X Bookmarks — 2024 KW11: Rate Limiting Next.js, Pika Gets Sound, Midjourney Gets Characters

@gregberge_ — Rate limiting Next.js with Arcjet

If you need to protect your Next.js app with rate-limit you should give a look to arcjet.com.

Smart pick. Rate limiting is one of those things you know you need but keep putting off because rolling your own is annoying and most solutions require you to bolt on Redis and write middleware that's half wrong. arcjet drops in as a Next.js SDK with built-in bot detection, rate limits, and email validation — no infrastructure side effects. Worth looking at before you ship anything public-facing.

@pika_labs — Pika launches Sound Effects

…Sorry, we were on mute. Today we're launching Sound Effects on Pika.

Now you can seamlessly generate and integrate sound into your videos. Either prompt the sound you want, or let Pika automatically generate it based on the content of your video.

If that sounds great, it's because it is.

The pun is doing a lot of work here, but the feature is real: video-to-sound without writing a prompt is genuinely useful. Right now AI video is mostly silent or scored with generic music — Pika is closing that gap. The automatic mode (where it generates audio from what it sees in the video) is the more interesting half; explicit prompting is just fancy sound design.

@HalimAlrasihi — Midjourney ships Character Reference

We have all been waiting for this.

Midjourney released their highly anticipated Character Reference feature

Here is everything you need to know about it and MORE

Character Reference lets you lock a character from one image and carry it consistently across generations — something Midjourney has been notably bad at until now. If you're building anything with persistent visual characters (games, comics, branded content), this is a meaningful unlock. The thread goes into the mechanics; worth reading before the feature reaches your plan tier.