TLDR 2025-10-28

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AMAZON TO ANNOUNCE LARGEST LAYOFFS IN COMPANY HISTORY, SOURCE SAYS

Amazon is expected to start informing employees about sweeping job cuts starting today. It plans to lay off as many as 30,000 staff across its corporate workforce. The layoffs are part of a broader cost-cutting campaign that started during the COVID-19 pandemic. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said earlier this year that the company's workforce could shrink further as a result of generative AI.

OPENAI'S LESS-FLASHY RIVAL MIGHT HAVE A BETTER BUSINESS MODEL

Anthropic gets about 80% of its revenue from corporate customers, of which it has around 300,000. Its Claude language models have been praised for their aptitude in coding. Anthropic is surprisingly close to OpenAI in revenue. It expects to get to a $9 billion annual run rate by the end of the year, a big lead in revenue per user over OpenAI.

SAM ALTMAN REPORTEDLY DEVELOPING NONINVASIVE BRAIN INTERFACE TO RIVAL ELON MUSK'S NEURALINK

Sam Altman's Merge Labs is a brain-computer interface (BCI) startup. It recently hired an award-winning biomolecular engineer, Mikhail Shapiro. Shapiro's past work suggests that the startup could be aiming to create a device that could link to the brain using sound waves. If Merge Labs is successful, its device may be preferable to Neuralink's BCI as it wouldn't require surgery.

INSIDE THE MINDS BUILDING THE FUTURE: NOTES FROM THE PROGRESS CONFERENCE 2025

The Progress Conference is a four-day event that connects people and ideas in the progress movement. The speakers at the conference discussed a technologically advanced future and provided thoughtful perspective on how we can make progress happen. This post contains notes and thoughts on some of the presentations at the conference, which had over 300 attendees.

EASY RISC-V

This is an introductory tutorial to RISC-V assembly programming intended for those with a basic familiarity with low-level computer science concepts. RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) architecture started its life at UC Berkeley. It is an open standard with a clean design that is quickly gaining steam and has found great success in many areas of application. The tutorial covers the 32-bit bare bones RV32I_Zicsr instruction set with a tiny subset of the privileged architecture.

WHY IP ADDRESS TRUNCATION FAILS AT ANONYMIZATION

Truncated IP addresses are still personal data under GDPR, especially when combined with other information that most systems routinely collect. Subnet size doesn't correlate with user anonymity. The network prefix itself contains enough information for trivial identification. Many organizations are creating compliance risks by thinking IP truncation is GDPR-compliant anonymization. What is actually needed is encryption specifically designed for IP addresses.

MORE BIG COMPANIES BET THEY CAN STILL GROW WITHOUT HIRING

Companies in the US are increasingly making the calculation that they can keep the size of their teams flat, or even shrink them, without harming their businesses. Part of this is the belief that artificial intelligence will be used to automate more processes, but companies are also hesitant to make moves in an uncertain economy. The widespread caution in hiring is frustrating job seekers and leading many employees within organizations to feel stuck in place. Operating with fewer people can pose risks for companies by straining existing staff or hurting efforts to develop future leaders.

MUSK'S WIKIPEDIA RIVAL SITE LIVE AFTER CRASHING ON LAUNCH DAY

Grokipedia crashed shortly after it launched yesterday. It was live late evening with nearly 900,000 articles. Many entries closely resemble their Wikipedia counterparts, but Elon Musk's views shape how some topics are framed. For example, his own Grokipedia page features a 'Recognition and Long-Term Vision' section instead of Wikipedia's 'Accolades'.

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SAUDI ARABIA, RICH WITH OIL, WANTS TO BE KNOWN AS THE AI EXPORTER

The kingdom is building three major data center complexes aimed at foreign companies.

QUALCOMM LAUNCHES AI CHIPS TO CHALLENGE NVIDIA'S DOMINANCE

Qualcomm's AI200 will start shipping next year, and the AI250 in 2027.

THE RENAISSANCE OF WRITTEN CODING CONVENTIONS: BECAUSE AI READS MANUALS, TOO

AI learns from whatever code bases you give it, and if your codebase is inconsistent or chaotic, the AI will reflect that.

TOWARDS A CONTEXT SHARING RUNTIME FOR THE PERSONALISED WEB

Instead of tightly controlling which applications have access to data, we should control where applications can send it.

JSON QUERY

JSON Query is a lightweight, flexible, and expandable JSON query language.

META BURIES THE METAVERSE: ZUCKERBERG TAPS VISHAL SHAH TO LEAD HIGH-STAKES AI REVOLUTION

Vishal Shah, a longtime executive who once led Meta's metaverse experiment, has joined Meta Superintelligence Labs to bridge the gap between cutting-edge AI research and Meta's apps.