#91
Apple rings a bell, finemath, Ember from Goodfire, Qwen goes QvQ, Base(d) UI, Lovalce's Note G, MOODENG got ETH-opted, EU Fuds USDT, why 0 after 9?, Ghostty, pdfslick, clay flop era, Taxonomy & more
🌞 Buenos Tardes and here’s the 91st, the last Nibble edition of 2024 (a tetrahedral number, btw!).
🥂 We hope you end 2024 on a high note (not that one 🌿, you madlad!) and continue to climb higher in 2025 (it’s a perfect square year 😭).
📰 Read #91 on Substack for the best formatting
🎧 You can also listen to the podcast version of Powered by NotebookLM
What’s Happening 📰
🔔 3 years after Google shipped a Google Nest Doorbell, there are reports that Apple is developing a video doorbell with Face ID. This would be a Home automation and security segment that would be new for the company making most of its revenue from Airpods and iPhone sales.
✨ AGI Digest
Just when we thought the crazy AI Shipmas was finally over, Santa revealed some surprises he had been saving until the end.
⚓️ Model and Dataset Drops
🧮 HuggingFace released finemath, a 148GB dataset containing over 34B tokens (FineMath-3+) and 54B tokens (FineMath-3+ with InfiMM-WebMath-3+) of mathematical educational content filtered from CommonCrawl. The dataset was curated by training a mathematical content classifier using annotations generated by LLama-3.1-70B-Instruct. They also released FineMath-4+, a subset of FineMath-3+ with 9.6B tokens, 6.7M documents of higher quality with detailed explanations. Models trained on this dataset perform better on GSM8k and MATH.
💭 Right after we were basking in the OAI and Google’s releases in the weeks leading to Christmas, Open-Source got a big present from Alibaba — the Qwen QvQ, an open-weight vision reasoning model built on top of Qwen2-VL-72B, making it the most capable open-source reasoning model standing almost shoulder-to-shoulder with the OpenAI’s o1.
Source: Qwen Blog 🐳 And Christmas was still not over because the very next day, Deepseek released the weights of DeepSeek-V3 (they had been testing it in their official API before) which is much larger (671B MoE parameters and 37B activated parameters) and much faster (60 tok/sec) with a new architecture while being just as competitive in pricing with $0.27/M input tokens ($0.07/M with cache hits) and $1.10/M output tokens (btw these prices would be applicable after Feb 8, until now, you can get V3 at the same prices as the previous V2.5). We’d urge you to go through their paper which has gems of infrastructure details.
🔥 Goodfire launched Ember (really appreciate their naming sense), an API/SDK that allows identifying model “features” extracted from SAE to steer the model behavior positively/negatively in a particular direction to shape the AI model’s capabilities and response. You may try it on platform.goodfire.ai, with support for Llama 3.3 70B and Llama 3.1 8B currently.
📑 Fireworks AI launched Document Inlining, which “bridges the modality gap” by using a more capable text-only LLM to do graphical/document-based vision tasks. They achieve this by parsing the input images/PDFs via a compound system which then routes it in the text form to the more capable LLM.
𝕏 XAI’s Grok is finally rolling out as an independent iOS App in some countries starting this week (Folks from Australia got it and it has started rolling out in India for us now too!)
🔐 0x Digest
🤷♂️ In this week’s edition of “Never a dull day in Crypto”,
🤡 The IRS confirms staking rewards are taxable. One investor filed a lawsuit against this tax, and many are discussing whether the rewards should be taxed immediately or if and when converted into fiat. (while we are still stuck on what the fuck, how do you tax that?)
🧱 BlackRock sold $188.7M worth of Bitcoin and it worried some, while others speculated that maybe it was circulated back to Ethereum ETFs, based on the ETF price fluctuations.
🚫 EU mandates to delist USDT from the exchanges by the end of the year (yes literally 1 day). It turned out that USDT is non-compliant with the EU's new MiCA regulation. wow, so a stablecoin is non-compliant, hmm.. maybe regulations are a mistake indeed.
🐧 $PENGU (Pudgy Penguins), the shitcoin which was launched ~2 weeks ago, flipped the giants in terms of market cap reaching $2.6B, on the way crossing TIA (Celestia), OP (Optimism) and BONK (🤷♂️). But as every ~thing~ coin that goes up comes down, there is a good chance that by the time you are reading this, it has gone below or around $2B, dropping the market cap ranks.
🦛 We got adoption (before adaption 😭) in Crypto, ETH Daddy Vitalik adopted Moo Deng and her family for 2 years, donating 88 ETH for their welfare. This course, unsurprisingly shot up the prices of MOODENG. Something is going on with cryptic nerds and animals.
🪄 Mark Beylin shared all the thoughts that have kept him up at night for the last few years in the form of a post on the ETH Magician forum - “Ethereum’s Social Layer is Broken”. This post sparked a discussion among the people in the community, he calls out that “with protocol growing stronger, the social layer is getting weak”, and people are building sub-groups, and Mafia within the community and not aligned with the core values of Ethereum (read Decentralization) anymore. Mark really asked a question out loud “Is decentralization with us in this room, guys?”
