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IF YOU SUCCEED, YOU WILL FAIL

Sometimes, success can lead to inevitable failure. This is especially when success is achieved through short-term strategies.

DISTRIBUTED CODE REVIEW FOR GIT

Google has released a command line tool for performing code reviews on git repositories. This tool is a distributed code review system for git repos. Code reviews are stored inside of the repository as git objects. Every developer in a team has their own copy of the review history that they can push or pull. The tool automatically merges updates from the remote repo when pulling.

LEARNDB

LearnDB helps students better understand the internals of databases by implementing a relational database management system from scratch. It allows students to delve into the internals of a functioning relational database and learn from it.

Supabase Studio 3.0 has been released with big improvements to its AI SQL editor. You can interact with your SQL queries as easily as talking to ChatGPT.

HOW DISCORD ROLLED OUT YUBIKEYS FOR ALL EMPLOYEES

An interesting read on how Discord rolled out WebAuthn and YubiKeys to all its employees in global locations. The article talks about why Discord made the decision to transition - the vulnerability of traditional MFA methods to phishing and SIM jacking attacks. Discord's rollout involved migrating to Okta as their primary Identity Provider, distributing two or more Web Auth authenticators, like YubiKeys, to all employees, and implementing a phased rollout plan across different departments. The article highlights the challenges and lessons learned during the rollout, many of which can be applicable to many other corporate environments.

ENTREPRENEURSHIP FOR ENGINEERS: SELLING OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE

No matter what kind of company you intend to build — open source or proprietary, DevTool or not — at least one of the company founders will have to close deals at the beginning of the company’s life. Even as the company gets larger, founders still need to be involved in sales, especially big deals. Selling open source software can be difficult, but talking to multiple experienced open-source salespeople can provide some eye opening perspectives.

JAVASCRIPT WAITFOR POLLING

A quick look into JavaScript’s waitFor, an async function that allows developers to provide a condition function, polling interval, and optional timeout.

WAYS I EXPECT AI REGULATION TO INCREASE X-RISK

Short stories about some of the ways AI regulation could increase existential risk to humanity.

CAN REACT SERVER ACTIONS FINALLY FIX FORMS?

Interacting with the server used to be painful in React. React’s new Server Actions makes building forms much easier.

SYSTEM AND MORE

Apple is reportedly planning a complete revamp of the Apple Watch for the device's tenth anniversary. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman says that the 'Apple Watch X', which will be released either in 2024 or 2025, will have a thinner casing and different ways for bands to attach to the device. The Apple Watch Series 9 will likely only be a minor refresh. Apple is considering switching the Apple Watch away from annual updates to offer more substantial upgrades on a less frequent cycle.

ALL

Around 11% of packages from Amazon in the US will now arrive without extra packaging. Amazon is aiming to streamline its delivery process, boost sustainability, and appeal to customers who are turned off by brown boxes. Customers can choose whether they want extra packaging or not at checkout on items qualified to ship in their own containers.

WITH CUSTOM AWS CHIPS

Amazon quietly started production of custom silicon in 2013. It has launched its own Arm-based server chip as a rival to x86 CPUs from AMD and Intel. Amazon launched AI-focused chips in 2018, two years before Google announced its first Tensor Processing Unit. This article takes a look at Amazon's strategy to provide the infrastructure for businesses to create generative AI applications.

NEW FORCE OF NATURE DISCOVERED BY SCIENTISTS AT FERMILAB

Scientists at Fermilab have found evidence of muons not behaving as expected by the current physics theory. There is still some uncertainty over the results. It could be a sign of a new force of nature. Muons are fundamental particles similar to electrons but about 200 times as massive. The standard model of physics is unable to account for many phenomena observed in the universe.

METATYPE

Metatype is a declarative API development platform. It uses Typegraphs, programmable virtual graphs describing all of the components in a stack, to enable API, storage, and business logic composition in a type-safe manner. Metatype supports plugins and reusable components. It is still in beta, but most of the core engine is close to production readiness.

THE SOURCE OF READABILITY

Code that is read together should be written together. There is a lot of actionable advice that can be derived from this rule, for example, maintain high cohesion and low coupling, write less code, keep modules deep, and avoid repetition. This article takes a look at the rule and how it results in more readable code.

THERE IS NO HARD TAKEOFF

The information revolution will do for intelligence what the industrial revolution did for energy. Most work used to be done by muscles, now it is not - soon, most thinking won't be done with brains. The change won't happen overnight, but it has already begun. More intelligence will lead to new tricks, but the tricks will get harder and harder to find.

