#51
Dencun, DevOut?, OSS Grok, Fig got Amazoned, TS 5.4, Node 21.7's styleText, no GPT drop on Pi Day, linguist-generated, Marta, on my puter, react-barcode, NearDrop, Long Shortcuts? and more
Early week Hello this time 👋🏻
Welcome to the 51st!
A lot of you told us to pick the best stories and detail up on them a little. So, we’ll limit the content to max 4 bits (Nibble, duh!) per section.
📰 Read #51 on Substack for the best formatting
🎧 Podcast version of this edition is available here → #51 | Recast
📢 Get access to bonus links and discussions with fellow Nibblers on Discord
What’s happening 📰
✨ AGI Digest
😶🌫️ Cognition Labs came out of Stealth on Monday night and with it brought out the hidden anxiety for a lot of devs. They dropped an announcement tweet about their AI Software Engineer “Devin”, and suddenly the whole 𝕏 was talking about it. Devin can solve 13.86% of open GitHub issues from the SWE-Bench benchmark unassisted (the previous best was 1.96%). For context, they have raised money from Thiel’s Founder’s Fund & have a geek (talent-dense) team (the founding team has 10 IOI gold medals). By the way, magic.dev is working on something similar as well.
→ Nibblers’ take: While we understand that it’s overwhelming for junior-level devs out there, we advise you to not be afraid and just build what you want to build. Just focus on the fundamentals like Mathematics. As DHH said in his post, “Screaming at Devin will only distract you from enjoying the last glorious years of a golden run.”📼 OpenAI released streaming on their Assistants API and this was the only release by the OpenAI team on this Pi Day. Since they released the OG GPT-4 last year on the same day, we were expecting more from them but rumor has it it may be Tau Day that they may be aiming for this time.
Gotta wait till June now, I guess 🤷🏻♂️ Musk said they’ll open-source Grok (Twitter’s AI chatbot) this week. Of course, he is doing all this to make a point that OpenAI should be “open”, but honestly we don’t know if Sama cares enough. In any case, we’ll have at least one more “open” AI.
🤖 Figure AI’s Figure 01 humanoid robot can now have full conversations with people and is using OpenAI models to provide it high-level visual and language intelligence
What if The Terminator had a dumb grandfather and you’re looking at it right now?
🔐 0x Digest
✨ The Dencun1 upgrade was finalized as promised. There are 9 major EIPs2 (fancy word for patches) in this upgrade. The major one is “EIP-4844” (aka Proto-Danksharding3) bringing the ability to accept transactions to store blobs temporarily on the Beacon chain (consensus layer of Ethereum).
This benefits the L2 (Rollups) chains more than anyone else, you see earlier rollups used to post a shit ton of data on-chain using “Calldata4”, which now can be posted on a new class of chain called “Data Availability (DA)”.
The key takeaway is this is one of the major upgrades andwillhas reduced the gas fee. As of the L2, the fee might roll-down5 to0x0(Jesse is already showing it off). [Dashboard to track Gas Fee]
TL;DR → Just like any Indian diet-driven human in their 40s, you’d be happy to hear “Gas Issues” are getting resolved. (*burps hysterically*)💰 El Salvador, the country leading the crypto as legal tender front, made BTC as legal tender back in Sep 2021 passing “Bitcoin Law”, and now guess what, they are sitting on top of $84M Profit from their BTC holdings. (*plays Baby, You're a Rich Man*)
🛠️ Dev & Design Digest
🆕 TypeScript 5.4 is out, some notable additions are:
NoInfer<...>utility type to restrict type inference to the contained type onlyObject.groupByandMap.groupBystatic methods.Quick Fix (⌘ + .) for adding missing parameters, in your favorite code Editors.
🤷🏻♂️ Support for
require()calls in--moduleResolution bundlerand--module preserve.
🖍️ Node.js 21.7.0 brings native utility for styling text, so you might want to drop the “Chalk” now. 😉
Source: Linked blog above
🌅 Fig, the autocomplete for Terminals, was acquired by Amazon back in August 2023, later they converted to Amazon CodeWhisperer for the command line. But more importantly, they are sunsetting the product now.
