#58
Secret AI Lab, Renewable AI, Victoria Shi, Copilot Workspaces, Rabby's free gas, Modular CaaS, Git v2.45, bun.report, S3 bills 4xx, Phantom Islands, Fata Morgana, terminal.shop, Borgo, GeoSpy and more
👋🏻 Welcome to the 58th!
📰 Read #58 on Substack for the best formatting
🎧 Podcast version of this edition is available here → #58 | Recast
📢 Get access to bonus links and discussions with fellow Nibblers on Discord
What’s happening 📰
🤝 Microsoft signs biggest renewable energy deal to power its AI. The deal is said to cost about $11.5B. They are planning to build 10.5 gigawatts of new renewable energy capacity. The plan is to not compromise on AI goals and also not hurt the climate.
🍎 Apple is running a secretive AI lab in Zurich that employs dozens of former Google AI experts (that they poached?) and it’s led by John Giannandrea, former head of Google Brain.
✨ AGI Digest
🇺🇦 Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry introduced “Victoriya Shi”, an AI spokesperson for their Foreign affairs department. This is the first-ever AI-powered spokesperson, although the catch is the ministry says that none of the statements given to Shi will be generated by AI instead they’ll be real humans involved in curating that content. Also, The main reason for creating her was "saving time and resources" for diplomats as per the department.
🚀 Sam Altman during his recent talk at Stanford University (alma mater) made some bold statements. He emphasized that GPT-4 is "by far the dumbest model any of you will ever ever have to use again.”
GPT-5 and its successors will be way smarter than any model right now.
“We are making AGI, it’s gonna be expensive, it’s totally worth it” and they ain’t holding back no matter what it costs.
“I’d much rather take one more question rather than you guys singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to me,” said Sam.
🤳 Microsoft re-affirms the ban on the US Police Department from using Azure OpenAI Services to do real-time facial recognition. Interestingly it doesn’t ban international police departments and just US ones, also it doesn’t ban the analysis using static cameras.
🧠 Memory is now available to all ChatGPT Plus users. Just tell ChatGPT anything you’d like it to remember.
🤖 GitHub announced Copilot Workspace, a Copilot-native developer environment (AI programmer) with a real demo, it takes the requirements and builds the MVP (way more promising than other tools out there).
It leverages co-pilot under the hood but can do way more than help you with one file. The idea that it can bootstrap the whole project from plain text, might hurt a few startups. Fireship covered it, so we are dropping the video.
🔐 0x Digest
📦 Paragraph acquired Mirror, which was technically a match made
in heavenon-chain. They aim to enhance the on-chain publishing experience and make it easier for content creators to get onboarded and rewarded. Also, Paragraph raised $5M.🐇 Rabby Wallet is giving FREE GAS on Ethereum, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Base, BNB Chain, Fantom, Linea, Optimism, Polygon, and ZetaChain. And they said more are coming. (How they are doing it? Well it seems really weird, probably funding your Gas fee from a central account, not sure why though!)
🔐 Inco integrates Hyperlane. It means that Inco's private storage and computation to the broader modular blockchain ecosystem. Starting Hyperlane-connected chains Inco’s “Confidentiality as a Service” will become a must-have privacy feature on-chain.
🛠️ Dev & Design Digest
💥 Bun introduced bun.report, their new crash reporter. It is lightweight and will make it easy to create GitHub issues directly from the crash logs.
🗜️ How short can Git abbreviate? Right now git uses SHA1 hashes abbreviating it to 7 characters, but Linux Torvalds recommends 12 chars.
On that note, Git v2.45 was released having tons of features and fixes, one related one is “preliminary SHA-256 interoperability”, which is an extension of an old release (Git 2.29), where they allowed SHA-256 as a hash function for some specifically configured repository and now with this interoperability it provides support to easily use both SHA-1 and SHA-256 together.🪣 How an empty S3 bucket can shoot your AWS bill to the moon? TL;DR, AWS charges you for unauthorized requests (4xx) coming to your bucket and this led to a shot-up of the bill for the writing of the blog linked (more details on why inside). So, the bad news is anyone who knows your bucket name can spam your bucket and that will cost you bucks (or someone trying to mistakenly write to your bucket still incurs costs for you). The good news is Jeff Barr tweeted that they are looking into how to fix this.