MY $0->$100M->$0 IN 5 YEARS STORY

This Reddit post tells the story of someone who quit their executive job at a FAANG and started a SaaS as a first time founder. It talks about how they scaled, raised money from VCs, and how the advice of VCs caused the business to collapse. The story aims to show another side of the VC startup scene to provide a different perspective in a field that often shows too much survivor bias.

AMAZON WARNS EMPLOYEES WHO DON’T GO TO THE OFFICE ENOUGH

Amazon sent an email to employees who rarely used their workplace ID badges to enter an Amazon office building saying that workers are expected to start coming into the office three or more days a week now.

RELEASE

Mozilla is launching support for an open ecosystem of extensions on Firefox for Android in the coming months - developers can start optimizing their desktop extensions for mobile use right away.

HOW A STARTUP LOSES ITS SPARK

A look at the differences between working at startups vs large companies for engineers.

HOW THE FBI GOES AFTER DDOS CYBERATTACKERS

In this interview, Elliott Peterson, one of the FBI agents who led the investigations around the DDOS attacks that knocked out some of the biggest websites in 2016, discusses his work going after the people behind DDoS services and identifying which services to take down.

SAM BANKMAN-FRIED IS GOING TO JAIL

Prosecutors convinced a judge that Bankman-Fried had fed documents to the media to intimidate a witness.

CARROT PROBLEMS

Anytime someone achieves success in a way they don't want to admit publicly, they have to come up with an excuse, which can mean misleading others into potentially wasting their time or worse.

SUPABASE STUDIO 3.0

Supabase Studio 3.0 is here, with some huge new features, including a brand new Supabase AI integrated right into the SQL Editor, Schema Diagrams, and new Wrappers.

ANDREW NG ON LLM WORLD MODELS

Recent studies suggest LLMs like Othello-GPT build world models, implying that they understand the world to an extent. The network discerned the underlying 8x8 board structure and game rules by training on game moves without explicit game rules. This challenges traditional notions, like John Searle's Chinese Room Argument, about machine understanding.

Serve Robotics, the autonomous sidewalk delivery robot startup that spun out of Uber’s acquisition of Postmates, is going public via a reverse merger with a blank-check company.

SDXL CONTROLNET

One of the best ways to control image generation is to use edges to condition the final output. The best open source model, SDXL, has a controlnet variation trained and ready to use.

SECURE SYSTEM FOR EVALUATING CODE MODELS

One hard challenge when working with language models that write code is evaluating the quality of the generated code. This is difficult because running arbitrary code is dangerous for a system. The code could do anything, including deleting everything. MosaicML offers a secure environment for evaluating generated code.

FOLLOW ANYTHING: A ROBOT THAT CAN TRACK AND FOLLOW ANYTHING

A robotic system called "Follow Anything" can spot, trace, and follow any object in real time, even if it has never seen it before. This smart robot can recognize objects from just a text description, a picture, or even a simple click - all powered by a regular laptop!

CHAINML RELEASES COUNCIL

ChainML recently launched Council — an open-source AI agent platform that makes it easy to rapidly develop and deploy customized generative AI applications using collaborative AI agents. Council integrates with a wide variety of LLMs, such as GPT-4, Llama 2, and Claude 2, to unlock generative AI for business applications, enabling use cases that were previously impossible through AI agents with sophisticated control flows.

OPEN SOURCE FORK OF HF TEXT-GENERATION-INTERFACE

Hugging Face recently removed commercial license-ability from one of its previously open packages. The package has now been forked by Preemo and will continue to be developed as an open source package.

WORLD CLASS TEXT-TO-3D NOW OPEN SOURCED

Mirage is a platform for generating 3D scenes. It is used by game developers to speed up the process. The team has been working internally on improving a variety of 3D generation methods. This open source push is designed to leverage the community to improve its models.

DO MACHINE LEARNING MODELS MEMORIZE OR GENERALIZE?

This article examines the training dynamics of a tiny model and reverse engineers the solution it finds. It provides an illustration of the exciting emerging field of mechanistic interpretability.

ZOOMING IN ON IMAGES BEFORE CLASSIFYING

If you zoom in on salient pieces of an image before running classification, you can get 98% on ImageNet. Fascinating and fairly easy implementation for real world computer vision systems.

WIZARD MATH

The WizardLM group from Microsoft has released the world’s best open source math model. It’s really good at reasoning through multi-step problems. The model hallucinates a bit, which is really fun for math, and offers explanations. I think this may be one of the best models for education for those interested in learning mathematics.

NVIDIA LANGUAGE, VISION ASSISTANT

Nvidia makes it easy to train your own vision-language assistant based on its Nemo model.

