#81
SpaceX booster catch, decentralized model training, complete fruit fly connectome, OneJS, Ithaca, Unichain, Stripe brings crypto back and more
👋🏻 Welcome to the 81st!
Unlike most of us, Nibble went past 80 🥳
📰 Read #81 on Substack for the best formatting
What’s happening 📰
🚀 SpaceX made history by catching the booster of its fifth Starship launch. Hugeeeeeeeeeeeee!
🏅 ML Engineers are dominating intradisciplinary fields in the Nobel Prizes! Geoffrey Hinton has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his groundbreaking work in AI, while Demis Hassabis, John Jumper, and David Baker won the Chemistry Nobel Prize for their work on AlphaFold and protein folding.
🌐 The UK decided to give the Chagos Islands to Mauritius and this will lead to some chaos as this transfer will result in us losing the TLD .io from internet. The .io being a ccTLD might fade away slowly, but this is another reminder of why not to pick ccTLD as your bread and butter.
🔓If you didn’t receive an email from “Have I been pwned?” last week, well congratulations, but information of 31 million accounts was leaked in a breach as part of an attack on the Internet Archive.
✨ AGI Digest
🧮 Anthropic introduced its Batch API where devs can send batches of up to 10k queries. Each batch is processed in less than 24 hours and costs 50% less than standard API calls. Before this, OpenAI was the only major provider of such a batching API at a large enough scale, so it is good to have some competitive optionality now.
💻 OpenAI released MLE-Bench, a new benchmark to measure how well AI agents perform at ML engineering tasks. It of 75 ML engineering-related competitions sourced from Kaggle and their new o1-preview model with AIDE scaffolding achieves at least the level of a Kaggle bronze medal in 16.9% of competitions.
🌐 Prime Intellect announced INTELLECT-1, the first-ever decentralized training of a 10B model allowing anybody to contribute to it through the platform right now and later on also with their hardware. INTELLECT-1 will be fully open source, including the training framework and dataset.
🚏 You can now access Xai’s Grok-2 and Grok-2-mini via OpenRouter at the tongue-in-cheek (but also high) prices of $4.2/M for input and $6.9/M for output for both models. Before this, you’d either have to get access to the Enterprise API or play around with the chat interface via X Premium.
🪰 Researchers, for the first time have created a complete map of the neural connections of the common fruit fly brain. Also known as a “connectome”, this is the largest and most complete one of an adult animal ever created and shows how far we have come from 2021 when only 15% of its brain had been mapped. You can explore it yourself on their interactive site.
⚡️ StackBlitz launched bolt.new, a powerful in-browser AI web development agent. It's not just like v0, but instead, it's like v0 + Claude + Devin + of course Sandbox. Stackblitz leveraged their "WebContainers" in the best way possible with this.
🔐 0x Digest
🐂 ETF Research analyst at Bloomberg, James Seyffart spoke at Permissionless about maybe he was too bullish on ETH ETF and the use case of Ethereum is unclear, especially when compared to Bitcoin, which people understand is digital gold.
⚡ Paradigm invested $20M in spinoff Ithaca. CTO of Paradigm Georgios will act as CEO of Ithaca. The main idea behind the new company is to accelerate the crypto frontier and guess what they already have an L2 from the future built on top of reth, which they call Odyssey.
⛓️ Uniswap launched Unichain, an Ethereum L2 designed for DeFi, leaving everyone out there in awe, as this was not in people’s bingo card for this year. It is a Superchain (i.e. built on OP Stack and open-source) and has a roadmap to make it a modular TEE-based builder and validation network. [More details]
📦 RISC Zero announced Steel 1.0, a production-ready EVM smart contract execution prover. The main value props that they sell are that Steel unlocks boundless application runtime, without rollups, without centralization, without re-writing your smart contracts, and without writing ZK circuits. Here’s an example.
💳 Crypto on Stripe is officially back, allowing US businesses to accept USDC from customers and get USD in their accounts. They’ll charge 1.5% of the transaction amount in USD. The update has already been rolled out to thousands of businesses. And here are the docs if you are looking to integrate this.
🏷️ Google officially integrated ENS to search, which reminded Vitalik of EIP-7708 to emit a log on all ETH transfers, making all transactions seamlessly indexable.
👻 The multi-chain but Solana native wallet Phantom now supports Coinbase’s L2 Base.
