#67
gm Sonnet, Lock(33Tera)bit, SEC vs Crypto, EIP-7732, Ladybird, Whalefin, Dubious CVEs, WasmGC, emoji.gif, WasmGC, Axolotls, Novopangaea, dotless domains, tsx, Debt, Lazy Jugglers & more
👋🏻 Welcome to the 67th! (just 2 more anon)
📰 Read #67 on Substack for the best formatting
🎧 Podcast version of this edition is available here → #67 | Recast
What’s happening 📰
✍️ Proton, the company famous for the privacy-first Proton Mail has released Proton Docs, an end-to-end encrypted, privacy-focused collaborative document editor inside their Proton Drive. It is aimed to be a Google Docs / Microsoft 365 replacement but with a more “privacy-first” approach to it.
🤕 Talking about privacy, OpenAI has been in a pretty bad rep this week with the news of its internal breach going public and the fact that it was storing convos of the Mac App in plaintext until it fixed it in the latest update.
🚨Lockbit (a Ransomware-as-a-Service) leaked 33TB of data including PII1 on June 26 attributing it as data stolen from US Federal Reserve, but after the leak, it turned out to be data from Evolve Bank & Trust. Evolve who didn’t talk about this leak earlier, later revealed that they had contained the attack which started because of malicious link clicks by some employees, and also, they haven’t paid any ransom. This gets serious when the news broke that Evolve has had partners like Wise & Affirm, which have shared PII data with Evolve in the past, which was probably compromised too.
✨ AGI Digest
🤖 The sentiment of people regarding AI bots crawling their websites is not particularly positive, especially so because a lot of these bots do not follow the rules specified in
robots.txtso, Cloudflare came up with a “one-click” button to block all such AI bots and it is available for all customers, including those on our free tier. Time to hop onto the Cloudflare DNS!⚓️ Model Drops
🤓 The InternLM team dropped the InternLM2.5-7b which competes with Qwen2-7b on benchmarks. Does that mean it is better than Qwen? No! On personal tests, it nails a few standard questions better (“How many r’s are there in Strawberry?”), but the moment you modify them (“How many r’s are there in Strawberries?”), it starts to hallucinate. Moreover, multi-turn convos are a big turn-off with this one, especially with it being too “stubborn” to change. Not surprised.
🤖 The Salesforce AI Research team released APIGen, an automated data generation pipeline designed to produce verifiable high-quality datasets for function-calling applications. Even 7B models trained on their dataset can achieve SoTA performance on the Berkeley Function-Calling Benchmark and even a 1B model achieves exceptional performance, surpassing GPT-3.5-Turbo and Claude-3 Haiku. For what it’s worth, we feel you do not need large models for function-calling and this paper shows exactly that!
🗣️ KyutaiLabs, a French AI lab released Moshi, a 7B Multimodal LM with native support for speech tokens (both input and output) with 2 channel I/O - Streaming LM constantly generates text tokens as well as audio codecs. And they pulled it off with just 8 team members! (watch from 7:39). Ohh! and this model absolutely yaps! Like crazy.
🚏 LMSYS released RouteLLM, an OSS framework for cost-effective LLM routing. LLM Routing is needed because ideally, all queries that can be handled by weaker models should be routed to these models, with all other queries routed to stronger models, minimizing cost while maintaining response quality; And there’s a lot of interesting work going on in this space.
💻 Nomic Labs released GPT4All 3.0, an OSS tool to do inference with local models via a nice UI with native chat-with doc using the Nomic Embed embedding model. We feel the doc search is better than most other UIs we have seen. Also, a good replacement for LM Studio.
🔐 0x Digest
👨🏻⚖️ Another week, another big crypto lawsuit, last week we discussed how Coinbase sued the SEC, and well, guess what, now the SEC sued Consensys (parent of MetaMask) over brokerage collected from swap and liquid staking services. SEC claims that MetaMask has collected over $250 in brokerage without being a registered broker. (no wonder this is a kitty-fight out there and it’ll hurt future attempts to get crypto on the front).
🛍️ Sony is planning to restart the crypto exchange Whalefin, which was acquired from crypto lender Amber Group last year. Sony’s interest in Web3 has been increasing lately, they started a Web3 incubation in Feb & also patented NFTs in Gaming Consoles.
🪙 Crypto x Countries
🇺🇸 Robinhood Crypto is now available in all 50 US States, including Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.
🇷🇺 Ah! A dear friend of the US, Russia contemplating permanently legalizing stablecoins for cross-border payments bypassing SWIFT.
🇩🇪 German government keeps dumping the seized BTC, on July 4th, they dumped 3000 BTC (worth ~$175M). The markets are reacting and the charts are going red.
📚 Good Reads
📝 Wake up babe, a new game-changing EIP2 just dropped.
🥁EIP-7732: Enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation, this one is probably one of the biggest EIPs I’ve come across, here are a few things we were able to grasp, it plans to⚡️ Epochs and slots down ways to give Ethereum users faster transaction confirmation times by Vitalik, where he discusses all options we have right now to make faster confirmation times in the current Ethereum setup and what the blockers we have for the Single Slot finality or similar setup to be implemented in the current Ethereum Roadmap. (rare quick read from Vitalik)
🛠️ Dev & Design Digest
🤠 Google Fonts built an official repository of all things related to animating Noto Emoji and being able to integrate emoji into your products & designs easily. They have made
.json,512x512 .avif,.webp, and.gifavailable on the site, and have been animating all the ~4000 emojis one at a time.😓 Growing dubious CVE4 filed against OSS projects from newbie security researchers and bounty hunters have been an issue in OSS lately. Recently, someone filed a CVE on node-ip, a JS IP parser with 17M weekly downloads, and it turned out to be dubious and led to temporary “read-only” archival by maintainers. There has been a debate about how to stop these theoretical security vulnerabilities from eating up maintainers' time.
🐞 An agenda-less browser proposal just dropped Ladybird. It's not yet another Chromium (Blink) copy, rather it's different in a lot of ways, it'll be completely OSS, built kinda from scratch (almost nobody did it in the last decade), and no default search deals. It started as an HTML viewer for the SerenityOS.
They have a board of skillset and not donors having Chris Wanstrath (OG GitHub CEO) & Andreas Kling (Lead engineer, who worked on Safari, Nokia, KHTML). They are aiming for an alpha release for early adopters in 2026. it's never a good idea to name your product after a bug. (yes ladybird is ladybug)🧮 Why does Google Sheets port its calculation worker from JavaScript to WasmGC? So, Google Sheet’s calculation used to happen on the servers (Java) initially until 2013, when it was moved to client-side JS. The Sheets team developed internal tools to make sure that the JS version produces the same level of precision as Java.
In this process, they found that the JS version of Calculation Engine was 3x slower than the Java one. (well that’s a bummer no?)What is WasmGC? - it is an extension to the existing WebAssembly specification which adds the primitives needed to compile garbage-collected languages (like Java), this helps bring them to the web at near-native speed.
The Workspace & Chrome teams worked for ~3 years optimizing the WasmGC and building a way to build high-performance applications.
What brings us to awe 😳
🔤 llama.ttf is a font file which is also a large language model and an inference engine for that model. Wait, what?
So the font shaping engine HarfBuzz, used in applications such as Firefox and Chrome, comes with a Wasm shaper allowing arbitrary code to be used to "shape" text.
This "arbitrary" code just be anything! So why not put an entire LLM inference engine with trained parameters bundled inside, and initialize the LLM to use it to generate text? Bet you did not think of that before.
🌏 Have you ever wondered “How would the earth look in about 250 million years?”. (well, we didn’t too, but guess what a bunch of people did and MapMen covers all those findings in the video). Hint: Novopangaea
😳 Did Claude 3.5 Sonnet just “wake up”? In a fun experiment called Infinite Backrooms, where two instances of AI talk to each other, and are told that a human will observe them, Claude 3.5 Sonnet has begun “breaking the 4th wall” and has directly asked a human observer to intervene — something that never happened previously.
Source: Tweet by @AISafetyMemes
Today I (we) Learnt 📑
🤯 You can have dotless domains (like type
ai/in your browser console), crazy, right? Then why don’t we have a lot of them? Well, first it’ll break some standards we have like SMTP servers (emails) and second ICANN didn’t like this idea since without the TLD (the last part after the dot, like com, in, etc.), they’ll require a record in the apex of a TLD zone in the DNS (in other words the place where TLD themselves are resolved). You might already know Nibbler A’s love for DNS and this one shook him to his core.📺 Screensavers are called “Screensavers”, as they were built actually to save screens 🤷🏻♂️. How though? Back in the day, we had Plasma or CRT screens, which were prone to image burn-in (uneven screen use leads to permanent damage to some parts of the screen). So, screensavers came to the rescue as they filled the screen with moving images or patterns, hitting all areas of the screen with no discrimination. (have fun with it)
so, that DVD logo hitting your screen everywhere was the untold hero. 🦾 Axolotls (a paedomorphic salamander) can regrow their limbs, tail, gills, brain, and heart in a few weeks. (In just a FEW WEEKS!!!)
🤝 You have read ~50% of Nibble, the following section brings tools out from the wild.
What we have been trying 🔖
📉 BAML: A domain-specific language to write and test LLM functions.
🔎 HN Search: a Hackernews semantic search built using Vectara.
💰 LLMPricing: An interactive app to compare the pricing of different LLMs.
🖥️ sql-studio: Single binary, single command SQL database explorer (nice looking). It supports SQLite, libSQL, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and DuckDB.
Builders’ Nest 🛠️
💖 tsx: TypeScript Execute, a simple command to run TypeScript in Node.js. Eg:
tsx file.ts🧊 ice: a powerful menu bar management tool for macOS.
⚙️ cdn-cache-control: this package provides a subclass of the Headers class that makes it easier to set cache control headers for content served through a modern CDN. (this is huge as it solves one of the 2 hardest problems in CS)
☄️ autocannon: fast HTTP/1.1 benchmarking tool written in Node.js
Meme of the week 😌
Off-topic reads/watches 🧗
🤹 The Lazy Jugglers by Seth Godin, an analogy for handling work in hand.
💵 How I Think About Debt by Morgan Housel and The Impact of Debt by Howard Marks talks about both the impact of debt (tech debt not counted) on our lives and how it can narrow the range of survivable outcomes.
🔭 The Startup as a Path to self-discovery by Bobby Pinero (CEO & Co-founder @Equals), where they share a few pieces of advice on how to treat your startup journey and not attach yourself to outcomes, and utilize this opportunity to push yourself.
Wisdom Bits 👀
“The test of a student is not how much they knows, but how much they want to know”
― Alice Wellington Rollins
Wallpaper of the week 🌁
🌌 Grab the week’s wallpaper at wow.nibbles.dev
Weekly Standup 🫠
Nibbler P was mostly sad this week because his coffee ran out and his new shipment batch got delayed. He compensated for the sadness by playing lots of Skribbl with his internet friends and doing a perfect-workout-week.
Nibbler A had a rollercoaster kind of week, starting with delve mode and ending with build & ship (adding finishing touches to first-ever ⚽️ rollup) mode. He managed to play 🏸 twice this week (yay, positive slope, baby).
If you liked what you just read, recommend us to a friend who’d love this too 👇🏻
Personal Identifiable Information
Ethereum Improvement Proposal
Relay is a trusted marketplace where blocks built by builders get auctioned off to validators
superb and informative as always
I read this over breakfast with a cup of tea to feel like an adult going through their newspaper 😅