#61
C-root outta sync, microsoft winning, both apple and google fumbled, ai shutdown button?, SEC <3 ethereum, get BTC in metamask, fix images, milk basics
👋🏻 Welcome to the 61st!
📰 Read #61 on Substack for the best formatting
🎧 Podcast version of this edition is available here → #61 | Recast
📢 Get access to bonus links and discussions with fellow Nibblers on Discord
What’s happening 📰
📸 Something’s up with how Apple handles the infamous p-word - Privacy. Apple and privacy concerns are no strangers to each other. And yet again, users were surprised when supposedly “permanently deleted” photos resurfaced in their devices, in some cases even showing deleted photos of a previous owner to the device’s new owner. Nibbler P was a victim to it too when his photos from a recent trip got deleted automatically and were restored later on with a software update. Explain yourself Apple!
🔧 Microsoft Build wrapped up on May 23rd and it had some pretty wild announcements:
💻 The focus was all around the new Copilot+ PCs, a new brand of Windows laptops featuring a Neural Processing Unit (NPU) that runs their specialised Small Language Model named Phi Silica which would be used for various local tasks, along with being connected with their larger models via Azure.
🔋 Their Copilot+ PCs flaunt beating Apple’s MacBook Air 15” by up to 58% in sustained multithreaded performance. Now that’s a breakneck competition.
💪 These new PCs also have several features thanks to the new silicon that would have been too slow on earlier devices. Some of these are the live captions, real-time translation and Windows Studio Effects (FaceTime-like video effects) that bring them a notch closer to the MacBooks of the world. Plus these devices look so slick!
Source: Microsoft Surface on X
✨ AGI Digest
🤕 Remember Google’s AI Overview that you started seeing recently in your Search Results? Turns out it was suggesting just outright crazy random stuff (check meme section below). And just when we started getting hacks to remove those summaries from our search results (such as &udm=14), Google themselves went ahead and removed this for everyone, perhaps until they find a solution. It was not that model that was hallucinating though, but rather satirical and outright wrong results served reddit comments and other sites that performed good on the SEO. This is why good model reasonings and safety alignments are important.
🤔 Microsoft Build sure had some mind-bending releases that make us wonder
👁️🗨️ Remember rewind.ai? Microsoft just shipped that feature in Windows, that runs locally on the Phi Silica. It takes constant screenshots of your PC (scary) and uses them to semantically find whatever you need to find in an instant.
🎨 And they didn’t miss out on our favourite childhood favourite MS Paint! Now we can all be the artist we always imagined ourselves to be. It uses your silly drawings and turns them into masterpieces using sketch2image generation. Numerous artists are going to get inspired by this.
📄 Of Regulations, Lawsuits, and Research
🙅 New California AI law requires on all large models models trained with over 10^26 flops to:
not be finetunable to create chemical / biological weapons
have an immediate shut down button
need significant paperwork and reporting to govt
🧠 Anthropic’s released a research blog “Scaling Monosemanticity“ that gives a first view inside how features are represented inside large LLMs.
🙊 There are two things that’s certain from OpenAI - SoTA performing LLMs and a constant stream of drama. First a lawsuit with Scarlett Johansson that went worse with sama’s “her” tweet (but eventually went in favour of OAI) and now talks about their former employees told to remain shut, as detailed in this vey aptly titled Vox article - ChatGPT can talk, but OpenAI employees sure can’t. BTW here’s a comparison of the voices of ScarJo, Samatha, and Sky’s voices.
👀 Meta’ Llama Chatbot in Instagram can now search through all of Instagram, inside content of reels with particular audio in it! Pretty insane indexing / retrieval AI.
⚓️ Model Drops1
3️⃣ Microsoft completed the Phi-3 family by dropping the
phi-3-small(7B),phi-3-medium(14B) andphi-3-vision(4.2B) models that achieve impressive performances beating GPT-3.5-Turbo, Gemini 1.0 Pro and Claude-3 Haiku in several benchmarks respectively. Microsoft refers to the Phi models as SMLs (Small language models) and highlights that these are specifically designed to perform small tasks well and fine-tuning is where they really outshine the competition.
Source: Phi-3 Release Blog 🌿 Cohere for AI dropped Aya, a family of very good multilingual models in three flavours- Aya 23 - 8B, Aya 23 - 35B and Aya 101 - 13B, where the first number in front of the name indicates the number of languages it is trained on (yes, you read that right - a model trained on a whooping 101 languages). They also released the Aya Dataset, a Multilingual Instruction Tuning Dataset consisting of 65 different languages.
🧼 Mistral is back with v0.3 of its 7B and 8x22B models (with 8x7B coming soon) with Extended vocabulary of 32768 courtesy of a new v3 Tokenizer and support for function calling. They also dropped a mistral-finetune repository containing scripts to finetune their models. GOAT behaviour.
🔐 0x Digest
🚀 Ethereum ETF got approved by the SEC and 8 ETFs are waiting for S-1 documents (these docs tell how the investments will work). This makes it the first ETF ever created because a character from “World of Warcraft” had its warlock powers nerfed. Just the rumors of ETF getting approved took ETH to the moon last week, not sure how it’s gonna end once a few of them go live.
💳 Metamask aims to add support for Bitcoin in the coming month. Well, if they do that, the least of their problems will be distribution, we guess.
🛍️ Talking about wallets, Phantom (leading Solana wallet) acquires Bitski (a16z backed wallet). The partnership is supposed to bring embedded wallets into the Solana ecosystem.
