👋🏻 Welcome to the 💯th!
Yes! 100 consecutive weeks (~2 years)

btw The Nibble is taking a hiatus for now, taking the time to reflect on where we have come, and what we'd want to do differently and get back with even more vigor.

📰 Read #100 on Substack for the best formatting
🎧 You can also listen to the podcast version of Powered by NotebookLM

Subscribe now

Now onto the edition…

What’s Happening 📰

• 🧹 Amazon went on an internal cleanup spree and shut down Chime (their in-house video conferencing app) and also Amazon’s Android App Store (you might have seen one in FireTV). Must be good for employees to see those Jira Boards go One to Zero.

• 🐛 Todesktop, the Electron app bundler to turn your web app into a cross-platform desktop app had a vulnerability (now patched) using which anyone could push arbitrary updates to popular applications such as Clickup, Cursor, Linear, and Notion Calendar!
  In short, Todesktop’s build container stored decryptable secrets and had a post-install script execution vulnerability that allowed gaining access to those secrets and using them to push updates to any application.

• 🌖 FireflySpace’s BlueGhost on March 2nd becomes the first commercial company to touchdown on the moon. It has sent a postcard from the Moon.

  

✨ AGI Digest

🗃️ Open Source keeps winning

🐳 The Whale Continues Shipping into the week and even surprised us with an extra day 6 release. Oh and they also announced off-peak hours discounts, slashing API costs upto 75%.

On Day 3, they released DeepGEMM, an FP8 GEMM (General Matrix Multiplication) library for both dense and MoE GEMMs, which they use for training and inference of their V3/R1 models. This library has a minimal dependency and achieves 1350+ FP8 TFLOPS on Hopper GPUs.

On Day 4, they released DualPipe, a bidirectional pipeline parallelism algorithm for computation-communication overlap when training LLMs and Expert Parallelism Load Balancer (EPLB), which introduces a redundant experts strategy that duplicates heavy-loaded experts.

And it just keeps getting better. On Day 5 they dropped a literal filesystem called 3FS (Fire-Flyer File System), a parallel file system that utilizes the full bandwidth of modern SSDs and RDMA networks. This system combines the throughput of thousands of SSDs and the network bandwidth of hundreds of storage nodes, enabling applications to access storage resources in a locality-oblivious manner and a cost-effective alternative to DRAM-based caching, offering high throughput and significantly larger capacity.

And we got a bonus Day 6 “one more thing” moment, we got a look over their inference system, which can serve 73.7k/14.8k input/output tokens per second per H800 node with a cost profit margin of a whopping 545%! What’s crazy is that they are using the H800 chip, which they are using in their inference, the lower bandwidth version of Nvidia’s standard H100, to limit exports to Chinese markets. Imagine what could be done had they had access to the newer and much more advanced ones.

👀 AllenAI released olmOCR, an open-source tool to extract clean plain text from PDFs. It can process one million PDF pages for about $190, which is roughly 1/32 the price to do the same with GPT-4o APIs in batch mode.

Their secret sauce? They used GPT4o to generate detailed PDF to Markdown samples using what they call “document anchoring” which leverages metadata and images in the PDF to improve the quality of extraction and they use this to finetune a Qwen2-VL-7B-Instruct to arrive at the olmoOCR model.

🎤 Microsoft’s Phi-4 Mini got an update with the Phi-4 mini Instruct (3.8B) and Phi-4 Multimodal Instruct (5.6B) models, both with MIT license, the latter with audio (in 23 different languages) and image input support.

The multimodal model is #1 on the Huggingface OpenASR leaderboard for speech recognition (better than OpenAI’s Whisper). They achieve these multimodal improvements over the text-only model without full retraining using a “Mixture of LoRA” to use modality-specific routers to allow multiple inference modes combining various modalities without interference.

Plus, we might be getting a reasoning model from the team pretty soon too 🤞

🎙️ Voice Models Galore

✍️ Talking of beating Whisper, ElevenLabs launched Scribe, a really accurate Speech to Text outperforming Geminin 2.0 Flash and Whisper v3 (in English).

Scribe can transcribe speeches in 99 languages, with word-level timestamps, and even speaker diarization. Though for $0.4 per hour of input audio, you might also want to consider Gemini 2.0 Flash which can be a lot cheaper with minimal loss in accuracy.

📣 Sesame released a mindblowing dmeo of Conversational Speech Model (CSM) — one of the most expresisve voice voice audio demo from a language model that we have seem so far.

CSM comes in three sizes — a 1B tiny model with a 100M decoder, a small 3B model with a 250M decoder, and an 8B model with a 300M decoder. The multimodal backbone processes the interleaved text and audio and the decoder reconstructs speech from it. And they’re saying this would be Open-Sourced with an Apache License!? It’s going to get crazy good.

📦 And some more miscellaneous announcements

• ✍️ OpenAI released their "last non-chain-of-thought model", GPT-4.5 and people had a lots of mixed reactions. While it did top the Lmarena for a while (still #1 with style control though!), which means that people prefer its response in blind comparisons with other models on the questions asked on the arena, on Karpathy's questionnaire, most people could not differentiate GPT-4.5 with GPT-4 (not "high-taste testers", eh?), the model is good with understanding user intent and creative writing, like humor which btw is much harder to get right because we do not have an objective way to measure it, as we have for coding and maths. People seem to be having fun with its greentext1 generation. On real-world tasks like Coding and Agentic Capabilities, Sonnet 3.7 still rules though, and with the massive $75.00/M input and $150.00/M output tokens, you're better off not replacing it in your existing workflows until it makes a massive difference to you. Right now, you can test it on the Pro and Plus plans as well as on Perplexity Pro.

  

• 🌡️ Diffusion-based LLMs are having their moment right now. First, it was the LLaDA paper, and now we have Inception Labs announcing Mercury dLLM, which caught up with both the speed and quality of traditional dense LLMs very quickly. They announced two code-specific models — Mercury Mini and Mercury Small, which together achieve performance similar to the Gemini Flash 2.0 on various benchmarks.

• 🔦 Deepmind’s Gemini 2.0 Flash Lite is now generally available making intelligence too cheap to measure. Like its elder sibling, it outperforms the previous 1.5 Flash models at multiple benchmarks at a fraction of the costs of the 2.0 Flash. Use it for quick, simple tasks such as translations or small summaries which do not require much intelligence. As always, you can try it out on AI Studio for free before integrating it into your apps.

  

• 💻 Following Anthropics’ Claude Code agentic coding tool, the Gemini Team released Gemini Code Assist with free 180K (what?) code completions per month on a context window of 128K. And they also have a GitHub app for PR reviews on your codebases natively on GitHub!

• 🔧 Anthropic quietly updates its API to support the OpenAI SDK using https://api.anthropic.com/v1/ as the base URL. Though it obviously does not provide 100% compatibility with all the SDK parameters, this is really cool to have because you can now use the single powerful SDK to call all of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, DeepSeek, and Grok models. Anthropic folks also rolled out a beta feature flag in Sonnet 3.7 API to reduce tokens in tool use, saving on average 14%, and up to 70% in output tokens, which also reduces latency. You can provide anthropic-beta: token-efficient-tools-2025-02-19 in the header to invoke this.

• 🔊 Talking of Anthropic, the next version of Amazon Alexa, called Alexa+, will be powered by Anthropic Claude. Costing $19.99 and free for Prime members, Alexa+ will roll out to the US first and subsequently to other regions in the coming week and is said to be more conversational than its predecessor, as well as much more knowledgeable in its responses and better at controlling your home accessories.

• 🤑 With the traditional LLM benchmarks saturating, people are turning to test LLMs on tasks that feel much closer to what a human would actually do. Andon Labs’ Vending-Bench does something just like that by letting LLM agents manage a simulated vending machine business. The agents need to handle ordering, inventory management, and pricing over long-term horizons to successfully make money. Till now, two models, Claude 3.5 and o3-mini, are the only ones whose mean reward has beaten a human, but the variance is still too high, though. We also have an AI Trading Arena where LLMs manage a real portfolio, taking in market news and buying/selling stocks live in the market. In this portfolio as well, Sonnet 3.7 bags the highest profit.

🔐 0x Digest

👑 Ethereum Foundation brings new leadership as demanded by the community, welcoming two new co-Executive Directors to take care of the roadmap ahead.

They promoted Hsiao-Wei Wang, who was a researcher at EF for the last 7 years, and got Tomasz Stanczak from Nethermind for these roles.

✨ Dubai approves use of USDC and EURC in DIFC (Dubai International Financial Centre).

Dubai has a unique connection with Circle and cryptocurrencies in general. Its relaxed tax policies and crypto-friendly rules are just making it more and more friendly for crypto firms to take shelter there.

🛠️ Dev & Design Digest

😱 Truffle Security found ~12k live API keys and passwords in Common Crawl, the scraped data from the web which is used to pretrain a majority of LLMs today!

The 400TB of data (which is approximately equivalent to ~3640 complete copies of the entire Wikipedia) contained live secrets in over 2.7 million web pages. Most of the secrets appeared multiple times, with one WalkScore API key appearing 57k times across 1.8 million subdomains! The lessons for us are to always store your secrets encrypted and never hardcode them into your apps.

🆕 TypeScript 5.8 is now out, with better checks on return types, support for require(esm) and star of the show being a new flag --erasableSyntaxOnly, which forbids the use of syntax that can’t be erased when stripping types.

This new flag, also says “I gotchu” back to NodeJS’s —strip-types, making it a closed and compatible ecosystem.

🚀 Laravel launched its own IaaS platform, Laravel Cloud, to deploy Laravel apps in under 1 minute. The PHP framework raised $57M Series A in Dec 2024, and this almost feels like the natural next step at this point. (because we do the same thing in JS Land).

They went over and above and added some Starter Kits, VS Code Extension, and whatever a developer might need to get started.

🦕 Deno shipped v2.2 mid last month with built-in OpenTelemetry support, faster litter, precise benchmarking, smaller bundling and what not.

Nayr Ryan Inc. has been really moving faster than Jared & Co. at Bun, they look closer to stable in the last 3 versions than Bun as a whole. Maybe I know what my side-projects are gonna use.

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

Share The Nibble

What Brings Us T(w)o Awe 😳

• √ One of the things that the legendary John Carmack did (along with single-handedly inspiring the world of 3D games) popularized the Fast Inverse Square Root algorithm incorporating clever bit manipulation tricks and some Newton’s method.

• 🤯 We probably saw the craziest project, you’ll encounter in a decade, Michigan TypeScript built the Doom engine running purely in TypeScript types. Yes, he rendered the Doom frame in the process and ended up building a VM, compiler, and whatnot. And before you ask, AI Code Generators couldn’t help him a little bit with these efforts, making this a year-long journey of determination.

• 🤯 Talking about determination and crazy shit, serial experimenter Nolen strikes again, this time arranging 240 browser tabs in a tight 8x30 grid and using favicons for playing Pong. In this article, he explains how he keeps doing unimaginable feats in great detail.

• 🪄 CSS Wizard Josh Comeau came up with a new course Whimsical Animations and as always a state-of-the-art website. In a blog, he deconstructs the “Whimsical Animations” landing page’s million little secrets and CSS tips like always. If you are afraid of CSS, read this post and feel the love this man has for details in animation.

What we have been trying 🔖

• 🛫 Flight Price Predictor: Airtrackbot’s AI-powered flight price predictor helps you decide whether to book tickets now or wait a bit.

• 🐐 Scott Chacon shares and talks about How Core Git Developers Configure Git. Most of us take gitconfig for granted, and don’t customize it to the fullest once installed, Scott shares a config that even Core developers working on Git use. He explains each setting in that his configuration urges you to customize it. (We really expect a better experience after modifying these attributes).

• 🧑‍💻 Warp: The AI-native terminal interface with a relatively cleaner user interface and other options (if you are looking to migrate from iTerm2 and for some reason don’t want ghostty). Also, they just released a Windows version last week, if you have a Windows Machine, you probably don’t have as nice options as this.

Builders’ Nest 🛠️

• 🍘 JSON Crack: Format JSON and transform it into a readable graph.

• 🫦 React Bits: An open-source collection of high-quality, animated, interactive & fully customizable React components.

• ⚒️ Smithery: A platform with a list of popular MCP Servers to use with your AI apps, like Cursor

• 🧮 Corca: A collaborative Math editor to work on equations on a computer intuitively, unlike LaTeX for which you need to learn a special syntax and which has a learning curve

Meme of The Week 😌

Off-topic Reads/Watches 🧗

• 🕊️ Nobody Profits by George Hotz, where this 10x dev urges us not to let scammers monetize AI like they did with the Internet and let's put all our might to "build technology and open source software that market breaks everything" and making AI deliver huge value but no profit to anyone.

• 🚀 Being a High-Leverage Generalist by Char emphasizes that rather than competing (with both humans and AIs) in specialized, narrow, crowded fields, it is much more valuable for you to be a high-leverage generalist and apply your knowledge strategically to connect ideas across disciplines, adapt to new challenges, and maintain optionality in their careers.

• 🎯 Joe Lonsdale explains Theil’s “One Thing” rule and discusses how the focus has a convex output curve.

• 🪤 Trapped by , where she goes through what triggers our flight-or-fight responses and how to pause and plan to remain calm instead (It includes some good relatable stories, too).

  hk’s newsletter

  Trapped

  Picture a wild animal caught in a steel trap. In its panic and pain, it might do something unthinkable—chew off its own leg just to escape. Trappers have a grim term for this: a "wring-off." It’s raw survival instinct in action—escape at any cost. It’s gut-wrenching to think about, yet, in that moment of torment and hopelessness, the animal sees no othe…

  Read more

  a year ago · 6 likes · Harnidh Kaur

Wisdom Bits 👀

“Any success takes one in a row. Do one thing well, then another. Once, then once more. Over and over until the end, then it's one in a row again.”
— Matthew McConaughey

Wallpaper of The Week 🌁

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

Weekly Standup 🫠

• Nibbler A had a review, fix, and build on the side week. He played lots of chess to cope, and his weekly physical activity has been at an all-time low. On the weekend he spent 30 mins making a little tool for himself.

• Nibbler P pushed to prod, watched some 🧛‍♂️ stuff, successfully drove away Mongols from Feudal Japan, and went on a long drive with his family.

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

👋🏻 Welcome to the 99th!
Hope you are having a great Tuesday!
Here’s a quick, short, and sweet edition right before we hit a ton of editions!

📰 Read #99 on Substack for the best formatting
🎧 You can also listen to the podcast version of Powered by NotebookLM

Subscribe now

Psst… if you have a second to spare and 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. 💪

Improve The Nibble!

Now onto the edition…

What’s Happening 📰

🌞 What a time to be alive, this summer, YC will be giving grants to college students to work on their own technical projects. They are calling it “Summer Fellows Grants”.

They’ll be handed over $20,000 in cash and $90,000 in compute credits.
📅 Submit your applications by March 28th, 9:00pm PT. Selected folks will be invited to attend AI Startup School too.

✨ AGI Digest

⚓️ Yes, it’s only Tuesday and we already have so much exciting stuff

👨‍💻 After weeks of speculation, testing and safety blogs, Anthropic released Claude 3.7 Sonnet and it was worth the wait! This model can respond both with and without reasoning and only gets sweeter than the previous model especially on Coding and Mathematical tasks.

Both on Aider Polyglot Leaderboard and BigCodeBench-Hard, it performs neck-to-neck with the competition without any thinking and though we are yet to see the complete result with thinking on all of the leaderboards, from what we have seen till now, it is going to be right near the top!

Along with 3.7 Sonnet, they also released Claude Code, an agentic coding tool in Terminal (much like Aider on steroids) which directly uses Claude via API to search, read code, edit files, write and run tests, commit and push code to GitHub and even use your command-line tools! It is available as an npm package but is currently on a waitlist.

🐳 DeepSeek is leaving no stone unturned to build the true “Open” AI by doing an “Open Source Week” where they open-source five projects that constitute the building blocks of their online services which they use in production. In their words, “No ivory towers - just pure garage-energy and community-driven innovation.“

On Day 1, they released FlashMLA, an efficient MLA (MultiHeaded Latent Attention) decoding kernel for Nvidia’s Hopper GPUs with BF16/FP16 and Paged Paged KV cache with a block size of 64. Using CUDA 12.6, it can achieve up to 3000 GB/s in memory-bound configuration and 580 TFLOPS in computation-bound configuration on H800 SXM5. The best part is that it was built by a single engineer, Jiashi Li.

