#87

Zoom.ai, D-Link Nuked, PAN 2.0, Claude's MCP, Open Reasoning w/ QwQ, Novel audio w/ Fugatto, No Rewards for EU, EF's Summer Intern, Expirable ERC-20, S3 conditional writes, Mythic, Electrobun & more

👋🏻 Welcome to the 87th!
Cheer up! We’re back shipping on weekends so that you get emails before Monday Blues.

let’s dive right in

📰 Read #87 on Substack for the best formatting
🎧 You can also listen to the podcast version of Powered by NotebookLM (12 mins)

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🎄 Advent of Code 2024 starts today!

What’s happening 📰

• ⚠️ GitHub Actions is introducing some breaking changes, you might want to take a look at, namely - the migration of ubuntu-latest labels to ubuntu 24, Artifacts v3 closing out and new rate limits on repo hooks.

• 🤡 DLink’s Routers and NAS are hit by severe vulnerabilities and thanks to time (which moves only forward, YET), these devices have reached EoL¹, which puts DLink off the hook. So, the quick fix suggested by them is to “get a new router”.

• ✨ Zoom pulled a Sean Parker and dropped the “Video” from their name, doing a complete re-introduction of the company as “Zoom Communications Inc” over the old "Zoom Video Communications Inc.". Zoom is now an AI-first workspace communication tools company.

  

• 🪪 Indian Ministry of Finance approved a new project PAN 2.0 at a cost of ₹1,435 crore. The project is supposed to make it seamless for citizens to perform all PAN/TAN-related operations on a single platform, basically linking it further down the system. (wtaf! how does one get such contracts? asking for a friend)

✨ AGI Digest

• 💈 Anthropic released a few cool things

  • Model Context Protocol (MCP), is a new standard for connecting AI assistants to the systems where data lives. With this new feature, you can build things like Claude ordering groceries for you. They’ve also released a repository of open-sourced MCP servers for reference.

  • Custom Styles for all users, allowing one to tailor Claude's responses to your unique needs and workflows.

    

• ⚓ Model Drops

  • 🤯 Alibaba’s Qwen released QwQ (UwU Qwen with Questions), an experimental research model that can compete with (as per their evals, it can beat) OpenAI’s o1 in logical reasoning. The model is “QwQ-32B-Preview” and as the name suggests it has ~32.5B parameters and can hold context of up to 32k words. This is also the first open-source reasoning model. You can run it locally by pulling from Ollama or wherever you like. Previously with DeepSeek’s R1-Lite and now with Qwen it’s not it’s outright 🇺🇸 vs 🇨🇳 in the AI race out there.

    

    Source: Qwen QwQ Announcement Post

  • ⛴️ Voyage AI shipped voyage-3 & voyage-3-lite, with the primary claim being outperforming “OpenAI v3 small” in all the evaluations, having smaller embedding dimensions, improved retrieval accuracy, and lower costs. On top of that for Voyager Series 3, the first 200M tokens on the house (free).

    

    Source: Voyage AI announcement post

  • 🔊 Nvidia Research released Fugatto (Foundational Generative Audio Transformer Opus 1), or as they call it, “World’s Most Flexible Sound Machine,” which can generate or transform any mix of music, voices, and sounds described with prompts using any combination of text and audio files.
    It can generate sounds never heard or produced before too. It will change how movies produce background sounds of some imaginary scenes.

  • 🤗 HuggingFace released SmolVLM, a new family of 2B small vision language models. The family has 3 models as usual Base, Synthetic, and Instruct and HF claims that these models are SOTA for their memory footprint and it claims to be cheaper and better than all the existing smol vision models. These smol models possibly unlock bigger things for the multi-modal LLM future.

    

    GPU RAM comparison with sister models

  • 📈 In this season of outperforming all previous models, Allen AI also released OLMo 2, a fully open language model, which is said to outperform other fully open models and competes with open-weight models like Llama 3.1 8B.

• ⛓️‍💥 Researchers at DotTXT AI published a new research paper Let Me Speak Freely answering a pressing question “Does Structured Outputs hurt LLM performance?”. The TL;DR of the paper is “If and only if used correctly (i.e. good prompts) it improves the performance”.

  

  Source: The linked paper.

