#95 — Chinese models dominate, no Googling without JS, Bun & Tailwind shipped
AI Yap Battle won by DeepSeek's R1?, Google Search requires JS, No Second Foundation but changes in EF Leadership, Bun and Tailwind shipped major changes, Tried Trae yet? and Just read books, anon.
👋🏻 Here comes the 95th edition!
😭 This week was a good year 👍
➕ We are really not sure how can we cover all that happened last week in one edition, but hey! we tried.
📰 Read #95 on Substack for the best formatting
🎧 You can also listen to the podcast version of Powered by NotebookLM
Psst… if you have a second to spare and want The Nibble to improve, let us know your thoughts by filling out a small questionnaire. We’ll reinforce the good parts and weed out the bad ones 💪
Now onto the edition…
What’s Happening 📰
📝 South Park Commons Founder Fellowship application closes on February 2nd, 2025. The program supports ambitious founders in -1 to 0: pre-revenue, pre-product, or even pre-idea with capital, 8-week cohort, and credits on cloud providers.
💰 Everstone acquired Wingify (an Indian bootstrapped A/B Testing tool) for about $200M. Paras (co-founder with ~70% stake) shared a note on Hackernews about selling his company after 15 years. Sparsh (co-founder) will take over as CEO after this acquisition. Big win for Indian SaaS out there, yay!
🐬 Docker Desktop on macOS is failing to start for some users reporting false malware warnings as “some files in existing installations are incorrectly signed”. The easiest way to fix this is to upgrade your Docker Desktop, the Docker team has acknowledged this incident and released some patches and guides.
📜 It is now required to turn on JavaScript for using Google Search starting Jan 15, 20251. Yes, until now they were supporting searches without enabling JS too. Roughly 9M searches every day used to come from clients without JS.
Users who were brave enough to use Google without JS were shown this.
✨ AGI Digest
💭 DeepSeek and Thinking
Machines2 Models🐳 Deepseek drew all eyes towards itself and gave major labs existential crisis by releasing its open-source reasoning model Deepseek-R1 which competes with OpenAI’s o1 on reasoning and general tasks at a fraction of the cost while being accessible to everyone. And when we say “a fraction of the cost” we mean ~27x cheaper inputs and outputs than o1! You can try it right now on their API, Openrouter, or chat.deepseek.com by selecting the DeepThink option. The weights are MIT-licensed and are available on HuggingFace. Like OpenAI’s o1, this model is also trained to “think”, reason, and self-correct before answering, leading to really good and thought-out responses.
Source: @paulgauthier on Twitter The secret sauce of such a good and cheap model lies in its training using large-scale Reinforcement Learning using a technique called GRPO, as explained in their accompanying Research Paper. You can refer to this simpler guide to understand how the R1 model works.
Source: @SirrahChan on Twitter People are comparing the release of R1 with the “ChatGPT” moment and there are already attempts by research labs to replicate it such as open-r1 by HuggingFace. OpenAI, on the other hand, felt personally attacked and announced 100 free o3-mini queries free for everybody whenever it is released to strengthen back its grip on the market.
♊️ Google DeepMind was quick to follow suit by releasing an update of the Gemini Flash 2.0 Thinking, available on AI Studio, which now also supports code execution, a 1M token content window & a reduced likelihood of thought-answer contradictions.
Source: @demishassabis on Twitter This new release comes with significant improvements in Math and Science benchmarks. Here’s a comparison with Deepseek for reference. Though point to note that DeepSeek R1 probably excels in other areas as these are the only stats that Google released for now.
Source: @deedydas on Twitter
🦾 Agents are on the Rise
👀 OpenAI finally released its “actual” agentic tool called Operator. Currently available only to the $200/mo Pro subscribers, you can ask the Operator to do a complex task for you such as booking a hotel room or ordering your groceries and it would revert by opening its browser window in a remote machine and trying to navigate around the site doing what you told it to do. You can even go do other chores and return to check on it sometime later, making it an actual “look ma, no hands!” tool that’s out there in the public.
