While randomly scrolling through Twitter, I stumbled upon a developer’s profile, someone I had the pleasure of meeting in person last month. I saw the word "Lunarpunk" in their profile, which got me curious and led me down the "punks" rabbit hole. I started reading about Lunarpunk and found a video on Solarpunk Station titled What is Lunarpunk?
It turns out it's just Solarpunk but with a focus on nocturnal creatures, bioluminescence, making the night accessible to all, and other night aesthetics. The video’s title funnily points it out as “Solarpunk at night” (which is kinda true too).
This curiosity led me to wonder what exactly Solarpunk is.

Ever since the rise of Cyberpunk (dystopian sci-fi, tech will rule us all future), there has been a release of a new punk subculture every few months. (don’t go into the etymology of punk, this word has a more diverse and weirder meaning than “fuck”)
Solarpunk is one of the sustainable and progressive punk subcultures.
And of course, whenever there is a list, there is a tracker. So, Isaac made a list of punks if you want to check them out. Vitalik also talked about Cypherpunk last year.

Solarpunk is a vision for the future where nature, technology, and humans coexist and progress together. It embraces cultural, natural, and technological advancements. And just like all other punks this also is an artistic and cultural movement, which is one of the escapes from reality. But digging a little deeper into this, I felt like, damn! we should work towards it.

First, one must understand what might seem like Solarpunk but isn’t. Simply using solar panels or other renewable energy solutions do not make something Solarpunk; it’s about how we integrate these technologies into a harmonious relationship with nature. Capitalism and the Solarpunk vision coexistence is quite difficult, as capitalism often leads to environmental degradation. As long as we exploit nature and others for our convenience and selfish needs, it cannot be considered Solarpunk.

At the same time, being a complete Luddite doesn’t make you Solarpunk either; technology and nature should be in harmony for the vision to come to life. Solarpunk involves accepting some trade-offs in convenience, which is very anti-capitalist, at the cost of keeping our actions nature-friendly.

Some good examples from the video linked in highlight that "Amazon Prime Delivery" is not part of the Solarpunk vision, as it exploits humans, fossil fuels, and in turn, nature, to ensure you get your package on the same day.

Similarly, one analogy I can draw from my random Instagram scrolling involves a person explaining the importance of a “courtyard" in a building's architecture, illustrating how it helps one visualize the microcosm by blending the outdoors (crafted by nature or God) with the indoors built by humans.

If I expand this bad analogy (which I shouldn’t), Solarpunk envisions that we create courtyards for our benefit. Yes, it’s counterintuitive if you think like a capitalist; after all, who would buy a piece of land and allocate 50% of it to plant trees and build open pools? But that's what Solarpunk is about—building in a way that not only your future self pats you on the back, but future generations do too.

I’m compelled to feel like an uncle and say Old is the new New. We keep going back and forth with things, and funnily or not, the constraints of the planet keep resonating with some cultural dogmas. (it’s fun losing an argument with your grandma).

The short-term implications might seem like an opportunity cost, but hey! Estimations are not our (human’s) forte after all, no?

Related

• 🎥 A Video on How we can build a Solarpunk Future

• 🗒️ Different punk: A to Z of punk genres

As soon as it deployed, things looked fine at first look, but it was not working as expected, on inspecting it a little, I found that some assets were not loading properly and the search wasn't working too, but interestingly the same thing works perfectly if I build it manually and deploy the dist folder using "Netlify Drop" (underrated feature btw!).

I was in the middle of the workday not wanting to spend more than 10 mins on this build. So, I did what I did best, brute force, I started comparing build files of automated builds and manual upload builds.
Within a matter of seconds, I realized uh oh, the first folder, doesn't exist when I build with CI automation. What was it? 🥁 .vocs directory. And guess what? the directory was responsible for keeping the search index and a few assets. (BINGO!)

I went down this rabbit hole of "Who allowed Netlify to remove files from my build?".
Ah! It turns out they accepted that they remove all the dotfiles/folders from the publish directory, except .well-known And, it's not very well-known why we need it.

Since there were no direct ways to get what I wanted, I did some hacks as suggested on forums and on intuition about what I could do in the least time.

• ⚒️ Build Command changed from yarn build to yarn build && mv docs/dist/.vocs docs/dist/dotvocs && mv _redirects docs/dist/_redirects (basically renamed the dot folder)

• ⏩ And also added _redirects file to forward all my requests coming to .vocs folder to dotvocs (my new directory)

    /.vocs/*  /dotvocs/:splat 200!
  

And BAM!! we have it all working smoothly.

Hope this helps someone! 🖖🏻

The new Nibbles are now moved to https://thenibble.substack.com/

We tweaked the banner a bit to make 1001 it more visible and also, and the 0s were not nerdy enough, so now they are. 🥂

In our defense, this was a busy and lazy weekend, plus had the content of two Nibbles ready, so might publish the next earlier than expected.

Don't let your Monday blues get in the way of reading this completely. (remember "pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional")

News 🗞️

• Microsoft announced Clarity for Mobile apps (It's like LogRocket but for Mobile apps, if you think about it carefully, MS might capture your development stack soon)

• Vercel announced Storages, they are offering serverless Redis, Postgres, and blob storage (S3-like) (honestly, what a time to play this masterstroke, when Server Components are the center of buzz and Vercel leading the market of SSR, the only thing one needed was a hosted DB from somewhere else)

  And guess what, they also have templates to use their DB for some use cases, for example, if you want to use Vercel PG as Vector DB, you can just one click deploy it using this template postgres-pgvector.