ORCA AND PLATYPUS LLM COMBINED

There are lots of models based on Llama 2 and trained on GPT-4 outputs. These are somewhat in that camp, but as non-commercial license models go, they are quite powerful.

COINBASE

Crypto venture firms a16z and Paradigm submitted a joint brief for Coinbase, contesting the SEC’s regulatory authority over the crypto industry as too broad. They argue for a dedicated, comprehensive legislative framework for digital assets, negating the SEC's inconsistent approach, to create a predictable environment for crypto entrepreneurs. a16z and Paradigm stress that such regulations should be crafted by Congress, not the SEC. These briefs were followed by one from sitting Senator Lummis, an ardent bitcoin supporter, and 6 leading legal scholars from top-tier institutions.

OCTOBER TRIAL

Sam Bankman-Fried's bail has been revoked due to suspicions of witness tampering and other violations of his bail agreement. He will be detained ahead of his October trial. The DOJ previously sought to revoke his bail, claiming its conditions were insufficient. They finally found grounds to jail him, and he will remain incarcerated until his trial. The upcoming trial will include charges related to money laundering, wire fraud, and political influence campaigns.

PAYING GAS FEES WITH VISA CARD

Visa released a paper outlining a solution that will allow users to pay on-chain gas fees with their Visa cards rather than using native tokens. The experimental solution, which utilizes paymasters and leverages account abstraction, aims to create an alternate and smoother onboarding experience for users when they don’t have native tokens available for gas - usually a requirement to initiate a transaction. It has been successfully tested on Ethereum's Goerli testnet, providing an initial proof-of-concept.

LOOK LIKE

The latest sensation on Base is Friend.tech, a decentralized social media app. Engineered by a crypto veteran, it has already generated a buzz and surpassed OpenSea in total volume on its first day. Friend.tech enables the tokenization of social media profiles, so users can buy and sell shares of individual profiles. Token holders have the ability to initiate private chats with the profiles. Friend.tech has had some strong initial traction despite being in beta and grappling with functionality issues due to overwhelming traffic.

HOW POLYGON ZKEVM PROVES BATCHES OF TRANSACTIONS

This article discusses how Polygon's zkEVM works. It details the process of submitting transactions and executing them instantly and describes how batches of transactions are encrypted and sent to Ethereum L1. The blog analyzes the structure used to sequence the transaction batches, states the three finality states a transaction can go through, and elaborates on the process of aggregating sequenced batches. It goes on to emphasize the benefits of the zkEVM approach, which include low gas fees and quick transaction speeds.

ROLLUPS ARE REAL — ROLLUP ECONOMICS 2.0

This article discusses an updated framework for understanding rollup economics in crypto. Changes in technology have given rise to variations of rollups such as independent rollups, rollup cooperatives and federations, Layer 3 systems, and more. The framework this article discusses considers economic aspects like extraction and allocation of MEV, fee management, operational costs, and overall resource allocation. It aims to enhance understanding of this ecosystem's direction and shape ongoing innovation and discussions.

ON CIRCLE’S WEB3 SERVICES STRATEGY

Circle recently launched its wallet-as-a-service product. The company said this was the first product in what will become the Circle web3 services product line. In this thread, Circle’s CEO lays out the company’s strategy for its new services line, the thesis and background behind it, and a vision for how it fits into the broader crypto ecosystem.

NEXT?

The SEC has extended its decision period on the proposed Bitcoin ETF by Ark Invest and 21Shares, with the next deadline set for early September. Bitwise's proposal will be considered on September 1, followed by decisions on other proposals from BlackRock, Fidelity, Invesco, WisdomTree, and VanEck on September 2. The SEC has 240 days to consider each application from its federal register publication date.

MAGIC EDEN UNVEILS BRC-20 API

Magic Eden released an API for BRC-20s that allows developers to easily access and build on top of indexed Bitcoin data.

MEMPOOL DUMPSTER

This tool, still a work in progress, collects and archives Ethereum mempool transactions from execution layer nodes. It saves metadata in Parquet format and raw transactions in CSV. It can process 2-4m transactions daily.

KRAKEN OUTPACES COINBASE AS MOST LIQUID US EXCHANGE FOR ALTCOINS

Kraken has been gaining ground in the bear market. It now accounts for 50% of the market depth on altcoins and has risen to over 20% market share in exchanges that accept USD deposits.

AAVE DAO VOTES IN FAVOR OF ACQUIRING CRV TOKENS WITH USDT

Aave DAO approved a proposal to acquire CRV tokens using USDT. The move aims to support the DeFi ecosystem and Aave's stablecoin, GHO.