📡 And so did Perplexity, on the Android App at least, calling it the Perplexity Assistant. This kinda does the same thing as the OpenAI Operator but with your apps. This is what Gemini should have been for Android and Siri should have been for iOS but as always, third-party developers took the lead.
⚓️ Model and Dataset Drops
🧧 It’s the Chinese New Year on the 29th of Jan and Chinese Labs are going crazy to release everything they could before it. We already saw DeepSeek do a massive release earlier. Now we have Kimi.ai release another reasoning model that mogs 4o and Sonnet.
Source: @Kimi_ai_ on Twitter Then ByteDance (parent of TikTok) released among other things, Doubao-1.5-pro, which as you might have guessed, again competes with the same top models but a prices competing DeepSeek’s.
Source: Dubao Release And then, just today, Qwen released a massive 1M version of its 2.5 Models in two sizes — Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct-1M and Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct-1M.
📦 Misc Updates:
📝 Anthropic announced a new API feature "Citations", which lets you ground its answer to the provided source documents. With this API Claude can now pinpoint the block of text from source documents used to generate output, this makes AI more verifiable and trustworthy (unlike most of you). 🤔 But wait (yes we are talking like R1 in this edition), what if you could just say in your prompt to "output direct quote" wouldn't that work the same? Well, not exactly. Since
cited_textdoesn't count towards output tokens, using Citations API will be cheaper, and citations are guaranteed to contain valid pointers to the provided documents, it's more reliable too. Right now three types of source documents are supported Plain text, PDF, and Custom (like Lists, transcripts, special formatting, and more granular citations).🤖 President Trump announced the "Stargate Project" to develop AI infrastructure in the US, the key thing is they plan to invest up to $500 billion over the next 4 years with $100B getting deployed as we speak constructing data centers in Texas. The initial key stakeholders in the project are Masayoshi (SoftBank), Sam Altman (OpenAI), Mr. Ellison (Oracle), and MGX (an Emirati investment firm specializing in artificial intelligence). The project is also expected to create thousands of jobs and eventually solve big problems for humanity although there is not much talk around that right now and from what we know all the stakeholders might have their own agenda with the outcome.
🧬 OpenAI and Retro (longevity startup, also investment of Sama) are partnering to develop
GPT-4b micro(no official word from OpenAI or Sama yet), a model ideally able to suggest modifications to Yamanaka factors, which leads to healthier and younger cells, hence longer life. This startup aims to add 10 years to the lives of people.♊ Google makes Gemini even more helpful in Samsung Galaxy Unpacked. One key feature coming is that Gemini Live can now work with images, files, and YouTube videos, which is rolling out on the Samsung Galaxy S24 and S25 series, and also on Pixel 9 devices.
Source: Blog linked above
🔐 0x Digest
📑 If you find it hard to remember a particular EIP, Andrew posted Friendly names for final ERCs, mapping all the finalized EIPs to their functional name.
💰 World Liberty Financial (yes the new DeFi project endorsed by Trump Family) made strategic purchases of over $100M in tokens including ETH, wBTC, Aave, etc to celebrate the inauguration of Donald J. Trump as the 47th PoTUS3 .
🍿 With Trump launching his meme coin on Solana, some questions were raised on Ethereum leading to Joseph Lubin writing a long-ass post on how it’s time for some changes in Ethereum Foundation leadership and Vitalik signaling the same right after it and confirming he is the daddy?
While this all was happening, someone created a Twitter account with the name “Second Foundation” and tweeted “hello world computer”. This started a rumor that there is a new organization splitting off from the Ethereum Foundation, which was later clarified by Konstantin (because bro QTed it) that it’s just a tweet guys.⚡ Earlier this month LayerZero introduced the Quick Merkle Database (QMDB), a verifiable database optimized for Blockchains. This is an SSD-optimized state database with in-memory Merkleization, cutting write amplification, and DRAM needs. They basically make Merkleization an operation as fast as it can get and while benchmarks are just numbers (and you should take them for a grain of salt), QMBD is said to outperform NOMT (the current leading verifiable DB).