  

• 😳 Geoffery Hinton, the Godfather of AI, left Google after a decade & spoke out about the risks that advancements in AI bring in. [Article] (the news was all over the place all week, and people are now really afraid as one of the smartest people who made Neural Networks possible is afraid.)

• 💔 Google said they won't share the advancements in AI with the public anymore. [Full Article] (uf! Someone got hurt with the ChatGPT going live, but Google was the reason behind the genesis of Transformers, so overall bad for us.)

• 📉 Oh! On that note, Chegg got hurt badly with the rise of ChatGPT, but they have been trying to recover, by making the biggest enemy their friend. They announced CheggMate, GPT-4 powered solution so to help you cheat on homework.

  

• Amazon Prime Video published a blog post, telling the world how they reduced the costs by 90% by moving from "microservices" to "monolith" architecture. As soon as the post dropped, everyone had a take on it, here are a few of the good ones.
  - Even Amazon can't make sense of Microservices by DHH
  - Serverless is a lie by Fireship
  (this could have been another "tab vs spaces" war, but this involves real money, so the only thing left to see is if organizations force their engineers to take out some bandwidth to move out of Microservices architecture if they can)

  

• Modular announced Mojo, a programming language that looks like Python and feels like C (yes, blazing-fuckin-ly fast). It is specifically built for developing more performant AI models. (I got the early playground access, but haven't played yet. Reminds me of the Gym membership I got last year 🫠)

  

• Some insider from Google leaked a document stating "We don't have a MOAT, neither does OpenAI" (it's been 4 days full of MOAT meme posting, if you are unaware about this, go click on the article link, also the GIGA chads in the industry met the POTUS)

  

Wild World & Web 🫠

• You might know "लक्ष्मण रेखा", but have you ever heard of the "Wallace Line"?
  \=> There is a 32 km stretch of water between Bali and Lombok Islands, which is indeed keeping the "worlds apart". The line is called Wallace Line. It is an imaginary line, on either side of which there is no similarity in bio-diversity and it is like an invisible barrier for animals and no one has ever crossed the line (except for humans ofc) [Full Video by PBS Eon]

• Mark Zuckerberg Wins Gold And Silver Medals In His First Jiu-Jitsu Tournament (yes, the same guy, who testified like an LLM in front of Congress. For some reason, it's been a thing now, Tech Bros are going deep into fitness to name a few Sam Altman, reportedly deadlifts, Zuck is winning medals in Jiu-Jitsu, Bezos has been buffed up for a long time now & Divyesh Puri has been a health and fitness enthusiast too)

Catch up 🤓

• 🙀 AutoGPT UI is coming - [Join Waitlist] (as long as you have enough money in savings, feel free to connect your OpenAI account to it)

• 🔥 Move your servers to the "Edge" using Hono, an ultrafast web framework for the Edge.

• You knew Whisper by OpenAI now meet Whisper JAX, the fastest Whipser model out there, 70x faster than the others. (this brings me to the point, is there someone who has already built the Movie Audio to SRT file thing?)

• Inflection AI release its own Chatbot called Pi. They say that it's smart & supportive and you can talk out personal stuff with it.
  (The team behind Inflection has the industry’s top AI experts who previously worked at DeepMind, Google, OpenAI, and Meta. I tried to use the product, personally, it's doing good for early access)

  

TILs 🤯

• You might have used the "sweating guy" meme, but do you know where it originated? [Key & Peele Clip]

  

• 🗺️ Have you ever come across maps that have some places that don't exist?
  Well, the detailed maps of the cities have such places and they make up some random places or random names so that they can later check if someone plagiarised their maps.
  You can watch the detailed video.

• WhatsApp Web has this cool option to blur the part of images, which you paste into it. (it's been there for a while, but I never noticed it seems, and the answer to the msg in the screenshot is "NO" ofc.)

New in town 👀

• Query Kitty - ChatGPT for the Impatient ones (press the Ctrl+Right Arrow key anywhere and use the text prefixing it as prompt)

• Hackercast - An AI-generated podcast summary of Hacker News (because why let folks like me read it from there and give you fine-grained content, instead go listen to 1-hour bot-generated podcasts)

• Unitary - AI-powered video content moderation

• Landing AI - Now make kinda beautiful landing pages with just a prompt. (RIP 🪦 Bootstrap template sellers)

Recommendations 💫

• Reflect - An alternative to Obsidian with appealing UX (at least on the landing page, from the first looks it feels like Linux:MacOS :: Obsidian:Reflect, but don't take my word for it, yet, go try it.)

• Communication is hard, and it has become harder with the ever-evolving and remote job world. Here is one of many rules that I follow, it's "Don't ask to ask, just ask" (also, always remember over-communicating professionally is okay, then under-communicating)

• RegexGPT - yet another tool for building out Regexes from plain text. (I personally think we get it, LLMs can write better Regex than humans, and let's not make more such tools please?)

• JamGPT - the Chrome Extension that allowed you to easily report bugs, now announced AI-powered bug solver (screaming intensifies as I feel attacked with this one personally.)

Cool OSS Projects 🤌🏻

• alright-react-app - Tired of setting up React apps all by yourselves?
  This CLI tool bootstraps the app with an exposed, unopinionated, high-perf config. w/ Jest, SWC, Storybook, TS5 & Webpack 5

• Internet in a box - It is a self-contained, offline version of the internet, with a lot of selected data in it, and it comes packed in a Raspberry Pi, which can be used as a hotspot to share access to these resources (if you remember Microsoft Encarta 🥹, this is like 2023 version of that, with more data and better ways to share that and yes, FREE!)

