GitHub Updates; Observable Updates; KagAI

The Daily Drop has paid subscribers! (Yes, plural!)

I feel (positively!) obligated to provide extra content for these kind/generous souls (🙏🏽), so this is a first go at said endeavour.

Some intra-week tidbits never make it to the drops. There are plenty of reasons for this, but I usually make the call to avoid posting something if it seems to have become ubiquitous knowledge, at least in my timelines.

However, I’m making it a daily exercise in 2023 to avoid relying on assumptions at home, at work, and also in the Drops. So, today’s bonus issue is chock full of some tidbits that ended up on the cutting room floor but may be useful in the event they did not make it into everyone’s curated zeitgeist.

GitHub Updates

The gravity well of the Fediverse has pulled in GitHub!

GitHub recently added support for adding more social links to GitHub profiles. You only get four more links (even if you pay for GitHub), but four is markedly better than the previous zero.

There was also a fairly major change to GitHub Action (GA) runner permissions. GA runners automagically received a GITHUB_TOKEN that they use to perform actions on your behalf. Originally, they were blessed with read/write permissions, which I found fairly terrifying when I saw the initial GA rollout. Thankfully, Microsoft has made a change so that the token permissions are now just read-only. This is a summary of the new rules:

• Enterprises: New enterprises will have read-only token.

• Organizations owned by Enterprise: New organizations will inherit the permissions from parent enterprise.

• Organizations not owned by Enterprise: New organizations will have read-only token.

• Repositories owned by organization: New repositories will inherit permissions from parent organization.

• Repositories owned by personal account: New repositories will have read-only token.

It is good to see this and other positive changes to the baseline security posture of GitHub repos. Hopefully, this will make 2023+ a bit safer for all of us.

Observable Updates

There’s a new “taste of Observable” that does a fantastic job showing off the core strengths of this collaborative data wrangling, analysis, and storytelling platform. I always appreciate resources that show basic usage idioms. I learn best by reading, trying working examples, then trying to break said examples (well, not deliberately, but there’s that “trial and error” period when one is attempting to figure out something new). So, plentiful examples are amazing.

$DAYJOB has been more “executive functions” than “executing functions” of late, but I managed to carve out some cozy Observable time this week and was pleasantly surprised to see a new organization feature: tags. All of us Fediverse n00bs are getting used to the #hashtag culture on most Mastodon communities, so it’s nice to have that idiom carry over into the Observaverse (yeah, that coinage is def not going to stick). I like having this newfound control over key semantic web components of my Observable notebooks. I just hope that it doesn’t lead to tag spamming campaigns.

KagAI

Alternative search engine Neeva recently debuted Neeva AI, an “authentic, real-time AI search”. I don’t use Neeva, but from the post, they’re using OpenAI’s generative, pre-trained transformers (a.k.a. GPT) to provide summaries with sources for your queries. Unlike everyone’s favourite stochastic parrot, Neeva keeps the model trained on current information and summarise original content, so the results are likely to be useful.

I do use (paid) Kagi every single day, and have been waiting with great anticipation for their similar offering. Kagi Labs debuted their summarizer this week, and it works very well in some basic tests.

Most of the longform content I consume is paywalled, so I don’t think I’ll be able to use this new toy with those URLs, but Kagi managed to summarise — https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/suspected-chinese-balloon-over-us-02-04-23/index.html — a CNN article on this week’s spy balloon distraction — pretty well:

A suspected Chinese surveillance balloon has been spotted flying over the continental United States, sparking national security concerns and prompting US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to postpone his trip to China. The balloon, which is roughly the length of three city buses, is expected to exit the east coast of the United States as early as Saturday morning. The US has not ruled out shooting it down, though the military had advised against it due to the risk of falling debris. China claims the balloon is a civilian research vessel that has been blown off course. Additionally, the Pentagon has reported that another Chinese spy balloon has been spotted above Latin America, though it is not currently heading to the US. This incident has added to already tense diplomatic relations between the two countries.

It will also break down the “key moments” from a text:

A suspected Chinese surveillance balloon has entered US airspace, sparking national security concerns.

• US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has postponed his trip to China in response.

• The balloon could exit the east coast of the United States as early as Saturday morning.

• US President Joe Biden and national security team officials have discussed options including shooting the balloon down.

• The substructure beneath the Chinese spy balloon is roughly the length of three city buses.

• China claims the balloon is a civilian research vessel that has been blown off course.

• A spokesperson for China’s Foreign Ministry described the situation Saturday as an “accident.”

• The Pentagon said Friday evening that another Chinese spy balloon had been spotted above Latin America.

• US officials are taking steps to protect against foreign intelligence collection.

• It is unclear exactly where the second balloon is over Latin America.

It took Kagi ~11 seconds to generate the summary. I read kind of, er, fast, so until it can catch up with me, I’ll likely continue reading, but will likely add generated summaries and moments lists as notes to what I save in Inoreader, Raindrop, Notion, and Obsidian.

FIN

I intend to do publish an extra Drop at least once per week (on Saturday). Likewise, I will also publish additional drops for any other content groups that don’t make it to the normal dailies. Finally, all new “Knowledge Drops” will be subscriber-only (which will be a good motivator to actually publish more of them).

Thanks for subscribing!

Also: please keep the feedback coming to ensure these inbox-fillers continue to be useful for you! ☮