#92

Blinkit's 108, Nvidia's new chips, USDT's blacklist, China's new forex rules, Bun's S3, Doom Captcha, JS is Verb, Turkey's trips, dragon tyrant, web-check & more

👋🏻 Wishing you a very happy new year & welcome to the 92nd!

🥂

While your feed might be full of “Predictions for 2025”, we definitely made it to our first delayed edition (~2 days, but DELAYED is DELAYED!)

📰 Read #92 on Substack for the best formatting
🎧 You can also listen to the podcast version of Powered by NotebookLM

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What’s Happening 📰

• 🚑 Blinkit, one of the top quick hyperlocal delivery apps in India is now launching Basic Life Support (BLS) Ambulance service through their app. Each ambulance would be loaded with oxygen cylinders, an AED, a stretcher, a monitor, a suction machine, and essential emergency medicines and injections; and would have a paramedic, an assistant, and a trained driver on it. As of now, this is operational in Gurugram with a total of 5 ambulances.
  It’s good to see private players like Blinkit—who already had the technical expertise and resources to pull this off because of their current infrastructure—coming into paramedic operations because with India’s current aim of having at least 1 BLS ambulance per 1 lakh people means that the initiative offered by Blinkit can impact 5 lakh people get better BLS services in case of emergencies. Huge W if you ask us!

• 🚬 Talking about India, Bryan Johnson (wanna-be-immortal Chad) shared some advice and statistics showing that India can save more lives by fixing the air quality over working on finding a cure for cancer. (these are facts, but for some reason feel like peak insult)

✨ AGI Digest

The New Year’s week has been a mostly quiet one for AI. Is this the calm before the storm?

• ⚓️ Model and Benchmark Drops

  • 💥 It’s the first week of 2025 and we already have another thinking LLM from Rubik's AI. The Sonus-1 family of LLMs contains Mini, Air, Pr,o and Pro with Reasoning (I wonder what inspired the naming scheme). Always good to have more OSS alternatives.

    

    Source: Sonos-1 blog

  • 💭 Talking of Thinking Models, we got SmallThinker 3B, a fine-tuning of Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct. Apart from being a small reasoning model for edge deployments, it can also act as a draft model for QwQ-32B-Preview, for which the authors reported an impressive 70% speedup in llama.cpp.

  • 🧮 Folks at Wolfram released the Wolfram LLM Benchmark, evaluating the different models’ ability to convert English-language specifications to Wolfram Language code. While almost all top models get >99% accuracy in the syntax, only Llama 3.1 405B Instruct, New 3.5 Sonnet, and o1-preview (and hopefully o1 too) achieve correct functionality > 50% of the time, that too by a very low margin.

    

    Source: Wolfram LLM Benchmark Site

• 🔁 Can LLMs write better code if you keep asking them to “write better code”? The answer is an unsurprising yes… but it would be a better use of your time and resources to use better prompt engineering to boost the performance of your code.

  

  Source: The above blogpost

• 🍪 It’s CES 2025 and NVIDIA unloaded a lot of interesting stuff during its event. What excites us the most are its new consumer chip lineups.

  • 🕹️ RTX 50 series of GPU with some crazy TOPS (trillion operations per second)/price ratios!
    RTX 5090 $1,999 3,400 AI TOPS
    RTX 5080 $999 1,800 AI TOPS
    RTX 5070 Ti $749 1,400 AI TOPS
    RTX 5070 $549 1,000 AI TOPS

    

    

  • 📦 Project DIGITS, a worthy competitor of the Mac Mini is a small $3,000 computer-in-a-box with a GB10 Blackwell chip capable of a petaflop of fp4 computing and 128 GB memory which means you can easily run a 200B parameter model (in fp4) on it locally easily!

    

🔐 0x Digest

• 🇨🇳 China doubles down on its anti-crypto stance by ordering banks to flag and report risky forex transactions. Despite being the second biggest holder of BTC (thanks to illegal activities), the country wants to regulate it all and track it down to the individual when it comes to buying digital tokens. If the dragon is scared of it, it must be something, huh?

• 💰 Daniel, Tech Partner at Eden Block, unveiled an interesting way in which smart crypto might have gotten tricked into extracting value and ending up getting scammed. He got a suggestion from Claude for a private key and naturally loaded that private key in his wallet (yes, it was a test key from Anvil) but he saw that it has some USDT, turns out the account was blacklisted (yes USDT contract have an isBlacklisted thing & c’mon it’s one of the test keys).
  The neat trick is, that a sMaRt VaLuE eXtRaCtor would think why not send some ETH and extract the USDT in this honeypot, no? But before they realize that it’s not possible, an automated transaction gets triggered transferring their ETH to another account.

• 🌐 Karthik introduced anon.world, an anonymous social network where posts are made with zk-based credentials. It can support creds beyond balances, actions beyond posting, and tons of communities. This is designed to be anonymous Reddit (it’s a skill issue if you can’t remain anon on Reddit, but anyways!)

• 🎤 If you have been living under the rock (intended), you might already know that Crypto is mostly driven by narrative over the product or what you ship and this fact makes it important to track how narratives shifted in 2024. Turns out “AI-fication” happened, and agents are the buzz of the town.