• jsnes - A NES Games emulator is written in JS. (Atwood's Law in action)

• shape-e - Generate 3D objects conditioned on text or images (It's like Dall-E but for 3D figures, and from the same org OpenAI)

• AutoPR - a GitHub Action that autonomously writes a pull request in response to an issue! (yes, it's time to pack bags and learn to farm!)

Meme of the week

Ponder worthy words

"Analysts are poorer forecasters than dart-throwing monkeys."
~ Prof. Philip Tetlock (he has legit research backing this statement)

Where do we stand in the year?

▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓░░░░░░░░░░ 33%

You can reach out to me using any of the links on the website
👋🏻 See you at the next one!

News 🗞️

• RIP Legit Torrents 2005-2023 (so, officially, the way to stop torrents chosen by the legal team is to DDoS and null route them)

• Google Authenticator finally now supports cloud sync (after years of making a market for Authy! GAuth is back in the game, No, I'm not crying, you are!)

• 🦄 Replit goes spitting rainbows, it's a Unicorn now! (yay!).
  They also announced replit-code-v1-3b, their LLM that spits out code. (Code Whisperer, Copilot, Bard, and Family keep getting bigger)

• 🛰️ Elon (SpaceX) launching first ever 5G Satellite (It is reportedly the first satellite in low Earth orbit (LEO) to operate on 5G)

• Slack launched new Automation APIs for everyone (now you can make better integrations and apps with Slack, it's free till Oct '23 for everyone)

• W&B announces PromptOps (easily debug, log, and monitor your LLM APIs)

• Remember Opera Browser? Well, they are coming back with an AI-first browser, Opera One (truth be told, its yet another Chromium fork, painted up with modern designs, and some default stuff on the left sidebar, notice the default ChatGPT, ChatSonic, and some communication apps pinned by default.)

  

Wild World & Web 🫠

• 😵‍💫 Gravity may have shaken space-time so hard that it spontaneously created radiation (light). [Article] (every day we get closer to the secret sauce of this universe and farther away from God)

• Floor 796, is an ever-expanding animation scene showing the life of the 796th floor of the huge space station! The goal of the project is to create as huge an animation as possible, with many references to movies, games, anime, and memes. (I found Dr. Hugh from House treating the back of Kakashi Sensei from Naruto 🤯)

Catch up 🤓

• You can now A/B test your YouTube Video Thumbnails [Tool Link]

  

• 📅 YC Summer Conf 2023, (June 17) If you are a student in the Bay area this summer, apply for this and meet the folks from YC (Prez & CEO, founders, and more)

• Bard now helps you code (another bot joins the party to help humans write more bots, it ain't as good as almighty Co-pilot, but they are catching up!)

• NextJS revamped its landing page, adding two Rust Logos to ensure people understand the "blazingly fast" thing.

• Will coding jobs exist in the future?
  Well, Matt Welsh says "no more than 3 years", it'll change as we know it and Co-pilot might soon take the main seat.

• 👀 Code Reviews are hard, but the best way to learn uncharted code, apart from breaking it. Kamran (the person behind Developer Roadmaps) released a quick new guide on how to Review Code

• 🎓 OG AI Instructor Andrew Ng releases the "Prompt Engineering for Developer" course.

TILs 🤯

• Egypt is in North Africa, the Middle East, and Asia [Article].
  Not every place gets the privilege to be part of three landmass regions. (those crazy aliens didn't make the Pyramids at those co-ordinates, for no reason)

• <StrictMode> renders App twice in only develop mode [SO Link] (for ~15 mins, it was very confusing, I spun up a fresh CodeSandbox to check and found this out.)

New in town 👀

• Supaglue - The Open Source Unified API for CRM integrations

• AI Marketplace - A platform where you can create prompts and earn commissions.

• Lamini - Fine-tuning is stale, make your LLM instead.

Recommendations 💫

• Map of Reddit - if you ever found it difficult to explore Reddit (any human should) this tool gives you beautiful

• Jellylade - An app that lets you turn your screenshots into beautiful posts with device frames

• Programmable Search Engine - This tool by Google provides you the ability to add top-level filters and then use an API to make custom searches, which are most relevant to you or your end user.

Cool OSS Projects 🤌🏻

• Track Anything - It's more or less now a ritual to talk about SAM (sometimes Altman, sometimes the model by Meta) in every edition. This cool project lets you track and segment objects in a video, it uses SAM (the model) and XMem

• art-of-command-line - A one-page README to master CLI commands. (but yeah who needs it after Copilot CLI? Well, trust me, I have been using it for 2 months now, and it is better if you learn these basics)

• cobe - 5kb WebGL Globe Lib, which improves perf by >60%. (How it was made?) (optimizations are hard, and UI optimizations are harder, as it involves engines and renderers beyond your scope of tasks, so when you hear WebGL & optimizations in the same line, you gotta respect that.)

  

Meme of the week

Ponder worthy words

"When gives you lemonades, make lemon. Life will be like 'Whatttt?' "
~ Phil Dunphy, Modern Family

Where do we stand in the year?

▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓░░░░░░░░░░░ 32%

You can reach out to me using any of the links on the website
👋🏻 See you at the next one!

