vim vs emacs, tabs vs spaces, or even Linter configurations. There are very few things in Computer Science that developers universally agree on, here is a list of Good Ideas in Computer Science.
What brings us to awe 😳
💰 VCs have invested $18.3B in AI startups through the first four months of the year, at this rate it can be extrapolated to $55b in 2024 just in AI.
⏱️ How does the computer’s clock remain in sync (do they?) using NTP? It was cool until Meta deployed PTP (Precision Time Protocol). The video below mostly explains NTP.
🙅 What a Referral is Not in The GitLab Handbook defines what a referral is not meant to be, according to their hiring philosophy [Shared by Amul on Twitter]
TL;DR → Don’t refer someone you do not know or cannot speak about confidently.🧬 We can now reverse hearing disability using gene therapy from biotech firm Regeneron. W! It was performed successfully on an 18-month-old girl Opal Sandy.
Today I (we) Learnt 📑
💁♀️ Ada Lovelace, the first lady programmer who worked with Charles Babbage on the Analytical Engine was the daughter of the famous English poet Lord Byron [Shared by Arpit on Twitter]
✌️ When Vite chose its default port as 5173 because it resembles SITE, someone also posted an interesting observation that 5 in Roman Numerals is V which makes it “VITE”. Also, Vite is French for “quickly” or “fast”.
💿 “The word SEQUEL turned out to be somebody’s trademark. So I took all the vowels out of it and turned it into SQL. That didn’t do too much damage to the acronym. It could still be the Structured Query Language.” — Donald Chamberlin, Co-Creator of SQL
👧🏼 MySQL was named after co-founder Monty Widenius's daughter "My". (I’m sure no one would have guessed it, I thought it was to give the feeling of “your own” or like self-hosted maybe)
🤝 You have read ~50% of Nibble, the following section brings tools out from the wild.
What we have been trying 🔖
🔗 y.gy: Shorten Links. Make QR Codes. Analyze Traffic. Stop Bots. Do everything by API. Invite your team. Use your domains
🗒️ Markdowner: A fast open-source tool to convert any website into LLM-ready markdown data.
🔎 Globe: REALLY powerful AI-powered discovery and search engine (as if it was a problem of me not being able to find things to learn 😭)
🐢 atuin.sh: Store your shell history into a local SQLite DB that helps you retrieve them better. It can also sync to the cloud b/w your different machines.
Builders’ Nest 🛠️
🗺️ tinyworldmap: a tiny world map for offline-first and low-bandwidth web apps. (“tiny is redundant when you are saying world, no?” *tells in Carl Sagan’s voice*)
🤖 OpenDevin: an open-source project aiming to replicate Devin, an autonomous AI software engineer. (be afraid of smart managers, eh!)
🟡 YellowDot: Hide the macOS yellow recording dot in the corner of your screen. (don’t ask me why hide it.)
⚡️nrr: Minimal, blazing fast npm scripts runner. (blazing is synonymous to Rust now?)
Meme of the week 😌
Off-topic reads/watches 🧗
📖 You Are What You Read, Even If You Don’t Always Remember It by Jim Nielsen
✨ Ashu Garg explains in his "Where AI is Headed in 2025: A Builder’s Guide" why founders should focus on iteratively building their compact models for the future and not think in terms of one big model churning the input to generate tokens anymore.
🚭 Smoking is Awesome by Kurzgesagt (of course a sarcastic clickbaity title) where they explain the end-to-end harms of smoking on your body.
〰️ Separation by Jason Fried. Jason sums it up by saying “One thing’s rarely everything unless you make it so” which is the gist of his short piece.
Wisdom Bits 👀
“Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.”
— Benjamin Franklin
Wallpaper of the week 🌁
🌌 Grab the week’s wallpaper at wow.nibbles.dev
Weekly Standup 🫠
Nibbler P spent time exploring some temples, beaches, and mountains and will meet friends (including Nibbler A, it’s a May-ly ritual) in the coming week!
Nibbler A had a build-and-plan type of week. By the end of the week, he got into shifting things, still getting over his old place (will he?). He also seems excited about the new Kimetsu no Yaiba episodes and might watch this one if he gets time (will he?).
If you liked what you just read, recommend us to a friend who’d love this too 👇🏻