  

  Source: Sandra from Kaito on Twitter

🛠️ Dev & Design Digest

• ⏮️ ComfyDeploy wrote about “Why you don’t need NextJS” (well, we’ve been yelling this for a while too). Unlike us, screaming in the void, they went ahead and migrated their dashboard from Next → plain old React (TanStack Router + Rspack), and omg sources say that their team’s happiness index shot up. The build time dropped from 3 minutes to 18 seconds. No wonder they did lose some flexibility like having server and client code in the same file, Vercel’s ISO-grade caching, but hey they actually kinda tasted freedom here.
  💡 The most common prediction for 2025 we’ve read is “SPAs will make a comeback”.

• ✨ Cassidy wrote about how JavaScript is the verb in The beautiful sentence that is the Web, and how you should add it “swaad anusaar” (according to taste) to tune it as per your need. There’s never too much JavaScript on the web.

• 🪣 Bun added first-class support for S3, zero deps, right out of the box. You can upload, download, stream, and pre-sign files like it’s your filesystem. S3 is the new fs.

  

  Source: Bun’s post

• 🔮 While Bun is making moves, Node ain’t holding back too. Starting v23.6.0, Node is going to support TypeScript natively (i.e. node index.ts will work). But but, as you might guess, it’s just stripping types and has some limitations like it’ll not typecheck and you still will have to transpile for good cold starts.

• ⏩ In case you haven’t moved away from Recoil, Meta’s state management library for React apps yet (move to Jotai if you haven't), the repository has been archived on 1st Jan 2025. One of the last maintainers said out loud that nobody would take charge as this doesn’t count in perf reviews.

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

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What Brings Us T(w)o Awe 😳

• 🔫 Guillermo (CEO, Vercel) was shipping while most of us were partying, our homie shipped Doom Captcha, i.e. play DOOM® to prove you're human. And of course, like any other CEO building in this economy, Bro used his home stack v0 and Next. He used Emscripten to compile a minimal port of Doom to WebAssembly and play with JS.

  • Between the time of us writing and shipping this, bro shipped another app made from v0 “Pixelate Me”, an image pixelator.

• 💡 Claude gave somebody the idea for a product (and helped them with it). The app is now #1 on Product Hunt! (it’s so over for ideas guys too?)

  

  Source: The above-linked Reddit post

• 🦃 When Shakespeare wrote, “What’s in a name?”, he clearly did not think of Turkeys! Merely tracing back the origin of this bird’s name takes you across four continents!

  

  Source: r/dataisbeautiful

Source: Posted by @btbytes on Twitter

• 🌐 There’s an HTML attribute translate=’no’ to opt out of automatic localization or tell the browser to not touch that element. This comes in handy when names or usernames have words that can be localized in some other languages, while they aren’t meant to be. [Source: Stefan’s TILs]

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What We Have Been Trying 🔖

• 🗺️ CartoSVG: an easy way to create lightweight, beautiful & interactive SVG maps.

• 📇 PDF Tab Renamer: A Chrome extension for renaming tabs to show PDF names from common providers

• 🛍️ 21st.dev: an open source community registry of React UI components to publish minimal Tailwind & Radix UI components that can be installed via npx shadcn.

• 📖 Google Scholar PDF Reader: A new PDF reading look in Chrome that helps you follow references, skim the outline, jump to figures, cite, and save.

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Builders’ Nest 🛠️

• 🌐 web-check: a tool to get comprehensive, on-demand open source intelligence (OSINT) for any website.

• 🤖 languine: CLI tool to automate localization of your application powered by AI.

• 🦴 skellyCSS: A lightweight CSS framework to quickly implement skeletons into your projects.

• 🦇 batman-comic.css: A CSS utility-class library to generate Batman comics with HTML and CSS.

  

  the one we generated using the same CSS file.

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Meme of The Week 😌

It does feel like that | Source: @yacineMTB on & from Twitter

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Off-topic Reads/Watches 🧗

• 🐉 You should The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant, a fantastic metaphorical story about [redacted]. Do not take a peek at the end, I repeat, do not take a peek at the end and you’ll be in for a pleasant surprise about the interpretation of the story!

• 😣 Let's face it, software development has a lot of thinking involved, and lots and lots of that thinking often spirals up into confusion and a feeling of being overwhelmed. Cognitive load is what matters by Artem Zakirullin talks exactly about this and how we should strive to reduce any cognitive load above and beyond what is intrinsic to the work we do.

• 💭 Intuitions - On Thinking about consciousness written by @tokenbender takes you through his thoughts on what questioning sentience of the ever-advancing LLMs in a not-so-distant future sounds like.

• 🫂 Cost of Confidence by

  Ash
  , spitting some facts and good advice on how “self-esteem” is the key, let go of your insecurities anon.

  cost of confidence

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Wisdom Bits 👀

“In my whole life I've never been good at something I wasn't very interested in. It just doesn't work. There's no substitute for strong interest.”
— Charlie Munger

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Wallpaper of The Week 🌁

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

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Weekly Standup 🫠

• Nibbler A was back in BLR for a week or so, met the loved ones 🫶, and had a banger start to the year. He wrote this edition from his beloved spot (ref: Sheldon’s spot). He is gonna spend the next few days catching up with reading, anime, and chores at home, which went on pause for a week. Also, seems like he took “break a leg” quite literally.

• Nibbler P has moved into a new place recently and has been basking in the sunlight, playing with the cats around, and tapping into ancestorial energy by cutting a few branches that were going astray in the backyard. However, a callous from the woodchopping forced him to skip the gym and only go for runs the last week T_T

If you have 2 minutes, please fill out a feedback form here. Your input will help us improve “The Nibble” for you and other readers!