Nibble #8
Sama's regulation call ☎️, TLD.zip 🧳, AI Anxiety 😨, ES2023 ✨, Gill Strang's retirement 👨🏫
👋🏻 Hello and welcome to The Nibble’s #8 Edition
Gomen’asai for the email you might have received in the mid-day yesterday.
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News 📰
Sama’s chit-chat with Congress (once again a tech-bro testifying against Congress) went well, he was very well received, unlike Zuck. He asked to regulate AI, a smart move considering that’ll eventually build MOAT for OpenAI.
Altman said and we quote “If this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong” ☠
Here is a quick summary 🧵 → Twitter ThreadZoom 🤝 Anthropic partners to make your meetings
moreproductive. (beware all the “Meeting summarizer” startups)Google convinced DNSCAA to push
.zip
TLD to production and now we have a few new problems - New Problems that come along with .zip TLD (TLDR; scamming will become easy and you won’t know when clicking a link on the internet likebla.zip
about whether it’s a file or domain)This time, it feels different, Dr. K from Zerodha talks about how AI hype isn’t like the previous hypes (*coughs* Web 3, Metaverse *coughs*). He explains why it feels different and it is exciting and scary at the same time. We can’t TL;DR him (outta respect 🫡). So better to go read it yourself.
Anthropic announces 100k Context Windows, last week & said out loud “Look who’s laughing now” to the speculators who thought they are not worth getting invited to the White House. (this might be something you have already heard/read, but it’s important to note the non-OpenAI advancements here)
OpenAI readies a new open-source AI model, Is OpenAI finally trying to stand true to its name? We don’t know for sure, but maybe they read the last edition? (In fact, they do have some open-source models available, but not quite the ones they’d be all in the press for. And after all the MOATivating discussions this week, we doubt if they’d be giving away any of their top models so soon)
Catching up 🤙
What are LLMs? How does ChatGPT work? What is this new AI that is going to take my job? Learn all at the new free course by cohere folks at LLM University
ES2023 will have some new features (yes, JS still has the capability to be loved or hated). Checkout 👉 What’s new in ES2023?
TL;DR Array getsfindLast
&findLastIndex, !#
hashbang enters JS,Symbols
can now be used as keys of WeakMapGoogle Colab teases folks with AI coding features using Codey.
Postman release VS Code Extension. (It’s still in Beta and very raw, but yeah the moment it gets better, a lot of old small players like Thunder Client will be wiped off in userbase share.)
Wild, World & Web 🤪
🌌 Adding to the list of how we were probably wrong about The Big Bang, we recently discovered that we didn’t even know the correct shape of our home galaxy, the Milky Way. [The new shape of the Milkyway]
Have you heard about Kopi Luwak (also known as “Cat Poop Coffee”)?!? It’s literally partially digested coffee buds from a cat and the poop is then processed to make the coffee (and it’s really a thing and expensive)
TILs 🤯
DNS (hands down our favorite topic to blabber about) uses UDP by default, but it has the limitation that packets can’t be bigger than 512 bytes. The 512-byte UDP payload size is a dependency on IPv4. (as per spec).
So, what comes to the rescue is EDNS 🦸🏻, an extension mechanism that uses TCP or multiple packets for a packet size bigger than 512 bytes.
Why should you care?
=> If your docker images use Alpine there is a version until which the resolver module of OS, musl (also, famously known as Alpine’s biggest weakness) only uses UDP, so DNS lookup might fail for domains with handshake packets greater than 512 bytes. (aaaaaaaaaa……, screaming loudly in my head, I’m telling you it’s podcast worthy story to tell someday.)Ever gotten frustrated with that one element that’s adding horizontal scroll to your site? Quickly Find the Element That Is Causing Horizontal Scrolling
const documentWidth = document.documentElement.offsetWidth; document.querySelectorAll('*').forEach((node) => {
if (node.offsetWidth > documentWidth) {
console.log(node);
}
});
Recommendations 🔖
🎧 Rekt Network - Plug in your favorite earphones, crack your knuckles, open that damn project you’ve been procrastinating for months, tune in to Reckt Network, and get going!
🎥 Gill Strang's Final 18.06 Linear Algebra Lecture - If you are a nerd about LA, just click the damn link and watch the thing, you’ll enjoy it. Fun Fact: Gill Strang dedicated 3/4th of his life teaching LA at MIT! (Shared by Mathematician Vashist)
🛠️ Vectorizer - A simple tool to convert PNG, JPEG, BMP, etc. (not-so-cool assets) to SVGs (very-very-cool assets)
🎧 'Are you a Lion or a Pig? - For an employer, all employees are equal, but are you more equal than your colleagues? (BTW, the entire ‘Cost to Company’ podcast by The Ken is an amazing weekly listen about the changing workplace cultures)
🛠️ dora AI - Feeling like an explorer? Go check out this tool that claims to actually build websites using prompts (they even built their own using it, they say)
Cool OSS Projects 💪🏻
Rules of ML - This is a simple visualization of a wonderful article "Rules of ML" by Martin Zinkevich.
Map of GitHub - if you have been following us, we shared the Map of Reddit project in a previous edition, this project is the same stuff but for GitHub
GPTeacher - Removing “What if” from “What if there exists a database of GPT prompts and the generated outputs”
smol-ai by swxy- Build your own smol dev, and delegate the boring tasks to it.
[🎥 smol-demo]LMQL - Query language for your natural language queries (Translated: spend less time figuring out the best delimiter for your query type)
Meme of the week 🙈
Ponder-worthy words 🤔
"Whoever has the most fun, wins."
~ Anon
(so, we are winning writing this and you are winning reading this?)
From the Author’s Lap(top)
You can reach out to us using our nests on the Internet.
- Pushkar, Gujarati Bihari Dikra, loves languages (programming and otherwise), can be a part-time meme-lord, and a part-time neural network whisperer.
- Aashutosh - Rajasthani Baniya, has a craving for memes, loves *-wares (soft, hard, middle, ALL), can talk in italics, is a part-time cat-whisperer, and can tirelessly work towards the bloom doom of humanity.
👋🏻 See you at the next one!