#68

ES2024, Bun v1.1.19, compromised domains, .DS_Store, FlashAttn, FontJoy, Satyrn, charts, dDocs, π², Proof of Creativity, Messi WATER$?, DoubleSpeak, diff-pdf, Iceberg, WindowSwap, Optionality & more

👋🏻 Buenos días & here’s 68th!

📰 Read #68 on Substack for the best formatting

🎧 Podcast version of this edition is available here → #68 | Recast

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What’s happening 📰

• 🚨 Multiple Squarespace domains were compromised when migrated from Google Domains to Squarespace. (possible whys in the link above.)
  What should you do? →

  • Add 2FA or transfer your domain to a different (& secure) registrar. (not a single second in this process we were bullish on this migration)

  • Do not click links (there is no “free lunch”, Baka!) as some crypto projects warned about DNS hijacking attacks too.

• 🥸 Talking about security, a dev (McPhail) was strolling through the Ubuntu Security Notices website (just like any of us on Friday night, right?) and USN-6880-1: Tomcat vulnerability (a vulnerability in Tomcat, which could allow unintended access to network services.) caught their eyes, which made them dive deep into to realize that Ubuntu Security Updates Are a Confusing Mess.
  TL;DR → A patch for the aforementioned vulnerability is available for Ubuntu 18.04 (with an Extended Security Maintenance subscription) and 20.04 (under regular support), but 22.04 (which McPhail was using) requires an Ubuntu Pro subscription (there is a free version for this too!) for the patch. (at least from the UI).

✨ AGI Digest

• 🇨🇳 With OpenAI banning their API in China (are they just safeguarding themselves against China for their upcoming launch?) things are getting tense between the Americans and the Chinese in the AI race. China is now posing serious competition with its homegrown AI labs that are competing with open models (look at deepseek-coder-v2 and qwen2!) and trying to beat GPT-4o (on benchmarks at least). There are even “new lmsys” which perhaps have better prompts and datasets for Chinese tasks. (if I were US, I’d be super afraid)

  

  Source: Tweet by @Andr3jH

• 💺 Microsoft, who had a non-voting observer seat on the OpenAI Board for the last eight months and Apple who was planning to join the board in the same position have both dropped their seats amidst Regulatory concerns. They both would now be involved with the company's progress via the regular stakeholder meetings. Good for everybody!

• 📜 Anthropic shipped interesting stuff this week. Firstly, it introduced fine-tuning Claude 3 Haiku via API in Amazon Bedrock on your prompt-completion pairs. Secondly, the console has the built-in prompt generator powered by Claude 3.5 Sonnet as well as running a multiple-prompt test suite parallelly and checking the completions all together in a single dashboard. (*coughs* visible $4B investment *coughs*)

• 🧑‍🔬 Research Updates:

  • ⚡️ Flash Attention 3 was released with more efficient GPU utilization (up to 75% of an H100), better performance with lower precision, and the ability to use longer context lengths. The major improvements come from utilizing the features specific to the Hopper (H100) GPIs to maximize performance. Talking of Flash Attention, Soft-capping got merged into it allowing better generations with Gemma2!

    

• 🐝 Prime Intellect (yes, the company other than Wrap who was distributing blue ticks like pennies) introduced Open Diloco (it’s natural if you read that wrong, don’t worry) which is an OSS implementation and scaling of DeepMind’s Distributed Low-Communication (DiLoCo) method, enabling globally distributed AI model training. They extended the previous research by training a 1B model over 3 countries with a bandwidth of less than 100mb/s with 90-95% compute utilization. The code is open-sourced on GitHub.

🔐 0x Digest

• 📑 Fileverse launched dDocs, a decentralized version of Google Docs. It is E2E encrypted, with real-time collab (CRDT), and stores data on IPFS. The onboarding to this app is smooth, as they use account abstraction from services like Privy. Probably one of those rare Web3 applications that will have active users.

• 🧠 Story Protocol shipped one of the most discussed AI x Crypto (VC's high) use-cases "Proof of Creativity", they have launched Story Network, the World's IP Blockchain, to prevent the "Tragedy of the Commons", where their IP is used without compensation. (so, we have started with our trademarking, and started making lawyer friends already, WBU?)

• 𝞹 Unlike Pi Networks (scam coin, in case you haven't heard of them, good for you), Pi Squared, who is building something (led by a professor) raised $12.5M. What are they building? Well, they are supposedly building a Universal ZK Circuit.
  The name π², here literally means "proof of proof" (clever name, huh, nerds), as they generate a small mathematical proof of a bigger execution proof without any translation to a common language, VM, or ISA. They are still in the PoC stage but might have a testnet by the end of 2024.

• 👩‍🎤 Never a dull day in crypto, and guess what

  • Messi (yes, #10 Lionel Messi) just promoted a Solana shitcoin $WATER, and they have already raised $40M in SOL presale. (amen! god save us)

  • Talking about scams, Blockchain analytics firm, Elliptic uncovered a larger scam network around Huione Guarantee, a marketplace that was being used by online scammers in SEA. The platform processed transactions worth over $11 billion since 2021.

🛠️ Dev & Design Digest

• 🆕 JavaScript’s new features (syntactic sugar) are approved by Ecma International. Here are some new things in ES2024:

  • Map & Object now has an in-house groupBy. (celebratory brit noises)

  • Promise gets withResolvers method, for better control over it. (no more breakups over them?)

  • new Atomics.waitAsync, a non-blocking brother of Atomics.waitSync, which is used by runtimes to implement sleep functions.