On Day 2, they released DeepEP, the first OSS EP (Expert Parallelism) communication library for MoE training and inference. It provides high-throughput and low-latency all-to-all GPU kernels, which are also as known as MoE dispatch, combined with support for FP8 operations.

💭 Qwen too released QwQ-Max-Preview a combined normal-and-thinking model and the most amusing part was that their announcement blog was written by the model itself!

This model is based on Qwen2.5-Max, their largest and most intelligent model so far. In fact, they would go ahead and open-weight both the QwQ-Max and Qwen2.5-Max under the Apache 2.0 license along with their smaller QwQ-32B wow! And their mobile apps are on the way soon as well. IDK about AGI but China has done a lot to pave the way to a more open-source AI community.

🌐 Perplexity opened waitlist for Comet, a browser for Agentic search. This gels in so well with what Perplexity is already doing.

We can predict seeing the bonds between Perplexity and The Browser Company getting a little sour (or sweet, based on how they perceive it), as Perplexity more or less is coming after Dia, or maybe it’s a healthy competition, whatever happens, remember, consumers are the ones who win.

⚒️ Code Editor Updates

• 💻 Along with 3.7 Sonnet being readily available on both Cursor and GitHub Copilot on Day 0, we have some more interesting AI Code Editor updates.

• 🎨 Lovable now has a Visual Edits feature which allows you to directly click any element in the app’s interface and edit it both via prompt and through a Figma-like position and styling fixes.

• 🏄‍♂️ Windsurf released its newest wave of updates, including support for MCP, a better tab interface with tab-to-jump to the next relevant line like Cursor, a Turbo mode to let the agent YOLO through command execution, support for images in chat, and support for more models.

• ✏️ VSCode’s much-hated tab completion is getting an overhaul with a new GPT-4o Copilot code competition model based on the GPT-4o Mini which has been trained on an additional 275k repos over 30 programming languages.

• ⚡ Zed introduces Zeta, an open-source model fine-tuned over Qwen2.5-Coder-7B to support blazing-fast edits. Using Zeta, Zed brings Edit Prediction, a tool that predicts your next move, or more like the next edit and you just have to tab tab tab your way to fixed code. Not to mention, just like anything else Zed builds, this is also blazing fast, thanks to Rust 🦀

• 🔎 Phind went through a major update to release Phind 2, which now supports web search, code execution, images, diagrams, and other interactive and rich visual outputs along with text… and they also did a fresh paint job for a more aesthetic UI.

📦 And some more small miscellaneous updates

• 🌳 Google AI Studio has a new message-branching feature where you can create a new message branch when there is more than one thing you’d want to ask the model from the current context but at the same time want to keep the history clear.

• 📒 HuggingFace dropped a massive “The Ultra-Scale Playbook:
  Training LLMs on GPU Clusters” containing the culminated knowledge of scaling the training of LLMs to thousands of GPUs with theory, practical code, and insights from over 4k experiments!

• 👀 HuggingFace’s Dataset Pages now has a DataStudio tab where you can ask questions about any dataset and an AI agent would write and run it as an SQL query. Check it live on any dataset.

  

• 💽 Weaviate released a small PDF Guide on Advanced RAG techniques that is a guide to improving the performance of your RAG applications.

🛠️ Dev & Design Digest

😵‍💫 Ian Fisher shared how he is using this new nightmare methodology of programming called “Append-only programming”. In this method, 1. everything goes in a single file, 2. new code is appended at the end and 3. old code can’t be edited.

We almost had a panic attack, before he said out loud “It’s a fun challenge”, so yes, we left the farmland and back to keyboards. This really reminds me of memes talking about why men die doing adventures more than women.

🍪 The Cookie Store API, alternative to document.cookie, (nostalgic eh?) is now available on Firefox and Safari (partly).

Both of them haven’t shipped the full API yet and have their own set of concerns in implementing it fully like Chrome and Edge did ages ago. But anyway, this is a cool API and will help us consume cookies more gracefully, so we hope both Apple and Mozilla decide to move the needle enough to get green ticks on MDN.

🛎️ Jared and boys never stop cooking, Bun released v1.2.3 with bunch of improvement as always but the apple of eye being "You can now develop Frontend application with Bun".

What mean? Hold up, we'll explain Bun.serve() got built-in support for hot-reloading frontends. More importantly, you can now do bun *.html and that's all it takes to serve single or multiple HTML files with relevant CSS on a port. What a time to be alive and be a prototyper

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

Share The Nibble

What we have been trying 🪤

• ⬇️ To convert a Nibble to a Podcast, we first have to clean it and convert it into Markdown. Lately, we’ve been using markdown-down to convert any webpage to a clean markdown with images downloaded.

• ⚙️ There is this VSCode setting to hide files from your Tree Explorer as per .gitignore settings. This really helps you de-clutter and focus more on what is going to get pushed and get you increments. [Source: Nick’s One Tip a Week]

• ⛓️‍💥 A new JailBreak for Kindles called WinterBreak, released as a New Year gift by a hacker can unlock almost all models of Kindle.

Builders’ Nest 🛠️

• 🎥 cap: Open source Loom alternative for beautiful screen recordings.

• 🐇 bunster: A shell compiler that converts shell scripts into secure, portable, and static binaries.

• 🎨 extract-colors: a tool that pulls the most common colors out of an image.

• 🔍 awesome-finder-icons: A collection of beautiful Finder icon designs.

  

Meme of The Week 😌

Off-topic Reads/Watches 🧗

• 🪭 When to Give Up by DHH, where he talks about how it’s equally important to have the humility to give up as much as it is to have the grit to stick when things start going south.

• 😸 Repeat Happy Accidents by Seth, asking us to allow ourselves to do things that might not work, to find things that work.

• ⛽ Why the AI world is suddenly obsessed with a 160-year-old economics paradox, you might have heard of Jevons Paradox already, a recent tweet when Satya when DeepSeek released, sparked discussion around it again.

• ⚛️ Following the Majorana-1 Quantum chip last week, we got Satya on Dwarkesh’s Podcast talking with deep conviction and charisma about their quantum leap (aka the transistor moment) and what they envision of the world in the coming years.

Wisdom Bits 👀

“Farmers who wait for perfect weather never plant. If they watch every cloud, they never harvest.”
— Ecclesiastes1 11:4

Wallpaper of The Week 🌁

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

Weekly Standup 🫠

• Nibbler P has lately been solving prod issues by the day and doing Wordle by night. He has been seeing an uptick in his VO2 max over the last few months and that makes him hopeful that better days are yet to come.

• Nibbler A had an eventful weekend and sorted things that required his attention during his more than-busy week. His weekend flew by in playing badminton, and chess and meeting few friends.

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

👋🏻 Welcome to the 98th!
Apologies for the delays so big, it seems like a skipped week to reset timelines.
… and, we also wanted to give you more time to read the last one 👉👈

To make sure we ship the 100th on time, we’ll be pushing a small #99 in the coming Monday!

📰 Read #98 on Substack for the best formatting
🎧 You can also listen to the podcast version of Powered by NotebookLM

Subscribe now

Psst… if you have a second to spare and 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. 💪

Improve The Nibble!

Now onto the edition…

What’s Happening 📰

🤯 Microsoft opens the door to the era of Quantum Computing by introducing the first-ever quantum chip Majorana 1 and built it from “scratch” in a way.

Satya unveiled in his tweet that they have been working for the last 20 years, and have finally created a “kinda” new “state of matter” (yes, like solid, liquid, gas, BEC) unlocked by this new kind of material “topoconductors”, which can create, control, and measure Majorana Fermions (exotic quantum particles that are its own anti-particle).

In essence, this moves Quantum computing decades ahead overnight. Until now Quantum computing was more about tons of error correction because it’s not easy to create or track qubits, but with Majorana 1’s Topological Core architecture, it becomes relatively easier and far more accurate. These little new chips once worked upon more, can actually compute-intensive problems worth millions of our regular bit-based computers

🌊 It’s official — Zuck goes underwater, with Project Waterworth, building the world’s longest (~50,000 km) subsea cable project with the latest technology.

This is going to cost multi-billion dollars and going to take a few years if not decades to complete, backed by Meta’s aim to bring AI and its capabilities to the masses. (And btw, BSNL is still planning the 5G upgrade)

📱Apple unveiled a new phone, the iPhone 16e (because 6E already has a of controversy going on), a successor to the “kinda-value-for-money” SE series.

This phone has everything one needs to be an Apple user—a mid-range camera, a 60Hz screen, some limited Apple Intelligence, a powerful A18 chip, and a hefty price tag of $599. It will be available for pre-order on February 21st. Although this isn’t cheap, Apple is now competing with flagship Android Devices in terms of price with this cheap thrill. Ah! Also, Apple might have casually killed the Event applications market by introducing its own Event apps.

✨ AGI Digest

🤖 Crazy week of new models and newer agents

📈 Starting this week on a high note, Elon’s XAI released Grok 3, a family of two models — a normal Grok 3 and a smaller Grok 3 mini, both with reasoning capabilities much like DeepSeek R1 and OpenAI’s o1/o3. While it is still in beta (i.e. still in post-training) it is open to use for X Premium and Premium+ users via x.com and grok.com and on their respective mobile apps.

While API access is still a few weeks away, the initial vibe check about the model is very positive, especially for programming and technical understanding! It holds the #1 overall position on LMSys and is the first model to get a 1400+ Elo rating (without style control, though; any way you should evaluate it on your tasks).

Also, following the host of “Deep Research” agents rolling out from every other major lab, xAI followed suit and added a DeepSearch button along with a Think button on the web and app interfaces to have more control over its search area and output length depending on your task. Plus, an unfiltered voice mode may be rolling out soon as well. Overall it’s a well-received model and xAI’s shipping speed is commendable.

🕵️‍♂️ Perplexity’s been on a small shipping spree as well, quickly launching its own version of “Deep Research” called, well Deep Research. Free users get 5 queries per day while paid users get 500. They also released their fine-tune of DeepSeek R1 on HF which has been post-trained to remove the Chinese censorship while maintainign it smaths and Code performance.

While it gets high scores on some benchmarks, in both our own testing and from what other users posted, it is just not quite there compared to the other similar offerings. @hrishioa has a good tweet on it with detailed comparisons with Gemini’s and OpenAI’s. Grok was not released when this was written but we’d keep it somewhere between Gemini and OAI’s in terms of quality.

🔎 Guess who else got “Deep Research”? Our frienndly neighbourhood embedding and reranking provider — Jina AI with its DeepSearch.

This one’s actually available via API as well as on search.jina.ai but compared to the other offerings mentioned above, we’d say you’re better off with the Perplexity’s free Deep Research over this.

👩‍🔬 While others are busy building a deeper search agent, Google actually created an AI co-scientist. AI Scientist is a multi-agent AI system built with Gemini 2.0 as a virtual scientific collaborator to help scientists generate novel hypotheses and research proposals. Think of it like a co-pilot but for scientists and researchers.

In its validation test on real-world laboratory tasks, the AI Scientist:

• Proposed novel repurposing candidates for acute myeloid leukemia (AML). Subsequent experiments validated these proposals, confirming that the suggested drugs inhibit tumor viability at clinically relevant concentrations in multiple AML cell lines.

• Identified epigenetic targets grounded in preclinical evidence with significant anti-fibrotic activity in human hepatic organoids.

• Independently proposed that cf-PICIs interact with diverse phage tails to expand their host range (a novel discovery that had not been done before but not yet revealed publicly)

And these are just the validation tests. The future is going to be wild!

⚙️ Talking of an AI Scientist, we cannot forget SakanaAI who came up with a primal AI Scientist back in August (we covered it in #73). They are back with an AI CUDA Engineer which can produce highly optimized CUDA kernels, reaching over 10x speedup over common machine learning operations in PyTorch.

While they initially claimed over 100x improvements in some kernels, it was quickly identified as a bug in the evaluation script which benchmarked it higher when it was actually 3x slower (here’s Lucas Bayer of OpenAI taking a jibe at it using o3-mini-high). The leaderboard has been fixed to remove these outliers and the team is working on fixing it. Even without the high 100x speedups, the 10x improvements are already much better than writing them by hand (given that you have good evals to test them)

🧬 And we’re not even done with Science yet! Acr Institute (of the ARC AGI benchmark fame) and Nvidia collaboratd to release Evo 2 — a fully open source biological foundation model trained on the DNA of over 100,000 species across the entire tree of life.

The model is based on the StripedHyena 2 architecture and is trained on 9.3T nucleotides—the building blocks that makeup DNA or RNA—at 1M token context length and they released two models — a 7B and a 40B, complete with their weights, training, and inference code and pretraining data. Evo 2 can predict the pathogenic effects of human genome variants across coding and noncoding mutations. In other words, if you have a genetic mutation, Evo 2 has an opinion on whether or not it might cause disease. Evo 2 can also be used for biological design, like for the generation of entire human mitochondrial genomes with coherent synteny and even whole bacterial genomes and eukaryotic chromosomes. This is next-level stuff and it’s only going to expedite the medical research going forward.

Meanwhile, along with Microsoft’s breakthrough in Quantum Computation, they also released BioEmu-1, which can generate thousands of protein structures per hour on a single GPU, which is Open-Sourced as well.

🤏 Plus some smaller model news that went under sight

• 💭 Nous released DeepHermes 3 Preview which unifies both reasoning and normal responses in a single model, controlled by a system prompt. It is based on the Hermes 3 model and the thinking mode improves over the non-reasoning by using more compute during inference to think harder.

• 🌍 Mistal released Saba, a 24B model trained specifically for Middle Eastern and South Asian languages available on API as of now. This model supports Arabic and many Indian-origin languages and is particularly strong in South Indian-origin languages such as Tamil.

  

• 👀 Microsoft released V2 of OmniParser, their screen parsing tool, which interprets/converts UI screenshots to a structured format, to improve existing LLM-based UI agents. Over its last version, V2 gets a 60% improvement in latency and a strong score of 39.6 average accuracy on ScreenSpot Pro.

• 📷 Google followed their last PaliGemma 2 with a new PaliGemma 2 mix model which is capable of performing multiple tasks such as short and long captioning, optical character recognition (OCR), image question answering, object detection, and segmentation. The model comes in sizes of 3B, 10B, and 28B for 224px and 448px resolutions.

• 🎥 Talking about big companies, Alibaba introduced a new video & image generation model, WanX 2.1. The demos of WanX (yes the name is indeed a little funny) look really promising and they are saying that 2.1 will be open source. China is definitely getting the hang of "how to please developers", if you think carefully about it they have done with every industry in the past too, build fast, make it cheap, and make others look like bad options.

• 🗣️ Google ain't stopping shipping and Gemini can now leverage all your past conversations with it for crafting new responses. The features are right now only available on Gemini Advanced in English on Gemini 2.0 Flash. Also, all the chats you want to keep are in your control, you can remove or review them in the ”My Activity” Tab of your Google account.

🔐 0x Digest

👛 Crossmint launched Solana Smart Wallets, which are programmable gasless wallets. This is definitely not something new in crypto land, but maybe for Solana tribe.

For unamused Ethereum maxis reading this, yes it’s more or less ERC-4337, but with a state structure that somehow works faster than our Merkle ops.

🇺🇸 The same SEC, who are not a fan of crypto companies making monies has now shown “very much” interest in staking.

This is a huge change from the last 2-2.5 years when there was a chaotic relationship between crypto firms and Govt entities that led to many disasters.

🇭🇰 Talking about countries favoring crypto, Hong Kong confirms that Bitcoin and ETH can be used as proof of assets for their new investment visa.

So, in case you are a diamond hand 💎🙌 type of person who also seems to receive loads of airdrops and community rewards, it’s time to take a round trip to Hong Kong for “investments”.

🇮🇳 Coinbase in talks with Indian Finance regulartors to enter the India Market back ASAP. Operating as crypto company in India has never been easy.

After disabling support for UPI in April 2022 (like literally a few days after enabling it), this is the first time Coinbase is openly talking about its interest in the विश्वगुरु.

🛠️ Dev & Design Digest

🪦 React team sunsets the good old “Create React App”, in favor of using frameworks, or using React on your own with custom build tools like Vite, Parcel, or RSBuild.

CRA got many of us started with React, as it was easy to ship applications. But if you have worked on really complex, performance-intensive applications, you might have seen the limitations of the bootstrapped structure of CRA at times. People usually eject or do craco to extend the config without losing everything. With this move, the React team has given us the freedom to use React from scratch as it’s not that hard and has more stable APIs.
‼️ Using this as an opportunity Tanstack team shipped create-tsrouter-app, a drop-in replacement for CRA with Vite and Tanstack Router.

