#64
Apple AI, iPad & tldraw, Luma DreamMachine, Nemotron-4, rollup.wtf, Paradigm's 3rd, Uniswap game, React 19RC, VSCode security, Earthrise photo, Odd One Out, Leidenfrost, proteinviz, turboseek and more
👋🏻 Welcome to the 64th bit! (16 Nibbles)
📰 Read #64 on Substack for the best formatting (some email clients trim the newsletter from the end)
🎧 Podcast version of this edition is available here → #64 | Recast
What’s happening 📰
🍎 WWDC 2024 happened and here are important b
itesApple finally had the AI (“Apple Intelligence” 🫠) moments (covered in the AGI section)
iPad now finally has a calculator but the catch is it’s awesome as it can do math from hand-drawn equations and numbers (folks at tldraw didn’t miss a beat before bombarding with demos of their PoC on it).
iOS 18 will now have a lot of things like dark mode in icons, home screen customizations, and a few more bits, that Android could do a decade ago. You can also mirror your Apple watch on it now.
macOS 15 Sequoia will have iPhone Mirroring, a better Password manager, and more (cannot wait to mirror my Apple Watch on my iPhone and then mirror my iPhone on my Mac just to feel something).
Improvements in visionOS, tvOS, watchOS, and of course incoming price hikes.
⏳ Contrary to the last promise, Microsoft won’t be releasing the Recall AI feature next week on June 18th along with Copilot for PC. The reasons are security & privacy concerns raised against the feature but mainly the requirement of NPU1 with at least 40 TOPS2.
✨ AGI Digest
🧠 Apple Intelligence
Apple devices with the M-series chip and iPhones (only the latest iPhone 15 Pros, lol) will support running Apple’s latest on-device foundation models. The more expensive compute would run on their private servers that boast of some crazy benchmark stats.
Source: Tweet by @ldjconfirmed And Apple also had a deal with OpenAI for even complex requests that SIri thinks GPT-4 can handle better. Siri would ask you if it can call the OpenAI servers and fetch you your result only if you allow. Though this does not pacify the fact that Siri has access to all your app data (if the app devs allow it). When Microsoft rolled out Recall, everybody was concerned but when Apple did it, people like it?
Source: Tweet by @NickADobos
💅 Midjourney’s released Model Personalization allows the algorithm to learn what you like so that it's more likely to fill in the blanks in your prompts with your tastes, just use
--pafter your prompt. But how does the algorithm learn what you prefer? It sees what you pick from your pair rankings on images generated by others and updates itself accordingly. You need to have rated at least 200 images for it to be activated.😴 After we had the Sora demo several weeks ago and Kling last week, the folks at Luma AI released Dream Machine, a tool to convert your text/image inputs to short videos. And you can try it for free from their website right now! The spatial and temporal coherence is quite good.
⚓️ Model Drops:
⚖️ Stability AI finally open-sourced (long-awaited) weights of SD3-Medium and the results are... mixed (especially so with the restrictive licensing). The model currently ranks #10 on the Imgsys leaderboard, beaten by all SDXL finetunes above it. While the aesthetics are overall better, it just seems too "aligned" and gives wonky outputs quite often.
🐟 Nvidia released Nemotron-4, a family of 340B (yes, a dense 340B. you read it right) that comes in base, instruct, and reward variants. It currently ranks at the top on the Reward Bench. Despite being a large model that beats the Llama-3-70B on some benchmarks, it is focused more towards synthetic data generation (mentioned multiple times in the announcement blog) and that is especially evident from its mere 4k context length.
🔐 0x Digest
🧻 Conduit announced rollup.wtf (really nice 2000s DOS Setup UI) for tracking real-time metrics across L2s and L3s. Currently, it features the top 3 Ethereum L2s and all Conduit chains, with plans to include additional major L2s in the future.
💰 Paradigm has raised its third fund, an $850M venture fund focused on crypto projects at the earliest stages. Their last investments have shaped the crypto landscape and they want to continue it with more funds in their hands. LFG!!!!
🛍️ EigenLayer acquired and open-sourced the Liquid Restaking Platform Rio as a reference implementation to support new and developing LRTs better.
🎮 Uniswap Labs has taken over "Crypto: The Game," a popular on-chain Survivor-style contest, as it gears up for the next season. The game's founders are now part of the Uniswap team, though they haven't shared the deal's financial details, and this comes as Uniswap faces some regulatory scrutiny.
💰 zkSync confirms airdrop of 3.675B tokens, distributed to almost 700k wallets. Check your eligibility here.
🛠️ Dev & Design Digest
👌 React 19 RC is out and devs have been trying it for a few weeks now. Wes shared a few cool things from the top of his mind → The use() API for promises, the new context API, and the
<head>tag hoisting, not to mention there is more stuff shipping with this version.🥹 Sometimes, Object Property Order Matters by Matt Pocock explains how since TypeScript 4.7 (specifically this PR), TypeScript has been using the order of properties to inform its inference. (bug or feature? bummer for sure!)
