Hey folks, welcome to the digest.
Today’s issue is a round-up of data visualization and AI inference tools that have popped onto my radar recently. But first:
Triplicate email post-mortem
Some of you received the last issue of the digest three times, and I apologize for that.
Appropriately enough for this newsletter, the root cause was data becoming out-of-sync between a browser-based client and its backend. The provider I use quickly identified and fixed the issue, so it won’t happen again (and I still recommend them!)
Thanks for continuing to subscribe in spite of the brief snafu.
Gephi Lite
Gephi Lite is a browser-based counterpart to the open-source Gephi graph software.
While the desktop-based Gephi is written in Java, Gephi Lite is TypeScript/JavaScript. The underlying rendering is done on WebGL through sigma.js, which has been around for a while.
Perspective
Perspective is a streaming data visualization library open sourced JP Morgan several years ago and now part of FINOS, which is sort of the Apache Foundation of finance.
Core contributor Andrew Stein has since left JP Morgan to co-found Prospective to push WebAssembly even deeper into the data analysis stack.
Quadratic
Quadratic is an open-source browser-based spreadsheet. Rendering is done on the GPU with PixiJS.
AI Inference in the browser
Chrome announced today that WebGPU will ship in Chrome 113 (Stable release May 2nd). I wrote a month ago about why this is a big deal for games and ML applications.
Lack of a modern GPU compute pipeline hasn’t held back browser-side inference entirely, though. transformers.js provides a JavaScript port of HuggingFace’s Python Transformers library directly in the browser.
Under the hood, it uses Microsoft’s onnxruntime, which runs the model in WebGL or WebAssembly.
Ermine.ai is a minimalist demo that connects transformers.js to the web audio API to do audio transcription on live audio (in 30-second chunks, the window size of the underlying OpenAI Whisper model).
Jamsocket
We (the team at Drifting in Space) opened the gates to self-registration on Jamsocket yesterday. There’s no more waitlist, you can sign up and deploy your first session backend within a few minutes.
Until next time,
-- Paul