News 🗞️

• ✨ Reddit will begin charging for their scraping APIs - [Article]

• 🚀 NodeJS 20.0 is out - [Release Notes] (this time they call it "Iron", so should be tough to break now, IYKWIM)

• Google Brain and DeepMind join forces to solve the biggest challenges facing humanity. (it *seems like an alpha-*bet to beat OpenAI in this race, not sure about the challenges facing humanity, but force sure it can solve the challenges facing existing of Google)

• Stability AI launches Language Models StableLM, and the good news is that you can dig up the repo and deploy your own server. (You can go ahead and play with StableLM-Tuned-Alpha-7b Chat that they release recently, it's not decent-ish yet, I mean OpenAI has set the bar too high for Chat Models)

• TypeScript 5.1 Beta is out (*they have loosened up some rules, and optimized it as always so that you have RAM left for VS Code and Chrome & breaking changes are "*ES2020 and Node.js 14.17" are minimum requirements)

• Kent Beck, OG behind Agile Manifesto and TDD worries a little about AI advancements and their effect on Software Industry but concludes that you shouldn't worry as it can't replace our stupid human mistakes 😌.

  

Wild World & Web 🫠

• 🏝️ You have been to this island a ton of times, but it doesn't exist, Null Island (TLDR; it is a fictional place that is located at the coordinates 0°N, 0°E. Since null is 0 in most programming languages and 0 is the placeholder/default location, so all errors or missing locations point to this.)

  

• 19k new undersea volcanoes were discovered, making it a total of more than ~43k. ()

• ♾️ Don't know what to read, but want to scroll through some good content over the web, well WikiScroll, brings infinite scrollable Wikipedia for you. (if you are going to this site, there is seriously something troubling with you, get yourself checked, thanks!)

Catch up 🤓

• 😶‍🌫️ How to train your own LLM, a guide by Replit.

• Cool folks at ui.dev have created a visual learning to React guide and bought a really expensive domain react.gg

• Codeium says out loud that "Copilot spits out GPL code", while Codeium doesn't. (Basically, folks at Codeium say that we don't train over non-permissive code, hence we don't generate that code.)

TILs 🤯

• Collective effervescence is an eye-catching name for the magic of shared experience and moving in unison.

  

• 📧 You can email yourself from Google Sheets [Post] (we have had long chats on the internet about how half the software is just replacing the spreadsheets, but with LLMs and Plugins, the things that spreadsheets can't do is also reducing every day. Beware YC Startups!)

New in town 👀

• 🎤 Murf.ai - Go from text to speech with a versatile AI voice generator

• 🧑‍🍳 littlecook - Turn unused ingredients into delicious new dishes (I feel a little sad on this one, wanted to hack something like this last weekend, but now happy, as I can now use this and save some time)

• 🪟 WindowAI - Use your own AI models on the web

• 🥹 Multi-ON - A ChatGPT Plugin that can browse the web for you

• 🧙🏻‍♂️ Mage - An easy-to-use platform with Text2Img, Img2Img, and Text2Gif with 50+ models to choose from, Stable Diffusion being free.

• "Sitting is the new smoking," they say, and a few other philosophy razors in a Twitter thread 🧵

Playgrounds 🛝

• AI Playground by Vercel - A single place to test a lot of LLMs at once with a single prompt.

  

• integer.exposed - a playground by b0rk, that lets you play around with different operations that you can perform on an integer like signed/unsigned left/right shift, byte order swap, and not.

Recommendations 💫

• 🔎 Magic Copy - Remember how we talked about SAM by Meta in the last two newsletters, well, this brings the power of SAM to your browser using a Chrome Extension. (I tried to demo it, and it works like a charm and with very good precision, attaching a small video of the same)

  

• Centered - an app that helps you achieve a flow state and get the task done. It has coaches and spaces, where you will be pinged in the voice of the Space manager (in my case cassidoo)

  

Cool OSS Projects 🤌🏻

• onionshare - a tool that lets you securely and anonymously share files, host websites, and chat with friends using the Tor network.

• GPTCache - a library for creating a semantic cache to store responses from LLM queries. (In easy words, it tries to group the queries that are similar in the same bucket and cache the response for it, saving us the response time and money)

• ocr-space-api-wrapper - a quick way to extract text from an image or PDF, use OCR Space API wrapper with a free API key from OCR Space (No Stable Diffusion, pure OCR, yes a tech from the late 1900s)

Shoutout

• Pixxel - In the world where software is eating the world, these guys are launching hyperspectral small satellites to capture beautiful pictures of Mother Earth. They are basically building a health monitoring tool for the planet. (these folks are building this cool stuff, right here, in Indiranagar, namma BLR)

• Julia Evans (aka @b0rk) - a software developer, who deeply understands the CS concepts and reflects them in her zines. You can check the awesome content (playgrounds, zines, and blogs) she creates here

Meme of the week

Ponder worthy words

Atreus: Who would reject the flood of fortune's gift?
Thyesters: Anyone who has experienced how easily they flow back.
~ Seneca, Thysestes, 536

Things I have been up to

• Went to an amazing event hosted by Bangalore Chess Club, and lost to some 8-year-old prodigies. 🥹

• Reading

  • The Daily Stoic as a Daily Driver. (yes, a self-help book 😭)

  • Sapiens - consuming slowly.

Where do we stand in the year?

▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓░░░░░░░░░░░ 31%

Note 👋🏻

You can reach out to me using any of the links on the website.
If you find any mistakes in this edition, blame the reviewer, he was busy moving out today.

👋🏻 See you at the next one!

