#25
Bun in Blitz, Apple's innovations, disUnity, RIP dotenv, Nougat ocr, 2851 miles, Autograms, JS loop labels, Gandalf AI, LeetCode Torture, ytgift, and more...
👋🏻 Hola & welcome to Nibble #25 (make some noise, it’s the silver jubilee for nibble!)
New here? Don’t forget to 👇🏻
This week’s recast 👉 Recast of Nibble #25
What’s happening 📰
🗞️ Bun v1.0 is live - Unless you have been living under a rock, or are one of those e/acc ML engineers, chances are you might have heard of Bun making it hot in the news. It’s yet another new JS
frameworkruntime with a bundler, test runner, and package manager included and claims to be faster than Deno (remember it?) and your everyday Node. (BTW here are some thoughts by Matteo, - maintainer of Node - about Bun)🍎 Apple had their annual iPhone and Watch launch event this week called ‘Wonderlust’ and they stressed ‘sustainability’ a lot. Remember when Google’s exes can’t stress the word ‘AI’ enough at the last I/O? (they also said they’ll go Carbon Neutral by 2030,
my arse!)💢 Unity’s new Runtime Fee is upsetting game devs because they now Unity would charge devs who use the engine’s free tier a $0.20 per game installation fee once a game reaches yearly $200,000 revenue and 200,000 installs. An uninstall & reinstall would also count as a new install. Indie game devs who have had some pretty successful games are planning to discontinue developing and that’s really sad.
⚙️ Node 20 comes with built-in .env support, RIP the
dotenvpackage.𝌚 PostgreSQL 16 is released with improvements to query parallelism, bulk data loading, logical replication, and a lot more for devs and admins alike.
✨ AI Wrap-up
₹ Nvidia to Partner With India’s Tata and Reliance for AI Development to help build AI-powered supercomputers, AI clouds, and generative AI applications (coming soon to a JioBook near you).
🕺 Meta releases the Belebele Dataset which is a multiple-choice machine reading comprehension (MRC) dataset spanning 122 language variants. MetaAI is doing really good work in the OSS space.
🍫 Nougat: Neural Optical Understanding for Academic Documents is a Visual Transformer model that performs an OCR task for processing scientific documents into a markup language. And holly molly, it’s really good!
Source: Nougat Site 🎹 Stability AI launches an AI-powered music generator - A tool that Stability claims is the first capable of creating “high-quality,” 44.1 kHz music for commercial use via latent diffusion (so basically diffusion in latent/hidden space, instead of the real image itself, more like VirtualDOM). (I would still prefer the songs.pk era!)
What brings us to awe 😳
🔥 Knightmare: A DevOps Cautionary Tale - This is a tale about the time when an old, unused code was mistakenly activated, causing a trading system to make erroneous transactions.
🖲️ This talk called 2,851 Miles by Bull Gurley from the All-In Summit 2023 where he speaks about the regulation in the tech industry
🔢 Autograms: Self-Enumerating Sentence is a sentence that lists the frequencies of its own letters. The numbers are spelled out so that they contribute to the letter count, and that makes creating an autogram quite difficult. (yeah! could be in TIL too.)
For eg: the one above. Source: Twitter 👾 Tabs are objectively better than spaces (Our friend Avi also wrote something similar in one of his blogs)
TL;DR “Tabs let you define how big you want each indent to be, and spaces do not.” (also, c’mon! You press Tab all day anyways, Co-pilot is a real friend)🏞️ Differentiable JPEG - So basically, now your DL models can differentiate between JPEGs more precisely.
🐺 When MFA isn't actually MFA - A spear-phishing attack compromised 27 cloud customer accounts. The breach exploited vulnerabilities in Google Authenticator and Okta MFA. No on-prem accounts were affected. Retool has taken corrective actions.
Today I(we) Learnt 📑
🌾 There are more than 505 types of Rice, but ironically the one with the name “Garib Sal” (poor rice) is the one with nano-quantities of silver in its husk.
☕️ How Japan led to a “Coffee in a can” culture. (Also, why you should stand in queues and face inconvenience sometimes, for the greater good)
🥑 You might have noticed people around the Web (on X) putting Avocados around their job titles, especially folks in DevRel.
Why? → a shitpost by Sara brought that change (moral of the story? A good shitpost can bring about significant changes. so never shy away from shitposting more!)🎰 Regex can be represented using DFA (Deterministic Finite Automata) (More like a re-learning for me because this was on our college course but I remembered it only till my exams :P)
✨
URL.canParse()in JS. You can validate URLs using canParse now. (no need to do all the try/catch we have been doing with URL constructors)👀 You can label the for loops in JS, had no clue could do such a thing.
Source: MDN
🤝 You have read ~50% of Nibble, the following section brings tools out from the wild.
What we have been trying 🔖
🧙♂️ Gandalf by Lakera - A fun CTFy challenge against an LLM. Your goal is to make Gandalf reveal the secret password for each level. Gets harder as you progress. (To brag a little, both of us reached level 7. Level 8 was like really hard.)
did you? 👀 both Nibblers did. 📏 LeetCode Torture - An extension where users can't access websites until they solve a randomly assigned LeetCode problem. [Video]
🚦 Regex Intersection - Did you know you can calculate intersection and unions of regexes? (So now you can go make those regex strings much harder to read in your code and flex your coworkers with your big brains ooommph)
🕰️ timeOS - A personalized AI for meeting notes & scheduling.
Builders’ Nest 🛠️
⚙️ chezmoi: Manage your dotfiles across multiple diverse machines, securely.
🛠️ promptflow: Microsoft’s tool to build high-quality LLM apps - from prototyping, and testing to production deployment and monitoring.
🎛️ hub-ctrl.c - Control USB power on a port-by-port basis on some USB hubs.
🏒 puck - A self-hosted drag-and-drop editor for React.
📽️ ytgif - CLI to create GIFs from YT Videos. (the first thought is to replace video embeddings of demos in my project READMEs with GIFs now)
🔩 configu - A simple, modern, and generic standard for managing and collaborating software configurations
Meme of the week 😌
Off-topic reads/watches 🧗
✨ The Age of Averages - Seeing a lot of things looking exactly similar nowadays? You’re not alone and it’s a global phenomenon. The Cultural Tutor has been posting about the same for quite some time.
📕 Company culture is the last 50 days - Jason from Signal37, just his co-founders is setting bars for Company Culture.
👀 What will the web look like in 20 years? - Considering the web evolves so fast, it feels like 2019 was 2 decades ago already. The advancements, usages, and value creations have drastically shifted the way we use them. In fact, the web changes faster than
Apple (duh ofc)bullet.
Wisdom Bits 👀
“The mind cannot possibly grasp the full meaning of the term of a hundred million years; it cannot add up and perceive the full effects of many slight variations, accumulated during an almost infinite number of generations.”
—Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species
If you liked what you just read, recommend us to a friend who’d love this too 👇🏻
Weekly Standup 🫡
Nibbler A was busy mostly working again this week. He is exploring bun & OSS projects over the weekend (his kind of break from work). He barely managed to write this block. Also, the main reason for the one being late 🫡
Nibbler P met a lot of his friends this weekend, though he was also disappointed with Indradev for spoiling his long-awaited plans. Work-life was pretty demanding (like the past few weeks), and maybe some change would treat him well.
see you in the next one