⭕ ESLint now supports linting of CSS. In their quest to make ESLint a general purpose linter the developers behind ESLint introduced a new plugin @eslint/css.

This new plugin leverages the CSSTree AST format to provide linting rules for CSS. With JSON, Markdown, and now CSS, ESLinters are on a roll here. After all, hey the linter business is getting tougher with Rust and Zig guys out in the open.

✨ After Node 22.12.0 (Jod) was shipped with require(esm) enabled by default in December, the grass felt more greener to community and keep that in mind, Joyee Cheung dropped a banger PR to backport require(esm) to Node.js 20.

This is a big change than it looks, backporting it to v20 implies that as soon as Node 18 hits EoL, we can all settle on ESM vs CJS debate and ship ESM-only packages in peace. (no more comparing this debate with spaces vs tabs or vim vs emacs)

📉 Although you might have heard of startups scaling faster than ever and software engineers being in demand right now, acktually Software engineering job openings hit five-year low.

Yes, we are back to pre-COVID demands of engineering talent, but multiple factors are playing here, of course including our beloved LLMs.

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

Share The Nibble

What Brings Us T(w)o Awe 😳

• ۞ This video by @Anthony_Bonato shows in very simple animations how a Rubik’s Cube can be represented as a Mathematical Group.

• 🧮 How hard can it get to implement a Calculator app? Going by the works of Hans-J. Boehm who worked on implementing the Android Calculator, was pretty frustratingly hard, as described in this extremely detailed Twitter Thread by @ChadNauseam. If you already hate the iOS Calculator app (hey! mate), you have some more reason to love the Android one.

• 🧐 Cleo, the infamous Math Stack Exchange account that answered the most difficult integrals with no explanation has finally been doxxed. Turns out, he was a man named Vladimir Reshetnikov who was coming up with various hard integrals to solve and wanted to verify if his solution was correct. So, he used multiple anonymous accounts to ask questions and used Cleo to drop his answer without any explanation so that people would get baited to pay attention and provide an explanation. It’s xkcd #386 all over 😂

• ⚡ More of TIL: MongoDB has the ESR (Equality, Sort, Range) Rule to make compound indexes more efficient. The idea is that when creating a compound index, the order of keys matters. You should order them so that keys on which you’ll perform equality come before those you’ll sort, and they come before those you’ll check ranges for.

Builders’ Nest 🛠️

• 📨 postal-mime: an email parsing library that runs in browser environments and serverless functions.

• 👨‍💻 Grep by Vercel: Fast code search across 1M public GitHub repositories.

• 💬 giscus: A comments widget built on GitHub Discussions.

• 🔎 Complexity: A Chrome plugin that adds advanced model control, code artifacts, and a much larger personalization support to Perplexity

Meme of The Week 😌

Off-topic Reads/Watches 🧗

• 🤲 Ensemble Stars by Seth Godin, on how most organizations don’t celebrate the Ensemble Stars but rather wait for a linchpin to arrive and fix things, and why that’s bad.

• 💭 your dreams demand your best hours by , where she talks about how not all hours are created equal and how the “best” use of your “best hours” is to make sure you work on your dreams.

  Working Theorys

  your dreams demand your best hours

  There are hours in a day, and then there are your best hours. Your dreams demand your best hours…

  Read more

  a year ago · 98 likes · 27 comments · Anu Atluru

• 💼 Code yourself out of the job by Swizec, a reminder on how to loosen your grip, let go of your legos, and trust people to get more time to work on yourself and not have the context as your moat.

• 👑 We Live Like Royalty and Don’t Know It by Charles C. Mann highlights the hidden mechanisms unbeknown to us, that make our lives far better than those of even the royals who lived as close as 200 years ago. I mean, you don’t have to think twice before drinking a glass of water because it might contain a bacteria that might kill you, or worry about a small mosquito biting your kid playing in the park. No amount of riches could have afforded this earlier. (but yes let’s not forget we are at the mercy of certain someone in the Northern part of Korea, who likes to press buttons)

Wisdom Bits 👀

“The best way to complain is to make things better.”
— James Murphy

Wallpaper of The Week 🌁

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

Weekly Standup 🫠

• Nibbler A had a super busy week mostly at work, the badminton streak is not streaking anymore, and he probably requires a few more weekends to reset timelines. If he ain’t replying to you this week, forgive him.

• Nibbler P is back on his workout regime after a little break, wishing his commits and reading sessions were a little more forgiving to him.

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

👋🏻 Welcome to 97th!
Heyyy! So it’s another mid-week Nibble, and we ask for just one weekend to get back on track. Now Let’s dive in.

📰 Read #97 on Substack for the best formatting
🎧 You can also listen to the podcast version of Powered by NotebookLM

Subscribe now

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Improve The Nibble!

Now onto the edition…

📍ETHDenver - February 23 - March 1 • Denver, USA

⭐ YC is hosting its first-ever AI startup school in San Francisco on June 16 and 17th. It is a free event but the attendees will be hand-picked to include some of the best 2000 grads and tech industry experts.

What’s Happening 📰

🪄 For starters, we got Quantum Internet before GTA 6. We got what? Yes! Quantum Internet. Let us brief you a little, regular internet is when bits can travel over the wire, right? Well, if you can make qubits1 travel over the wire, it’s what Utopia and that’s what Oxford Scientists claim, that they have achieved teleportation using Quantum Computer.

It’s not as big a feat as the headline, but it’s not any small feat too, they transferred logic gate computation in qubits over the wire.

✨ AGI Digest

🗞️ OpenAI loves being in the headlines, but where’s Claude 4?

Following last week’s DeepResearch release which now has rolled out to all Pro and Team Users (and got some quick Open-Source replications in the same time), OpenAI’s site underwent a major design rehaul and dropped an eye-popping SuperBowl ad. What made more news though is the long-ongoing Elon-Altman banter where Musk again asked “But hey, when are we dropping the Open?”, teasing Sam. Never a dull day in AI fr.

And being the richest man on Earth that he is, Musk presented a $97.4 billion bid to acquire control of OpenAI, to which Sama responded, “No thank you but we will buy Twitter for $9.74 billion if you want”, and a lot more.

Media presence aside (honestly, we don’t care much about what’s happening between the two billionaires and their long-held spite, as long as at least one of them keeps shipping good models), OpenAI did learn its lesson from DeepSeek and decided to show an updated (longer?) CoT for the o3-mini model family. It’s still not the entire actual reasoning and is in fact still a summary so idk if that should be counted as a step forward.

What’s a step forward though is sharing a roadmap of the GPT-4.5 and GPT-5 which would release in the next few weeks/months. Though would they release the GPT-4o image generation still remains unanswered. GPT 4.5 would be their “last non-chain-of-thought model”, after which GPT-5 would merge the o-series and and GPT-series models by creating systems “that can use all our tools, know when to think for a long time or not, and generally be useful for a very wide range of tasks”.

And oh boy, they do have very impressive models, just watch the video below from 19:56 (already timestamped in the preview below). They internally have a model that is equivalent to the 50th-best programmer in the world (at competitive coding) and they might be able to churn it to be the number one by the end of the year!

And will Anthropic just sit tight releasing research insights and red-teaming results while letting OAI take away its cake just like that? And that too after releasing the Anthropic Economic Index which btw clearly highlights how its models are being used for Computer and Mathematical tasks far, far more than any other use case?

They better release the Claude 4 soon or it’s Owari-Da(rio) for them.

🧮 Reasoning AIs keep nailing Maths

AIME I 2025 questions were released some days ago and we have all the reasoning models taking the limelight, led by OpenAI’s o-series. o3-mini-high the highest score — an impressive 80% accuracy on the problems while costing merely $3.19 which is really cheap! DeepSeek is not far behind and even the distilled models achieve 50% accuracy, though don’t take it for a “general” intelligence just yet.

The reason why these Maths and Programming benchmarks, especially GSM8K and MATH, are the favorite of reasoning model makers is that the solution to the questions in these datasets can be easily broken down into small verifiable steps — exactly the kind of stuff that a reasoning model is supposed to do in its chain of thought, correcting itself if it takes a wrong step and trying alternate approaches to make sure it is understanding the problem correctly from all angles.

In fact, the IMO Gold Medal, which up until just two years ago was seen as too tough for LLMs to solve and possibly even a mark of AGI if a model manages to solve it, has received a fair share of attention from both Google DeepMind and OpenAI. DeepMind’s AlphaGeometry 2, which is based on its Gemini models, solves 84% of all IOI geometry problems of the last 25 years, compared to 54% of its predecessor AlphaGeometry 1. This makes it better than an average gold medalist in Geometry. On the other hand, OpenAI’s unreleased o3 scored 395.6 points in the IOI 2024 competition (the cutoff for gold is 360)!!! This model also scored 71.7% on SWE-bench Verified, a first for a model to cross 50%!

📱 Release the app now!

Seeing DeepSeek amass huge success with their app and there still not being a competitive LLM App offering from Europe, Mistral quickly revamped Le Chat offering Pro and Team plans and launched native apps for Android and iOS.

And with the custom hosting on Cerebras, what Mistral calls “Flash Answers”, it can answer at a blazing speed of 1,100 tokens per second! It’s not just Mistral, even Perplexity shifted its own Sonar models to serve using Cerebras at over 1,200 tokens per second! Talking of fast inference, Groq recently integrated their models on OpenRouter and also finally launched their long-awaited Dev Tier.

Replit also noticed a gap in the market which until now did not have a good prompt-to-site mobile app and launched their Replit Agents on mobile.

AllenAI took a step ahead and launched an app that runs its OLMoE model natively on iPhones 15 Pro and newer, and M-series iPads, while also open-sourcing the code of their apps!

GitHub taps into “The Force” and integrated agentic mode into Copilot, similar to what Cursor has. This feature is calable of iterating on its own code, recognizing errors, and fixing them automatically. It can suggest terminal commands and ask you to execute them and analyzes run-time errors with self-healing capabilities. It also has the new Gemini Flash 2.0 model available in the chatbox.

They also demoed a custom SWE agent codenamed “Project Padwan”. This allows you to assign Issues to the agent which comes up with a pull request addressing the change.

⚓️ New Model and Data Drops

After much testing in the past few months, Gemini Flash 2.0 was finally made GA. Along with this, they also released a Gemini 2.0 Flash-Lite and Gemini 2.0 Pro (both in experimental preview). All three models support multimodal input and the 2.0 Flash and 2.0 Pro would also support image and audio outputs in the future along wiht Live Multimodal API support.

We don’t know if the 2.0 Experimental is final right now because looking at the stats, the Flash 2.0 does the most heavy lifting from the previous version, and the Pro honestly looks like a humble upgrade in front of it. But if you had to choose one, Gemini 2.0 Flash performs best on the price-performance-cost spectrum. And it’s really good for OCRs!

The Gemini App is also upgraded with the new Flash and Pro models along with the 2.0 FLash Thinking and a brand new “Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental with Apps” which can work with YouTube, Maps, and Search, in turn watching videos or navigating in detail and then answering your questions.

LMSys now has a nice Arena Score-Price Plot showing the price vs. performance trade-offs for LLMs.

Bytedance is going crazy with realistic video generation. First they released Goku, a family of joint image-and-video generation models which gets top scores on image adn video generation benchmarks such as GenEval, DPG-Bench and VBench. And, they also announced Goku+ which is built on top of Goku specifically designed to optimize advertising scenarios.

Then, they released OmniHuman-1, an end-to-end multimodality-conditioned human video generation framework that can generate human videos (with audio!!!) based on a single human image and motion signals.

Prime Intellect introduced a distributed synthetic data generation system called Synthetic-1 to create verified reasoning traces for math, coding and science, using DeepSeek-R1. The dataset contains over 1.4M high-quality tasks and verifiers to generate data for training high quality reasoning models.

Nomic released a first-of-its-kind MoE Embedding model nomic-embed-text-v2-moe. This multimodal embedding model has an active parameter count of 305M (475M total) and is trained with MRL for using truncated embeddings, if required, to optimize storage. It performs pretty great compared to models in its size range, though it only supports input lengths of up to 512 tokens.

Zyphra released Zonos-v0.1 beta, a family of TTS models with high-fidelity voice cloning. The two 1.6B models — one transformer and one hybrid (Mamba2) — are available to download from Huggingface as well as on their model playground via the API at a rate of $0.02 per minute. The expressiveness in voice is really good and the 1.6B means that it can be run at almost-real-time without very high VRAM requirements.

🔐 0x Digest

🤝 Rippling partners with Unicâmbio, Portugal’s leading currency exchange.

This introduces instant cross-border payment services between Portugal and Brazil.

👛 Crossmint introduces Agent Wallets for AI Agents and launchpads. WTF? Yes! let us explain 👇

Each agent wallet is supposed to have two keys, none visible to either you or Crossmint, Passkeys or Embedded Wallets manage one, and the other is secured in TEE. This sets your agent free to make the on-chain entropy positive and you free of regulatory BS.

🦄 Uniswap’s L2 Unichain goes to Mainnet, and launches itself as Stage 1 rollup with permissionless fault proofs for now. And promised to soon allow anyone to host UVN (Unichain Validation Network) node and verify blocks.

After almost 4 months in testnet, they knew what was required to get on with the user’s needs. We remember people (us too) laughing when Uniswap launched a wallet and then an L2 Testnet, we still don’t regret it

🎓 Balaji’s Town cum School is coming with its second cohort Network School 2025 or as per his plan “Society-as-a-service (v2)”

It is a year-long program for 256 members that began March 1, 2025, on an island near Singapore. While v2 is running they’ll be building a permanent campus for Society from scratch (v3) for 1024 people.

🛠️ Dev & Design Digest

↕ Jim (Engineer at Gronola) wrote a piece on “Don't animate height!” explaining how their app was using 60% CPU and 25% GPU (no, not because it was in Electron, calm down guys). Jim unveils a pure CSS animation that causes resource hogging as if it were JS (crazy, right?), a simple frequent transition on height triggers a layout recalculation (and as we know from How Browser’s Rendering pipeline works?), it’s fucking expensive thing to do.

So, they did what any of us would do → move to composite properties (yes the cheapest ones), which ones you ask? transform and opacity, leading to better resource usage.

🆕 A new DOM primitive moveBefore(), state-preserving atomic move API just dropped. This new function will be available on the ParentNode.

It will help in moving elements within the DOM without losing their current state. It helps avoid unnecessary reloading or resetting of elements like iframes or dialogs when they are moved to a new location. You can read more about this from this Pull Request.

🪃 We’ve not got time to watch it yet, but Honeypot (known for building documentaries of nerds in tech ) released “Angular: The Documentary”.

The story of Angular from an internal side-project at Google to a sensational web framework to a boomer framework and back.

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

Share The Nibble

What Brings Us T(w)o Awe 😳

• 🪟 “Due to concerns about the fact that acknowledging the existence of certain countries can be perceived as a nominally political stance, Microsoft has opted to just avoid the issue altogether by not including country flag emojis in Windows’ system font.” from The Dumb reason why flag emojis aren't working on your site in Chrome on Windows. This article quickly explains why adding a country flag emoji to your website without polyfills can bite you back.

• 🎮 A developer found a bug in the Marvel Rivals game that exploits their hotfix patching system to remotely execute code (RCE). More importantly, the developer clarifies that there are many such cases and rants about how Game Developers mostly don’t care.

• 🥚 How far will you go to get a perfectly boiled egg? “A lot!” say a group of researchers from Italy who have come up with a groundbreaking way called “periodic cooking” to improve texture and nutritional content in boiled eggs compared to other traditional techniques. The idea is that both the albumin and the yolk require different temperatures for optimal cooking (85 °C and 65 °C respectively) which is hard to achieve unless you prepare them separately. The way they achieve this is by placing the raw shell-on egg alternatively in hot water and cold water for relatively short periods of time and repeating these cycles multiple times until the optimum cooking of both the yolk and the albumen is reached. Look at the diagrams below for yourself!

  

  Innovative? Yes, very much. Are we going to cook our eggs this way now? A good soft boil serves just fine with much less effort, thank you very much.

  

• 💣 Turns out that you can use Zero Width Joiners (ZWJ) sequences to encode an unlimited amount of data in a single emoji to overwhelm LLM’s context windows (aka TokenBombing by Pliny, because why bend when you can bomb?) In simple words, it adds a bunch of zero-width UTF characters to your inputs which are not rendered for human eyes but still take up space in your text.
  This opens up a host of new kinds of attacks on LLMs if proper guardrails are not set on inputs which means even a single character by a malicious actor may crash your systems.

