Nibble #7

Sundar's call for AI, Dr. K guides Redditors, Twitter's new CEO, LBs visualized, Proxying Private classes in JS, Antimetal cuts AWS bills, Raycast goes Pro

👋🏻 Hello and welcome to The Nibble! (no, we won’t drop the “The”, unless Sean Parker asks us to)

It’s the 7th Edition of this Series, and since 7 is such a lucky number, we decided to move to Substack from Hashnode. This new place looks prettier and cozy to us authors, let us know how it feels to you. With two people writing this, we are able to do this better (funnier?) and faster† (oh! we always were).

If you are new to this place, don’t forget to Subscribe to this place.

News 📰

• Google bomBARDed its way to winning everybody’s hearts (and hopes) by showcasing its recent AI, Ai, aI & ai advancements at Google I/O. I mean, it wasn’t until around 16 mins into the keynote that they actually started talking about Search. I guess the Code Red worked? (BTW, Google Execs mentioned the word “AI” around 143 times and GOOG 0.00%↑ jumped by a whopping $56B) [Google I/O 2023 in a wrap]

• OpenAI has started suing people with Surname product names ending with GPT (and no, it doesn’t stand for “General Purpose Technology”), one gotta be careful naming their products now. Sam ain’t joking around anymore. (there are tons of suing going on, Elon & Artists want to sue OpenAI, and OpenAI is suing people with domains having GPT in them, don’t know where this is heading, but be safe, legal shit is scary.)

• Dr. Kailash Nadh, “a hobbyist developer” who also happens to be the “CTO at Zerodha” (when it comes to humility, Kailash rightfully is the peak) recently did an AMA on Reddit. Engineering, FOSS, VC, Startups, Management, you name it - he’d got it all answered. [Reddit AMA Thread]

  

  Reverse transliterated: “People can celebrate Kailash’s outreach anons, but hiring would still continue to happen through Leetcode”

That’s the approach we are taking with this newsletter as well 😉

• Grammarly (the OG ‘competitor’ of every ‘disruptive’ GPT-based SaaS company) has finally boarded the GenAI bandwagon by launching its generative writing assistant for all its Premium users (Isn’t this the best time in history to be a paying subscriber of any SaaS with LLMification potential?) [GrammarlyGO]

  

  Seriously, We are all in for the MOAT memes. I mean that’s our MOAT afterall

• Thiel signed up to have his body cryogenically preserved (Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?) [Billionaire Peter Thiel still plans to be frozen after death for potential revival: ‘I don’t necessarily expect it to work’]

  

• Remember, in the last edition, we talked about how ChatGPT (OpenAI) single-handedly kind of killed Chegg, it’s time to talk about the OG giver, StackOverflow. It seems that since ChatGPT’s release and with tools like RayCast AI coming up, the lazy people (definitely not us) are not putting in the effort to make Google Search. So, StackOverflow traffic went down by ~14% in March

• Elon appoints the first female CEO of Twitter, Linda Yaccarin [Article] (more power to Women in Tech, but the tweeters didn’t stop him from reminding about Elizabeth Holmes)

  

  Not bad though [Source]

Cool Stuff 🤙

• An Archaeology of Books Known to ChatGPT/GPT-4 - What books does ChatGPT remember? Do you ever wonder what books it likes?

• Is Critical Thinking the Most Important Skill for Software Engineers? Hear out the Pragmatic Engineer himself, on why it’s important to be a Critical thinker.(although it’s a quick read, I’ll still give you a TLDR; Don’t promote thought leaders or be one and ask questions wherever you should and can.)

• Load Balancing Visualized (Sam Rose, the author of this beautifully handcrafted post, is known for over-delivering things (just like any other Sam you might know of), the post is a clear sign of how the guy was enjoying writing the post, I’m telling you to be afraid of the folks who can write their minds out in an aesthetic way.)

• Inner working of Databases (if you have ever met a nerd, you might have heard “Buddy! I wanted to work on databases, they are so cool” and honestly if you think about it. Databases are all we are living on top of, it’s the Kernel of the modern world. I mean ACID is all we do, CURD CRUD is all we eat need)

• What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work? - Remember Wolfram Alpha? (easiest question to separate Gen-Z from millennials in tech) Well, earlier this year OpenAI announced that they’re launching a plugin to make Wolfram Alpha the Alpha it deserves to be. And Stephan Wolfram (the founder, genius guy) has put up a brilliant and comprehensive post on how ChatGPT works.