🛠️ Dev & Design Digest
🧃 CSS is hard and if someone gave you a task to "slide open a box with an unknown amount of content", I think you'll take a long breath (Water Breathing?) and then start to plan it. While planning this you'll realize, oh! JavaScript comes in handy to help it, even after knowing that more often than not, JavaScript is the only way to shoot yourself in the leg (performance issues). Alex talks about how "We'll soon be able to slide open a
height: autobox with native CSS". Thanks to the new features in CSS — interpolate-size and calc-size, which in case you are wondering have limited availability right now (just supported in Chromium)🌭 Bun dropped some MAJORR (technically minor, but hey you get it) changes with v1.2.
How big of changes you ask?Well they gota reaction video on Release Notes from ThePrimeagenwell, they went above and beyond (with low-level code touching metal underneath) this time, the bottom line is everything is faster now (so zig join the Rust Club?)the compatibility with NodeJS APIs is at an all-time high, with a continuous test suite on Node.
Bun.s3makes ops from S3 as simple as interacting with filesystem APIs.Bun.sqlnow supports Postgres (yay! DB enthusiasts)and yeah, just like Deno came back to
package.json, Bun realized that having a binary lockfile can hurt more than it can help, so they now have a text-based lockfileand you can add comments and trailing commas in package.json, (but hey! Is JSON spec with us in this room?)
other major things include HTML Imports (as weird as it may sound, it's quite a turn-on), CSS Bundling, and a lot more improvements.
ThePrimeagen honest reactions to Bun v1.2
🪁 While this release fest was going in, Tailwind CSS shipped v4.0 and they also dropped more features than "r"s in strawberry. Well, we'll try to give you the most here:
whoosh: a new engine leading to the full builds became 5x faster, and incremental builds became around 100x faster.
wow: it can now leverage new CSS like @property for custom properties, and color-mix() for advanced color manipulation.
weightless: You can set it up with one line of CSS (
@import "tailwindcss") with zero configuration and automatic content detection.what we wanted: you can now customize and extend Tailwind directly in CSS files instead of JavaScript, with CSS theme variables for easy design token management. (I'm not crying, you are)
🖼️ Unpic released v1.0, for the uninitiated, it is a component library that helps you display high-performance and responsive images across various web frameworks. It automatically generates
srcsetandsizes, supports modern optimized image formats, generates LQIP4 while images are loading and much more.⛳️ TypeScript 5.8 will ship with a new flag --erasableSyntaxOnly, an
tsconfigoption to disallow features requiring transformations that are not supported by Node's--strip-types. And guess who's happy (spoiler alert: it's Matt Pocock). Matt has been recommending not to usenon-erasable stufffor a while now. This flag marks enums, namespaces, and class parameter properties as errors since they cannot be deleted without the runtime behavior being affected.🌟 Before you start developing web applications in 2025 with your favorite JS toolings, take a moment to step back and look at 2024 JavaScript Rising Stars, and maybe reconsider a few of your choices or at the very least be informed what to learn if anything.
🤝 You have read ~50% of Nibble, the following section brings some fun stuff and tools out from the wild.
What Brings Us T(w)o Awe 😳
🌳 Crazy how even a simple innocuous word like vlogger can have such grandiose etymology. What’s even more interesting (as pointed out in this comment) is how a third of the chart is dedicated to “worldwide”, which is immediately ditched after being shortened to just “web”.
Source: Post on r/UsefulCharts 🌊 PickentCode used the Water Splashing method with the help of BFS and K-NN to recognize digits. They mapped 9 values to each digit sample, the first 8 were the fraction of water that the surface can retain (4 sides divided into two halves, so 8) and the last value represented the fraction of water left in the vessel if the digit is submerged. The application recognizes correct things ~85% of the time, you can try this out, or dive into the code.