• 📊 shadcn launched charts and you can expect all SaaS to look the same from now on.

• 🚀 Bun (pretty much bullish on them now) had quite a shipping week, with few big-ass releases. They casually added support for Raspberry Pi 4, npmrc (yay!), upgraded JavaScriptCore, fixed a crash in dns.lookup, and fixed some memory leaks.

• ⚡️ Zed is now live for Linux, this is big because now all the perf-pilled Rustaceans, don’t need OSX anymore. (technically they don’t, but let me tell you what, these people secretly use VSCode)

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What brings us to awe 😳

• ⚡️ Optimizing Javascript for fun and profit, useful 13 tips on how small choices you make while writing your application in JS affect its performance and resources locked for it. (sometimes you gotta pay off your debts son!)

• 🤦🏻‍♂️ A post from 2006, shed some light on the origins of .DS_Store. Yes! it was not supposed to get created without your will (only when you change the view setting of a directory), but it’s a bug that never got fixed (thanks Apple!).

• 🌌 Do grayscale images take less space?, well it depends, just kidding, of course, yes technically they take less space (3x less bpp¹), but with a bunch of optimization tricks, we end up having way little difference between grayscale and a colored image.

• 😭 If you want to best-moderate world news on Reddit, as unintuitive as it sounds, don’t go to r/worldpolitics. Instead, surprisingly r/anime_titties is one of the top moderated legit world news subreddit. (now don’t ask us what’s on the other one please, we intentionally haven’t hyperlinked it, so open at your own risk.) [Source: @mojorojo on Instagram]

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Today I (we) Learnt 📑

• 🌊 Nearly every iceberg you see in a picture or diagram probably floats the wrong way. We may still want to draw our icebergs tall and deep to make our point, but now, at least, we can do so with the knowledge that they're not like the real ones. Here’s a fun game to draw an iceberg and see how it’ll float (approximately) [Source: Sketchplanations]

  

  Source: Sketchplanations

• 🗣️ DoubleSpeak, a term coined by William Lutz is a language/style of speaking designed to mislead while pretending not to (inspired by Doublethink from 1984). People use this all the time for a variety of reasons (often for deceiving and scamming), so the next time you see "There are some minor side effects" stop and think if it means "This drug may cause a heart attack". (that’s what red pill does to you?)

• 🇨🇱 Why is Chile so long?, umm actually it’s curved too 🌶️ (sorry our flat-earther readers). It’s as long as the US and Canada combined. A big (quite literally) reason for it being long is the Andes, a mountain range in western, South America. The linked post explores it in more detail.

  Why Is Chile So Long?

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🤝 You have read ~50% of Nibble, the following section brings tools out from the wild.

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What we have been trying 🔖

• 🪟 WindowSwap: Look through someone else’s window, somewhere in the world. (feeling the wanderlust? swap your window with someone else in the world)

• 📝 stempad: an online editor and platform that streamlines writing and sharing scientific documents fast, basically an editor for people in STEM². (have an urge to buy an iPad because you can’t share equations? move your lazy ass to this app.)

• 🪐 Satyrn: A modern Jupyter client for Mac. (word smiths out there, building software now)

• 🧘🏻 DoNothingFor2Mins: Calm.com’s timer for 2 minutes, that tracks your keyboard/mouse activity, and resets if you do anything. (reveals the tough parts in life for us!)

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Builders’ Nest 🛠️

• 📑 diff-pdf: A simple tool for visually comparing two PDF files. It has an option to produce a PDF file with visually highlighted differences.

  

• 🔨 es-toolkit: A modern JavaScript utility library 2-3 times faster and up to 97% smaller — a major upgrade to lodash. (Is it time to pull the big guns out? You-Dont-Need-Lodash-Underscore)

• 💣 aws-nuke: Nuke a whole AWS account and deletes all its resources. (DO NOT USE THIS AT HOME OR SCHOOL!!)

• 📼 FontJoy: Font pairing with machine learning. (let v0 make the app and FontJoy pair the fonts, and you should grab some popcorn)

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Meme of the week 😌

Source: somewhere on Twitter

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Off-topic reads/watches 🧗

• 🧘🏻 Achieving Optionality by Jason Fried. It briefly explains how “optionality” is the freedom, entrepreneurs should chase over “growth-at-all-costs”. (grindset argh!)

• 🤥 The distribution of character by Seth Godin, on how character distribution is not like power and wealth and why you shouldn’t correlate them much. (with great power comes great responsibility, not great shoulders to bear them)

• 😣 Maybe You're Not Sick of Programming but just burnt out and that’s skewing your perspective on everything? (when in doubt, take a deep breathk)

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Wisdom Bits 👀

“Life is trying things to see if they work.” (FAFO!)
― Ray Bradbury

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Wallpaper of the week 🌁

🌌 Grab the week’s wallpaper at wow.nibbles.dev

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Weekly Standup 🫠

• Nibbler A had a delve & derive kind of week, he ended up returning 503 by the end of the week, he took some advantage of that situation and watched a little Kimetsu No Yaiba, he hopes to start returning 200 by the time you are reading this 🤞🏻.

• Nibbler P had a week filled with a lot of reading — for work, about his coffee, and some random research papers he found in his open tabs. He ran a little extra this week after watching a David Goggins video and is left with a sprained ankle. (both of us got cursed or something?)

If you liked what you just read, recommend us to a friend who’d love this too 👇🏻

1. bits per pixel

2. Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics