#78
googleXarchive.org, no think tokens 4 u, lionsgate 🤝 genai, USDC on Sui, Bhutan got BTC, NFT fungible?, sanitize data, DAVE, dilemma of randoms, URL to markdown, colourful commits, feedbacks and more
👋🏻 Welcome to the 78th!
Since we shipped mid-Tuesday last week, we are trying to move a few hours back every week now, and soon will be on track.
📰 Read #78 on Substack for the best formatting
What’s happening 📰
⌨ TSMC’s Project Arizona is now ready and Apple is the first one to get their chips made in the US by TSMC.
🤝🏻 Google partners with The Internet Archive to bring more context and historical info from the web to your search results.
✨ AGI Digest
‼️ This section is not model-heavy this week, read Nibbler P’s updates for details.
📕 Google announced Audio Overview in its NotebookLM which makes two AI hosts start up a lively “deep dive” discussion based on the contents of the notebook. They summarize the material, make connections between topics, and even banter back and forth. This conversation can also be downloaded and used elsewhere. And unlike other Google products, people are mostly positive about it.
🤡 In a pussy move, OpenAI said they might ban users who’ll ask for the reasoning tokens of o-1.
🎥 Lionsgate partners with Runway to train on their huuuuuuugeeee portfolio of videos and help them iterate on the “creativity” faster. This deal is a first-of-its-kind deal where a Hollywood studio is not suing an LLM, but rather planning to use them. They would create and train a new AI model, customized to Lionsgate’s proprietary catalog (which is > 20,000 films and TV shows btw).
💨 After last week’s Pixtral release, Mistral also announced a bunch of updates on its platform namely:
A free tier on their la Plateforme API Platform
Price reductions on their model offerings on la Plateforme
The 22B Mistral Small updated to a new checkpoint v24.09 offering improvements in human alignment, reasoning capabilities, code, and function calling
Their newly-released vision model Pixtral 12B available for free on le Chat
🔐 0x Digest
⛓️ Circle’s USDC and Cross-Chain support is coming to Sui. This makes SUI the first Move-based chain to have native $USDC. Circle will also bring bridged USDC on Soneium (Sony’s L2 Chain)
🇧🇹 Bhutan Government holds over $750M in BTC on Arkham, and unlike most other governments, the BTC doesn’t come from law enforcement asset seizures, but rather from their newly increased mining operations.
☁️ Google Cloud launched the Ethereum-compatible RPC offering. Right now it works for Ethereum’s mainnet and testnet. They plan to extend support to other blockchain networks within the next year. Developers get 100 requests per second and 1M requests per day in the free tier. (watch out revenue-making startups in crypto)
💸 BingX, another centralized exchange, got their hot wallets compromised and lost $44.7 million worth of assets.
😵💫 Unlike regular attacks in crypto, a unique thing happened last week, Ethena’s domain registrar got hacked, yup you read that right, it was a ”front-end” attack in a way that interacting with the domain from the wallets became risky. This is a really scary domain, and it is supposed to be the ultimate truth. Keep your registry and your registrar close.
🐦 From the bird app
0xfoobar wrote about how the “non” in NFT is a lie.
@vishalkgupta, an ex-ecutive from Coinbase and Circle announced TrueX, a non-custodial, stablecoin-native exchange out of stealth.
@DeFiMinty posted New Crypto Narratives to keep a close eye on.
🛠️ Dev & Design Digest
🔐 Discord has been experimenting with encryption tools for audio and video for over a year now, and they finally have Discord’s audio and video end-to-end encryption, or as they called it DAVE. Just as any E2EE protocol should do, Discord has opened up the DAVE protocol’s whitepaper for all to read, understand, raise issues, and fork, and fix things. They leverage WebRTC Encoded Transforms to make this possible at scale.
🆕 A new HTTP Method, QUERY’s proposal dropped last week. It’s a middle ground between GET and POST. How? 👇🏻
This method allows query parameters to be sent to the request content instead of the URI, which can be useful when the query is too large to fit in the URI. Unlike POST, it is a safe and idempotent method that allows caching and automatic retries. In addition, a new header “Accept-Query” is also proposed signaling the server on whether to support QUERY and with what Content Types.✨ Bun 1.1.28 introduces experimental support for compiling and running native C code directly from JavaScript.
🔥 A new type “stripper” in the house, ts-blank-space. The tool is a fast type-stripping compiler that converts TypeScript to JavaScript, by replacing all the types with whitespace, yup! the name checks out. However, please note it's still experimental, and doesn’t support all the syntax of TS yet. But oh boy it’s fast.
What brings us to awe 😳
😵💫 Our RNG Git Hash Bug, is another case of not explicitly calling strings as strings and leaving it to the interpreters (in this case YAML parser).
Lesson? ALWAYS wrap your string in quotes, your Git Hashes can be of the form123e567, which might make shit hit the fan faster than you think.➖ Another interesting
bugnuance when dealing with the “dash” character of the “minus” sign is to remember how there can be myriad numbers of them in the Unicode and you can never tell them apart by just looking at them. So always sanitize, normalize, and make sure to double-check your assumptions.🚘 Javascript is boring? How about hacking cars using JS? Well, don’t actually go hacking cars. It’s wrong and you can be put into jail. But you can try other fun stuff like your doorbell or small gadgets that use radio frequencies. All you need is a browser and a HackRF One device. (haccar fr fr!)
🏏 Team USA Cricket's Captain Saurabh Netravalkar is working on vector databases at Oracle.
Today I (we) Learnt 📑
🌯 While reading Web Weekly #141, we found out that JSON.stringify utilizes toJSON methods, just like
toString, but less known and more useful.🎲 Surprisingly enough, the distribution of
sqrt(Math.random())is similar toMath.max(Math.random(), Math.random()). Below is a detailed explanation.🗑️ GitHub trick to find the commit that deleted a file, you might already know how you can find it in git logs, but it’s surprising that GitHub allows this too. These tricks require you to know the path of the deleted file though, if you don’t know it you can utilize this Find the last commit that changed a file with a given filename in Git.
🤝 You have read ~50% of Nibble, the following section brings tools out from the wild.
What we have been consuming 🔖
🧒🏻 Your team needs Juniors, a sweet and short article on how founders can also be their own worst enemy: wanting only the experts who already have all the answers, rather than juniors hungry to find new answers.
✨ r.jina.ai: a simple API that converts any URL into an LLM-friendly markdown with just a simple prefix:
r.jina.ai🏙️ Things.in: Explore the best attractions and restaurants and stay in cities worldwide.
🪙 g8keep: an app that allows you to launch a token in 30 seconds from your phone. Instantly tradable on every DEX. Instantly protected from bots and snipers. (no no! We don’t have any tokens, or do we?)
Builders’ Nest 🛠️
🔥 honox - a simple and fast meta-framework for creating full-stack websites or Web APIs (earlier known as Sonik)
🛟 safe-await: Safely use async await without many try/catch blocks. (it was never easier to keep promises than in 2024, if you still can’t it’s a skill issue)
🪵 ngtop: a command-line program to query request counts from nginx's access.log files.
😼 devmoji: a command line tool that adds color 🌈 to conventional commits, using emojis inspired by Gitmoji 😜
Meme of the week 😌
Off-topic reads/watches 🧗
🙇🏻 Modern apologies by Seth, on how “Sorry” doesn’t have to be an admission of guilt or acceptance of fault. It could simply be the kind way one human acknowledges to another human that things aren’t ideal right now.
🤝🏻 Ears rarely open until a rapport is established by DHH, on why writing just can't compete with a podcast or a stream. BTW he went on a stream with ThePrimeagen and this screenshot tells all the vibes.
🎣 Attracting feedback by Ken’s First Principles, where they explain why one should not ask for rather attract feedback.
📋 Arpit’s List of Blog Links by @arpitingle is a fine collection of good blogs and articles by some of the most interesting writers on the internet.
Wisdom Bits 👀
“If I am worth anything later, I am worth something now. For wheat is wheat, even if people think it is a grass in the beginning.”
— Vincent van Gogh
Wallpaper of the week 🌁
🌌 Grab the week’s wallpaper at wow.nibbles.dev
Weekly Standup 🫠
Nibbler A had a work, network (met some of internet friends IRL in conferences), and travel (ah! to-and-fro) kind of week. Although his plans didn’t go as intended, there is some hope to fix things, he’ll try in the coming week.
Nibbler P started the week with energy, got bitten by a mosquito, and has been recovering ever since. We hope that he gets better soon so that we can get “Model drop” updates. He is using his sick time to read Kurzgesatz’s Immune.
If you liked what you just read, recommend us to a friend who’d love this too 👇🏻