#66
Polyfill attack, rabbit's ravage, Etched, PaLM 2's langs, Gemma 2, window.ai, MegaETH, Blinks, SOL ETF, KidPix, ccTLDs, immich, dotenvx, Phrenology, Defaults and more
👋🏻 Welcome to the 66th! (one 6 short of the devil’s number, but don’t worry he they are in the details).
A lot1 happened over the last week, some major AI advancements, security breaches, crypto bans, and as always a shit ton of fund-raises. Don’t worry we have covered it all.
📰 Read #66 on Substack for the best formatting
🎧 Podcast version of this edition is available here → #66 | Recast
What’s happening 📰
🐰 rabbit’s r1 might be a perfect example of how things can keep going downhill sometimes. After all the past accusations (true ones) of being just an Android app and wrapping around existing stuff (and not being as revolutionary as the original pitch was), they managed to raise the bar of the disappointment a single product can give (reverse “Sharma ji ka ladka”).
This time a group of developers called Rabbitude, gained access to the rabbit codebase and found several critical hardcoded API keys (ElevenLabs, Azure, GMaps to name a few) in its code, out of which ElevenLabs API key is the most catastrophic one, as it allows to “read every response EVERY r1 has ever given”, “replace every r1’s voice”, brick devices, “sending email from rabbit.tech subdomains”🪦 and whatnot.
But the rabbit team despite knowing about leaked API keys, chose to ignore it. 🤡
✨ AGI Digest
🍪 A new startup Etched, founded by Harvard dropouts, has raised $120 million to develop a specialized AI chip called Sohu, aiming to compete with Nvidia's dominant GPUs. They boast of a chip specialized for transformers (can’t run CNNs, LSTMs, SSMs). Sohu is >10x faster and cheaper than even NVIDIA’s B200 GPUs and a single Sohu server runs Llama 70B at over 500k tok/sec.
😑 Meta is incorrectly marking real photos as ‘Made by AI’. Back in February Meta had this wet dream of being able to disclose your AI fakes (but guess who is laughing now?), first of all, it was a great idea, second these bad marking is something they might have also expected, but doing this in production can hurt people sometimes. For instance, some images from the Techcrunch reports.
Meta’s AI tagging KKR’s IPL winning celebration post as “Made with AI”, like come on it’s not even some hypothetical win like RCB’s 🤖 ⚓️ Model Drops
🤿 Apple and EPFL released 4M (Massively Multimodal Masked Modeling) – a single unified Transformer encoder-decoder using a masked modeling objective across a wide range of input/output modalities (21, to be precise) capable of performing a diverse set of vision tasks out of the box, as well as being able to perform multimodal conditional generation.
💎 Google released the next generation of Gemma with models of two sizes – gemma-2-9b and gemma-2-27b (in both code and instructio-tuned variants), with the weights available on HF as well as Google AI Studio. And it performs better than llama-3-70b-instruct on lmsys in all of coding, multi-turn and overall categories, making it the best open-source model on the leaderboard. Too good to be true, right? It is – especially if you are a developer – since the model does not support system prompts so you can’t really steer the responses as much as you can do with other models. Bummer!
⚙️ Meta releases LLM Compiler a family of 7b and 13B models built on CodeLlama with additional code optimization and compiler capabilities. LLM Compiler can emulate the compiler, predict optimal passes for code size, and disassemble code, achieving state-of-the-art results on code size optimization and disassembly.
Product enhancements:
📖 ElevenLabs released a reader app in the US, the UK and Canada, with expansion along with multilingual ability coming later. The app can narrates articles, PDFs, ePubs, newsletters, or any other text content by simply uploading your content and listen to it narrated by one of their realistic voices.
🌟 Chrome is experimenting with a local Gemini Nano support inbuilt in Chrome, as per the latest Chrome Canary. Chrome Canary versions 127 and above allow you to use a native `
ai.window`API to use the model directly. You can also use the model to help you debug your console logs and ask it to suggest fixes. If you’re willing to try it out, you can check this site built on top of the Vercel AI SDK. BTW, somebody even released the weights so you can play with it outside chrome if you like.