What brings us to awe 😳
🏝️ The Phantom Island of Google Maps by MapMen. A lot of places have existed on maps for centuries because no one could verify their existence and ofc. After all, sailors used to get lost in the sea, see the same land again, or see a Fata Morgana (read TIL) and name it something new, claiming it as discovery.
Interestingly, these phantom islands also appeared on Google Maps until recently, as the platform merged satellite imagery with old government records. (we just realized they could be called “Pretentious Map Reviews” IYKYK)🗓️ Leap day bugs are meant to be notorious (as of course programmers are bad with dates, no pun intended).
A bug in Azure Cloud services where someone incremented the year incorrectly from a date, led to a complete meltdown of Azure Cloud for ~2 days and the story has more twists, sometimes the interim fix makes things worse. Kevin Fang covered the Feb 29, 2012, SSL Certificate bug in a detailed and fun way in this video.✨ If you were wondering how AI became synonymous with ✨ emoji in the last two years. David Imel had the same question and spent a lot of time analyzing the emoji’s origin investigating the sparkle emoji and making a 28-minute video on it. There was no solid conclusion other than that the organizations want to sell AI as new, shiny, or magical stuff. (& In defense of Samasun’s Galaxy AI’s logo, Samsung “literally” means “three stars”)
Today I (we) Learnt 📑
🗻 Fata Morgana is a complex type of mirage that appears as a narrow band of distorted and magnified images just above the horizon. Due to lower temperatures in the sea, sailors can see a mountain covered in mist or floating shops (a mirage).
📱 Apple imposes a rule on films if they are going to use its products that bad guys in movies are not allowed to use iPhones. (another one uncovered by Mohak)
🐬
docker-compose downneeds to be run from the same directory as the one wheredocker-compose upwas run from, and vice versa. [from AkJn’s Tweet]
🤝 You have read ~50% of Nibble, the following section brings tools out from the wild.
What we have been trying 🔖
☕️ terminal.shop: a CLI by ThePrimeagen that created quite a buzz for trying to sell coffee from Terminal (now there are more ways to spend money from terminal other than DROP TABLE IF EXISTS, yay!)
💸 Money Visualizer: a fun blender project where you can visualize the size of stacks of money (of course, it has the US Debt pile too)
📺 WhereToStream: Explore international streaming options for movies & TV shows. (not sure about you but we have been in a situation where you don’t know where to watch the show you want to.)
📍 GeoSpy: AI-powered geo-location. Uncover the location photos were taken by harnessing the power of AI. (we tried a flat and it kinda told the city)
Builders’ Nest 🛠️
↔️ pragmatic-drag-and-drop: Fast drag and drop for any experience on any tech stack
🔇 JioCinema Ad Muter: Chrome Extension to mute JioCinema’s ads so that you can focus on the IPL matches.
🆕 Borgo: a new statically typed language that transpiles to Go, more expressive than Go but less complex than Rust.
Meme of the week 😌
Off-topic reads/watches 🧗
🪐 Why Adding a 2nd Product Creates The 3 Body Problem by Dharmesh Shah (co-founder & CTO, HubSpot). Dharmesh explains how the 3rd body causes the problem.
🗒️ Comfort and Convenience by Seth Godin, he drops a hot-take that “perhaps the next cultural development will be people picking comfort over convenience”. (ah! let’s see, we don’t see that happening)
💸 How I think about Debt by Morgan Housel. As debt increases, you narrow the range of outcomes you can endure in life.
Wisdom Bits 👀
“I've made it a principle not to be over-influenced by minor disappointments.”
— Marianne Moore
Wallpaper of the week 🌁
🌌 Grab the week’s wallpaper at wow.nibbles.dev
Weekly Standup 🫠
Nibbler A had a good ship week at work, he got a little time to lose some chess games & binge some YT (this edition is evident) this week. He has a big week coming up with some shifting around the city, important things at work, and Nibbler P coming to Bengaluru.
Nibbler P has had a week full of work, but he’s happy that he finally published his loooong due blog post. He’s prepping for the travel coming early morning and will be traveling for the next few weeks 🚗.
If you liked what you just read, recommend us to a friend who’d love this too 👇🏻