#52
Brain Chess, VLOGGER, Blackwell, G(Foundation Models), Unstability.CEO, Memcoin Presale, ETH Security, Cosmic Particles, Dharmambudhi, Snoo, getModifierState, knip, evm.codes, Garnet and more
👋🏻 Welcome to the 52nd! 🃏
It’s been almost a year since we decided to spend weekends together writing these Nibbles for y’all ourselves.
And we couldn’t have done it without all of you lovely readers and your constant suggestions 🎊.
To make this edition extra special, we have created a Crossword out of all our previous TILs. Let’s see how many of them you can get correct 😼.
It’s also Holi season here in India and we wish you and your family very bright and colorful days ahead. 💖
🧩 Crossword → Play here. Let us know if you solve it and share it
📰 Read #52 on Substack for the best formatting
🎧 Podcast version of this edition is available here → #52 | Recast
📢 Get access to bonus links and discussions with fellow Nibblers on Discord
What’s happening 📰
🇮🇳/acc is back, India drops the plan to require approval for AI model launches. After criticism of the 1st March
prankannouncement on bringing regulations over publishing AI models. Ministry planned not to make that slip of the tongue into a law.🧠 Neuralink revealed its first human implantee (patient) and shared a video of them playing Chess using their “brain waves”. The patient, Noland Arbaugh, 29 years old, was paralyzed 8 years ago and Neuralink can help him in a good way!!! Just imagine how good this can get in the next few years.
🍪 Intel received $8.5B worth of grants from President Biden to construct and expand Semiconductor manufacturing in the US. The plan is to MAGA in semiconductor manufacturing and reduce reliance on Asia which is currently the largest exporter of these chips. The US military is heavily dependent on Intel for their operations, and no way they would get chips from China or Taiwan which they see as a competitor. Now Intel can you make better GPU chips, please?
✨ AGI Digest
📹 Google’s announced VLOGGER, a Multimodal Diffusion for Embodied Avatar Synthesis which takes an image and audio to create entire videos of the person saying the audio clip with realistic hand and facial movements. Hell, it can even edit existing videos to edit the lip movements to sync it with new audio (such as in a translation). This stuff is getting so good you might even start seeing AI influencers on your TL already and not realize that the person doesn’t exist.
💻 XAI open-sourced Grok weights which reveal that the 314B model (nice Pi reference) is an MoE. The internet went crazy following its release because Elon went ahead and released it after pressure from people to open-source Grok after he started taking a jibe at OpenAI on 𝕏. Since the model is so large, very few people have the kind of resources to try it out on their own devices but hey, it is good that we have the weights.
Nothing, just one of the world’s richest men trolling one of the largest AI startups that he once co-founded 🐡 If you are over the Devin hype, we have something better here Sakana AI, the nasty Japanese AI company is currently developing technology to automatically generate foundation models. And they are not all talks. They started by introducing Evolutionary Model Merge, a general method to find the best ways to merge OSS models of different expertise. (Look how the tables have turned, huh! Who is getting automated now?)
🎰 Nvidia releases “Blackwell”, its new lineup of GPU chips at the GTC 2024. The two chips, B200 and GB200 are the successor to its very-successful “Hopper” H100s chips that were the apple of the eye of all the AI companies. Things will now get even more interesting as training a 1.8 trillion parameter model which would have previously taken 8,000 Hopper GPUs and 15 megawatts of power, could now be done using just 2,000 Blackwell GPUs can do it while consuming just four megawatts. As the saying goes, “The last best time to be bullish on matrix multiplication was 1969. The next best time is now.”
📑 Something with AI startups’ CEOs stepping down this week with:
Inflection co-founders Mustafa Suleyman (who was also the CEO) and Karén Simonyan, will be leaving Inflection to start Microsoft AI, a new division at Microsoft that will bring together their consumer AI efforts, as well as Copilot, Bing, and Edge. We do not know what they might be cooking but Microsoft for sure has been quietly keeping it in all the baskets it can gather.
On that note, Satya sure knows a thing or two about how to run things Emad Mostaque also resigned from his role as CEO of Stability AI and also from the board to pursue
unstabledecentralized AI (what?) There is not much to know what he’s onto but man surely is building something big that made him do the switch.
🔐 0x Digest
💸 As part of “Memecoin Presale”, one of the startups raised ~$100K in a few minutes. And in the next few minutes, the founder took his time to deactivate the Twitter account and disappear. This is by far the funniest scam in crypto. Also, we are not associated with
0xnibbain any way.Oh! talking about “Presale”, Solana had a gold rush as more than 796,000 SOL ($149.2M) was raised from 33 presales. Under the table trading goes brrr…
✨ Bitcoin Virtual Machine (BVM), a Bitcoin layer 2 project claims that they have figured out a way to put AI on Blockchain. The developer who leaked this alpha also mentioned that it’ll be like API call-wise payment for such a Node-based Neural Network and said that DAs would become a storage layer for AI Models.
