#28

MacSafe /etc/hosts, Arc Max, Magic Studio, AI Playlists, AI Pendant, Sky Computing, Cosmic Latte, SNAFU, F5Bot, Image App and more.

👋🏻 yo! 28th week here.
Fun fact about “28”, the math enthusiast in Nibbler A wakes up.
1 + 2 + 4 + 7 + 14 = 28 (so, it’s a perfect number as all its proper factor sums up to the number itself.)

New here? Don’t forget to 👇🏻

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What’s happening 📰

• ✨ Arc released Arc Max, i.e. AI into the browser itself. It released 5 new features all crazy and make it an AI-powered Arc, you can say. It has features like:

  • Ask on Page: It’s like Cmd + F but on steroids, you can ask questions in plain text, as shown in the image below. (and yes, it was coincidental that the Upvotes were 69 when Nibbler A upvoted that)

  • 5-Second Preview: Press Shift & just hover over any link to get a summary quickly.

    

    Showcasing Arc’s Cmd + F with AI feature

• 🎨 Canva Magic Studio - Canvas is adding a bunch (it’s really a bunch; one of us almost got overwhelmed by everything that it offers) of AI features to its newest Magic Studio. In partnership with Runway, it now allows users to create 18-second AI-generated videos too.

  

• 👀 GPT-4V Explorations - this is the latest feature that OpenAI is going to make Generally available. It enables users to instruct GPT-4 to analyze image inputs provided by the user (If you’re curious, yes it can also analyze candlesticks. They haven’t nerfed it yet).

• ✨ Just like Google’s Magic Editor in the Pixel 8 Demo, Adobe is now showing off the Stardust Project’s “object-aware editing engine”. Image editing is going to be really breezy soon and fake images will fill the web. Stay strong.

• 🎼 Spotify developing “AI-generated” playlists. Yup, just tell it what you want in plain text and it’ll create one playlist for you in real time right there. Let’s be honest these people are shipping consistently.

  

  Source: Tweet

• ⏪ Remember Rewind? an app that records everything you do and creates a memory of your digital experience. Well, as much as it seems like an April fool’s joke, they are working on a Pendant, a wearable that captures what you say and hear in the real world and then transcribes, encrypts, and stores it entirely locally on your phone.

• 📟 AI app EPIK hits No. 1 on the App Store for its viral yearbook photo feature and people on Instagram have been going crazy over the old-school vibes it brings to their profile. (It’s like when FB peaked with it’s collage apps) - Shared by Parth

  

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What brings us to awe 😳

• 🎶 LOL, funny that someone had to create resonate.coop an OSS version of Spotify because Spotify itself started as a response to the growing piracy problems (read free music) that the music industry was facing.

• 🌁 Sky Computing is almost here? Multi-cloud application building was always tough and vendor lock-ins are something Cloud Service Providers have relied on as their moat for a while.
  Well, not anymore here comes Sky Computing. In short, you can now build your app for the sky, and as it has a Cloud Abstraction layer, the same app can be hosted on any Cloud (CSP)

  

  Sky Computing

• 🙌 Open Source does not win by being cheaper - Here, the author argues that the essence of OSS is not to be a *cheaper* alternative to some existing solution because well, there is something called revenue that you need for survival. Where OSS shines though is when it comes to building transparent, extensible, and better solutions to problems.

• 🌏 This tweet 𝕏 by Wes Gurnee demonstrates that neurons in LLMs indeed learn a spatial-temporal representation of the world from their training data supporting the view that they learn not merely the superficial statistics, but literal world models. [Link to Paper]

• 📖 Slack employees will take a week off starting Monday, setting aside their regular work duties in order to reach "Ranger Status" on Salesforce's proprietary online learning platform. The most “corporate” thing I have heard in the last 6 months.

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Today I(we) Learnt 📑

• 🫡 SNAFU, an acronym widely used to stand for the sarcastic expression Situation Normal: All Fucked¹ Up

• 🥴 I mean we already knew that your data is not safe on the internet no matter what, but when you read this list, you realize it’s REALLY…. unsafe.

• 🔭 In the last edition, we talked about the color of Uranus. This time, we zoomed out a bit and found that the average color of the universe is beige-ish white, more precisely, #FFF8E7 (and not some shade of black as we imagined). Interestingly, due to some flawed calculations, the color was originally thought to be turquoise.
  Ah! And wait guess what the color #FFF8E7 is called?
  => 🥁 “Cosmic Latte” (also, if you might have noticed, it’s our new background color)

• 🧘 From Huberman’s Neural Network Newsletter, this table shows how different breathing techniques can help you achieve different effects on your mind and body. You can Google these different breathwork practices if you want to know more.

  

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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 🔖

•  📋 Harden your MacOS, a Quick and easy guide for securing macOS systems, for both laymen and security enthusiasts.
  Extracted from that → Consolidated and extended host files from several well-curated sources. Pick any host files from these and block adware/malware.

• 👀 F5Bot - F5Bot is a free service that emails you when your selected keywords are mentioned on Reddit, Hacker News, or Lobsters. (good for monitoring your own products & competitors)

• 🧳 ProductJobs - Be first to discover new product jobs at YC Startups

• 🚀 New.Space: Send anything in seconds. No account is needed. It’s more like Airdrop for all, we know there are a lot of such apps already, but one more to add to the list.

• 🏞️ Image App: a one-stop place for you to generate AI Images and videos using all the models to choose from.

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Builders’ Nest 🛠️

• 💾 harpa.ai - A Chrome extension that uses LLMs to bring some automation magic to your browser (primarily focused towards content writers)

• 🦦 StreamingLLM - Deploy LLMs for infinite-length inputs without sacrificing efficiency and performance.

• 📄 PDF Debugger: A tool to debug PDFs, basically you can see the structure and XML.

• 💬 fontogen - Generate your very own font with FontoGen

• 🍒 OnnxStream - Stable Diffusion XL 1.0 Base on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 (or in 298MB of RAM)

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Meme of the week 😌

Source: Tweet by @miniapeur

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Off-topic reads/watches 🧗

• 🚀 The Musk Algorithm by DHH, a small piece where DHH defines his takeaways from the recent book on Elon Chan.

• 🧳 Jobs are good, actually people have been romanticizing entrepreneurship and leaving 9-5 and being a solopreneur or a founder. But there is a dark side to that also. As PG says “Startups only know how to consume” and for most founders, it consumes their lives. There are also some good parts to regular 9-5.

• 🔨 True Leisure and the Tyranny of Total Work, a quick dive into what happens when you make your life a bunch of green ticks and how to actually fix it.

• 🤝 It's okay to Make Something Nobody Wants - Look, we need more people to work on those side project ideas we always dismiss thinking “Who would use/read it anyways?” It’s okay to make something because you enjoy doing it.

• 🎧 Sam Altman gets The Joe Rogan Experience. They talk about AI, AGI, Environment, UBI, decreasing testosterone in men, low birth rates, and tons of random shit.

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Wisdom Bits 👀

"A man is about as big as the things that make him angry."
- Lord Winston Churchill

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

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Weekly Standup 🫡

• Nibbler A dragged himself through another week on this planet. He lost his sense of time at this point, it’s just a concept for him. Saturday was some off-time, he played a few chess games and watched some JJK episodes.

• Nibbler P 🤒 is down with a fever this weekend for what was otherwise a decent week for him. BTW, he also posted about starting to blog again. Give him a sub and show some love. Maybe it’ll help him recover?

  

  see you in the next one ;)

1. Look, Nibble is PG-13