Google in your console, Google in your sheets 🗣️ Yapping with AI bots was not enough so Character AI launched Character Calls allowing you to literally have a phone call with your favourite AI waifu, all free of charge. We tried it (hehe) and holy moly it is surprisingly fast. Though it still feels very robotic but it is the worst this thing would ever be!
🔐 0x Digest
🔗 Solana introduces blinks (blockchain links) – a new primitive that transforms on-chain actions into shareable links. These links can be shared anywhere on the web (X, Discord, Reddit, etc.). Blinks leverage Solana Actions API under the hood and allow to request payments using links, QR codes, and Push notifications (like we already do on a day-to-day basis). It’s like farcaster frames but...everywhere. (ideal UX abstracting away chain).
💰 MegaLabs, the team behind MegaETH, raised a $20 million seed fund from a bunch of VCs but more importantly KOLs of crypto. (Vitalik, Sreeram to name a few, basically “harder to fool” gang).
MegaETH claims to be the first “real-time blockchain” with full Ethereum compatibility. They claim to achieve sub-millisecond latency & up to 100,000 TPS (in comparison to 3 digits of current EVMs). Unlike the traditional nodes (homogenous) in the chain, the nodes here are heterogenous systems and leverage Node Specialization to “reduce” the duplicate computation we perform right now in the regular chain setup, by delegating the execution to specialized nodes (based on type). They mentioned that it’s expected to have a public testnet around Oct-Nov ‘24.📑 ETF & MF Manager VanEck files an ETF for Solana (the first of its kind in the US), claiming that it’s a commodity just like ETH or BTC (fair in all senses, btw BTC ETF is doing okay and ETH is expected to even better).
👨🏻⚖️ In another turn of completely unrelated (gonna hurt SOL ETF?) events, Coinbase filed a bunch of lawsuits against the SEC & FDIC asking for internal docs of past investigations of the DeFi companies. Why? Coinbase(& industry) suspects(& knows) that there were some efforts in the past by these firms to discourage and cut off banking access to crypto companies.⛔️ The Danish government released a DeFi guide stating that “DEX2 interface providers must be regulated, including mobile app developers”. In other words, they want to ban all cryptocurrencies, but in a sneaky way.
Talking about Governments and crypto, the US Govt. sent 3940.28 BTC (worth ~$241.22M) to Coinbase Prime, as usual transferring the seized funds from criminals. Kinda great timing as Coinbase just filed a lawsuit against some govt. entities 😂📚 Some good reads
🍪 100y.eth wrote a thread about “What is SGX Proof? & Why do you need the multi-prover system?” (The thread itself is succinct, so won’t do a TL;DR)
🤏🏻 Light Protocol teamed up with Helius Labs to ship the testnet for their new "ZK Compression" scaling solution on Solana, which people compared with L2s in Ethereum space and oh boy it was some drama.
🛠️ Dev & Design Digest
🔫 More than 100,000 websites have been at risk of this Supply chain attack since February due to one CDN “polyfill.io”.
What is polyfill.io? It’s a popular open-source library (click the link, GitHub can’t warn you enough) & CDN service that hosts polyfills3, and since devs like using newer features, web services depend on it.
What happened? A Chinese (it’s always them) company bought the domain in Feb early this year and since then there have been some reports of the site injecting dynamically generated malware along with polyfills.
It wasn't until last week when this was reported properly, that the domain was taken down by the registrar and Cloudflare took the initiative to automatically replace polyfill.io links with Cloudflare’s mirror for a safer Internet.📝 Notion released publishing websites natively from its pages (and in the process killed a bunch of wrapper startups who did exactly that). While it is free for all, upgrading to the paid plans allows you to connect your custom domain, light/dark themes, Google Analytics, and more.
🎙️ With the help of PaLM 2, Google added 110 new languages to Google Translate, representing ~614 million speakers, opening up translations for around 8% of the world’s population.
🪦 Google's Material Web Component moved to maintenance and the devs working on it are now shifted and reassigned to work on their large-scale internal Wiz framework (just like Angular but they are yin & yang kinda pair).