• How The Benner Cycle Predicts 100+ Years of Market Movement (We love people who don’t give financial advice (wink wink), and we like to be one of them. So if you start to suddenly see a cash surplus in your bank accounts after reading this post, Harsh is the one to be blamed for this suggestion. Also, if you’re good at spotting†, can you find 2023 in this pic?)

  

  So, technically yeah! 2023 is not the best time to make money.

• Link to Observable by Mike Talking about money, “Bank runs” are a common causality now, visualize how big the disasters were and how much money we lost combined.

  

  We aim to be a bank and run soon! Please help us with that

Wild, World & Web 🤪

• macOS Internals - Among all the Jobs Steve did at Apple (no pun intended), nobody can deny that he was absolutely “brilliant” at designing. No doubt their engineers carry that philosophy and still continue to design some of the most visually striking applications for computers. (ahem *iOS Web Push Notifications* ahem, no I mean seriously, the visuals are worth the bag full of money)

• The World’s first Wood Transistor, this is seriously a big feat, no not because we had a semi-conductor shortage and TSMC can anytime be overtaken by China, but because it taps into an exciting space of bio-degradable chips. (Remember people saying "We won’t let a chip on our shoulders to measure health metrics”, what if it’s Cellulose, folks?)

• Lithium reserves traced in Rajasthan's Nagaur, capacity higher than J&K reserves (Li, as you know is a mood stabilizer, no way you already knew it, and apparently also the new Gold in this shift to EV rush was kind of rare in India. The State known for its Desert, Food & Culture adds Lithium to the list)

• The more you store in a USB drive, the lighter it gets (yes, crazy isn’t, it? The best invention of humanity like to be full-filled.)

  

TILs 🤯

• You don’t have to actually filter an Array of JSX elements with a condition like .filter((e) => e !== null) in React. [Ref]
  As React renderer automatically doesn’t render null, undefined and false. The weird part is I can’t map them to some kind of value, like ‘‘ & 0 are rendered as they should, so one can’t say that “all falsy values” are auto-removed.

• You can’t proxy Classes with private #fields in them. Yes, it sounds a bit weird, but yeah that’s how proxy & private fields don’t go hand in hand. Read a detailed post from Lea Verou, a member of TC39 - JS Private class fields considered harmful (Sometimes JavaScript is nothing more than the embodiment of PAIN)

• You can add Cashtags (live stock ticker) on Substack by writing $STOCK_TICKER & space after it. For example NFLX 0.00%↑ (partially sad news is that it only supports US Stocks.)

Recommendations 🔖

• Charged - Wish your crypto transactions could have a debugger? Check out how you can pause your transactions and catch those fishy ones before things go really smelly.

• Antimetal - Worried about your AWS Bills? Don’t want to go deeper into Infra Optimizations? Well here comes AI to the rescue (and to take away more MOAT from your skillset.)

• Leave Me Alone - Troubled with all those irritating emails you didn’t subscribe to, but are also lazybones? (here’s a cute little platform that can help you!)

• EyCandy - Some eye popping catching gifs to make your visual projects stand out

  

• Remember Raycast from Editon #1, it went pro this week. Meet Raycast Pro. (you can still be a freebie, TBH. But some dev tools are completely worth the money)

Cool OSS Projects 💪🏻

• Flameshot - A powerful, yet simple-to-use open-source screenshot software (thanks to Ashutosh, (notice the single ‘A’) for this papayalicious recommendation)

• micro-ts - A micro-minimalist template to create TypeScript packages (ideas are no one’s monopoly, but building clean and great packages should be, also what is a better way to build packages than in TS?)

• PaLM - An open-source implementation of Google's PaLM models (I guess one day, we’d have OSS implementation of every LLM except “Open”AI’s? 🤷)

Meme of the week 🙈

Ponder-worthy words 🤔

"Let yourself occasionally get a little screwed in exchange for not having to live with your guard up all the time. It’s worth it."
~ Sam Altman (@sama)

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From the Author’s Lap(top)

You can reach out to us using our nests on the Internet.
- Pushkar, Gujarati Bihari Dikra, loves linguistics, can talk in Assembly, and part-time Neural Network whisperer.
- Aashutosh - Rajasthani Baniya, has a craving for memes, loves *-wares (soft, hard, middle, ALL), can talk in italics, is a part-time cat-whisperer, and can tirelessly work towards the bloom doom of humanity.

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👋🏻 See you at the next one!

† that’s what she said