• ✨ Not sure if you were paying attention but 𝕏 subscription is worth every penny² as you get Grok & 𝕏 AI shipping consistently. X AI just shipped all the missing features like longer context, image understanding, web search results, PDF Upload, analysis, and one very unique & early stage feature → personalization.

• ♟️ Apart from being one of the main sponsors of the 2024 World Chess Championships, Google released a free and unique chess game, GenChess (not available in India, turn on VPNs). In this game, you can design your and your opponent’s pieces using some little instructions to AI and then play the game as usual.

  

  an attempt to generate pieces with GenChess

• 🛕 The Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams (TTD) Trust Board has decided to use AI to reduce darshan times to 2-3 hours, which some people reported to be 30 hours on an odd day. Nibbler A got nostalgic as he worked on a URL shortening service for them back in 2021 with Jio.

🔐 0x Digest

• 📈 Amidst the bull run, people are buying ETFs left and right, and Bitwise (early to Crypto Index Fund game) filed for an ETF including 10 Crypto Index Funds, making it even easier for folks to have a bucket of crypto-currencies in their investments.

• 🪃 Hackers stole $71M worth of crypto in November, making the yearly sum of robbed money in hacks to ~$1.5B. The risks and rewards go hand-in-hand.

• 💧 [Claim] Testnet Faucet: 1000 MekETH (Mekong Testnet ETH) if you attended DevCon 2024, but just log in with your ticket here.

• 💼 The Ethereum Foundation announced its first formal summer internship program in 2025 fostering the next generation of Ethereum developers and researchers.

• 🪙 Thanks to European Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulations, Coinbase can not give USDC rewards to Europeans anymore, leading to the sunsetting of USDC Rewards in EEA.

• ⌛An interesting but useful ERC-7818 dropped, proposing Expirable ERC-20 tokens. If this gets implemented, we might have a standard for time-sensitive tokens.

🛠️ Dev & Design Digest

• 🆕 Shipping never stops in TypeScript Town, Microsoft released TypeScript 5.7, and the major changes are:

  • 🏁 As always more checks with AST, now they can detect never-initialized variables in function branches too.

    

  • 🌴 TypeScript Servers in editors will now be able to search ancestor configuration files (tsconfig.json) for project ownership, instead of stopping on the first found config file.

  • ⚡ Support was NodeJS/V8 compile caching in entry point shims was added, which sped up tsc with node by 2.5x.

• 🚀 Bun v1.1.35 is out and they are in shipping mode, as usual, squashing 46 bugs (introducing a few maybe?), the binary size is not reduced by 6MB, and one of part and parcel of this release 🥁 → “Native support of musl” is shipped, in turn adding native support and smooth onboarding with Alpine Linux.

• 🦕 Talking about JavaScript runtimes, Deno’s CEO was busy filling a petition to free the trademark of JavaScript from Oracle.

• 🪣 Amazon S3 adds new functionality for conditional writes. You can validate the object’s old content using ETag of an object, this will help prevent unintentional simultaneous overwrites of the same object.

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What brings us to awe 😳

• 🤯 Right before we were going to ship this edition a WhatsApp group sparked discussion on how ChatGPT refuses to say “David Mayer” (it’s just a ChatGPT client-side application issue, since APIs work fine, see images). We also checked other LLM friends and none seem to glitch like ChatGPT. And of course, we discussed it because there is a David Mayer in the Rothschild family, and we all have heard the conspiracy theory that the Rothschilds control the world.

  

  Proof that APIs (bottom) work, but ChatGPT (top) doesn’t.

• 🖥️ Josh Tumath from BBC wrote about How a BBC navigation bar component broke depending on which external monitor it was on if you are into interesting bugs stories behind their RCA. Then this is a crispy one for you.

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Today I (we) Learnt 📑

• 🇷🇺 Russia is a big land mass and we do know that they have 11 timezones. A tweet by Amazing Maps shared that you can drive for 149 hours (~6 days) and still be in Russia

  

  Source: 𝕏

• 📸 You might have noticed the DCIM folder in your phones or prefix on the camera images. The “DCIM” folder stands for “Digital Camera IMages.” It’s a special folder name chosen to keep all your photos in one place and make sure that every device (like cameras, phones, and computers) can easily find them. This agreed-upon directory years ago, makes it easy for galleries and similar apps to know where to look for images.