Yup! This time we are a little early but didn't want to make this thing too big, so it's better to increase frequency than content

News 🗞️

• ✨After SAM, last week, we now have Inst-Inpaint, a paper on Instructing to Remove Objects with Diffusion Models - Demo (I feel sad for the image editors on Twitter whose only work was to remove background objects from the images of people and get some Karma points)

  

• 📈 Trends in Generative AI Explosion by Forbes (these charts are getting out of hand)

  

• 🗼OpenAI Plans for Japan Expansion (I knew it, how can a guy have his username as "sama" and not be a weeb, I think Altman beats Anshuman in terms of love for Japan)

• 🐛💰 OpenAI announces Bug Bounty Program with $20k in rewards for reporters (I hope they are not allowing infra issues 😂*, else it'll be the costliest way to fix Azure*)

• 🥁Welcome Mullvad Browser, Tor's new pet project centering privacy without the Onion network (first, the name is weird, second Jains might celebrate this news)

• ⚡️ Chrome is now ~10% faster on Mac and Android (so, yeah the memory will fill up faster than before, you'll need more RAM soon)

• 😧 Google is finally going to bring AI to search (Samsung's move is worrying for them as it's ~1B users, but I'm not sure how they'll make money people will get answers without clicking links 🤷🏻‍♂️)

Wild World & Web 🫠

• 🔭 JWT (no, not your token James Webb Telescope) spots surprisingly massive galaxies in the early universe. [Article] (is it time to reconsider the Big Bang theory??)

• 🧩 Do you know the difference between == and === in JS, yes, right? Here's a quick Windows 9x-style game for you: EqEq (ah! This game will make you feel very smart or very dumb, there is no in-between)

• 📸 You Can Make a Netflix Style Doco About Literally Anything by Paul E.T. [a very kewl video editor] (okay, this guy nailed it, by the time I saw the plate in this video, I completely forgot that I was not on Netflix, also, for some reason these 4 and half a minute feel like lot more)

• 🥘 How one of our "Bose" created the best-selling dish in Japan, the "jun indo kari-" (pure Indian curry) (NGL, I was very confused at first, is this SC Bose, but thankfully no!)

• 🌊 Are sea levels rising the same all over the world, as if we're filling a giant bathtub? (this could also go in TIL, but this is very hard to digest for me, but that's why we built the engineering marvel, the Panama Canal)

Catch up 🤓

• 😶‍🌫️ What are Transformer Models and How do they work? by Cohere (look, I think at this point, every edition will have one such post until all of us understand how it works exactly)
  [Bonus: Illustrated Transformer]

• 📨 It's hard to catch up with AI Tech developments right now, so all you need is ML Papers of the Week

• 🎮 In the last post, we discussed that Chrome shipped WebGPU, but where do you learn stuff about it? Well, here's a resource WebGPU Fundamentals

• ⚡️ If you already know about tRPC, and are still not sold. Try reading this post from folks at unzip.dev (Every time I watch or read something about tRPC, I tend to convince my co-worker to use it, this post was not sponsored by theo.gg)

• 🔐 SBOM (Software Bill of Materials) is a new way to keep track of parts/dependencies of your software and how much are they costing you in terms of security. You can read more about it at an amazing compilation of the same by unzip folks

• 👨🏻‍💻 Our favorite AI tutor Andrewj NgKarpathy did a weekend hack to build out awesome-movies.life, a movie search/recommendation engine site. (Not perfect yet, but works and the chef's kiss UI from the future reminds me of my DLD Lecture Slides from undergrad)

TILs 🤯

• 🔥 useEffect sometimes fires before paint (Dan was right, don't use useEffect and sleep like a baby at night, or use it and pluck your hair out)

• ☘️ null is the smallest value in MongoDB, so only non-existent keys will return false on $gt: [$key, null]
  So, if you want to check if a key exists or not, you can use $gt: [$key, null]

• Temptation bundling is a productivity technique that involves combining an activity that gives you instant gratification. The image below by folks at Sketchplanations

  

• Crown shyness is a phenomenon observed in some tree species, in which the crowns of fully stocked trees do not touch each other. [Tweet]

  

New in town 👀

• β Apollo, a ChatGPT-powered app for real-time knowledge. Talk to it all day long through your headphones. [DM for TestFlight]

• 🎥 Figma to Video - a Figma plugin that allows you to export smart animations to GIF or MP4 (as if prototypes were not enough, now you can send people proto-gifs)

• 🧩 LiveBlocks - Building Collaborative components in web applications was never easy, but this tool proposes a cool way to make it easy and also claims that you can now build collaborative experiences in days, not months. (my verdict is it's a super cool product, but it won't always be a breeze using it for complex use cases, I have worked on building Collaborative UIs and they get messy quickly, but LiveBlocks should make easy ones breezy)

• 💸 Pump - YC-backed startup that claims to reduce your AWS bill by up to 50% using AI, plus it's free and doesn't require your engineering team (I hope this ain't true, I know people who worked really hard to optimize AWS bills)

Recommendations 💫

• 🔎 Phind: AI Search engine for developers (it's not a new tool but in the last 3 months, it has improved a lot, tried to use it for some tasks successfully)

• 🤫 WhisperBot, is a WhatsApp bot that sends you transcripts of voice notes. (so, now you can do dirty confidential talks without making noise)

Cool OSS Projects 🤌🏻

• ⏳ wayback - A self-hosted archiving service integrated with Internet Archive, archive.today, IPFS, and beyond.

• 🚀 np - It's a better npm publish with tons of small tweaks and interactive UI (and who is a better person to create this than Almigthy Sindre Sorhus, who used to publish at least one package a day)

Meme of the week

[From good folks at Work Chronicles]

Ponder worthy words

"Most of the disorders and dysfunction in the world is caused by lack of impulse control"
~ Andrew Huberman

Where do we stand in the year?

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Note 👋🏻

Thanks for reading till here 🙇🏻‍♂️
We need some feedback here on the format of this newsletter/post.
We are thinking to add fewer links and more takes, plus moving this to another domain/place, as I have a co-author with me now.
We are looking for better alternatives to host this thing also, Hashnode doesn't have the best of things. So, we are open to suggestions.