🛠️ Dev & Design Digest
🍽️ Material UI launched Base UI, which is literally base(d). It’s an open-source library of accessible, unstyled UI components, i.e. BYOS (bring your own styles). Finally, someone is shipping UI libraries that need users to add style, we were almost convinced that we’d lose the variety of web to shadcn.
🪄 Converting JS to native or Wasm has always been a task of wizards, with many developer tools coming regularly to aid developers, but guess what? none of them are good enough yet. Tzvetan wrote an article titled “Compiling Full-Featured JavaScript to Wasm”, and he uses Static Hermes by Meta to show that. Meta developed Hermes originally as an engine optimized for the fast start-up of React Native applications, but let’s see if we can use this for this noble act.
⚡ Avinash from TursoDB a summary of his talk on “How bloom filters made SQLite 10x faster”, back in 2022 with SQLite v3.38.0, sharing how they used Bloom Filter to cache the values of predicate before doing a nested loop over tables to join them. If you want to read about Bloom Filter, here’s a post by our friend Sam.
🤝 You have read ~50% of Nibble. The following section brings some fun stuff and tools out from the wild.
What Brings Us T(w)o Awe 😳
🧙♂️Talking about Sam, he’s sort of a wizard when it comes to simplifying a concept with his amazing interactive blog posts, this time he chose to make Turing Machines and Turing Complete easy for us, in his blog post “Turing Machines”. bro went over and above to explain with simulation what is computed and how turning tapes work.
👩💻 You might have heard that Ada Lovelace is the first programmer that she wrote the first computer program ever or that she ain’t the one (yeah, it’s like a fight on the internet). But do you know what did the program do? This article by Sinclair on Two-bit history explores what Ada was up to, what she wrote in her Note G, and how her strong mathematical foundation led to the first program ever being about calculating the eighth Bernoulli Number.
📸 Remember the pictures people with body image issues used to put as their profile pictures? The one where it’s the scenic background and they are facing their back towards the camera. Well, it’s called Rückenfigur, a German word derived from Rücken (back) and Figur (figure), which translates to "figure seen from behind."
⌨️ How the initial Typewriters and their evolution shaped our modern keyboard and Why is 0 placed after 9 and not before 1 on our keyboards? (shared by
). It’s weird for WAviator 1 to post such videos, but hey! who cares?
What We Have Been Trying 🔖
🖼️ QuickPic: A bunch of free and simple tools for images by Theo.
👻 Ghostty: a fast zero-config terminal emulator that uses platform-native UI and GPU acceleration (basically terminal with GPU acc and also supports Ligatures by default.). If you are a cool kid, you can also build it from the source. Oh! and yes, it’s written in Zig by Mitchell Hashimoto, the founder of Hashicorp.
📠 sacred.computer: A super simple and retro-themed monospace React component library for cool anime-pfp anon accounts. (maybe Nibbler A will finally rewrite his website after 6 years now?)
👍 pipx: a tool to help you install and run end-user applications written in Python. It's roughly similar to macOS's
brew, JavaScript's npx, and Linux'sapt.
Builders’ Nest 🛠️
🪟 termo: a simple terminal emulator for the browser. It is a wrapper on top of the Xterm.
🏷️ annotateai: Automatically annotate papers using LLMs.
🧱 clay: (short for C Layout) is a high-performance 2D UI layout library. (yess!) And you can compile it with clang to a 15kb uncompressed .wasm file.
📝 pdfslick: a library that enables interaction with PDF documents in React, SolidJS, Svelte, and JavaScript apps. It's built on top of Mozilla's PDF.js and utilizes Zustand.
Meme of The Week 😌
Off-topic Reads/Watches 🧗
🐥 Actively Learning Languages by
, where she bashes the little Duolingo bird (just like many of our friends), calling it a good streak app, but does it help (from personal experience, not much)? She shares how she approaches actively learning languages & suggests using Language Transfer for learning Spanish if you are serious. (our friend suggested it about 3 months back too.)⚰️ Always Go to the Funeral by Deirdre Sullivan, a heartfelt piece she wrote explaining you should practice doing the right thing even when you really, really don't feel like it, or when you don’t have to.
🗂️ Taxonomy as a Service by Seth, a short read explaining how the world demands taxonomy (i.e. organization/classification or labeling) no matter whether you like it or not.
😕 I’m in my flop era is a beautiful video about the struggles of a creative person (a filmmaker in this case) with their career and personal life. If you’re struggling and feel like you too are in your "flop era", then embrace it tightly and go try new things that make you step outside your comfort zone.
Wisdom Bits 👀
“Be humble after but not during the action.”
― Ernest Hemingway
Wallpaper of The Week 🌁
🌌 Grab the week’s wallpaper at wow.nibbles.dev.
Weekly Standup 🫠
Nibbler P is busy with some home chores this weekend and on the side, he has been RUNNING as if his life depended on it every day. He was also caught saying “new PR every day, " which brought joy to both his CEO and Health Coach.
Nibbler A is in traveler mode again, meeting some closed ones for New Year’s Eve. By the time you might be reading this, he should’ve already missed 2 cardio sessions.
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