  

Builders’ Nest 🛠️

• 🕵️ sniffnet: a cross-platform and intuitive application to monitor your Internet traffic comfortably.

• 🚰 httptap: View the HTTP and HTTPS requests made by any Linux program by running httptap -- <command>

• 💅 clack: a tool to effortlessly build beautiful command-line apps. If you have seen some really good-looking CLI, it was probably built using Clack.

• 🏋 WeightWatcher: Open-source, diagnostic tool for analyzing Deep Neural Networks, generating layer-by-layer diagnostics.

Meme of The Week 😌

Off-topic Reads/Watches 🧗

• 🏄‍♂️ Rainy Day Surfers by Seth, on how only the hard-core surfers show up in the rain when they are needed the most. Keep your Rainy Day Surfers close and yourself safe, if you are one.

• 🧠 asks whether the neuron comes first or the feeling. A small telling of how feeling and neurons are like a “dichotomy of science and religion”.

  Bits of Wonder

  Which came first, the neuron or the feeling?

  In 1998, cognitive scientists Christof Koch and David Chalmers made a bet. Koch believed that within 25 years, we would have clear evidence about where in the brain consciousness resides—the “neural correlates of consciousness.” Chalmers believed consciousness is a…

  Read more

  a year ago · 42 likes · 3 comments · Kasra

• ⌛ What's still here? by Jason Fried, tells us to be curious about what passed the test of time, what lasted, and what is durable.

• 🌊 You Should Get Wet (ah! not that way) by appreciating the power of being near Water and its benefits. TL;DR → Be near water, even aquariums count.

  Doublethink

  You Should Get Wet

  Blue Mind Theory…

  Read more

  a year ago · 66 likes · 11 comments · Lewis O’Brien

Wisdom Bits 👀

“What you deny subdues you. What you accept transforms you.”
— Carl Jung

Wallpaper of The Week 🌁

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

Weekly Standup 🫠

• Nibbler P had a super ultra-busy time last week, squashing bugs and creating deployments. He started reading more about Silicons, learning some RL, and playing stuff in between to keep things balanced.

• Nibbler A had a loonng week, with an even bigger week coming up. He missed several workout sessions this week, even fell sick, and had close to nil screentime. Delayed Update: He’s in love with Apple’s Mac-to-Mac hand-off. But he was off track on his reading and badminton the last 2 weeks. Here’s a postcard from Udaipur for you. 🫶

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

👋🏻 Welcome to 96th! This week, we are experimenting a little with the format. Let us know how you like this!
96, an abundant number, just like the news we have seen this week.

📰 Read #96 on Substack for the best formatting
🎧 You can also listen to the podcast version of Powered by NotebookLM

Subscribe now

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. 💪

Improve The Nibble!

Now onto the edition…

What’s Happening 📰

🪦 To start on a positive note (*coughs*), the “Doomsday clock” is now set to 89 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been to midnight. The clock was set to 7 minutes to midnight in 1947 and midnight symbolizes the destruction of humanity. Yeah! And of course, AI is one of the big factors along with geopolitical tension and nuclear weapons in the hands of so-called “leaders”.

🌥️ And hey, software engineers have been keeping their own Doomsday clock which moved when Xuan-Son Nguyen raised a Pull Request on llama.cpp: “ggml : x2 speed for WASM by optimizing SIMD”, written mostly by DeepSeek-R1. (it’s joever?) Maybe it's time to reclaim your role.

And while you can add “fucking” to your search query to neutralize the AI summaries (talk about well-mannered AIs, as they can’t repeat curse words), maybe it’s time to learn to respect these agents (you know “just in case”).

✨ AGI Digest

💭 OpenAI, DeepSeek, and the race to think harder (& better?)

🤏 Following some vagueposting from its employees, speculations from the community, and competition from China, OpenAI released o3-mini — the next generation of its small & fast reasoning models and Deep Research — a search & research agent built on top of o3 (not o3-mini!).

They also did a Reddit AMA answering some of the popular queries including releasing the missing image generation in 4o (!!!), tool-use and retrieval for reasoning models, displaying the model’s CoT tokens (which might be teased “one-more-thing” feature; maybe they’ll keep it for Pro users only but all credits to DS R1 for prodding them in that direction), and possibly doing more open-source work. Also, they revealed that they used r/ChangeMyView to train o3-mini with the “best human reasoning data available on the face of the Earth”. (guess, who just got treats being the early investor in Reddit → Sama)

o3-mini is available to all ChatGPT Users (unlimited for Pro, 150 messages/day for Plus, and a few1 messages/day for Free) and in the API for users in tier 3-5. With $1.1/M input tokens and $4.4/M output tokens, it is a lot cheaper than o1-mini while also being much faster at inference and of course more intelligent!

The model can be used with low, medium, or high reasoning effort. It is already performant with o1-mini on low and matches o1 on medium-high effort. The reasoning_effort parameter can control this effort in the API. Sadly, the model's knowledge cutoff is only until October 2023, making it a huge bummer for using recent dev tools. We guess it won’t increase anytime soon, given how adamant OpenAI employees are about using it with Search instead. People are already comparing it against DeepSeek R1 and from what we and others have tested there is no one clear winning model between the two. o3-mini surely performs a lot better on high reasoning effort but that comes at large API cost.

📝 Deep Research (wonder where they got the name inspiration from while taking a dig on DeepSeek) meanwhile is a search agent that conducts multi-step research on the internet as well as the user-uploaded files, with access to a Python tool for analysis. It is trained on hard browsing and reasoning tasks across a range of domains and already achieves more than 25% accuracy on the recently released Humanity’s Last Exam benchmark — a broad academic benchmark with broad subject coverage. Currently available only for Pro, it will be rolling out to the Plus and Team tier soon.

😳 Meanwhile, DeepSeek is getting popular among developers primarily because of its low costs and is already being used extensively, such as the earlier mentioned PR of a developer using DeepSeek R1 to write 90% of this code to optimize SIMD in llama.cpp. Unsloth has even released a 1.58-bit quantized version of DeepSeek R1, compressing it 80% to be only 131GB while retaining much of its reasoning via dynamic quantization!

But popularity also comes at a cost. Last week of Jan, DeepSeek servers were hit by DDoS for three days totaling the network traffic of the entire Europe! And with the US already eyeing a bill that would prohibit anybody in the US from even using Chinese OSS (which would be devastating), providers like Perplexity, Fireworks, and Together are deploying DeepSeek models on their own American Servers to keep both the traffic and the data within the borders. India is also waking up to the idea of having a stronger self-sustained AI power, and we are seeing more government and community initiatives about it.

🫵 Meanwhile, OpenAI is still accusing DeepSeek of stealing its output to improve its models, which is a classic case of “the pot calling the kettle black”.

⚓️ New Model Drops

🧧 Even with last week's Chinese New Year, the Sino bros kept shipping. We got DeepSeek Janus Pro 7B — a unified multimodal model with native support for both image and text inputs as well as outputs, an improvement over their previous Janus-1.3B model. It improves over earlier approaches by decoupling the visual encoding from text encoding into separate space, while still utilizing a single unified transformer architecture for processing.

👀 After Qwen Max and Qwen Turbo, the Qwen folks released Qwen 2.5 VL, the next iteration of their VL, in 3B, 7B, and 72B model sizes while again establishing themselves as the top-performing OSS Vision LLM family.

🎐 France’s Mistral in their signature move released Mistral Small 3, reaffirming their stance on Open-Source by using Apache 2.0 license and promising to progressively move away from their previous MRL license. Mistral Small 3 is a strong 24B model that punches above its weight with speed and cost efficiency. Mistral hosts it for $0.1/M input tokens and $0.3/M output tokens with ~140 tok/s latency.

✅ AllenAI added Tülu 3 405B to its Tülu 3 family which competes with both DeepSeek V3 and GPT-4o. They use their fully open post-training recipe, most remarkably the Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) — a new approach to train language models on tasks with verifiable outcomes such as mathematical problem-solving and instruction following which significantly improved MATH performance.

📦 And some more developments

🌟 Nous Research announced Psyche, an infrastructure to democratize and decentralize training. It is built using Nous’ DisTRo optimizers on the Solana Blockchain to coordinate heterogeneous compute (4090s, A100s, H100s) to join together and train models to be fault-tolerant and censorship-resistant.

Starting with an initial Phase 0 on the testnet, they would refine the system to make it fault-tolerant while improving efficiency and rewarding the GPU providers appropriately. While they have achieved distributed pre-training of a 15B model before using DisTrO, running it trustlessly on a blockchain on scale would be a completely new feat.

🤗 You can now directly call supported Inference Providers on HuggingFace of different models from their model page as well as via the HF API.

External inference providers, starting with fal, Replicate, Sambanova, and Together AI, are integrated into both the client SDK and the website. You can either set your own API keys of the provider or use them routed through HF using its own credits.

🔐 0x Digest

💪 With Interoperability being the theme for this year quarter (nothing lasts for a year in markets) in crypto, a wild RIP-7859, Rollup Improvement Proposal was dropped, proposing an overhaul to “Expose L1 origin information inside the L2 execution environment”.

The idea is to make sure L2s can access the most recent block data from Layer 1 somehow, but it’s still in the discussion phase on how are we going to do it. A major microservices vibe is going on in the L1 and L2 space, all we can see is two services calling each in a private subnet or using some relay.

🛟 In “Never a dull day in Crypto”, so hardware wallets keep your monies safe, don’t they? Well, one of (they have eight) the co-founders of Ledger, David Balland, and his wife were kidnapped and rescued after a police operation involving 90 officers.

Post rescue, it was found that his hand had been mutilated, which just re-affirms our beliefs that biometric ledgers and Passkeys are safe as long as the kidnappers want them to be 😭.

👨‍🏫 Former SEC Chair Gary Gensler has returned to MIT to teach AI and Finance. For Context: Gensler has done his fair share of mischief in making stringent regulations around crypto.

And Tyler, co-founder of Gemini, said out loud that they will not hire any graduates from MIT, not even interns as long as Gensler is associated with them. Talk about being salty 😭
Well, while we’re talking about unreasonable shitty regulations on crypto, we are pleased to inform you that Indian crypto holders face a 70% tax penalty on undisclosed gains under Section 158B. (cc: Homies)

🤝 The integrations club is busy as usual 👇

💧 Sui is now available on Phantom. I’ve just heard good things about both Solana and Sui doing a few things right that Ethereum wasn’t doing.

This unlocks a big market for Sui as 15M users of Phantom (the leading Solana wallet) now can easily play around with Sui.

$ Aptos gets Native USDC by Circle, so no more circling (bridging) assets, all hail interoperability.

This is huge as I think crypto as a community underestimated the impact of “centralized entity-backed stablecoins in revolutionizing the community said to believe in decentralization” 🙂

🖋️ The renaming club weren’t sleeping this week, ai16z officially rebrands to ElizaOS, because you know it was confusing for “a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley” to differentiate.

And well, Chris Dixon requested them to change their name as they became famous. And yeah for the traders in the mailbox, the ticker remains the same for now $ai16z is still how they roll baby!!!

🛠️ Dev & Design Digest

🗂️ PyPi adds support for archiving a package. This is aimed to be a way for maintainers to signal that they are not deleting the project from index, but don’t expect any new releases on this package and in turn decide carefully whether you do want to depend on this package.

One thing that they don’t tell you outright is, that you need to have 2FA to access “Your Projects”. I went it to archive a project and ended up doing the “TOTP ritual 🤡” (imagine the unamused face)

⚡Felix, Co-Maintainer of Electron, was sick of people having misconceptions about Electron and went ahead and wrote an article “Things people get wrong about Electron”, addressing few of the concerns like Electron ain’t native, obese bundles, web apps are bad and more.

And before people could say more shit about the piece of software he is working on for over a decade he slapped them with this repository containing examples of Native UI with Electron and told them how it’s done.

💞 Superglue, the love affair between React and Rails is now (on track) v1.0. Superglue is a library designed to make building interactive Rails and React applications as productive as classic Rails Stack apps (also it is a fork of Turbolinks 3). The author of the library Johny Ho (not to be confused with the co-founder of Perplexity) has been working on Superglue for over a decade and has seen many attempts trying to glue Rails with React, but hey!!! integrations aren’t simple.
Enough talking what does Superglue bring to the table?

• Well, it relies heavily on Rails to do the server-side rendering in its way, breaking the classic foobar.html.erb into three parts .json.props, .js and .html.erb. But instead of sending the whole 2 file, it just sends the props.

• Leverages the oldie Rails UJS to allow creating dynamic interactions such as modals and pagination, without full page reloads.

• It supports Server Side Rendering with its Humid Components. For complex state applications, it provides a way to integrate Redux (Big & true)

⌛ JavaScript Temporal is coming to the browsers near you soon. If you have ever used Date/Time in JavaScript you probably know that the native Date mostly sucks and you use libraries moment, luxon, or their distant cousins to handle dates (urge to say I don’t do Dates?).

The Temporal adds support for time zone and calendar representations, many built-in methods for conversions, comparisons and computations, formatting, and more, over 200 utilities functions and counting.

🦊 NestJS announced the release of Nest 11, and just like any other major update, this one comes with a bunch of treats, too, we’ll highlight a few important ones.

1. The Logger now supports JSON logging.

2. Microservices transporters get a new method unwrap, allowing devs to interact directly with the underlying client.

3. They have improved the startup time by revamping the module's opaque key generation process and have updated underlying server frameworks like Express and Fastify to v5.

🤝 You have read ~50% (well, we don’t know how much, tbh) of Nibble, the following section brings some fun stuff and tools out from the wild.

Share The Nibble

What Brings Us T(w)o Awe 😳

• ⏲️ Rachel By The Bay shares how they smeared the “leap second” at their organization (Facebook, we guess?) back in 2015 by intentionally pushing the whole company into the past. This sorcery is rather a common affair now, major companies maintaining NTP Servers smear the leap second, instead of adding it right at the moment.
  🐇 Here’s a Rabbithole for you: What harm does a leap second cause on a Unix system?

• 😔 Why Applications are OS Specific? by Core Dumped, a quick and small video telling why System Calls design decisions taken by Windows and UNIX create this decades-old problem of having to run OS-specific programs. (*sad noises of all those who want easy ways to play games on Mac*). TL;DR → Sys calls, registers, sys call table, parameters in sys call, and a lot more matters.

• 💰 Since Jira had some "issues" (pun intended), Here's a quick walkthrough by Arpit on How Jira moved from JSON to Protobuf and ended up saving 55% of the cost of their Memcached. Since Protobuf is smaller they got 80% savings on their payload sizes, 75% fewer CPU cycles, and of course better serde5 than almighty JSON.

• 💫 Samuel built a CSS library based on the Counter-Strike 1.6 UI, which we call cs16.css. We think this, along with win95.css, is all we need to accelerate down memory lane.

Builders’ Nest 🛠️

• 🎛️ evo: a modern, offline-first version control system that focuses on what matters most: helping developers write great code together. No more merge conflicts that make you want to quit programming. No more branch structures that look like abstract art. Just a clean, intuitive version control that works.

• 🗺️ jsvectormap: A lightweight JS library for creating interactive maps and pretty data visualization.

• 🪗 llm-compressor: Transformers-compatible library for applying various compression algorithms to LLMs for optimized deployment with vLLM.

• 📦 LocalSend: Free, open-sourced app that allows you to securely share files and messages with nearby devices over your local network without needing an internet connection. Like an OSS Airdrop.

Meme of The Week 😌

Off-topic Reads/Watches 🧗

• ⌛ Jensen’s Vision for the Future, an interview with Cleo. They discuss how NVIDIA started, what problems they were solving, what led to the creation of the almighty CUDA, and of course how NVIDIA is driving the AI boom. Jensen talks about how they reinvented modern computing and how the next decade is all about Applied AI, Omniverse (with Cosmos), self-driving cars, Biotech, Climate Science, and whatnot.

• 📱 People don’t like using technology, an old essay by (we stumbled upon on Twitter) reminding all of us that “People care about their problems” and maybe the fancy piece of tech you built is not as pleasing to them.

• 🫡 To be in charge by Seth, talks about why one should take initiative and act as if they are "in charge" even when it feels uncomfortable.

• 🧠 A great piece by explaining how “Genius is not age-bound” and also, why Fields medals are given to people below 40.