You can reach out to me using any of the links on the website

👋🏻 See you in the next one!

News 🗞️

• ✨ Recent YC Batch has a 1.4% acceptance rate, here's a quick look at them, complete the dataset here

  

• Talking about YC, someone created a Chatbot exclusively for YC's Knowledge base so that you can ask your doubts to it. Try it

• 🚀 Chome ships WebGPU [Link] (so, now you can develop more graphic-intensive shitty stuff and fill the web with that to poison DALL-E too)

• 🐣 Twitter chooses a bad-ass way again to hunt down the leaker [Link] (definitely, not the first time Elon is doing this sort of sorcery, also I like how the "The Intercept" has a section at the end "Takeaways for Leakers" 🤣)

• 🏞️ Well, well, well, Guess who is back (It's Zuck Meta), Meta released SAM (Segment Anything Model) which recognizes a different object in an image with mind-blowing accuracy. It has been trained over 11M images. (so, yes our FB Images are being put to good use and what's this obsession of AI tool names with SAM{a})

• 💰 Meet Pull, a company that lets you withdraw up to 6 months' salary in advance with a 3% fee and no interest (BNPL was definitely a mess here in India, but these guys took this to next level, also the domain reminds of some of the scariest order I have been given)

Wild World & Web 🫠

• 🐆 Meet Cheetah, a Whisper & GPT-based app for passing remote SWE interviews (looking forward to the era where we'll interview LLMs and enjoy this all self-deprecating humor, joke apart it's getting really scary down here, do you guys have a link to Farming Tutorials?)

• 📺 Meet More Episodes!, it's a tool that generates the natural extension episodes to your favorite shows. (Finished watching a TV Series, wishing that there should have been more episodes of the same. Worry not. GPT-4 has got you covered)

• 💬 Ask HN: What lesser-known accessories do you use with your computer? (yup! the idea is to find the devices to burn money, if you still have doubts, I know a guy)

• 🌉 Have you ever wondered why the Golden Gate Bridge is called "Golden Gate" when it's not Golden and not even Gate? - [Link] (we might do one nomenclature link in every post, I know tons more of them)

• 🐦‍⬛ How Killing Sparrows Led to Great Famines in China (this post is a quick reminder of how all the species on this planet live in harmony and why you shouldn't mess with things you don't understand) - Shared by Divyesh

Catch up with the tech 🤓

• Why you should avoid HTTP3 for some time? ⚠️ - Link (TLDR; your container's OS might be a bottleneck)

• A COBOD Printer is being used to print a 2-Story 3D building in Namma Bengaluru, also, the first in India 🖨️🏚️. (yup, forget Indiranagar roads, let's focus on what's easy first, huh!) - Link

• Learn Quantum Computing with IQM Academy's Curriculum (really can't wait for these chips to be GA and then go again re-inventing all of the cryptography)

• 🧵 Tech Opportunities you can't afford to miss in April

"Today I Learned" moments 🤯

• NaN always had a complicated relationship with NaN, indexOf joins the party as the third wheel.

  

• You have the BTC whitepaper 📃 hidden on your Mac, you can open that right now using
  open /System/Library/Image\ Capture/Devices/VirtualScanner.app/Contents/Resources/simpledoc.pdf
  Source: Twitter

• @here only notifies all online members of the channel, while @channel or @all notifies everyone in the channel 🔔 (been bombing 5 timezones at work lately, gotta keep it to wakey ones from now on.)

New tools in town 👀

• EnhanceAI lets you quickly add autocomplete using AI in your applications (shorter sprints for such features now)

• PWA Builder helps you to build packages out of PWA that can be distributed to Google, MS & Apple Store (so, we have 1 good and 1 bad news, it'll be easy to distribute your web apps and it'll be easy to distribute your web apps)

• Freefy lets you stream music without ads in between (it is open source, and uses APIs from YT & Spotify for the sole purpose of being an alternative 👏🏻)

• MemeCam allows you to generate a meme from any image, just upload it and it'll add some funny and relevant text on top of the image (Content Creator era what??)

• Copilot for Dating: Having a hard time breaking the ice? (I don't know where this thing will stop)

• ToolBuilder, this scary tool allows you to generate AI Tools just by using prompts. (NGL, this one is scary, I wanted to build an Ingredient based recipe finder and I gave it the prompt, it took less than 5 seconds to give me a functional app)

  

Tools Recommendations 💫

• RClone: a CLI tool to manage your files on the cloud that supports all major storage providers (this one has a crazy amount of features in it, oh! and yes it comes with an experimental Web-based GUI too)

• ProxyMan: A simple tool that lets you monitor all the network requests going out from your computer (this is pretty nifty at times, it basically creates a proxy that gives you the ability to intercept all the requests, save lives & hack stuff sometimes too)

• Gamma: It's a new way to communicate ideas, I have been using this at work for a while. (can't say it'll replace any app from your workflow, but you can try it out)

Watching 📺

• AlphaGo - The Movie - this one will surprisingly bring water to your eyes, it's one hell of a gripping documentary, and also reminds us of how early we started addressing AI as some unpredictable human (I mean long before GeePeeTee)

• Why π is in the normal distribution by 3B1B (this stuff I don't know should have been part of my degree, but anyways YT University it is!)

Meme of the week

Quote of the week

"The world will ask you who you are, and if you don't know, the world will tell you."
~ Carl Jung

Note

This newsletter might be a little stale, but the next one will come a little early as I want to keep it shorter and we are lagging by a week.
Also, I know some of you told me to tweak the banner designs a bit, I'll try to get it done by the next one.

