#94 - OpenAI does your Tasks, Jio wants to bring Web3 to masses, another framework hosts webpages, understanding in-flight entertainment & more
Tasks in sheets, o3-mini in weeds, ETH Pectra upgrade in March, WeFi's Deobank, Import Attributes coming soon, Expo launched EAS Hosting, Chrome's 102nd download, Focus w/ Raycast, Flatland & more
👋🏻 Welcome to 94th!
📰 Read #94 on Substack for the best formatting
🎧 You can also listen to the podcast version of Powered by NotebookLM
Psst… if you have a second to spare and you really want The Nibble to improve, let us know your thoughts by filling out a small questionnaire. We’ll reinforce the good parts and weed out the bad ones. 💪
Now before the blues hit you, let’s dive in…
What’s Happening 📰
⚠️ Truffle Security loves poking around Google OAuth (as shared in #39) and pointing out the repercussion with third-party services when a domain is sold. Google re-opened the ticket they opened on flaws in OAuth, leaving millions of accounts vulnerable to sensitive information leaks. But this time, Google said they are working on a fix. 👍
✨ AGI Digest
⭕️ S’more OpenAI Updates
⌛ ChatGPT now has Cron & Tasks. It can now manage and execute tasks asynchronously on your behalf — whether a one-time request or an ongoing routine! This allows ChatGPT to send notifications through desktop, web, and mobile. It is rolling out in beta to users of the Plus, Pro, and Team plans. While tasks also have web search access, we’d have loved even more access to ChatGPT projects so that you can refer it to a set of files like To-Do lists or Workout Schedules that it can automatically send you reminders of. Maybe we’ll get that someday.
🤖 If you think OpenAI is just working on the AI yapper, they also restarted working on the Robots. Caitlin from OpenAI tweeted about open roles in the Robotics team.
💭 o3-mini is out there in the wild, available to a few selected testers. The OpenAI team has finalized a version that will be out in a couple of weeks in both API and ChatGPT!
⚓️ Model Drops
👩💻 Mistral updated its code-specific Codestral model with the Codestral 25.01 update, increasing the context length to 256k and 71.4% on HumanEval (average of several languages) a ~6-point jump from its previous checkpoint. What makes this release sus is that there’s no comparison to the likes of Qwen2.5 or Qwen2.5 -Coder or DeepSeek-V3 which are currently leading the open-weights coding model, while making no hints of releasing the weights anytime soon rendering this release still as API-only. While it is indeed an impressive model, the positioning as a sub-100B parameter FIM coding model, scoring #1 in the LMSys Copilot Arena makes it feel like they are aiming for a very niche use case for this instead of being a good general coding model.
📖 JinaAI updated its 1.5B ReaderLM to v2, improving it over the last version by training it on higher-quality data and with a context length of 512K tokens. Primarily meant for HTML to Markdown and JSON, it performs at par with the big frontier models.
Source: JinaAI Announcement 👀 The Chinese Lab OpenBMB released MiniCPM-o 2.6, an 8B model that beats GPT-4o-202405 in vision, audio, and multimodal live-streaming. It can take images, video, text, and audio as inputs and provide output in both text and speech. How much more information can we contain in an 8B model? Are we even anywhere close to that limit?
Source: MiniCPM-o 2.6 HF Page 🏄♂️ Windsurf got a second major update, called the Surf 2, with support for web search + pulling in content from URLs, automated memory to learn how you write code to retain it for referencing later, and improved execution support by using the underlying IDE terminal for running commands (these used to be executed independently in a different shell before). Windsurf is the only real competition to Cursor in the Agentic AI Code editors right now and it would be fun to see what Cursor rolls out next.
🧑💻 Salesforce released SFR-Embedding-Code, a family of 400M and 2B models fine-tuned on multi-lingual multi-task code retrieval tasks with the 2B model performing #1 on the CoIR code benchmark.
📽️ Luma dropped a new generative video model Ray2, based on a new multi-modal architecture scaled to 10x compute of Ray1. The model can generate sub-10-second videos faster and with more natural movements.
