TLDR 2024-10-03

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OPENAI NEARLY DOUBLES VALUATION TO $157 BILLION IN FUNDING ROUND

OpenAI has raised $6.6 billion in new funding, with investors valuing the startup at $157 billion. Investors in the round include Thrive Capital, Microsoft, SoftBank, and Nvidia. The startup was last valued at $86 billion early this year. Investors have the right to withdraw their money if OpenAI fails to convert to a for-profit company within two years.

DID APPLE JUST KILL SOCIAL APPS?

iOS 18 will allow users to select which contacts to share with an app instead of revealing their entire address book. Apple doesn't think the change will hurt developers, but some startups have seen contact sharing drop significantly since the iOS 18 change. The ability to quickly connect new users with friends can mean the difference between success and failure for apps. This change could mean friend-based social apps may eventually be replaced by apps like TikTok which show users content based on what they like rather than who they're connected to.

GOOGLE IS TAKING ITS RIVALRY WITH OPENAI TO ANOTHER LEVEL

Teams at Google have made progress on software for AI models with humanlike reasoning abilities in recent months. The company is using chain-of-thought prompting, which allows large language models to solve multistep problems using a series of intermediate reasoning steps, to give models the ability to solve more complex math- and company-programming-related inquiries. OpenAI's new o1 model also uses chain-of-thought prompting. Google employees were worried last year that the company had fallen behind in the AI race, but they are now less concerned now that Google has unveiled more products to compete with.

LARGEST BRAIN MAP EVER REVEALS FRUIT FLY'S NEURONS IN EXQUISITE DETAIL

Researchers now have a map of the brain of a single female fruit fly that includes nearly 140,000 neurons and captures more than 54.5 million synapses. The map was described in a package of nine papers by a consortium known as FlyWire, which is co-led by neuroscientists Mala Murthy and Sebastian Seung at Princeton University in New Jersey. It has been in development for more than four years. The map shows how neurons connect through chemical synapses but doesn't offer any information about electrical connectivity between neurons or how neurons chemically communicate outside synapses.

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PIPET

Pipet is a tool for scraping and extracting data from online assets. Made for hackers, the command line-based web scraper supports HTML parsing, JSON parsing, and client-side JavaScript emulation. It can be used to track shipments, receive notifications, monitor stock prices, and much more.

WE NEED MORE ZERO CONFIG TOOLS

This blog post lists several command-line tools that just work out-of-the-box. These include Fish, Helix, Lazygit, and Zellij. Developers should strive to make the default experience of their apps work really well for most people.

AUTOMATTIC DEMANDED A CUT OF WP ENGINE'S REVENUE BEFORE STARTING WORDPRESS BATTLE

Automattic asked WP Engine to hand over 8% of its revenue each month in a deal sent on September 20. WP Engine was given the choice to pay the 8% cut as a royalty fee to Automattic or as salaries for WP Engine employees who would contribute to the WordPress.org open-source project. It didn't accept the proposal as it believes that its use of the WordPress trademark and 'WP' abbreviations meet fair use guidelines. Automattic says that the main issue is over trademarks, not the use of open source software.

HOW NORTH KOREA INFILTRATED THE CRYPTO INDUSTRY

GMAIL'S NEW ‘SUMMARY CARDS' FIND USEFUL LINKS AND INFO BURIED IN YOUR EMAILS

Gmail's new summary cards will now start appearing inside of individual messages on iOS and Android, starting with purchases but expanding to more categories soon.

TINYJS

TinyJS is a JavaScript library that allows developers to generate any standard HTML tag programmatically, apply properties, append content, and select DOM elements with ease.

TESLA CANCELS ITS CHEAPEST ELECTRIC CAR

The cheapest Tesla is now the Model 3 Long Range Rear-Wheel-Drive at $42,500.

WHAT YOUR JOB AD SAYS ABOUT YOU

A look at regular mistakes made in job adverts aimed at helping recruiters write better listings.

SAMSUNG REPORTEDLY WORKING ON RAY-BAN META GLASSES COMPETITOR WITH GOOGLE GEMINI AI

Google and Samsung are also partnering on a high-end mixed-reality headset to take on the Apple Vision Pro.

OFFLINE UX PATTERNS

This post discusses how to allow users to do as much as possible when offline even when everything the user does in an app is related to an API request.