  The Common Reader

  Does the flame of genius burn past 30?

  James Marriott in the Times has written that “there is a hard, bright intensity to the flame of youthful genius that doesn’t burn much past 30.” James is absolutely right in his broader thesis that the flourishing of young talent is essential to a lively culture. “Youthful genius has a special, anarchic power that our society is not currently good at harnessing.” Agr…

  Read more

  a year ago · 91 likes · 19 comments · Henry Oliver

Wisdom Bits 👀

Wallpaper of The Week 🌁

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

Weekly Standup 🫠

• Nibbler A had a looooong week of revamping some things at home, marking the full week with nil screen time (but hey! over 15k steps daily), and then crying on the pile of emails on Sunday night. (hence the delays)

• Nibbler P had a work-filled week that ended with battling zombies, exploring Midgard, and riding through feudal Japan on his new gaming machine while maintaining his weekly workout streak.

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

👋🏻 Here comes the 95th edition!

😭 This week was a good year 👍
➕ We are really not sure how can we cover all that happened last week in one edition, but hey! we tried.

📰 Read #95 on Substack for the best formatting
🎧 You can also listen to the podcast version of Powered by NotebookLM

Subscribe now

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Now onto the edition…

What’s Happening 📰

• 📝 South Park Commons Founder Fellowship application closes on February 2nd, 2025. The program supports ambitious founders in -1 to 0: pre-revenue, pre-product, or even pre-idea with capital, 8-week cohort, and credits on cloud providers.

• 💰 Everstone acquired Wingify (an Indian bootstrapped A/B Testing tool) for about $200M. Paras (co-founder with ~70% stake) shared a note on Hackernews about selling his company after 15 years. Sparsh (co-founder) will take over as CEO after this acquisition. Big win for Indian SaaS out there, yay!

• 🐬 Docker Desktop on macOS is failing to start for some users reporting false malware warnings as “some files in existing installations are incorrectly signed”. The easiest way to fix this is to upgrade your Docker Desktop, the Docker team has acknowledged this incident and released some patches and guides.

• 📜 It is now required to turn on JavaScript for using Google Search starting Jan 15, 20251. Yes, until now they were supporting searches without enabling JS too. Roughly 9M searches every day used to come from clients without JS.

  

✨ AGI Digest

• 💭 DeepSeek and Thinking Machines2 Models

  • 🐳 Deepseek drew all eyes towards itself and gave major labs existential crisis by releasing its open-source reasoning model Deepseek-R1 which competes with OpenAI’s o1 on reasoning and general tasks at a fraction of the cost while being accessible to everyone. And when we say “a fraction of the cost” we mean ~27x cheaper inputs and outputs than o1! You can try it right now on their API, Openrouter, or chat.deepseek.com by selecting the DeepThink option. The weights are MIT-licensed and are available on HuggingFace. Like OpenAI’s o1, this model is also trained to “think”, reason, and self-correct before answering, leading to really good and thought-out responses.

    

    The secret sauce of such a good and cheap model lies in its training using large-scale Reinforcement Learning using a technique called GRPO, as explained in their accompanying Research Paper. You can refer to this simpler guide to understand how the R1 model works.

    

    People are comparing the release of R1 with the “ChatGPT” moment and there are already attempts by research labs to replicate it such as open-r1 by HuggingFace. OpenAI, on the other hand, felt personally attacked and announced 100 free o3-mini queries free for everybody whenever it is released to strengthen back its grip on the market.

  • ♊️ Google DeepMind was quick to follow suit by releasing an update of the Gemini Flash 2.0 Thinking, available on AI Studio, which now also supports code execution, a 1M token content window & a reduced likelihood of thought-answer contradictions.

    

    This new release comes with significant improvements in Math and Science benchmarks. Here’s a comparison with Deepseek for reference. Though point to note that DeepSeek R1 probably excels in other areas as these are the only stats that Google released for now.

    

• 🦾 Agents are on the Rise

  • 👀 OpenAI finally released its “actual” agentic tool called Operator. Currently available only to the $200/mo Pro subscribers, you can ask the Operator to do a complex task for you such as booking a hotel room or ordering your groceries and it would revert by opening its browser window in a remote machine and trying to navigate around the site doing what you told it to do. You can even go do other chores and return to check on it sometime later, making it an actual “look ma, no hands!” tool that’s out there in the public.

  • 📡 And so did Perplexity, on the Android App at least, calling it the Perplexity Assistant. This kinda does the same thing as the OpenAI Operator but with your apps. This is what Gemini should have been for Android and Siri should have been for iOS but as always, third-party developers took the lead.

• ⚓️ Model and Dataset Drops

  • 🧧 It’s the Chinese New Year on the 29th of Jan and Chinese Labs are going crazy to release everything they could before it. We already saw DeepSeek do a massive release earlier. Now we have Kimi.ai release another reasoning model that mogs 4o and Sonnet.

    

    Then ByteDance (parent of TikTok) released among other things, Doubao-1.5-pro, which as you might have guessed, again competes with the same top models but a prices competing DeepSeek’s.

    

    And then, just today, Qwen released a massive 1M version of its 2.5 Models in two sizes — Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct-1M and Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct-1M.

• 📦 Misc Updates:

  • 📝 Anthropic announced a new API feature "Citations", which lets you ground its answer to the provided source documents. With this API Claude can now pinpoint the block of text from source documents used to generate output, this makes AI more verifiable and trustworthy (unlike most of you). 🤔 But wait (yes we are talking like R1 in this edition), what if you could just say in your prompt to "output direct quote" wouldn't that work the same? Well, not exactly. Since cited_text doesn't count towards output tokens, using Citations API will be cheaper, and citations are guaranteed to contain valid pointers to the provided documents, it's more reliable too. Right now three types of source documents are supported Plain text, PDF, and Custom (like Lists, transcripts, special formatting, and more granular citations).

  • 🤖 President Trump announced the "Stargate Project" to develop AI infrastructure in the US, the key thing is they plan to invest up to $500 billion over the next 4 years with $100B getting deployed as we speak constructing data centers in Texas. The initial key stakeholders in the project are Masayoshi (SoftBank), Sam Altman (OpenAI), Mr. Ellison (Oracle), and MGX (an Emirati investment firm specializing in artificial intelligence). The project is also expected to create thousands of jobs and eventually solve big problems for humanity although there is not much talk around that right now and from what we know all the stakeholders might have their own agenda with the outcome.

  • 🧬 OpenAI and Retro (longevity startup, also investment of Sama) are partnering to develop GPT-4b micro (no official word from OpenAI or Sama yet), a model ideally able to suggest modifications to Yamanaka factors, which leads to healthier and younger cells, hence longer life. This startup aims to add 10 years to the lives of people.

  • ♊ Google makes Gemini even more helpful in Samsung Galaxy Unpacked. One key feature coming is that Gemini Live can now work with images, files, and YouTube videos, which is rolling out on the Samsung Galaxy S24 and S25 series, and also on Pixel 9 devices.

    

🔐 0x Digest

• 📑 If you find it hard to remember a particular EIP, Andrew posted Friendly names for final ERCs, mapping all the finalized EIPs to their functional name.

• 💰 World Liberty Financial (yes the new DeFi project endorsed by Trump Family) made strategic purchases of over $100M in tokens including ETH, wBTC, Aave, etc to celebrate the inauguration of Donald J. Trump as the 47th PoTUS3 .

• 🍿 With Trump launching his meme coin on Solana, some questions were raised on Ethereum leading to Joseph Lubin writing a long-ass post on how it’s time for some changes in Ethereum Foundation leadership and Vitalik signaling the same right after it and confirming he is the daddy?
  While this all was happening, someone created a Twitter account with the name “Second Foundation” and tweeted “hello world computer”. This started a rumor that there is a new organization splitting off from the Ethereum Foundation, which was later clarified by Konstantin (because bro QTed it) that it’s just a tweet guys.

• ⚡ Earlier this month LayerZero introduced the Quick Merkle Database (QMDB), a verifiable database optimized for Blockchains. This is an SSD-optimized state database with in-memory Merkleization, cutting write amplification, and DRAM needs. They basically make Merkleization an operation as fast as it can get and while benchmarks are just numbers (and you should take them for a grain of salt), QMBD is said to outperform NOMT (the current leading verifiable DB).

🛠️ Dev & Design Digest

• 🧃 CSS is hard and if someone gave you a task to "slide open a box with an unknown amount of content", I think you'll take a long breath (Water Breathing?) and then start to plan it. While planning this you'll realize, oh! JavaScript comes in handy to help it, even after knowing that more often than not, JavaScript is the only way to shoot yourself in the leg (performance issues). Alex talks about how "We'll soon be able to slide open a height: auto box with native CSS". Thanks to the new features in CSS — interpolate-size and calc-size, which in case you are wondering have limited availability right now (just supported in Chromium)

• 🌭 Bun dropped some MAJORR (technically minor, but hey you get it) changes with v1.2.
  How big of changes you ask? Well they got a reaction video on Release Notes from ThePrimeagen well, they went above and beyond (with low-level code touching metal underneath) this time, the bottom line is everything is faster now (so zig join the Rust Club?)

  • the compatibility with NodeJS APIs is at an all-time high, with a continuous test suite on Node.

  • Bun.s3 makes ops from S3 as simple as interacting with filesystem APIs.

  • Bun.sql now supports Postgres (yay! DB enthusiasts)

  • and yeah, just like Deno came back to package.json, Bun realized that having a binary lockfile can hurt more than it can help, so they now have a text-based lockfile

  • and you can add comments and trailing commas in package.json, (but hey! Is JSON spec with us in this room?)

  • other major things include HTML Imports (as weird as it may sound, it's quite a turn-on), CSS Bundling, and a lot more improvements.

    

• 🪁 While this release fest was going in, Tailwind CSS shipped v4.0 and they also dropped more features than "r"s in strawberry. Well, we'll try to give you the most here:

  • whoosh: a new engine leading to the full builds became 5x faster, and incremental builds became around 100x faster.

  • wow: it can now leverage new CSS like @property for custom properties, and color-mix() for advanced color manipulation.

  • weightless: You can set it up with one line of CSS (@import "tailwindcss") with zero configuration and automatic content detection.

  • what we wanted: you can now customize and extend Tailwind directly in CSS files instead of JavaScript, with CSS theme variables for easy design token management. (I'm not crying, you are)

• 🖼️ Unpic released v1.0, for the uninitiated, it is a component library that helps you display high-performance and responsive images across various web frameworks. It automatically generates srcset and sizes, supports modern optimized image formats, generates LQIP4 while images are loading and much more.

• ⛳️ TypeScript 5.8 will ship with a new flag --erasableSyntaxOnly, an tsconfig option to disallow features requiring transformations that are not supported by Node's --strip-types. And guess who's happy (spoiler alert: it's Matt Pocock). Matt has been recommending not to use non-erasable stuff for a while now. This flag marks enums, namespaces, and class parameter properties as errors since they cannot be deleted without the runtime behavior being affected.

• 🌟 Before you start developing web applications in 2025 with your favorite JS toolings, take a moment to step back and look at 2024 JavaScript Rising Stars, and maybe reconsider a few of your choices or at the very least be informed what to learn if anything.

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

Share The Nibble

What Brings Us T(w)o Awe 😳

• 🌳 Crazy how even a simple innocuous word like vlogger can have such grandiose etymology. What’s even more interesting (as pointed out in this comment) is how a third of the chart is dedicated to “worldwide”, which is immediately ditched after being shortened to just “web”.

  

• 🌊 PickentCode used the Water Splashing method with the help of BFS and K-NN to recognize digits. They mapped 9 values to each digit sample, the first 8 were the fraction of water that the surface can retain (4 sides divided into two halves, so 8) and the last value represented the fraction of water left in the vessel if the digit is submerged. The application recognizes correct things ~85% of the time, you can try this out, or dive into the code.

• 🇸🇬 Singapore was once a part of the Bengal Presidency (discovered via @kukreja_abhinav’s tweet). At its territorial height in the mid-nineteenth century, the Bengal Presidency extended from the Khyber Pass to Singapore! Singapore at that time was a part of the Straits Settlement — a group of territories controlled by the British East India Company, which later went under the control of the British Raj and then under direct British control as a Crown colony. Yes, our friend Deba is from the ex-capital of Singapore and not Calcutta.

  

• 🛜 Andrew shared how an unusual WiFi issue kept increasing the latency of his network for over 8 months until they could hunt it down using a debugger and find how the Qt5 (<5.14) application QNetworkAccessManager would check for wifi interface changes every 10 seconds.

What We Have Been Trying 🔖

• 🧑‍💻 Trae: a Cursor competitor by ByteDance5 (yes, it’s a VS Code fork). It is not asking for money yet, the interface looks a little better than existing ones. Right now it uses Claude 3.5 Sonnet as the Default model, but we are looking forward to using DeepSeek R1 with this (like the complete China Stack 🇨🇳). And it’s 🆓 for now.

• 🎥 Qwen Chat: We talked about Qwen chat in the last edition and it has got even better with image and video generation! Though we still fw DeepSeek Chat these days, but FWIW, the image and video quality in Qwen is really good.

• 💹 EconGraphs: Interactive graphs and explanations about key economic concepts (good to understand stuff when reading Zerodha Varsity)

• 🗺️ Wikimap: a geospatial plot of Wikipedia articles, pan, zoom, and explore the map, search for articles, and read them right within the map. [Built and shared by Shuvam]

Builders’ Nest 🛠️

• ✂️ trimMiddle: a package (or function tbh) that trims the string from the middle and fills it with filler, instead of start and end.

• 🐘 Searchlight: a native macOS, open-source PostgreSQL client designed to be simple, lightweight, and developer-friendly.

• 📦 Repomix: a powerful tool that packs your entire repository into a single, AI-friendly file. This makes it breezy to feed your codebase to LLMs (been seeing a lot of projects like this lately).

• 🧪 fast-check: Property-based testing framework for JavaScript/TypeScript is also test runner agnostic. Here’s a demo by egghead.io on how you can utilize it.

Meme of The Week 😌

Off-topic Reads/Watches 🧗

• 💭 Subjectivity in Productivity from , talks about how “projects are rarely math problems” and “Subjectivity and productivity are partners, not adversaries.”

• 🥼 Expertise and credentials by Seth, a short note on how expertise and credentials don't always align as you’d expect and how expertise is more like a measure of being able to keep a promise.

• 📖 You Must Read At Least One Book To Ride, a neat long article about how much "One Book" unlocks for you, and how strategic engagement with authoritative knowledge (books) creates disproportionate rewards in this world of low-quality content.
  TL;DR -> Read books, as the author clearly doesn't want you to read one, so that they stay relevant on this mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam6.

• 😔 Grant Slatton (founding engineer at Row Zero) rants about how “Nobody Cares” and conveys that society is plagued by widespread indifference and wishes more people cared about improving the world around them. (us Grant us)

Wisdom Bits 👀

“Intensity gets attention. Consistency builds empires.”
―

Wallpaper of The Week 🌁

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

Weekly Standup 🫠

• Nibbler P completed his mandatory annual solar circumambulation this week and got lots of new stuff to read. By the time this edition hits your inboxes, he’ll be busy writing his long-due blogpost.

• Nibbler A had a long week like most of tech Twitter, but yeah he checked off an item off his bucket list (Listening to Music of the Spheres) this week. He has been hit by the fact that his time to dive into rabbit holes might soon get compromised, so he’s locked in and closing all those tabs as soon as he can.

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👋🏻 Welcome to 94th!

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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.

    

  • 👀 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?

    

  • 🏄‍♂️ 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).

  The Pragmatic Engineer

  Cross-platform mobile development

  These days, it seems almost everyone owns a smartphone. In the US, 91% of adults have one, in Europe, this figure is 89%, while in India, Deloitte predicts 75% of adults will have a smartphone by 2026. In total, there are an estimated 4.8 billion smartphone users in the world, which is an incredible number! This means that for tech startups and tech businesses that build consumer products, it’s a baseline expectation for them to be usable on smartphones, and for there to be a mobile app for the product…

  Read more

  a year ago · 219 likes · 8 comments · Gergely Orosz, Elin Nilsson, and Fatos Morina

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

Share The Nibble

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).png and if you do it again it’ll be Meme (2).png and 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.

  

• 🗺️ 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 code NIBBLE25 to 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.

👋🏻 Welcome to n3rd 93rd!
🪁 A very happy Makar Sankranti to those who celebrate.