📦 Misc Updates
📚 Anthropic adjusted their prompt caching to check for cache hits at previous positions automatically. Developers only need to specify cache write points in their requests. Earlier, you must specify both cache write and read in your requests. For a refresher, Anthropic’s cache writes are 25% more expensive than regular input tokens while the cache reads are 90% cheaper than the regular input tokens.
🕸️ Last week, DeepSeek released its iOS app (which is also available on Android now), and this week, Qwen released its free Web App, which offers access to both its open-weight and proprietary models. The app supports image + document upload and HTML rendering of generated code (similar to Claude artifacts). The site and its announcement mention web search, image generation (what?!), voice mode, and even video generation (WHAT???!) on the way.
🆕 Microsoft forms a new engineering organization: CoreAI – Platform and Tools. The focus of this team will be solely to integrate first-party and third-party tools in coherence building a good AI-first application stack & agents everywhere, unleashing the One Microsoft. The team will be led by Jay Parikh, who has been VPE at Meta and is an advisor at Google Venture.
🔐 0x Digest
🤝 Starting with trending of the week, Polygon partners with Jio (and ofc there is still a Team working with Flipkart) to take Web3 to the masses, it’s tough to move fast in India especially when it comes to Crypto. Polygon has done a neat job here, the deal took the effort of more than a year from both teams coming on the same page about the use cases. 🤞 may this bring the next million users to Web3, though Jio will likely start with a Point System.
🚀 Ethereum developers are aiming for the Pectra (Prague+Electra=Pectra) mainnet upgrade in March (it was supposed to be in Q4 2024). This upgrade is another important one after “The Merge” bringing changes like
Increased Effective balance for validators and increasing the max stake limit from 32 to 2048 ETH
Validator deposits moved to the execution layer making the deposits faster and more secure, complimenting this by allowing validators to trigger exits and partial withdrawals via their execution layer
And wait, the most important bit is EVM, right? We have EVM Object Format (EOF) [EIP-7692] coming in, which is a collection of EIPs bringing structure, verification, and new instructions making the EVM faster and more efficient.
🏦 WeFi launched the world’s first Deobank (yup, you guessed it right, a neo-bank with a tinge of blockchain). It’s still a little too early, but WeFi is offering things like non-custodial accounts, rewards with their native token $WFI, and have meta-optimized bridge for asset transfers to L2 and networks.
💰 Money bag movement
🌝 MoonPay acquired Helio for $175 million, Helio is a Solana-based digital currency processing platform with integrations with giants like Discord and Shopify.
👻 Phantom Wallet raised a $150M Series C at a $3B valuation, co-led by Sequoia and Paradigm. It already has 15M active wallets and $25 billion in self-custody assets.
🛠️ Dev & Design Digest
⤵️ The new ECMAScript feature “Import Attributes” (or “Import assertions” for those who remember) enables importing artifacts other than JS modules (like JSON, Wasm, CSS, etc.). The proposal (almost five years old) for this feature landed in Stage 4 in October 2024, and it is supposed to be part of ES Spec this year. Dr. Axel wrote a succinct blog explaining this feature.
⤴️ David talks about Why you shouldn’t be using
navigate(-1)in Remix/React Router. When you pass -1 in the navigate function, it is supposed to take you back to the last item in the history stack, but the tricky part is, it doesn’t just consider App’s history stack, but instead the whole browser’s history stack. And nobody wants users to leave their app unintentionally.⛴️ Expo introduced a new service in their suite called Expo Hosting (hosting service is the Endgame for any framework, if you ask me so, they made it.), for quickly deploying your web projects built using Expo Router. It gels in with their CLI and makes it easy to deploy API routes, server functions, and server-side assets. It becomes as easy as
eas deploy(this tweet shows it pretty neatly too)📱The Pragmatic Engineer published an in-depth analysis of “Cross-platform mobile development”, highlighting how most of it converges to React Native and Flutter, even after decades of frameworks being available native applications rule the respective app stores and how Meta uses React Native (good parent), but Google doesn’t have any mainstream application itself in Flutter (bad parent).