BTW Modulus Labs ZK proved a 1.5B parameter LLM on-chain, last week. So, just like anything in the Bitcoin ecosystem, this is also lagging.👀 Recent reports suggest that the SEC is trying to classify ETH as Security. And maybe in an unrelated turn of events, the Ethereum Foundation removed (Warrant Canary Icon1) footer text from their website saying “will publicly disclose any sort of inquiry from government agencies that falls outside the scope of regular business operations” in a commit a few months back. (more importantly, that could have been two commits, the commit is flooded from linter changes)
🫥 Google Search of your ENS might2 now show your Ethereum Balance (privacy my arse!). It's easier than finding my Bank Balance at this point. 🫠
Quick Google Search!
🛠️ Dev & Design Digest
🖼️ The Getty Makes Nearly 88,000 Art Images Free to Use However You Like (including commercial purposes) by making them freely available under the CC0 license. It's time to get some pretty inspirations and add a dash of them to your projects.
✨ NodeJS website got a major redesign after ages. From the top, it feels like NextJS, Vercel, and Cloudflare workers kinda setup. But wait, the team is also trying to fix the ESM/CJS issues, right? I lost half my hair on it.
What brings us to awe 😳
🤡 Indian Govt. has been nasty around new tech and with their special love for crypto they have been turning off them since epoch 1. And recently, another cryptocurrency exchange, OKX is exiting India and has asked users to withdraw funds by April 30. They never fail to surprise.
🔭 Hubble and Webb working together to confirm the Universe’s expansion rate, with Webb one-upping its big bros’s measurements is the most wholesome story about the two telescopes working together to unravel the deep mysteries of the universe.
☄️ The Universe is Hostile to Computers, quick explanation by Vertasium on why sometimes Cosmic particles may flip the bit and cause BSoDs. (it’s an old video, but a friend reminded us of this and we thought it’s nice to share it.)
Today I (we) Learnt 📑
🔫 If you’ve ever taken a bus into Bengaluru or away from it, there’s a high chance you boarded it at the Kempegowda Bus Terminus (or what was known as Majestic Bus Stand).
It’s bang in the middle of the city. And guess what… till the 1950s, it was a big water tank or man-made lake called Dharmambudhi! [Source: Finshots]🆕 Reddit was originally intended to be named "Snoo", as in "What snoo?" But snoo.com was too expensive, so they settled for calling the mascot Snoo and picked a name for the site that wasn't registered.
Early on Reddit was just a provisional name, but it's probably too late to change it now. [Source: PG's The Reddits]⌨️ You can getModifierState from a KeyBoardEvent. To quickly fetch any of the user’s modifier keys that are on or locked (Eg: CapsLock, Fn, Alt, Ctrl, etc.). We feel it’s a little underused function. [Related: Detect Caps Lock]
😵💫 Regex character “$” doesn't match “end-of-string” but matches at the end of the string and the end of each line (immediately followed by a new line).
This is how you reg exret
🤝 You have read ~50% of Nibble, the following section brings tools out from the wild.
What we have been trying 🔖
🗡️ ilovepdf: Every tool you need to work with PDFs in one place
🤗 face-to-sticker: A simple app/API to turn a face into a cool sticker
🎰 evm.codes: Tools to play around and learn Ethereum Virtual Machine
✍️ LM Studio: Discover, download, and run LLMs locally
Builders’ Nest 🛠️
♦️ Garnet: a remote cache store from Microsoft Research that offers strong performance. Also, compatibility with unaltered Redis clients.
✂️ knip: Find unused files, dependencies, and exports in your JavaScript and TypeScript projects.
🎧 AutoEq: AutoEq is a tool for automatically equalizing headphones (it makes a hell of a difference if you equalize your headphones according to their frequency response)
Meme of the week 😌
Off-topic reads/watches 🧗
💅🏻 Be less precious by DHH - Quote from the article: “Being too precious is the same as being fragile. That's not a goal to aspire to. We should all be chasing higher resilience instead.”
🤔 Willfully Uninformed by Seth Godin discusses that in this information abundance age, if you do not know about something, it is more so because of a choice to not care about it enough than it being inaccessible to you
📊 Weird but statistically true stuff 👇🏻
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 🫠
Nibbler A might probably be sleeping while you are reading this, had a busy week from post-Sheeran tiredness to learning and building new things with the team. Met his good old friends from Kota days and went to 🏎️ & 🎳.
Nibbler P has a lot on his plate this week but on the good side, he met a lot of friends last weekend and got relatives over for Holi, so yay!
If you liked what you just read, recommend us to a friend who’d love this too 👇🏻
A warrant canary is usually some form of text or visual warning (like a colorful bird, in the case of the Ethereum Foundation), which some companies include on their websites to indicate they've never been served with a secret government subpoena or document request.
It’s indexing so, not all are indexed, but soon, it will be