As promised, Postcard from my trip last week

[Alt: Living Root Bridge, Riwai, Meghalaya]

Where do we stand in the year powered by Year Progress Bot

▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓░░░░░░░░░░░░ 29%

You can find me on Twitter for any feedback.
👋🏻 I’ll see you next one!

Let's make sure we have our seatbelts on, this is gonna be a long & overwhelmingly distracting ride. 🎢

⚠️ Warning: it's more like an octet (instead of a nibble) now!
So, I recommend you bookmark this post, in case you can't go through all of them at once.

News 🗞️

• ✨ The Microsoft (creator of my favorite Linux distro, XP 😉) is blowing it off with the new Loop (from the looks of it, they are coming after Notion) & brand new Teams 2.0 (you dump, Electron, and/or Angular off your stack, and you get my vote for the elections, dead simple!)

  

• In these weird AI times, there is a place where MS & Google doubles down on bonding, yes you guessed it right, it's when they are building something against Apple, Nearby Share Beta lands for Windows, making sharing files between Android and Windows seamless.

• 📊 Sequoia released a chart of Developer Tools 2.0, talking about the missing automation by AI in SDLC (NGL, you shouldn't be this direct, let the humans enjoy writing code for a while)

  

• 🔗 Nokia launched a new design system called Nokia Pure and changed the page to coming soon as soon as it got some traction. But don't you worry our Web Time Machines have a snapshot from March 14th (Pi Day)

• 📈 In the times, when you wake up daily with layoffs news in Tech, you should seriously check out Eight Graphs That Explain Software Engineering Salaries in 2023 (TLDR; you are doing fine, don't push it.)

• 🤖 Databricks launched Dolly, they trained on open-source LLM, trained it for 30 minutes on a single machine, with small but quality data, and got a surprisingly good output in performing tasks.

• Elon open-sourced "The Algorithm", and some people built a visualizer for it too (not sure if the visualizer is correct, but people are all over the repo)

  

Useful Links 🔗

• If you want to build stuff on LLMs, but the APIs are costly, worry not!
  OpenAI has announced free $2500 API credits for self-funded startups not associated with VC partner firms. You can apply here.

• Paywalls? in 2023? duh! here comes the double combo attack (yes, just like pressing L1 & R1 together, good ol' days)

  • Use a 12ft ladder

  • on an archived snapshot

• GitHub announced Octernships for students.

Wild World & Web 🫠

• Tech

  • 📹 Why 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key? no wonder I love Microsoft.

    

  • 📹 Fit bands are for kids, use CROWN™ by Neurosity and see how your neurons are doing today.
    BONUS: crazy video on how you can "literally connect the brain to GPT-4 with JavaScript & Crown"

  • "We can't send mail more than 500 miles away" - 500 miles bug

• Routines of Creative People, for some reason I know people who have routines very close to Mr. Kafka (no, I told you I won't give any names here!)

Catch up with the tech 🤓

• 📹 Transformers, explained by Dale from Google, explains how Transforms work way faster and are more context-aware than RNNs, kudos to Self-attention (AIAYN)

• 📹 LLM explainer from Scratch is by far the best explainer I have seen, the guy takes you from Gradient Descent -> NN -> Transformers -> AGI in a small amount of time.

• 📄 Visual Guide to Event Loop, the core of NodeJS, has always been one of the interesting topics to read, but there are barely any good resources out there on the internet. The folks at builder.io have been writing some good technical blogs, no doubt.

• 📄 Cross-browser support landed for Import Maps, a saner way to use ES Modules in browsers, not sure how long the builders gonna last in my stack. You can read why do we care article here

• 🐥 NativeScript announced support for jQuery (yup, in 2023)

"Today I Learned" moments 🤯

• You can throw string instead of Error objects in almighty JavaScript. (I'm at the point in life, where I'm confused if "No Rules, Rules" was deliberately written for JS)

    const nibbleOne = () => {
      const nibble = 0x0F;
      // throw new Error('Nibble one'); ✅ works
      // throw "Nibble one"; ✅ works
    }
  

• Do you know how the "auto-adjust backlit brightness" ⌨️ works?
  this story goes long back (jk, barely 3 years) to my undergrad days, I used to think that "nothing was gonna stop me once I got a device with a backlit keyboard", as I can then type like ThePrimeagen even in the darkest of times.

  

  Okay, no worries, you can guess it for the starters.
  To me, naturally, it makes sense that if I have light in the environment the keyboard's backlit, should dim itself (as opposed to how we treat screens, right?) and once I have low light in the environment the keyboard should litt itself up (like Louis from Suits exactly opposite of screen), but NO, that's not how it works, at least for Apple.

  And knowing this all it's very easy to conclude that it might be that your device is buggy, but worry not, Reddit folks got us covered on this one: Why your auto-adjust of keyboard backlit might not be working?

• Why do you see ’ instead of an apostrophe, got a bug at work, where CSVs were behaving like a bad bad boy as they should?

• ReDoS, yup Denial of Services using Regex, and you are more vulnerable to this than you think you are. On a casual Friday walk to AWS Inspector, while at work I saw a Medium Vuln with word-wrap, I quickly dug deeper into this one and found out it's a dependency of eslint (so might be affecting half the world).
  Proposed a fix for this in this Pull Request, basically to avoid using Regex where things can be done without it.