• 🙆🏻 Eponyms are the words that are named after a person. Some surprising examples are Jacuzzi, Dielsel, Sandwich, etc.

• ☺️ In our weekly dose of etymology, we have Vorfreude, a delightful German word for the pleasure of anticipation. It combines vor, meaning "before" or "in advance", and Freude, meaning "happiness". It's the joy from the anticipation of joy. (we can draw analogies but it’s a PG13 newsletter)

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🤝 You have read ~50% of Nibble, the following section brings tools out from the wild.

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What we have been trying 🔖

• 🎮 Mythic: An open-source macOS game launcher with the ability to play Windows games through a custom implementation of Apple's Game Porting Toolkit. (it’s in alpha, and requires you to log in to your Epic account)

  

  it seems they do set a Windows filesystem container though? 😵‍💫

• 🚬 Intenty: a mobile app for those of us (addicts) who find ourselves doomscrolling unintentionally, intenty fixes this by asking you “What’s your intent?” every time you unlock your device. (2 days in, got busted 100 times a minute, and found a loophole, when someone calls it lets you in)

  

  The reminder notification from Intenty bugs you if you exceed 5 minutes after unlocking.

• 👊🏻 Slack Attack: a pack of 6 unique and unassuming emojis to express your truest feelings. (use at your own risk)

• 🎵 Eleven Reader: Bring any book, article, PDF, newsletter, or text to life with ultra-realistic AI narration in one app. This is Eleven Lab’s take on NotebookLM.

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Builders’ Nest 🛠️

• 🖥️ screen-sharing: Share your screen with one simple room code. No downloads or sign-ups are required. (in case you are still sharing your screen with humans)

• 🎯 vince: Self-hosted alternative to Google Analytics (since you know GA4, has been out there for 1.5 years and it’s still confusing)

• 🌳 jsontr.ee: a tool to effortlessly visualize JSON structures as dynamic tree diagrams.

• 🐰 Electrobun: a very early-stage, framework that uses bun and zig for native bindings to create cross-platform applications. (it’s a PoC at this point).

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Meme of the week 😌

somewhere on 𝕏

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Off-topic reads/watches 🧗

• 😸 Sincerity is expected by Seth highlights how “Social media has rewarded people for bringing a post-reality mindset to places where sincerity is expected” and for this exact reason, it’s more important and scarce (you tell us?) than ever.

• 😵‍💫 Found this gem from Jan 2022, this is so relatable if you are (good for you if you aren’t) an Indian Adult living “Double Lives”.

• 🥣 Another Typical Article About Sabbatical — Or Is It? by Jorge Galindo. Another highly relatable and helpful read if you are in or planning a sabbatical, bottom line is, own your time use it wisely, and stop conforming to societal biases. (Nibbler A can confirm a lot of this post, 1 month in)

• ✊🏻 The Gracious Hustle by

  Harnidh Kaur
  , talking about how “Privilege” is like that great power, that comes with responsibility. (also, you can relate it to the Sabbatical article above)

  The Gracious Hustle

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Wisdom Bits 👀

“The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely”
― Carl Jung

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Wallpaper of the week 🌁

🌌 Grab the week’s wallpaper at wow.nibbles.dev.

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Weekly Standup 🫠

• Nibbler P is on the run towards higher AQI states to meet his high IQ frens and experience some vorfreude. Sources say he is the breeze of fresh air NCR needed in these crucial times ← Written by Nibbler A.

• Nibbler A is finally back at his work desk after 3 weeks of impromptu trips, weddings (not impromptu), and whatnot. Of course, he has a postcard 💌 for you and a pic with “Sky Full of Stars” (in his attempt to capture the rising Milky Way 🌌, but hey you can spot Jupiter and Polaris). He plans to keep building on some ideas and write stuff on his scratchpad for the rest of the week.

If you liked what you just read, recommend us to a friend who’d love this too 👇🏻

1. EoL is End of Life, usually used to define that a product will no longer receive updates from the vendor.

2. Okay two things here: 1. it’s not an advertisement, 2. we got X Premium at a 50% discount, so 🤷🏻‍♂️