🇸🇬 Singapore was once a part of the Bengal Presidency (discovered via @kukreja_abhinav’s tweet). At its territorial height in the mid-nineteenth century, the Bengal Presidency extended from the Khyber Pass to Singapore! Singapore at that time was a part of the Straits Settlement — a group of territories controlled by the British East India Company, which later went under the control of the British Raj and then under direct British control as a Crown colony. Yes, our friend Deba is from the ex-capital of Singapore and not Calcutta.
Source: Wikipedia 🛜 Andrew shared how an unusual WiFi issue kept increasing the latency of his network for over 8 months until they could hunt it down using a debugger and find how the Qt5 (<5.14) application
QNetworkAccessManagerwould check for wifi interface changes every 10 seconds.
What We Have Been Trying 🔖
🧑💻 Trae: a Cursor competitor by ByteDance5 (yes, it’s a VS Code fork). It is not asking for money yet, the interface looks a little better than existing ones. Right now it uses Claude 3.5 Sonnet as the Default model, but we are looking forward to using DeepSeek R1 with this (like the complete China Stack 🇨🇳). And it’s 🆓 for now.
🎥 Qwen Chat: We talked about Qwen chat in the last edition and it has got even better with image and video generation! Though we still fw DeepSeek Chat these days, but FWIW, the image and video quality in Qwen is really good.
💹 EconGraphs: Interactive graphs and explanations about key economic concepts (good to understand stuff when reading Zerodha Varsity)
🗺️ Wikimap: a geospatial plot of Wikipedia articles, pan, zoom, and explore the map, search for articles, and read them right within the map. [Built and shared by Shuvam]
Builders’ Nest 🛠️
✂️ trimMiddle: a package (or function tbh) that trims the string from the middle and fills it with filler, instead of start and end.
🐘 Searchlight: a native macOS, open-source PostgreSQL client designed to be simple, lightweight, and developer-friendly.
📦 Repomix: a powerful tool that packs your entire repository into a single, AI-friendly file. This makes it breezy to feed your codebase to LLMs (been seeing a lot of projects like this lately).
🧪 fast-check: Property-based testing framework for JavaScript/TypeScript is also test runner agnostic. Here’s a demo by egghead.io on how you can utilize it.
Meme of The Week 😌
Off-topic Reads/Watches 🧗
💭 Subjectivity in Productivity from
, talks about how “projects are rarely math problems” and “Subjectivity and productivity are partners, not adversaries.”🥼 Expertise and credentials by Seth, a short note on how expertise and credentials don't always align as you’d expect and how expertise is more like a measure of being able to keep a promise.
📖 You Must Read At Least One Book To Ride, a neat long article about how much "One Book" unlocks for you, and how strategic engagement with authoritative knowledge (books) creates disproportionate rewards in this world of low-quality content.
TL;DR -> Read books, as the author clearly doesn't want you to read one, so that they stay relevant on this mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam6.😔 Grant Slatton (founding engineer at Row Zero) rants about how “Nobody Cares” and conveys that society is plagued by widespread indifference and wishes more people cared about improving the world around them. (us Grant us)
Wisdom Bits 👀
“Intensity gets attention. Consistency builds empires.”
―
Wallpaper of The Week 🌁
🌌 Grab the week’s wallpaper at wow.nibbles.dev.
Weekly Standup 🫠
Nibbler P completed his mandatory annual solar circumambulation this week and got lots of new stuff to read. By the time this edition hits your inboxes, he’ll be busy writing his long-due blogpost.
Nibbler A had a long week like most of tech Twitter, but yeah he checked off an item off his bucket list (Listening to Music of the Spheres) this week. He has been hit by the fact that his time to dive into rabbit holes might soon get compromised, so he’s locked in and closing all those tabs as soon as he can.
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The date when these changes went into production (as per sources)
President of The United States of America
Yes, the parent of TikTok
Yes! From the Pale Blue Dot