🦀 Java is implementing some useful stuff from Rust (bringing the crab mentality to the next level, jk). Since memory safety is a matter of National security now, it’s good to see Java leveling up. Java is anyways the most used production language and has brought features from GoLang to its suite in the past. And this adaptability might keep Java in business for longer than one can imagine.
What brings us to awe 😳
🌱 Inbox Zero (* happy Nibbler A noises *) is the way to save the world as most of the data stored in the cloud is probably unnecessary. Think all those promotional junk mail and that one random photo you took on a random stroll, stored somewhere in
us-west1servers that were never accessed thence. Deleting them saves us some carbon footprint and some extra cloud storage for you.📸 Location of every photo taken from the International Space Station, (more than 1M). All are plotted on maps and some charts, mission and geo-coordinate-wise.
Today I (we) Learnt 📑
🗃️ By marking files using linguist-generated attributes in a .gitattributes file, you can keep certain files from displaying in diffs by default or counting toward the repository language. (remember how your JS project used to come up as CSS because of the Bootstrap 4 CSS file? nostalgia eh!)
🤪 Javascript interprets numbers starting with
0in Octal base by default unless otherwise parsed or not possible.
So, if you look at the image below, you can see how017is being interpreted as15, as it’s 15 (1 * 8^1 + 7 * 8^0) in Octal Base. But at the same time,018doesn’t behave like that. Oh! because018is not possible in Octal, JS parses it as a Decimal 🤷🏻♂ (Ajay from Nibble Family found this out last week, and one among his many “wat?” moments in JS).
Image showcasing the best of JavaScript
🤝 You have read ~50% of Nibble, the following section brings tools out from the wild.
What we have been trying 🔖
🖥️ puter: The Internet OS and Desktop Environment in the Browser! This is like your own personalized Cloud Provider, a super cool concept.
Not us, using it to share a common workspace for Nibble 😜 🗂️ marta: File Manager for macOS. Native. Extensible. Fast. 🚀
📚 Prompt Library: Explore optimized prompts for a breadth of business and personal tasks by Anthropic.
🕸️ exa: A search engine powered by context. It’s like Perplexity but instead of summarizing the result, it returns a collection of webpages like Google.
Builders’ Nest 🛠️
🔍 react-barcode: A
<Barcode/>component for use with React🧐 pdfcheck: Immediately check one or one hundred PDF files for signs of inaccessibility
🔁 NearDrop: An unofficial Google Nearby Share app for macOS. (if folks work on this officially we can have an Android-MacOS ecosystem)
📋 jsoncanvas: An open file format for infinite canvas data by Obsidian.
Meme of the week 😌
Off-topic reads/watches 🧗
📚 Curation (vs the road to junk) by Seth Godin. In this one, he discusses how curation might keep us away from mixing everything, but at the same time how economic pressures tell you to include more things & lead to junk.
🫨 The Shortcut is probably too long. The article beautifully explains our urge to stop pursuing something in the recommended way because it’s a drag and settle for “it works for me”, but that might not lead to consistent results and maybe just initial positive feedback. (it might be okay in some cases, but when you want to pursue something seriously, maybe you should skip those initial Dopamine hits?)
🧠 A mathematical deep dive on Why you can’t multiply vectors? (dot & cross product ain’t multiplying) by Freya Holmér, a game dev turned mathematician.
Wisdom Bits 👀
“The work you do while you procrastinate is probably the work you should be doing for the rest of your life.”
― Jessica Hische
Wallpaper of the week 🌁
🌌 Grab the week’s wallpaper at wow.nibbles.dev
Weekly Standup 🫠
Nibblers P & A are “co-incidentally” going to the same concert with friends/family this weekend. So, by the time you read this section, we both might be chilling a bit after a week of working our assess off, as both of us are working on exciting stuff at work and leveling up every day.
If you liked what you just read, recommend us to a friend who’d love this too 👇🏻
The name comes from Deneb (consensus layer upgrade) & Cacun (execution layer upgrade).
Ethereum Improvement Proposals
The name comes from the two researchers who proposed the idea: Protolambda and Dankrad Feist, weird no? It feels like a legitimate term.
eh! Fancy word for function arguments & identifiers?
ofc pun intended