🚨 Israeli researchers auditing VSCode extension's security developed a fake "Darcula" (typo of Dracula3) Theme for VS Code, containing theme code along with the malicious code that sends some user-specific data to a server. After they got it successfully listed on the store and installed on a bunch of users' computers, they realized that this way VSCode Marketplace could be easily exploited and in turn developed named “ExtensionTotal” to find high-risk extensions, unpack them, and scrutinize suspicious code snippets.
Image showing the malicious “Darcula Official” Theme
What brings us to awe 😳
(Unintentionally this section is made of photon & sons this time)
🦩 A photographer was disqualified from an AI image contest after winning with a real photo. What a complete flip from the times when people used to cheat in real photography competitions with AI-generated images. (not sure if we should put this in the meme section?)
Source: PetaPixel 📸 The photography behind Earthrise (the most famous photo of the whole Earth from lunar orbit) & how photography became a serious thing in Astronomy by Phil Edwards. The photographer William Anders, an Apollo 8 astronaut unfortunately passed away last week in a plane crash.
🎨 Talking about photographs, we have made our fair share of jokes on AI-generated images, no? But can you Guess the AI-generated “imposters” hidden among the artworks? Google released an experiment game → “Odd One Out”.
🍫 “Diffractive Chocolates” is what Wyantt College of Optical Sciences is calling their recent experiment with turning ordinary chocolate into an edible optics demo that shows how diffraction works.
Source: Demo page
Today I (we) Learnt 📑
💦 The Leidenfrost Effect that makes water flows uphill.
⏰ We used to think Russia had the most time zones as the area it covers globally. But, France has most, 12 time zones because of the territories it governs outside of Europe. Technically, it has 13, if you count daylight savings! [Source: Recent edition of Chitthi from MoM]
🥗 You can order food on the train from Zomato using your PNR. [Source: Abhishek’s Tweet]
🤝 You have read ~50% of Nibble, the following section brings tools out from the wild.
What we have been trying 🔖
💻 Best local base models by size, quick guide: We here at Nibble are a huge proponent of good local models and have been trying them on and off for quite some time. TL;DR:
<=20B → Llama-3 8b
<=6B → Phi-3-mini
<=6B (coding) → StarCoder2 3b
<=20B (coding) → CodeQwen 7B
🧐 iOS version release date history: A nice version history tracker for all iOS version releases. Useful to estimate when you can expect the next beta updates.
🎲 Probabilistic Tic-Tac-Toe: Same as normal tic-tac-toe, but each square has a different probability of a good, neutral, or bad event happening.
Builders’ Nest 🛠️
🧬 proteinviz: A simple and open-source alternative to AlphaFold3
🔎 turboseek: An open-source AI search engine inspired by Perplexity.
😑 arethetypeswrong: Tool for analyzing TypeScript types of npm packages. (helpful if you are a package maintainer)
👨🏻💻 replit-desktop: Replit open-sourced their Electron Desktop app.
Meme of the week 😌
Off-topic reads/watches 🧗
🏴☠️ Did we give up before AI arrived? by Seth Godin. If AI can do the menial work, we’ll have to/should raise the bar.
🤔 Confusion is a muse by Phil Eaton, usually Phil posts technical (mostly DB-related) blogs, but this one is an interesting view on “Confusion” as an opportunity.
🤓 How to Build Anything Extremely Quickly by @dnbt777 reminds me (Nibbler P) of my previous manager. He was good at the “outline speed-running” style and discussing plans with him made me ship so much faster.
🤫 Silicon Valley’s Best Kept Secret: Founder Liquidity by Stefan Theard. Founder liquidity refers to the practice where founders sell a portion of their shares during a new funding round, it’s not a rare thing to happen, but is less talked about to keep the perception of founders being the risk takers?!?
Wisdom Bits 👀
“Be friendly to those who enjoy your work and friendlier to those who attack it.”
— David Leggett
Wallpaper of the week 🌁
🌌 Grab the week’s wallpaper at wow.nibbles.dev
Weekly Standup 🫠
Nibbler A had a release prep & learning week, touched some racquets last week 🏸, traveled back to the “city of nice weather”, and has somehow managed to make his sleep schedule worse.
Nibbler P read a little about LLMs, drank a lot of coffee, yapped with some online friends, got some new interesting stuff to tinker with at work, and beat his own running record (again).
See you in the next one 👋🏻
If you liked what you just read, recommend us to a friend who’d love this too 👇🏻
Neural Processing Unit
Tera Operations per Second
This is known as Typosquatting
rest assured if there is anything i missed, i would find it in nibble release.