What brings us to awe 😳
🎩 James wrote some code to leverage AI inference to drop hats on the heads of people standing outside his apartment in New York for more than 3 seconds.
🎨 KidPix App, a web app implementation of Apple’s Kid Pix from 1989.
📧 Dharmesh, the co-founder/CTO of HubSpot, who is known for collecting cool domains, plus building and hosting useful tools on them, built a summarizer bot on agent.ai. You can now forward an email to
agent@agent.aiand ask a question at the top, and the bot will revert with an answer to you in some time.⛓️💥 Let’s say you play a game where “You open a random Wikipedia page and click the first link and you keep doing that until you end up somewhere”. When playing the above game the video creator found out roughly 97% of the Wikipedia pages lead to “Philosophy” and someone broke it and then unbroke it and the video below explains how that affects the whole network.
Today I (we) Learnt 📑
👩🏻💻 In git, when you have a folder/file with the same name as a branch, you can't simply checkout to the branch like
git checkout <branch-name>as it requires you to specify what you are talking about “folder or branch”?
It'll throwfatal: '<branch-name>' could be both a local file and a tracking branch.
In such cases, you can use--at the end to disambiguate and checkout to the branch usinggit checkout <branch-name> --👑 Not something new, as we have tried it several times ourselves and lost a shit ton of games, but Can sacrificing a Queen be considered a brilliant move? well answer is “Yes” if it ends the game quickly.
🗾 In the last edition we covered a video from MapMen saying that “it depends” is the answer to the question “How many countries are out there?”. Well, what if we ask you how many ccTLDs are there and which is the most famous one? Another video by MapMen covers this.
☁️ Upgrading to iCloud+ allows you to set up email for any custom domains – even the ones you purchased elsewhere.
Source: Tweet by @shrihacker
🤝 You have read ~50% of Nibble, the following section brings tools out from the wild.
What we have been trying 🔖
🤳 immich: Self-hosted photo and video backup solution directly from your mobile phone. (like Google Photos but without Google)
🌾 Farm: A Rust-Based web-build tool to facilitate your web program and JS library.
🌌 CodeGalaxies - A neat visualization of package managers.
🧳 luggagelosers - A live ranking of airlines by how much luggage they are losing (by @levelsio)
Builders’ Nest 🛠️
⚪️ dotenvx: it extends the core functionality of dotenv by adding cross-platform compatibility, multi-environment management, encryption, and other productivity-enhancing features
🤖 ai.robots.txt: A list of AI agents and robots to block (if you want to “ask” them POLITELY not to scrape you)
🏓 openstatus: open-source synthetic & real user monitoring platform.
🪝hot-hook: Simple HMR for NodeJS + ESM.
Meme of the week 😌
Off-topic reads/watches 🧗
🧠 Phrenology by Seth Godin. A take on how humans always look for proxies to understand something complex and how that can be absurd and harmful sometimes (more than that tbh?).
⚙️ Software Defaults by Jason Fried. Here is a brief explainer of what “defaults” represent for users, and why builders should focus on making it the best.
🤷🏻♂️ No Matter What They Tell You, It's a People Problem, more of often than not we seem to ignore the weightage of your work life satisfaction that depends on the co-workers you work with.
Wisdom Bits 👀
“The best things in life are free. The second best things are very, very expensive.”
― Coco Chanel
Wallpaper of the week 🌁
🌌 Grab the week’s wallpaper at wow.nibbles.dev
Weekly Standup 🫠
Nibbler A had a good delve and develop kinda week at work and has been reading & experimenting on the new things that happened this week for the last 2 days too, he did watch India lift the T20 Worldcup with the fam in BLR, legends say he is still screaming his lungs out from the excitement.
Nibbler P has been experimenting with a bunch of new coding LLMs and he’s happy that his job is still safe from being automated by them. He did the usuals of doing a couple of runs and set his new record in 5km. (Run
ForrestP, run!)
If you liked what you just read, recommend us to a friend who’d love this too 👇🏻
really really more than usual.
Decentralized exchanges
A polyfill is a piece of code (usually JavaScript on the Web) used to provide modern functionality on older browsers that do not natively support it.