🛠️ Dev & Design Digest
📱A new React framework popped up, unlike a gazillion others you know, this one is different, it is the One (pun intended). This allows you to develop cross-platform (web and mobile) apps as fast as just one platform, leveraging Vite. It’s not a “write once, run anywhere” type of framework, rather your file’s extension decides its compilation target for example
.ios.tsxor.web.tsx. This is developed by the creators of Tamagui, who built One out of our experience at Uniswap.🖐️ The Gradio team released Gradio 5 addressing several issues that had been voiced around a lot by the devs, the most important of them being faster load times, improved design, support for real-time streaming, and an experimental AI Playground where you can use AI to generate or modify Gradio app.
🌐 Wasmer 4.4 allows you to compile C programs directly from JavaScript or any browser to Wasm. This is a big milestone in their aim to run any program in Wasm.
What brings us to awe 😳
♟️ A chess-playing machine constructed in 1770 called The Turk, which appeared to be able to play a strong game of chess against a human opponent, remained mysterious on how it works for more than 85 years, and the secrets of the hoax were revealed after the machine was destroyed.
🛌 For the first time, two people did their first ever “chat” in dreams. Through special equipment, the two participants, both in a state of lucid dreaming, exchanged a simple message while they were asleep. Inception IRL is not far, baby!
🦚 There are more AI slop than actual images when you search for “baby peacock” on Google Images.
Brace yourself for more AI slop spread around the internet 🦠 You thought only humans could sense the change in seasons (and hence come up with funny stuff like DST)? Well, time to say goodbye to that homo sapien ego because it turns out organisms as dumb and short-lived as single-celled bacteria can also anticipate the approach of cold weather and prepare for it.
Today I (we) Learnt 📑
👨🏻💼 Fun fact: When Geoffrey Hinton, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics recently, worked at Google, they couldn’t figure out what title to give him so they just called him an intern, briefly in 2012 (The intern fr fr!)
🏑 In contrast to common perception, hockey is not India's national sport. A student filed RTI back in 2020 and the government replied they haven’t declared any sport as the national game.
🌿 Yerba Buena means"good herb" in Spanish, referring to several aromatic plants, including mint. Also, it was San Francisco's original name.
🧼 The term "soap opera" originated from radio dramas sponsored by soap manufacturers. The term was preceded by "horse opera", a derogatory term for low-budget Westerns.
🤝 You have read ~50% of Nibble, the following section brings tools out from the wild.
What we have been consuming 🔖
🫛 Photopea: A completely open and in-browser Photoshop alternative that packs almost all its features.
🪗 Podyssey and PodQuest: AI-powered search engine and discover tools designed specifically around podcasts
🦀 Rust needs an extended standard library by Sylvain, an urge to simplify Rust for the masses so that devs don’t write unmaintainable code.
🔤 Font sensei: a Google fonts picker categorized by tag names.
Builders’ Nest 🛠️
🧽 git-absorb: git commit
--fixup, but automatic🗃️ garn: a build tool and environment manager that replaces justfiles/makefiles, docker, and the annoying parts of READMEs.
🦦 river.ts: Easy, Composable, and type-safe Server-Sent Events (SSE).
🪓 fetch-in-chunks: A utility for fetching large files in chunks with support for parallel downloads and progress tracking.
Meme of the week 😌
Off-topic reads/watches 🧗
🚀 Mark Zuckerberg’s email asking to “ship the app” in context to an Instagram competitor photos app that Facebook was building at that time.
🤖 Machines of Loving Grace, an essay by Dario Amodei (the CEO of Anthropic) has a hopeful and measured take on the next 5-10 years of AI.
💰 Everything costs by Seth on three kinds of costs and what people get wrong about them.
🎯 Say it. Do it. Repeat by Garry Tan. A 𝕏eet telling on how to achieve dreams.
Wisdom Bits 👀
“If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up someplace else.”
— Yogi Berra
Wallpaper of the week 🌁
🌌 Grab the week’s wallpaper at wow.nibbles.dev (straight from Nibbler A’s lens 📸)
Weekly Standup 🫠
Nibbler P had a potpourri for a week filled with work, reading books, watching anime, and ending it all in a festive mood with Durga Puja.
Nibbler A had a builder’s week, ending with some fun outdoor activities, he did utilize his camera to capture some scenic views after a while.
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