  

New tools in town 👀

• CoScreen by Datadog, beware devs and designers, the hand-holding meme is closer to reality now. Watch the demo

  

• Arc for iOS, the new browser for cool kid**z, yes it can now be found on Apple Store and this will be a big step as one missing piece earlier for cross-device sync. I've been using this since its release, if you are still not in yet, here's an invite.
  Oh! on that note, you might also want to listen to a Stackoverflow Podcast with Arc Team - [The next-gen web browser has no tabs, only spaces (Ep. 549)**](https://stackoverflow.blog/2023/03/28/the-next-gen-web-browser-has-no-tabs-only-spaces-ep-549/)

• Regex.ai, AI-Powered Regular Expression Solver. (yup! just marked one more skill as irrelevant on my resume)

  

Tools Recommendations 💫

• Obsidian (your own "Dear Diary") with Git Sync Plugin (started post little push and marketing pitch from Kautuk & only4)

• Rewind (imagine, a screen memory with ChatGPT), found it on Twitter, installed it, and thought would give it a try. But, funny story, in mere 3 days, it saved from unrecoverable states twice, one should give it a try iff you trust their policies.

• Raycast AI (joined the party a little late), this is a game changer, you will soon realize how lazy you are as soon as you get access to this, there is no going back to ai.com (yup, Mr. Altman is doing some serious domain shopping).

  

• Hacker News Arc Boost, technically it's just a CSS file, but it improves the page so much (if you are using Arc or not, I recommend injecting this stylesheet)

  

Fin-bits

(this section is to share informative things I read, not a fin-fluencer, yet!!*, so go do your research before trading based on things you read on the internet*)

• Tata Technologies IPO Breakdown, no doubt this is one of the most exciting IPO coming up, and if you are by any chance like me scarred by LIC (*sad crying noises*), you should give it a try.

A quote that got me thinking

Don't meet, write. Don't react, consider.
~ Jason Fried

Note

Look! this might have been a long one, but trust me when I say this, I held back from sharing more links, as it might be redundant for folks who read other newsletters too. 😅
Also, yes I remember telling you it'll be 4 sections and a quick read 🫠, but I think we can't make it smaller if weekly is the frequency we choose. And regarding the shrinking down the sections, I'll work on it in the coming editions.

On the same note, I think this one should keep you occupied for a week and a half, as I'll be taking some time off-screen, touching grass ⛵️ for a week exploring 🎒 the beautiful North Eastern part of India 🇮🇳

Where do we stand in the year powered by Year Progress Bot

▓▓▓▓░░░░░░░░░░░ 25%

You can find me on Twitter for any feedback.
👋🏻 I’ll see you next one!

Starting from the start

I have been having a hard time writing full-blown blog posts (having 4 great posts in drafts from the last year).

I know it might be too late to enter the content creation space, but lately, I have been very much active on Twitter and have been tweeting a lot and mainly of the tweet are Series of #TIL (Today I Learned) and I curate them using a query later on my website.

Meanwhile, I do don't want to drop the plan of completing the big blog posts, I have been reading and chirping (tweeting) a lot lately.

Coming to the point

That brings me to the point of starting something inspired by Seth Godin's blog, which is to write more and write short pieces (don't force me to tell you about your attention span) that are easily consumable in this fast-moving space.

So, I plan to write small posts (ideally, will come up with a pattern dividing the whole post into 4 categories) called "Nibble" (coz why not).

What is Nibble?

In computing, a nibble is a four-bit aggregation or half an octet. It is also known as a half-byte or trade.

If you are already subscribed and receiving this one in your mailbox (thanks!), stay tuned!
Haven't decided on frequency yet (Twitter Poll)

Why start now?

( * 4 years after buying the domain?? 🤫 *)

Well, something has sparked the fire in my heart, and I realized that writing content is a good way to get criticized and make sure you have learned at least the objective things correctly.

Also,

• I have been enjoying writing professionally and starting to like putting more life force into it for the past ~1 year.

• Few of the major bummers was not able to come up with good headline, logos, or banners. I think the new cool kids' tools (MidJourney and bois) are gonna help me with that.

• I have been reading more than before, and I need this to be my rough notebook on the internet 😌.

yeah, a bit of a selfish move. (don't want to lose my "full-time passion, which brings me a money" job to ChatGPT).

BTW, for the uninitiated, I have been building some finger muscles 💪🏻 writing Release Notes (as if it were part of my JD) at Regie.

And I have introduced something there called GaaS (Good Vibes as a Service):

which means that everything inside the (round brackets and in italics) is a purely fun take to make sure you giggle while you consume the important parts and the content is sending good vibes across the globe.

What to expect?

Well, mostly the plan is to figure out the way, but the main bits will be Tech, Dev Toolings, Life, and News that matters. (I read almost ~12-17 newsletters every day, will try to keep this one with the least duplicate content)

Credits where it's due

Thanks to Mohit ✨ for helping me convert the logo idea to reality and Pushkar 🤝 has been helping me push (as the name suggests) myself all this time for writing, so, if you don't like a post, go blame him, he might have said "LGTM 👍🏻" before I published.

Godspeed 🖖🏻

You can find the Nibbles here:
- Nibble #1- Nibble #2- Nibble #3- Nibble #4- Nibble #5

There is only one issue you'll face with the package is while wrapping over ioredis the devs kept the key name for the sentinel name and the same name is used for client/connection name as per the implementation of the parent package.

I have fixed the same issue in forked repo.

The example config to connect to multi-sentinel name-based setup is below:

[
  {
    "clientName": "sentinelDB5",
    "sentinels": [
      {
        "host": "localhost",
        "port": 6380
      },
      {
        "host": "localhost",
        "port": 6381
      }
    ],
    "db": 5,
    "name": "hahaCluster",
    "password": "topSecret"
  }
]

After connecting with this config you can call the following in your services to get clients for these sentinels

const client = await this.redisService.getClient('sentinelDB5');

That's all, now you can go back to hacking as usual 🖖🏻