📰 Read #93 on Substack for the best formatting
🎧 You can also listen to the podcast version of Powered by NotebookLM

Subscribe now

What’s Happening 📰

• 👁️ Meta decided to copy Twitter’s homework, in their plan to reduce censorship drastically, promote more political content, and have a community notes-like setup.

• 🥶 Salesforce CEO told on a VC podcast that they are not going to hire any software engineers for 2025, as they have seen a 30% productivity boost in engineering using Agentforce and other AI technology. In fact they’ll be letting go of support engineers soon, as Agentic flows come into play and hire more Salespersons to upsell.

✨ AGI Digest

• ⚓️ Model Drops

  • 🤏 Microsoft says “HNY” and pushes the weights of Phi-4 to HF. The 14B SLM (where are the good old days when only sub-7B models were considered SLMs?) goes head-to-head with GPT-4o-mini while continuing the MIT License tradition 🥂. You can check out the full release of the Technical Report.
    ⚡ And before our computers could finish executing ollama run phi4, folks at Unsloth found and fixed 4 bugs in Phi 4, making it 2x faster and 9x more capable of holding context.

    

  • 👀 Moondream just keeps getting better and with the 2025-01-09 update the 2B model got an update with Structured Outputs, Gaze Detection, and a better OCR, available right away on HF.

    

  • 🪆 llamaindex released vdr-2b-multi-v1, an open-source multilingual (IT, ES, EN, FR, DE) visual embedding model with dense embeddings, trained using MRL. It is based on dse-qwen2-2b-mrl-v1 (currently, rank 10 on the ViDoRe benchmark) and performs on par with it while using 30% fewer tokens.

• 🐳 DeepSeek has an iOS App now with both DeepThink and Search options available for free along with the option to upload images and docs in the chat.

• 🌪️ Stanford STORM is an LLM-powered Wikipedia-like article-writing system that researches a topic using web search and generates a full-length report with citations. We tried to make one ourselves and while the writing does give an LLM-y smell, this still makes for a great tool to research new topics and converse with the different expert personas to gain a high-level understanding along with relevant references before delving into it yourself.

🔐 0x Digest

• 🆕 Yolc went live last week. It’s a safe, expressive, fun language for Ethereum, powered by YulDSL/Haskell. Yolc is not a new programming language; it is just programming in Haskell. Last week they hit a milestone of successfully producing a partial ERC20 code deployable to Ethereum networks.

• 🗺️ Crystal Tai upgraded the Map of Stores (crowdsourced) worldwide that are accepting USDC on Base. Buy coffee, pizza, and whatnot using zero fees USDC transfer on Base, naaicee.

• 🐾 Privy announced sign-up with Passkeys (biometrics like FaceID / TouchID) without linking any other identity provider. Passkeys are evolving fast and this feature unlocks a new UX pattern for connecting as an anonymous entity.

• Crypto x Countries

  • 🇧🇹 Bhutan’s Gelephu Mindfulness City (GMC) includes Bitcoin, Ethereum, and even BNB coin in their mindful strategic reserves. Since everyone is taking a dig at it, maybe it’s time for Nirmala Tai to give us some tax-free gains too.

  • 🇹🇭 Thailand’s PM and FM sat one day and realized “Oh! Maybe it’s inconvenient for tourists to use fiat money”, said “Phuket, we ball” and BAM! They are now running a pilot program “Tourists can pay in crypto” in Phuket city.

🛠️ Dev & Design Digest

• 🛤️ React added native support for <ViewTransition> component. This component is like a DOM fragment that transitions its children in its own isolate/snapshot. The API works by wrapping a DOM node or inner component. It will only trigger for async updates like startTransition, useDeferredValue, Actions or <Suspense> revealing from fallback to content.

  

• ↔️ Nicholas opened an RFC on ESLint to add an extends key to the flat config to make it easier to mix and match other configs. This addresses the confusion that the config exports bring, as the importer doesn’t know explicitly if it’s an object or array.

• 💥 Dennis posted a rant about how LLMs are giving his infrastructure a hard time at the diaspora, banging once every 6 hours to scrape more data. He points out “This is literally a DDoS on the entire internet.”

• 📱 CES 2025 happened and Fireship posted a banger video about everything you should know that was weird cool.

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

Share The Nibble

What Brings Us T(w)o Awe 😳

• 🏙️ Why Bengaluru doesn’t have Skyscrapers? by Bengawalk. The answer ain’t straightforward but as they mention in the description. TL;DR of reason would be “BBMP, HAL, and Defence Land”.

• 🏴‍☠️ Billie Eilish’s middle name is "Pirate Baird". It comes from her older brother, Finneas O'Connell, who called her "Pirate" while she was still in the womb. [sourced from the chitthi]

• 🫨 JavaScript is the lingua franca of the web, YES!!. But did you know what all things it had to do to be called one? Last week Twitter randomly stumbled upon a deprecated String.prototype.link(). And oh boy, all hell broke loose. Imagine having a native function on String class to generate anchor tags. It works on node and bun too.

  

What We Have Been Trying 🔖

• 📍 We all know minimap in VSCode, but probably we are not leveraging it to its fullest. A blog by CSS Weekly explains how to use Minimap with markers and region section headers.

  

• 👺 Notion Faces: Customizable avatar faces in the classic notion style.
  Sidenote: It’s 2025, why do we still not have an app that allows you to upload a photo and suggests an avatar for you automatically?

• 📑 ArXival: A chat with the arXiv app that sources relevant pieces of research papers and their links based on your query.

Builders’ Nest 🛠️

• 🔥 bippy: a toolkit to hack into react internals.

• ✍️ khoshnus: a library to craft beautiful handwritten SVG text animations.

• 🚣 Kinesis.js: a suite of components to create engaging animations and transformations based on user interactions like mouse movements, scroll events, and audio input.

• 🗄️ lla: blazing fast (why don’t they simply write Rust) ls replacement with superpowers.

Meme of The Week 😌

Off-topic Reads/Watches 🧗

• 🧑‍🔬 If you are in STEM and are even slightly exposed to research in your field, You And Your Research by Richard Hamming is a wisdom-packed talk (transcripted and annotated to be read as an essay) on how to spend your time doing scientific research and development.

• 🎨 What is creativity anyway? What is novelty? What do you think about intelligence? Can AI match you in any of these things? umm, maybe at some tasks? or maybe not? In his essay Why A.I. Isn't Going to Make Art, Ted Chiang, the popular Science Fiction writer argues why these smart next-token predictors may not be quite up there with human creativity yet.

  

• 🧱 Beneath the Surface: An Infrastructure Podcast by StripePress (beautiful website btw) takes you on a tour around the globe exploring the why’s and how’s of some of the biggest infrastructural projects around the world and how they impact the cultures around which they are built.

  Sidenote: Is there a Goodreads but for podcasts? We absolutely need one!

• 🧮 Working with Problems by Seth Godin, where he tells why we should not turn problems into situations but rather solve one (and no, even if the title looks like he is talking about your co-workers, he is not).

Wisdom Bits 👀

“The beginning is the most important part of the work.”
— Plato (also, twss)

Wallpaper of The Week 🌁

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

Weekly Standup 🫠

• Nibbler P has been constantly battling Javascript this week and shipping some new features at work, while slowly rekindling his friendship with fiction and tasting some odd coffee.

• Nibbler A returned and resumed his explore (reading) and exploit (play with code and racquets) arc. Also, helped a friend save his day and is back on track with his OSTEP reading.

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!

👋🏻 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

Subscribe now

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.

    

  • 💭 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.

    

• 🔁 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.

  

• 🍪 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.

  

🛠️ 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.

  

• 🔮 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.

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

Share The Nibble

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?)

  

• 🦃 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!

  

• 🌐 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]

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.

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.

  

Meme of The Week 😌

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

  The Creative Athlete

  cost of confidence

  When talking about being confident there are two things I have come across …

  Read more

  a year ago · 5 likes · 3 comments · Ash

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

Wallpaper of The Week 🌁

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

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!

Subscribe now

📰 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.

    

  • 🐳 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's apt.

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.

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!

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

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What’s Happening 📰

• 🎁 NVIDIA unveils Jetson Orin™ Nano Super the most affordable Generative AI Supercomputer, priced at a sweet $249 (as compared to $499 for its predecessor). It delivers up to a 1.7x gain in generative AI performance, supporting popular models for hobbyists, developers, and students. (👉👈 hey! we are accepting Christmas presents btw!). As @championswimmer tweeted “It is the Raspberry Pi of the AI generation.”

✨ AGI Digest

• 🚀 It is impressive how Google (still) kept shipping this week, drifting away from its previous reputation of being a giant slow mover.

  • 🎥 Just when the week started and the initial Sora wave was settling, Google announced Veo 2, the latest version of its text-to-video model, and pushed some updates to Imagen 3 to better handle diverse art styles and high-fidelity details. While Veo 2 is still behind a waitlist, going by the handpicked demos posted online and by the people who had early access, Veo 2 nails photorealism and physics much better than Sora.

  • 💬 After testing the gemini-exp-1206 and Gemini Flash 2.0 in AI Studio for a while, Google went ahead and integrated them into the Gemini Mobile and Web Apps with the Flash being available for all and 1206 available for Gemini Advanced subscribers.

  • 💭 And, Google also released Gemini Flash 2.0 Thinking in AI Studio which builds on the success of Flash 2.0 and scores at par with gemini-exp-1206 in all categories on lmsys and performs really well on tough maths problems.

• ⭕️ 12 Days of OpenAI comes to an end, giving us a glimpse of what’s possible in the future

  • 🔎 Day 8 brought ChatGPT Search to all logged-in users and gave the Advanced Voice Mode access to search the web when answering queries.

  • 👨‍💻 Day 9 gave developers (yes tier-5, we are looking at you) API access to o1. The real-time API now also supports WebRTC and its prices have been slashed by 60%. OpenAI also has new Java and Golang libraries… and in case you felt useless, Sam just assigned a ticket to devs by renaming "system prompts" to "developer messages" across OpenAI’s APIs. They even sneakily changed the API docs, lmfao.

  • 🤙 Day 10 came with ChatGPT being available over a call from the US and Canada by dialling 1800-ChatGPT and chatting on WhatsApp for the rest of us.

  • 🤖 Day 11 was an update for the ChatGPT Mac App (with the same updates rolling out for Windows and Linux apps later), with support for more coding tools like Warp, IntelliJ IDEA, and PyCharm and some writing tools like Apple Notes, Notion, and Quip. You can also use Advanced Voice mode to work with these apps!

  • 🤯 Day 12 dawned on us all with a fresh dose of existential crisis when OpenAI demoed o3 and o3-mini. The o3 model which would now go safety and alignment testing (with the mini launching next month) has a 2727 rating on Codeforces making it equivalent to the #175th best competitive coder on the planet! If that doesn’t scare you, it also scored 71.7% on SWE-bench verified (the current best is ~55%) and has improved leaps and bounds on the ARC-AGI benchmark scoring 88% (there will be a much harder V2 in 2025) in the high-tuned mode though at a very high cost. And, even if you say that these models do not justify operating costs at the current state, remember that this is the worst and costliest they would ever be. We are going to see crazy times ahead.

    

    

    

  • 📽️ Bonus Day 13 was a surprise from Sam where they gave all plus users unlimited Sora access via the relaxed queue over the holidays!

• ⚓️ Model Drops

  • 🌝 MetaAI and Stanford released Apache 2.0 Licensed Apollo Multimodal Models in sizes of 1.5B, 3B and 7B and can comprehend up to 1 hour of video! However sometime after it was released, the model disappeared from HuggingFace without any explanation. Do you smell a WizardLM here?

  • 😎 XAI pushed new updates to Grok 2 and released grok-2-1212 and grok-2-vision-1212 on the API. This new model is also live on the Grok Chat on Twitter with support for web search powered by the Twitter newsfeed and updates on Aurora, their image generation model and a dedicated button to analyze a post you see on your timeline using Grok.

  • 🦅 The Technology Innovation Institute (TII) in Abu Dhabi released the Falcon 3 model family in sizes of 1B, 3B, 7B, 10B and a 7B-Mamba version which perform well across the board on various text tasks. You know that they are confident about their models because, in their benchmarks, they did not forget to compare to the Qwen2.5, which a lot of research teams shy away from ;)

    

  • ⚡️ ElevenLabs released a blazing-fast text-to-speech model named ElevenLabs Flash which can generate speech in 75ms (+ application & network latency) which is the realest real-time you can ever get right now.

  • 🐶 The folks at AnswerAI and LightOn released ModernBERT — a new model series that is a Pareto improvement over BERT and its younger siblings across both speed and accuracy and an increased context length of up to 8k tokens. These improvements stem from using newer architecture techniques that have been in the literature in the past few years after the release of the OG BERT + focusing on improving both the quality and quantity of data.

    

• 👩‍💻 GitHub Copilot is now free for all and also includes access to the new OpenAI o1 model. While it lacks agentic coding capabilities like the ones in Cursor and Windsurf, it is a good way for more people to get access to and experience AI coding capabilities and then slowly figure out other tools of their liking. BTW, our friend recently wrote an article on The Evolution of AI-assisted coding features and developer interaction patterns that explores how the paradigms have been shifting since we first got the humble Tab autocomplete.

🔐 0x Digest

• 🐧 The Pudgy Penguins launched their ecosystem token $PENGU on Solana on December 17th. They’ll have a total supply of 88,888,888,888. Pudgy Penguins have been keeping people engaged for 3 years now, you might have come across multiple nerds or KOLs1 using Penguin as their pfp now. The airdrop faced a little privacy hiccup, as a developer found out that public API returned all the Solana claim's linked ETH wallets.

  

• 💻 From custom circuits → RISC-V zkVMs → 🥁 OpenVM. Axiom & Scroll launched OpenVM, an open-source zkVM framework with no-CPU architecture (as in you bring your own), an extensible ISA2, and unbounded on-chain verification all served in Rust frontend via intrinsic functions.

  

• 📣 French MP Sarah Knafo urged the EU Parliament to think about Strategic Bitcoin reserves like the US and said out loud that we shouldn’t opt in for the Digital Euro and its fight for freedom against a totalitarian European banking system that wants all control.

• 🐒 Succint brings Zk to Solana with a banger announcement video. They published the SP1 Solana verifier crate which can verify Groth16 proofs generated with SP1. Here’s the blog for how to get started.

• 👛 Privy introduced Server Wallets, they are like embedded wallets that can be scaled as they can be created and controlled using APIs, but at the same time keep the cryptographic systems of embedded wallets in place. It leverages secure enclaves and key splitting to ensure secure key reconstitution and appropriate custody for all use cases.

• 🇩🇪 Deutsche Bank to build an L2 on ZKSync, calling it Project Dama 2. Banks building their L2 was not on our bingo cards for 2024.

• 🔄 Monda Labs rebranded top Category Labs (because it rhymed with Gonad?) before launching a chain yet. They notoriously picked all the pain points of the Ethereum Ecosystem as their Value propositions like a 10,000 TPS, 1-second block times, single-slot finality, and low-hardware requirements. But hey, it’s not out there, yet.

• 💰 Vitalik shared a new way of funding open-source software calling it “Deep Funding” and also added $170k in ETH as a pilot to figure out which OSS dependencies of Ethereum to fund. The challenge is to develop an agent allocator function to assign weights to 40,000 identified Ethereum dependencies.

  

🛠️ Dev & Design Digest

• 🧵 Remember Meta’s microblogging platform Threads? Well, they are doing numbers, with users trying to move off 𝕏, Threads reported that they have a 100M DAU3, not only that Adam (head of Insta) wove(?) a thread they are seeing three months with more than a million signups a day.

• 📜 State of JS 2024 is out and we won’t spoil much for you, it’s a good interactive read, you should take that ride all by yourself. But people loved Vite and TypeScript a lot. (that means you’ll find AI Coders writing these two stuff more human-like.)

• 🐢 Lee Robinson wrote a thread on “Why does transition between pages when running Next.js locally take time?” and ended up calling everyone who asked as stupid explaining lazy route compilation, how Turbopack (a bundler that fixes world hunger using Rust) fixes some stuff, and hey you can still do use client and opt for useEffect.

• ⚡ e18e, the project aimed to clean up, speed up, and level up the JavaScript ecosystem published their November Contribution showcase, mentioning some package trimming and utility merging, mostly on performance gains.

🤝 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 😳

NOTE: yeah, we merged the “What Brings Us To Awe” and the “TIL” sections into one.

