Nibble #19

A 3D Alliance, IBM Prithvi, Motabhai on dhandho, Claude > ChatGPT, ai.com -> x.ai, peek into LK99, ChatGPT does not apologize

Pushkar

and

Aashutosh

Aug 06, 2023

👋🏻 Hello & welcome to Nibble #19

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📆 If you are looking to join events, here’s one we know of in the coming few months → DevOps Day BLR - Early Bird Tickets are out! (if it’s helpful let us know we might add a section for this in future)

What’s happening 📰

🫂 Pixar, Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, and NVIDIA form Alliance for OpenUSD to drive open standards for 3D content and this makes us wonder if companies have realized that it actually was the collective moat of their individual moats that actually matters to push innovation forward, or is this some kind of protective mechanism? (btw last week had an AI alliance, and this week has a 3D alliance. Superconductor alliance wen?)
📸 MIT developed a technique to protect photos from AI - PhotoGaurd, it basically, adds some ~invisible pixels to images, confusing the transformers, and morphing pictures into something else.
Source: Original Paper on arXiv
🌏 IBM and NASA Open Source Largest Geospatial AI Foundation Model on Hugging Face - Apart from Watson and some Quantum Computing advancements, IBM has kind of been in the backseat when it comes to being among the 'AI hotshot' companies. (Remember that brilliant shy kid in the classroom that once in a while astounds the entire class with how much she knows?) But recently, they dropped their one-of-its-kind Open-Sourced GeoSpatial AI model in partnership with NASA. Guess what makes it even more interesting? It's called Prithvi! (you can try it out here)
💻 Reliance Retail launches JioBook at ₹16,499 (with mobile-like specs & JioOS) and a few days later, Indian Government announced its plans to restrict the import of laptops, tablets, and some kinds of computers. Don’t bet against Motabhai.
Man that design is sure to become an Apple of Discord | Source: India Today
🎮 Google Play Games is now available on PC in Beta. (well, if you watch the space carefully, Google might be late to the ecosystem and AI party, but they are going to grab ‘em by the “Android user base they have”. It seems they are doing pretty fine on both ends)

Google not having their own OS (I mean come on, ChromeOS doesn’t count, and yes Jio has one now) is basically partnering up with Microsoft (yes, creator of the almighty Windows XP) against Apple.
👮‍♀️ Anthropic shows off their research updates and how they are better than GPT-4, being less prone to adversarial & universal attacks [aka Jailbreaks]. (someone finally working on avoiding attacks on AI)
Source: “Claude developer update” email
✨ AI Weekly Wrap-up (regular ones)
- 🏰 OpenAI trademarked GPT5 (not sure if Sam Chan trying to get back the lost hype or really going to work on new stuff)
- 🧱 Google doubles down on Bard to provide a superior experience than ChatGPT (really really something to keep an eye on, this will get Sundar pretty fast)

What brings us to awe 🤪

🤷 ai.com now points to Melon Musk’s x.ai instead of Sam Chan’s chatGPT (in the end it’s all about, who got enough money to buy the domains)
🎼 Listen to Wikipedia getting updated (a simple app that streams the Wikipedia update events, but in the form of music, the bigger the update, the more the sound?!?)
🔑 GitHub now has passkeys support. (passwordless movements can’t be a thing without players like GitHub being in the picture)
GitHub feature preview modal
🐦 Vercel released react-tweet, allowing us to embed tweets in any React app with a single line of code. (bye bye twitter.widgets.js 👋🏻)
🪬 TwentyHQ (the modern take on CRM) open-sources their favicon provider. Just like Clearbit’s company logo API, you can fetch a company logo like https://favicon.twenty.com/x.com should give you ~~bird~~ X logo.

TILs 🤯

💿 Mongoose by default minimizes schema by removing nested empty objects. You can solve this by setting minimize: false it at the schema level.
Eg: Right now by default, { a: { b: {} } } → { a: {} } in mongo.
⚛️ Electronic structure of our beloved LK-99 (Pb9Cu(PO4)6O)
Source: The paper in the link above.
🫤 How can I get ChatGPT to stop apologizing? - After Stack Overflow gave developers a new place to blabber by announcing GenAI Stack Exchange (which we covered last week), people are flocking to ask these questions that had been in thread bois's tweets.

The most voted answer says that if you ask it to “Respond as if you are an unapologetic assertive person for the rest of this conversation.”, it makes the AI go pretttttttty based. Don’t take our word for it; try it yourself!
🤯 Propagating bounds through bitwise operations - Did you know that if you have a ≤ x ≤ b and c ≤ y ≤ d, then using some pretty clever bitwise operations, you can compute the bounds of x | y and of x & y. (This is one of those things we could never ever imagine discovering on our own! Rooting for the days when bit manipulation is the only manipulation humans ever do.)

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

What we have been trying/reading 🔖

🧩 tixy - Learn Javascript logic, maths, and expressions by solving puzzles in a simple visual grid.
📣 promptpal - Be more productive at work and in your day-to-day life with the industry's best AI prompts.
🏁 Don’t know where to start for OSS, here is a list of projects that can give you (free) XP.
𐱈 bash brackets cheat sheet by @b0rk (having millions of types of brackets in bash is confusing, no worries, with this cheatsheet)
Source: Julia Evan’s Blog

Builders’ Nest 💪🏻

tesseract.js - Pure Javascript OCR for more than 100 Languages. (no more lambdas to extract text out of images and PDFs.)
khoj - An AI personal assistant for your digital brain
tesseract.js - Pure JS OCR for more than 100 languages

Meme of the week 👑

Off-topic reads/watches 🧗

🫵 Putting the “You” in the CPU by Lexi Mattick, on how the computer “actually” works from start-up to program execution.
😱 Cut out everything that’s not surprising - One of the (relatively) recent banger words of advice from Derek Sivers’ site.
🧟 Man Spends Entire Career Mastering Crappy Codebase - A techie horror story in a few words.
🙃 Not everyone can be the best by DHH (hot-takes as service)

Read full post on Substack

Ponder-worthy words 🤔

Menus work. Even when we’re not at a restaurant.
— Seth Godin, on choices in Consider the Wordwindow

Job Posts 💼

PS: This section is not sponsored, we hand-pick stuff by ourselves, from the week-long scrolling of the web and email reading. We will usually post Global or India-based opportunities.

📉 Ask HN: Is the market bad, or am I having the worst luck job hunting? (some good advice in the thread, but TL;DR → डरे नहीं अप्लाई करे |)

Software Engineer (ML/NLP) at Cresta [Remote | US Timezones]
Software Engineer at Plaid [Remote | $138k-$186k]
Senior Software Engineer at HiHello [Remote]

From the Author’s Lap(top)

Nibbler A was busy with work but got time this weekend to watch (simp) Gojo sensei & now on track with JJK S2 📺. He is ~~trying to~~ recover(ing) from his addiction to playing (really bad) chess ♟️ all night.
Nibbler P played some badminton 🏸 this week, stretching his muscles a little for the coming sprint. He has been preparing some Sys Design and ruminating about his personal blog that he should get to writing really soon (else he doesn’t get to get his Twitter dopamine).
👋🏻 See you at the next one!

The Nibble

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