🤝 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 😳
📺 Have you ever wondered how the in-flight entertainment systems get their content? Why does the Airline name keep popping up in some titles? Are the titles edited for the airline? The video below by Simply Aviation answers all these questions. We bet you are not ready to digest the costs and efforts it takes to bring a title to your airline seat. They get movies from studios (20TB) and compress, edit and whatnot it down to what your IFE System can play (0.5-1GB).
🌏 Biocubes is an eye-opening visualization of how much everything on the earth's surface weighs and how that has changed over time. More importantly how humans have produced more mass (techno mass) than living and natural mass (biomass) on this planet. LFG!!! Does Earth need dieting?
⬇️ We all know that when you download the same file again let’s say “
Meme.png”, the browser will download it with the name →Meme (1).pngand if you do it again it’ll beMeme (2).pngand so on. But there is a case that when you Download a file 102nd time and further, the Chromium-based browser starts adding timestamps, instead of numbers. We tried looking for the exact code that was handling this in Chromium to find the reason for this behavior, turned out that either Chromium doesn’t implement this (wrappers do) or we couldn’t find it, the closest we could reach was this function.
we tried it in Chrome too, and the article ain’t lying. 🗺️ Václav built maps that show time instead of space, also known as Isochrone maps. Drawing circles on traditional maps to figure out equally time-distant points is often wrong because of how the city is structured, two equidistant points may not have the same travel time from a point. Here’s the source code for nerds.
What We Have Been Trying 🔖
⚡Godspeed: A todo manager built for speed, every interaction in <50ms, 100% keyboard driven. (2 weeks free trial).
→ 🎁 You can use the codeNIBBLE25to get 25% off on the first year.🪐 The Atlas of Space: an interactive visualization to explore the planets, moons, asteroids, and other objects in the Solar System. (yes! it’s realtime)
🎓 Learn Yjs by JamSocket: a set of interactive lessons for creating real-time collaborative apps using Yjs’s CRDT abstraction.
🎯 Raycast Focus: A native timer in Raycast that lets you set a goal, define the duration you want to work on it, and select the apps and websites you want to block.
Builders’ Nest 🛠️
🗞️ jsesc: A utility that returns a stringified representation of that data. It is like
JSON.stringify()but on steroids.🌝 fullmoon: An iOS app to chat with local large language models that’s optimized for Apple silicon and work on iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
💽 rqlite: A relational database that combines SQLite's simplicity with Raft’s robust, fault-tolerant, distributed system.
🏆 LeetGPU: A platform to write and run CUDA code without GPU. Has a playground right now with challenges coming later.
Meme of The Week 😌
Off-topic Reads/Watches 🧗
🙁 “Doing cool things and meeting cool people is a priority that I optimize for. Ironically, this also means I encounter failure and rejection more often.” quoted from the article Aim to get rejected often stuck out to us. Rejections come and go but as they say, “You can’t compete with someone who is having fun” anon!
🤙 Stop trying to schedule a call with me, a rant by Matthew about how a single click to some random product sometimes leads to a whole-ass sales project for companies. He narrates the whole journey with satire from click to break up.
😶🌫️ Joey points out how social media and the algorithms behind them are like the new Skinnerbox, how he ditched the algorithms and is embracing the traditional RSS feeds in the weeds.
🫓 Escaping flatland opens up your eyes to look at many more possible career paths than the traditionally marketed options, and nobody other than yourself is capable of looking at the other planes and pursuing what actually means a lot to you.
Wisdom Bits 👀
“The end of a melody is not its goal.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche
Wallpaper of The Week 🌁
🌌 Grab the week’s wallpaper at wow.nibbles.dev.
Weekly Standup 🫠
Nibbler A had a usual week playing regular 🏸 and ♟️, wrote very little code for a personal project, organized a little event at home, and off to a long resting Sunday. He’s prepping to listen to Music of the Spheres.
Nibbler P realized that after a point, self-help books stopped helping and started to feel like the same food regurgitated and served on a different plate. Hence, he has revamped his read list to have more fiction (please send reccs!!!) and is enjoying Monster and Antimemes as of late.