• 🖥️ We are almost certain that someone in tldraw is a time traveler. What happened now? Well, tldraw launched the tldraw computer, which is like an infinite canvas where you can do whatever you want, like adding custom logic to these boxes or calling LLMs. (quite literally). While walking down this rabbit hole, we found a tool Paul Shen’s natto.dev, a spatial live multiplayer JavaScript environment, and an attempt to make code more tangible and interactive.

• 📊 The folks who worked on ModernBERT found an interesting issue in Pytorch where the torch.randperm infact does not shuffle the elements randomly when dealing with magnitudes of billions, while numpy’s PCG64DXSM generator does. The fix is on the way by the Pytorch team but this issue highlights how

  

• 🌔 Here at Nibbles, we love Bartosz Ciechanowski and his immensely well-researched and interactive blog posts. Just this week, he published another one related to the cosmos, this time about the Moon, Moon its path around our planet and the beautiful dynamics behind it.

• ☕ Does walking with a coffee mug often lead to spills? In 2015, Jiwon Han published a paper on why that happens (spoiler alert: coffee likes to slosh with the same frequency at which we like to walk). He also suggested several methods to prevent that, like Claw Hand which minimizes the spill 🦞.

  

• 🛐 Julia Evans listed her 20 years of using the terminal in a blog post "Rules" that terminal programs follow. It’s full of TILs, gotchas, and booby traps you should know if you are a terminal person (or not).

  

• 🔢 Sexy Primes are prime numbers that differ from each other by six!

  

What We Have Been Trying 🔖

• 👨‍💻 TypeScript Console: Run and debug TypeScript code in the Chrome DevTools.

• 📹 Article Summarizer: Lesson22 launched an extension that can convert turn text into a memorable watch. [Eg: this video explains the new Protobuf Opaque API]

• 🔥 Addy Osmani built an open-source image background remover using Transformers.js. So that you and I don't put our files on random applications, we can host our own, or trust Addy's code for images never leaving your device. (exciting times for WebGPU and AI in the browser)

• 🗺️ Timemap.org - a World History Atlas. Using this app you can navigate back in time and see regions, rulers, people, and battles happening in that region. (a tool sufficient to give a boner to both map and history chads)

  

Builders’ Nest 🛠️

• 📄 markitdown: Official Microsoft library for converting Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files to Markdown.

• ⚒️ ƒun: a local serverless function λ development runtime. It’s just like AWS Lambdas fr fr, but local.

• 🌊 waveterm: an open-source terminal that can launch graphical widgets, controlled and integrated directly with the CLI. honestly, it works well with my ADHD.

  

• 🤗 HuggingFace chat-MacOS: A native chat interface by HuggignFace designed for MacOS. (note — use the package in the release page instead of brew install because there was some checksum mismatch issue in the latter, the last time we tried)

Meme of The Week 😌

Off-topic Reads/Watches 🧗

• 🪤 The premise trap by DHH, back after ~25 days, writing a post that he (and we) hope doesn’t age well. DHH talks about how AI is much like a promising junior engineer (right now) and how the training data it has been fed is the root of problems. And maybe feeding it more robust corporate codebases will fix it?

• ✊ The fame/trust inversion by Seth talks about how in the short run, fame (or marketing) leads to trust instead of the other way around, but “well-earned trust might go out of style for a while, but it’s always going to be a useful tool.”

• 👛 Underrated Ways to Change the World by Adam Mastroianni shows us that you don’t have to be born with a silver spoon in your mouth to make a positive change in the world. Sometimes, a few unconventional ways and some courage is all you need :)

  Experimental History

  Underrated ways to change the world

  A lot of people would like to make the world better, but they don’t know how. This is a great tragedy…

  Read more

  a year ago · 1308 likes · 64 comments · Adam Mastroianni

• 🪖 Nat Eliason says in Proof You Can Do Hard Things that it is the ability to do hard things is an essential skill to cultivate which builds your self-image, making you more confident and resilient when facing future challenges.

  Nat Eliason's Newsletter

  Proof You Can Do Hard Things

  When a precocious yet nonconformist teenager asks why they need to learn calculus, what should you say…

  Read more

  3 years ago · 680 likes · 62 comments · Nat Eliason

Wisdom Bits 👀

“Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important.”
— T. S. Eliot

Wallpaper of The Week 🌁

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

Weekly Standup 🫠

• Nibbler A is filing a complaint (no idea where) as he doesn’t feel that his week has 7 days like others. Still, all occupied catching up with his readings, AoC, and racquet-shuttle game.

• Nibbler P did some infra and code stuff this week, ran longer than he ever ran, deadlifted more than he ever deadlifted and went on a sweet night drive with his family at the end of the week.

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!

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

Refer a friend

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📰 Read #89 on Substack for the best formatting
🎧 You can also listen to the podcast version of Powered by NotebookLM

What’s happening 📰

• 🪄 Google Quantum AI labs announced Willow, their state-of-the-art Quantum Chip (*screams eternally*). Willow can do some computations in 5 minutes that would take 10 septillions (10²⁵) years (longer than the age of the universe) on current best supercomputers. This is super exciting as it unlocks the possibility of more open and large-scale quantum computers being available soon. This also aids in scaling issues with AGI.
  The major breathtakingly important changes that they bring are:

  • The newer chip can reduce errors exponentially as they are using more (105 to be precise) and better quality qubits1.

  • The new chip absolutely killed it in benchmarks when done on Random Circuit Sampling. (the “Hello World!” of Quantum computing)

  • And don’t forget that Neven’s2 law states quantum computers are improving at a "doubly exponential" rate compared to conventional computers.

✨ AGI Digest

• ⭕️ OpenAI continued shipping with Days 3 to 7 of their 12 Days of OpenAI, but we still didn’t get GPT4.5/GPT-5 😞 (hopes high for next week)

  • 📼 Day 3 started the week with a bang with OAI unveiling Sora, their SoTA video generation model and boy oh boy, it is so wild, it leaves the rest of the competition behind. After a few scaling challenges, sora.com was generally available for all Pro and Plus users.

  • 📋 Day 4 had OpenAI make its Canvas (a collaborative split-screen writing and coding interface, similar to Claude Artifacts) available natively with all GPT-4o chats, even with custom GPTs, along with the ability to execute Python code in it. This code execution differs from its previous “Code Interpreter” because Canvas uses Pyodide (Python in WASM), which means it can now make network requests from Python!

  • 🍎 Day 5 saw only an announcement of integration b/w Apple Intelligence in iOS/iPadOS 18.2, MacOS 15.2, and ChatGPT allowing Siri to make calls to ChatGPT to present the user with richer results for complex questions. We found the feature good and seamless for quick tasks but we’re still better off writing our own prompts, thank you very much. The Apple Intelligence section also has a dedicated “Upgrade to ChatGPT Plus” button on the Settings page that would surely nudge a lot of people to get the OpenAI sub. Smart move Sama.

  • 📽️ Day 6 got us live video recognition in the ChatGPT App’s Advanced Voice Mode (AVM). So now along with speaking, you can also show it the stuff around you and it would consider that when responding (btw, Google beat OpenAI to this by releasing Geminin 2.0 Flash with multimodal capabilities just a day before, more on it in the following section). The best way to get it is to see it for yourself in the app or in the demo video below. Oh and they also have a new Santa voice in the AVM until Christmas, so you know what to do when your kid posters you to take them to Santa.

  • 🗂️ Day 7 finally ended the week with ChatGPT Projects (similar to Claude projects), a way to group files, chats, and custom instructions into different folders.

• ♊️ Google Continues Shipping with the first release in the Gemini 20 Family

  • ⚡️ A day before OAI shipped the AVM live video, Google dropped Gemini 2.0 Flash (different from gemini-exp-1206 btw), which despite being a much smaller model, outcompetes Gemini 1.5 Pro on several benchmarks. Gemini 2.0 Flash supports tool use and is natively multimodal with text, image, audio, and video inputs and support for audio output with image output coming along next month. You can try the live video/audio input streaming in the AI Studio.

    

  • 👨‍💻 And with that, Google has already started the integration of the Gemini 2.0 Flash, starting with Data Science Agent in Google Colab, which will have new agentic coding capabilities that would fix bugs, write code and execute them based on the description of the task.

  • 📒 NotebookLM also gets new updates with a slick new UI and the ability to “join” the AI Podcast hosts and interact with them live and ask them for more details or to explain a concept differently.

• ⚓️ Model Drops

  • 🐳 DeepSeekAI released DeepSeek-V2.5-1210, the final model in the DeepSeek V2.5 series (V3 is coming next!) This is available to use in chat.depseek.com with the ability to use “Internet Search” on the UI. Benchmark-wise, the model shows quite big improvements in both coding and creativity.

    

  • 👀 DeepSeek also released DeepSeek-VL2, an MoE VLM in 3B/16B/27B sizes, giving equal competition to Qwen2-VL-7B with fewer active parameters. Compared to its predecessor, this was trained on higher-quality data and added dynamic image tiling for handling images across all resolutions.

    

  • ϕ Microsoft Research released Phi-4, a 14B LLM which “outperforms” the likes of GPT-4o and Gemini Pro 1.5… but if anything can be said from the past Phi models, then it is that these models are trained majorly on synthetically-created datasets and the family often falls short of performance on real-world tasks, so take these claims with a grain of salt and always do your due diligence with your own eval sets.

  • 📟 Cohere4AI released Command R7B, a 7B model — the smallest one in their R series which is deemed to be a good model for RAG use cases. The model is both available on HuggingFace and available via an API at the Cohere Platform.

    

• 🧺 Misc Updates

  • 🧑‍💻 Cognition Lab’s Devin is now Generally Available for $500/month (not expensive considering that we are replacing entire software engineers over here). And though it did have its own share of hiccups, this is the worst it would ever be. A year from now, this may very well be integrated all around every workplace you come across. Brace yourselves!

  • 💨 Hugigngface released TGI v3.0 which is faster than ever, processing 3x more tokens than vLLM and 13x faster processing on long prompts. The way they have achieved this is by removing all config flags and instead evaluating the hardware and model, to select automatic values to give the best performance. Plus, they also introduced new kernels, optimized prefix caching, and improved VRAM efficiency. Ohh btw, vLLM has joined the PyTorch Ecosystem meanwhile.

    

  • 🤺 LMSys has a new WebDev Arena to compare the web coding capabilities of various frontier models. And unsurprisingly, Claude 3.5 Sonnet does come on top and that too by a wideeeeee margin.

    

  • 🪡 Midjourney has introduced Patchwork, an infinite-scrolling world-building canvas with which you can create characters, events, places, and factions — creating anything from your imagination all of it in the theme of the current patchwork. You need to see it to understand how wonderful it is.

🔐 0x Digest

• 💸 Since none of us like paying taxes on our gains (realized or unrealized, it doesn’t matter), Nick made a list of 22 countries with no capital gains tax on crypto.

• 💰USDT is now officially recognized in the Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM), and as much as I want to say “yay! global expansion for crypto ftw ;)”. Let’s be honest here, Tether is mostly controlled, it’s pegged against USD and has reserve backing it, not sure if it’s a big win for “acktual” cryptocurrencies or decentralization in general. But.. hey, you can now swap and spend, yay!

• 💳 Moonwell Finance and Cypher Capital partner to launch a new crypto card, Moonwell Card. This is yet another attempt to make it easy to use crypto to buy groceries, and coffee, basically making it mainstream and usable. A few key things are it has no annual fee and allows auto-top-up from Google or Apple Pay.

• ⛔ Microsoft shareholders voted “no” to hold Bitcoin in reserve. The main reasons cited for rejection were “too much volatile” (ufff) and too much of it driven by FOMO from riding the next wave.

• 🇯🇵 Satoshi Hamada, an MP in Japan proposed for Strategic Bitcoin Reserve like Argentina and Russia. (the name is purely coincidental, right?)

• 📦 Stackr published “Your definitive guide to zkVMs”. They took 8 real-world algorithms to benchmark 6+ different zkVMs/zkWasms. (shameless plug Nibbler A here.)

🛠️ Dev & Design Digest

• 🕶️ If you have tried the Vision Pro demo or have heard from people about it, it’s a dope cyberpunk-themed gadget. But we bet you didn’t see this one coming, In a not-so-rare partnership, Google, Qualcomm & Samsung are collaborating on a new AI-powered OS, Android XR a way to put Android VR headsets on your face. Samsung built a device to showcase this and codenamed it “Project Moohan”. To remind you, this isn’t the first time Google touched this space, Google Glasses came and crashed a decade ago.
  Victoria from The Verge tried it, wrote her experience here, and ended her experience with “I felt like Tony Stark with Gemini as my Jarvis”.
  For Consumers → The first devices will be available in 2025.
  For devs → Google has already launched the Developer Preview of Android XR SDK.

• 🎨 A decade-old rant on how compilers of hot new languages handle async and sync code. “What color is your function?” by Bob. He concludes it with Java ain’t bad, Go is great as it breaks the notion of async and sync and leaves it up to users.

• 🖋️ A frontend developer, when bored of fixing build systems and drilling props into children's components usually goes to therapy starts drawing SVGs by hand. You see, SVGs are beautiful (yes I skipped that therapy session too), and drawing them is hard (for most of us). Akshay Gupta wrote an article Mastering SVG Arcs, breaking down the move and arc attributes in d (drawn) attribute of path, which allows us to draw curves as we like them. (shut up!).

• 🚥 If you were busy writing useState slop (like us), while the web folks were making the noise about Signals. Corbin has you covered with their really intuitive article “What are Signals?”, where they explain Signals API by implementing it function by function for you. The Signals API is cleaner as compared to our usual useMessyHookWithDepArray and that’s what the noise was all about. One interesting bit that Signal has that makes it different is auto-tracking, which allows you to do things on the effect of a signal without a dep array.

What brings us to awe 😳

• 🗺️ How does Google Maps even exist? To give you an idea of complexity, Maps processes 25 Petabytes3 of data daily, uses Graph DB with over 1 trillion edges, and maintains 99.99% uptime with a global response time of under 100ms. And yes it uses every other software optimizations you might have heard of or used. With all this, building a maps application that can load vector tiles as fast as you scroll is peak engineering.

• 🚏 A map that plots the orientation of streets of 100 cities in the world. Some of the big cities worldwide are more disoriented than you might think. Also, Delhi and Mumbai are surprisingly well-oriented than you could’ve guessed. The chart is not intuitive, but you have to feel it. If you are feeling like you have to dig into it here’s the source data provided by Deedy that he used to plot this.

  

Today I (we) Learnt 📑

• 🫗 When you drop molten glass in cold water (yes, just like ice plunge) the glass rapidly cools and solidifies (as it should, duh?), but what happens next is interesting, it forms a tadpole-shaped (sorry this was only PG-13 reference) glass drop that is formed. It is called Prince Rupert's Drop. It is not just like any other object though, it has a very strong head but a very delicate tail (like male muscle and ego?), such that the head can survive bullets, and bend the hydraulic press BUT if you press the tail a bit, it's EXPLODES the whole thing. We went down this rabbit hole, here's a good video to learn about it.

• 😵‍💫 We all come across situations, conversations, TV shows (CID?), or Movies where the whole thing could’ve ended sooner if not everyone involved in that was not an idiot, right? Well, this thing is so common that it has the name Idiot's Plot. Not only that there is a second-order idiot plot when a narrative "in which not merely the principals, but everybody in the whole society has to be a grade-A idiot, or the story couldn't happen".

• ▲ We dived into a rabbit hole that started from someone asking about Decentralized DNS on HN (a year-old post), turns out DNS-based Authentication of Named Entities (DANE) solves this and proposes a way to authenticate the TLS connection without the need for centralized Certificate Authorities (CA). Then what’s the catch? who is stopping us, well most of these CAs are controlled/operated by big tech giants like Google or Microsoft (just like DRMs). The major browsers haven’t implemented DNSSEC support and it’s kind shame. But never the less, someone on the thread pointed out that it’s not as easy as it sounds as suggested by Zooko's Triangle.

  

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

What we have been trying 🔖

• 📦 npmpackage.info: Discover detailed information about npm packages.

• 🤝 this to that: a tool that guides you on how to glue item a (this) to item b (that).

• 💻 lima: Linux virtual machines, with a focus on running containers. (been writing and debugging some C/C++ lately and realized you can’t have gdb on Mac)

• 🖼️ TextBehindImage: a dead-simple app for new images with text behind the main subject. (like iOS putting a digital clock behind objects in wallpaper)

Builders’ Nest 🛠️

• 🛵 scooter: an interactive find-and-replace terminal UI app. ofc it’s written in 🦀

• 📨 himalaya: a blazingly fast (yes, 🦀) CLI to manage emails.

• 💽 limbo: a work-in-progress, in-process OLTP database management system, compatible with SQLite.

• 🤖 react-executor: Asynchronous task execution and state management for React.

Meme of the week 😌

Off-topic reads/watches 🧗

• 😫 Complaints by Seth Godin talks about why complaints are good (can't press this enough) but there is a fine line, where the complainers become whiners and there's where shit hits the fan. So, don't be a whiner — complain, but with dignity.

• 💪 James, CEO of Posthog talks about how Product Management is broken and Engineers can fix it. He talks about *gasps* Production Engineers.

  Product for Engineers

  Product management is broken. Engineers can fix it

  When Tim and I first started PostHog in 2020, I was adamant we would never hire a product manager. I wanted engineers to wrestle with hard product problems. Product managers, I believed, would just get in the way…

  Read more

  a year ago · 98 likes · 5 comments · James Hawkins

• 🏋️‍♀️ Dalton & Michael from YC talk about “How to make the most out of your 20s”. Some important bits are Embracing hardcore challenges early, delaying gratification, and seeking risks.

• 📝 How to choose a startup by Dan Hock. The article covers great points telling it how good old metrics like retention, unit economics, compensation and culture should be accessed and used to determine if you should join the startup. And please stop applying lessons from big companies too early in the life of a startup.

  Dan Hock's Essays

  How to Choose a Startup

  Here is a common failure mode in early startup careers…

  Read more

  2 years ago · 120 likes · 11 comments · Dan Hockenmaier

Wisdom Bits 👀

“How beautiful it is to get up and go do something”
— Kurt Vonnegut

Wallpaper of the week 🌁

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

Weekly Standup 🫠

• Nibbler P is back at work — shipping features, trying to meet his Goodreads reading goal, and maintaining his workout streak at the gym and the running track. He has been taking time to watch some new movies and anime meanwhile.

• Nibbler A is catching up with the OSTEP Book Club reading (covering the last few missed weeks) and enjoying AoC 2024, and rabbit-hole maxxing. He has been consistent with 🏸 & 5 am club after so long. (yay!)

If you have 2 minutes, you can fill out a feedback form here. This would help us make The Nibble even better for you and other readers out there!

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

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📰 Read #88 on Substack for the best formatting
🎧 You can also listen to the podcast version of Powered by NotebookLM

What’s happening 📰

✨ AGI Digest

• 🌊 Meta plans to build a 40k+ km long $10B subsea cable spanning the world. This plan is still in its early stages and no physical assets have been laid out as of now. Since Meta would be the sole owner of this project, it when completed would give Meta a dedicated pipe for data traffic around the world.

  

• ⚓️ Model Drops:

  • 🗞️ Amazon (after its failed try at Titan series last year) released Nova, its family of foundation models that’s competent with the frontier models like GPT-4o, Gemini 1.5 Pro and Claude 3.5 Sonnet. The family includes Amazon Nova Micro — a small and cheap text-only model, Amazon Nova Lite — a low-cost and fast multimodal model, Amazon Nova Pro — a medium-sized multimodal model with the best combination of accuracy, speed, and cost and Amazon Nova Premier — their most capable multimodal model for complex reasoning that’ll be available in Q1 2025. They also released Amazon Nova Canvas — a text-to-image generation model and Amazon Nova Reel — a text-to-video generation model. Whew, that’s a lot for a release! All of these models are available on AWS Bedrock for inferencing right now.

    

  • 🤯 Meta released Llama 3.3 70B which blows away its previous Llama 3.1 405B model like dandelion parachutes in the wind. This is a big moment because by using a new alignment process and improvements in their online RL techniques, they were able to compress the intelligence level of a ~5.7x larger frontier model into a much smaller model that can run at a fraction of inference speeds.

    

  • 🌕 Moondream released Moondrem 0.5B, the smallest performant VLM that’s tiny enough to run on edge devices. A 8-bit quantization, it requires a mere 996 MiB of memory to run. And at 4-bit, it only requires a runtime memory of 816 MiB. Like its elder 2B sibling, the 0.5B model also has its weights openly available.

  • 🗣️ The team at Pleias released Pleias 1.0, a family of 350M, 1.2B, and 3B models plus two additional models Pleias-Pico (350M) and Pleias-Nano (1.2B) which are specialized for multilingual RAG that surpass several other models larger than their size. The model family focuses on being performant while being small enough to run on a CPU. Another interesting thing about this release is that Pleias says these are the first-ever models trained exclusively on open data (non-copyrighted / published under a permissible license) and the first fully EU AI Act-compliant models.

  • ❄️ Snowflake released Arctic Embed L and M 2.0 embedding models trained on multilingual data to support English, French, Spanish, Italian, and German, competing head-to-head with OpenAI’s Text Embedding 3 Large, without compromising on English quality (which is usually typical of other multilingual embedding models). Talking about multilingual embeddings, JinaAI released their multilingual + multimodal Jina Clip v2 embeddings a couple of weeks ago.

  • 💭 Following suit from DeepSeek and Qwen, the Chinese company InternLM released a reasoning model named InternThinker with long-term thinking, self-reflection, and correction during reasoning. Internally, InternThinker is a small model distilled from a large model’s CoT results.

  • ⛵️ Bytedance (parent of TikTok) released Sailor2, a family of LLMs (0.8B, 8B, and 20B) with SoTA multilingual language understanding specializing in South-East Asian (SEA) languages with complete Apache 2.0 License.

• 🚢 Google DeepMind Ships:

  • ♊️ The Gemini team released Gemini-exp-1206 (which many suggest might be the new Gemini 2.0 Flash [1] [2], which is insane if true) which decimates all other models on the popular benchmarks. In our testing too, we feel it has gotten significantly better at understanding complex prompts and at coding, sometimes even solving problems in one-shot that took Sonet and 4o a few rounds of back and forth.

  • 🧞‍♂️ Google DeepMind introduced Genie 2, a large-scale foundation world model capable of generating an endless variety of action-controllable, playable 3D environments for training and evaluating embodied AI agents, which is a leap forward from the previous Genie 1 which was limited to generating 2D worlds. It is capable of object interactions, complex character animation, physics, and the ability to model and thus predict the behaviour of other agents.

  • 🌤️ They also introduced GenCast, an AI ensemble model which predicts weather and the risks of extreme conditions with SoTA accuracy. Partnering with weather agencies, this would lead to a lot better forecasting and a lot of economic value saved with better predictions.

  • 🎥 Veo, Google’s Video Generation model is now available on Vertex AI in private preview, along with Imagen 3, their image generation model. Looks like someone is gearing up for the upcoming OpenAI Sora releases.

  • 👁️ The Gemma team released PaliGemma 2, which updates the old PaliGemma’s decoder with the new Gemma 2. It comes in sizes of 3B, 10B, and 28B models.

  • 🎁 NotebookLM partnered with Spotify to launch “Spotify Wrapped AI podcast“ which uses Google’s NotebookLM Audio Overview to create a podcast discussing and directing your year in music.

• ⭕️ 12 Days of OpenAI: Day 1 and Day 2
  OpenAI is doing 12 Days of OpenAI where for the next 12 weekdays (2 already done), they’d be announcing big and small updates about the stuff they had been working on.

  • 🧠 Day 1: o1, their reasoning model is out of preview and is faster, concise and smarter (really tho?) and supports image uploads. They also introduced a $200/mo ChatGPT Pro plan with unlimited access to all models plus access to an “o1 pro mode“ that uses a version of o1 that uses more compute to think harder and provide even better answers to the hardest problems. This is meant for users who need cutting-edge research-grade intelligence in their day-to-day work.

    

  • 🎚️ Day 2: OpenAI announced Reinforcement Learning fine-tuning that allows users to fine-tune models for specific, complex tasks in domains such as coding, scientific research, or finance.

• Misc:

  • 🎖️ Cohere released its Rerank 3.5 endpoint with an enhanced understanding of complex user queries and multilingual support for 100+ languages along with the ability to search long documents with rich and relevant metadata (e.g. emails, reports), semi-structured data (e.g. tables, JSON), and code.

  • 🔎 Exa introduced Websets (currently in waitlist), a way to find a comprehensive set of anything you want from the web using AI.

🔐 0x Digest

• 👛 Vitalik wrote "What I would love to see in a wallet", which makes this an officially important problem to solve for the rest of the crypto bros too. He talks about how the L2 interactions, privacy, deep security, 2FA, and more things should be in-built parts of the wallets.

• ⏳ Balajis tweeted about how this is the best time to be in crypto and how someone should take the lead and become fully anonymous life. He says one should become Zatoshi to bring out ZEthereum. And unlike zk tech on Ethereum which is mainly to solve scaling issues, he mentioned that this is for addressing privacy needs.

• 📱 Coinbase launched Apple Pay for fiat-to-crypto purchases via Coinbase Onramp. This solves a big part of the equation, it just got easier to onboard new users. Support for Apple Pay unlocks the next million users who would’ve otherwise not bought crypto. Oh! and also Base confirmed there is no plan for Base Network token and they’d rather keep building useful things.

• 📈 Last week Bitcoin reached a great milestone of $100k but reports are signaling a 30% pullback soon. And while the crypto Twitter ain’t all bullish on Ethereum (trade-wise), the legendary CryptoLark says ETH is going to $8k and there is no stopping.

• 🗺️ Crypto x Countries

  • 🇺🇸 Earlier this month, the US Govt moved some 19,800 BTC (worth ~$2B) linked to Silk Road to Coinbase Prime. For what? Of course with the intent to liquidate. And probably they did sell it at ~$100k, as there was a dip post that.

  • 🇫🇷 The French Senate has proposed an “unproductive wealth tax”: which would include unrealized gains from digital assets like Bitcoin. This proposal aims to tax dormant assets. However, this is not yet final legislation, indicating it is in the early stages of policy development.

• 📝 Interesting proposals to checkout

  • EIP-7830: Contract size limit increase for EOF, raising the limit for only EOF contracts to 64 KiB from 24KiB.

  • EIP-7833: Scheduled function calls, by adding a new opcode OFFERCALL (personally not sure if this would be a good idea)

  • EIP-7831: Multi-Chain Addressing by @samwilsn. This proposes chain-specific address format that allows specifying both an account and the chain on which that account intends to transact. Eg: nibbles.eth:optimism

🛠️ Dev & Design Digest

• 🖱️ The Browser Company released a recruiting video for their new browser "Dia". They are looking for gigachad systems, AI, and infra engineers to help them build this new vision of the browser. They say out loud that "AI won’t exist as an app. Or a button. We believe it’ll be an entirely new environment — built on top of a web browser". But but.. what happens to Arc? Well, they won't abandon it.

• 🌐 In all its glory and stability, React 19 was released earlier this week. We’re yet to try it firsthand, but in short, it’s a piece of good news to have a stable release for a major version. The major things that improved from the last RC1 were mainly

  • React Suspense performance is not suspense anymore improvement, truth be told most of the time you just make things fast by doing lazy delegation

  • Our favorites: ref can now be passed as a prop (bye-bye forwardRef), useFormStatus, useTransition, useOptimistic, and some more hooks to flip over the business of many libraries.

    

• 🧊 Adam from Pulumi wrote about how we have a Cursed Container Iceberg in the name of hosting things over the internet, and how literally from mobile phones to big-ass machines, we are leveraging 105+ options to host and deploy containers.

  

What brings us to awe 😳

• 💫 The coming year, 2025 (45²), might be the only perfect square year most of us will live in. (not you Bryan Johnson) [found when doom-scrolling]

• 🎯 Kilian wrote about “Where autofocus shines”, to set the context, the autofocus API is tricky and often produces unexpected behaviors, as the page gets more complex. But there is one place where it shines and that’s what the article talks about, “Single purpose, Single form pages”.

• 🫀Even in 2003, there were between 50 and 100 people in the US who still had nuclear-powered pacemakers. It was Plutonium Powered Pacemaker using thermoelectric batteries, that’ll charge from the decay. (if this wasn’t a sensitive topic, would’ve said Arc Rector goes brr..)

• 💥 Nolen, the one million checkboxes guy is back with another project EveryUUID.com (bro got some serious domain shopping going on). Just like the previous one, this is not an easy problem but hey Nolen was struggling to remember all of the UUIDs. Alright, he had to handle rendering all by himself, on top of that, he went all the way to add some entropy, ordering, and search to it. He wrote down a neat article explaining “Writing down every UUID”.

Today I (we) Learnt 📑

• 🌈 In case you were feeling “Oh I know this thing”, Derek has some bad news for all most of us. Rainbows are more than what you (might) think they are personalized optical illusions for all of us. How much personalized? Well, no two people see the same rainbow, even your left and right eyes don’t see the same rainbow. Also, it’s not enough to say that “white light scattering” produces a rainbow. He also explains things like why you can’t see a rainbow when looking in the direction of the sun & why the sky is darker on top of the rainbow

• 🥫Fred Baur, a chemist for Proctor & Gamble in Cincinnati and inventor of the familiar “Pringles” potato chip can. He was so proud of his design that he requested that his ashes be buried in one of the tall, circular Pringles cans. Or as he said, “I want to be buried in one of my creations”.

• 🪙 On average, an EV contains approximately 83 kg of copper, ~4x that of a traditional internal combustion vehicle. So, buy the copper stocks anon. [Source: The power of Copper in EVs]

• 🫨 JavaScript has this Comma Operator that evaluates each of its operands (from L to R) and returns the value of the last operand. What’s fascinating about this operator can be used for stuff like incrementing multiple values together in a for loop, or discarding reference binding, or running it in safe eval mode. I thought it was not designed to do this (pun intended) until I came across this “comma operator trick”.

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

What we have been trying 🔖

• 🪷 Apps for ADHD: Best, hand-picked, and game-changing apps, that the ADHD community has tested to help you focus better, work smarter, and stress less.

• 🤖 ai.pydantic.dev: A Python Agent Framework by Pydantic designed to make it easier to call LLMs and run agentic workflows along with Pydantic's structured validation.

• 🎱 Eightify: A chrome extension that summarizes YouTube videos using AI, giving you TL;DW of the video.

• 🖥️ scrapybara: a platform that provides instant, secure virtual desktop environments via API for AI agents to perform tasks. Since it’s not recommended to run agents on your machines. (give them extra marks for the cute name.)

Builders’ Nest 🛠️

• 💽 slatedb: A cloud-native embedded storage engine built on object storage.

• 🍒 cherry-studio: a cross-platform desktop client supporting multiple LLMs with document and data processing, AI assistants, and more features.

• ⚒️ es-toolkit: JS utility library, which is ~3x faster and up to 97% smaller — a major upgrade to lodash.

• ✨ lumen: AI-generated commit message, Git changes summary from the CLI, without API keys.

Meme of the week 😌

Off-topic reads/watches 🧗

• 🏁 You’ve already failed by Seth Godin addressing how “any effort we spend on controlling the uncontrollable bits is wasted”

• 👏 Making it Happen vs. Letting it Happen by Jason Fried, talks about how you don't always have to push the ball uphill (making it happen) and should trust the machine you have built to do the rest (letting it happen). It's loosely analogous to explore and exploit methodology.

• 💼 How to Get a Job Like Mine by Aaron Swartz talks about his journey into the world of tech and the importance of curiosity, saying yes, and taking initiatives that led him to live the stressful but fulfilling life he lived.

• 📕 Facebook’s Little Red Book is an internal book distributed within Facebook that has Facebook’s ethos—breaking things, thinking big, and moving fast—distilled into a manifesto. More than a handbook, it was a declaration of identity, solving the problem of scaling culture during explosive growth for its then employees.

Wisdom Bits 👀

“Stand for something or you will fall for anything.”
― Rosa Parks

Wallpaper of the week 🌁

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

Weekly Standup 🫠

• Nibbler A is finally² back home this time, he was mostly busy mid-week in some events, caught up with his anime list as the weekend came closer, tried to solve the missed AoC problems, and was found cheering Gukesh for WCC.

• Nibbler P is back home this week as well, after two weeks of moving around. He did some reading, watched a couple of movies, tried his hand at golf, got a little inebriated, and ran his third-best 5k.

If you have 2 minutes, you can fill out a feedback form here. This would help us make The Nibble even better for you and other readers out there!

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

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

🎄 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.

    

  • ⛴️ 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).

    

  • 🔊 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.

    

  • 📈 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”.

  

• ✨ 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.

  

• 🛕 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.