🫣 Trump is now accepting donations in crypto (not just BTC, and ETH, but bro went all over the board and will take Shiba Inu and sons too)
🛠️ Dev & Design Digest
💣 One of the Root name servers (yes, one of the 13 that are responsible for resolving DNS) got out of sync for 4 days, precisely The C-root name server managed by Cogent Communications. The sad part is we still don’t the the exact reason for what happened. But there are some loose relations with Cogent de-peering Tata Communications as it was the last event that happened before the sync-out on 18th May.
🤔 Ryan Dahl gave a 30-minute talk on JSR’s launch (JSR, for context, is yet another package manager but ESM only, auto-generates docs and is TS first), we don’t know what and why is this thing going on anymore bro lost me when they said: “Deno will have package.json”.
🫠 Logging out of Twitter got harder, as x.com also checks sessions from twitter.com and will auto-login if they find a session there. And yes, you can log in from x.com as it is current Twitter but not twitter.com as it 301s to x.com.
⚫️ An interesting read on how a condition from the spec of SMTP Server and some nuances to handle that on clients, led to missing period (.) in the emails.
What brings us to awe 😳
🌊 Nobody likes living under a rock (as a reader of Nibble, you need not worry about it), but living under the water has some advantages. Joseph Dituri spends 93 days under the Atlantic Sea and becomes “10 years younger” according to a study.
🌐 How someone temporarily took over my subdomain and why you should always double-check dead links in your sites.
⛽️ A ChatGPT search requires 10x as much power as a traditional Google search. But what about the back-and-forth between different sites results in Google's thought process?
Source: Post by @zerohedge 🥽 This really cool animation of a hand taking in the texture of whatever it touches built using AnimateDiff Stable Diffusion reminds us of Kevin Levin from Ben 10! Crazy this is all possible today without assembling a team or even specializing in video animation at all.
Today I (we) Learnt 📑
♊️ Google Gemini was originally named “Titan” (after Saturn’s largest moon, stop nodding aggressively fellow Cosmos fan). Jeff Dean revealed that later they came up with the name “Gemini” which means twins in Latin, as it required two teams - Google Brain & DeepMind to work together.
🚎 The Bus factor is a measurement of the risk resulting from information and capabilities not being shared among team members, derived from the phrase "in case they get hit by a bus" (shared by HashFyre in a group chat).
TL;DR → On minimum how many people need to get hit by a bus before a project stalls due to lack of knowledgeable or competent personnel?🤔 There exists
for/elsea loop in Python, don’t ask us why, just let that sink in.
Source: Twitter 🔦 The Windows 10 Wallpaper was physically built and photographed, and is not a piece of digital vector illustration! (this was completely unexpected)
🤝 You have read ~50% of Nibble, the following section brings tools out from the wild.
What we have been trying 🔖
🪟 If you miss the old Windows (like us), you can try Windows 98 Online (no we are not crying, you are).
🏞️ Recently switched phones and your gallery is all haywire? Use EXIF Image & Video Date Fixer to migrate your photos and videos while keeping the dates and other metadata consistent.
🐚 Till recently, Datasette’s LLM utility has been our tool of choice for chatting with both local and hosted models via terminal but elia (totally not a pun on Ilya) quickly became our favorite with its intuitive and very clickable chat UI and right in the terminal. shell-ask by EGOIST is another great option that supports piping in commands. Or perhaps you are looking to do RAG locally? Verba has you covered.
💻 Recently discovered mactop, a cool tool to check how your Mac’s memory, CPU, power, and disk usage changes when you perform an operation, in real-time.
Builders’ Nest 🛠️
🎨 pintora: An extensible text-to-diagrams library that works in both browser and node.js
📋 jira.js: A JS/TS wrapper for the JIRA Cloud, Service Desk, and Agile REST API
📥 better-sse: Dead simple, dependency-less, spec-compliant server-sent events implementation for Node, written in TypeScript
💵 LLM Pricing: Compare cloud LLM pricing & performance across different providers from one single-screen
Meme of the week 😌
Off-topic reads/watches 🧗
💰 Salary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More Valued: An immensely detailed salary negotiation advice for Software Engineers. Shared by param on X.
🤝 Open source is neither a community nor a democracy by DHH, where he explains why OSS is neither community and neither a democratic setup with committees and why people should stop acting like maintainers owe them something, instead they should appreciate whatever they get as a gift. He also highlights why elitism is best kept stuck with OSS
🫵 Are you milking the basics enough? By dejavucoder, reminds you to milk the basics before you go for optimisations and hacks.
Wisdom Bits 👀
"Scientists mostly discover, engineers and artists invent."
— Seth Godin
Wallpaper of the week 🌁
🌌 Grab the week’s wallpaper at wow.nibbles.dev
Weekly Standup 🫠
Nibbler P came back home to find the heat welcoming him with warm hands at 48° Celsius (118° F) and 20% humidity. He completed some work assignments and nailed an important demo this week that made him glee. He got back on track and set his new PR for a 2k run. He’s spending the weekend tinkering with stuff.
Nibbler A chose to travel home from Bangalore breaking the way into every means of transport possible on the way and dissecting through the heatwaves of North Western India. He met some loved ones, ate some authentic food, watched BWF championship finals (at least that was an interesting final), and stayed in a house built on Plot 42 (nerd, eh?). He’ll prolly still be traveling when this hits your inbox.
If you liked what you just read, recommend us to a friend who’d love this too 👇🏻
Fun Side Trivia - There was this phenomenon on r/localllama last week where whenever somebody posted that a certain company hasn’t been doing releases for some time now, the company dropped something in just a few days. Both the Cohere and Mistral model drops this week came out of that.