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ON THE WEB, AND OPTIMISM

This author reflects on the shift from optimistic to more realistic views of the web's potential. He critiques techno-optimism, highlighting the web's vulnerabilities to disinformation and manipulation and the concentration of power in a few tech giants. The author remains hopeful, drawing inspiration from the web's decentralized origins and the potential for new technologies like the Fediverse and Interledger to create a more equitable and open internet. Ultimately, he acknowledges the possibility that his optimism may prove naive, but emphasizes the importance of learning from past mistakes and building a better web for the future.

TRENCH

Trench is an open-source, real-time event tracking system built on Apache Kafka and Clickhouse. It offers GDPR-compliant analytics and scalable deployment options for self-hosting or a fully managed cloud solution.

RADIX VUE

Radix Vue is an open-source, accessibility-focused UI component library for Vue.js that ports the Radix UI primitives.

OUTLINES

Outlines is a library for structured text generation. It has features like multiple choices, type constraints, regex-structured generation, efficient JSON generation, and the ability to use context-free grammars to guide generation.

WE'RE FORKING FLUTTER. THIS IS WHY

Flock is a new fork of Flutter created due to the Flutter team's limited labor and slow response times. Flutter's open-source nature and large developer base make it possible for external contributors to improve the framework faster than the Flutter team themselves.

INVESTIGATION OF A WORKBENCH UI LATENCY ISSUE

Netflix engineers investigated a latency issue affecting JupyterLab UI on their Workbench platform. They started with identifying the "bad" notebook and ruling out potential culprits like the pystan library and network issues. The root cause was traced to the jupyter_resource_usage extension, which was causing CPU contention by recursively querying all child processes, resulting in excessive memory usage and slow parsing of a file.

DEBUGGING AUDIO ARTIFACTS CAUSED BY... A SERIAL PORT?

A company that processes millions of video call meetings per month migrated its cluster from Kubernetes to a self-built system. After the migration, customers reported popping noises in captured audio, despite no changes to the application code. The issue was traced back to the cloud-init logging system, which writes to a virtual serial device. The system received too much data from the audio encoding process and became overwhelmed, causing the audio processing to experience CPU starvation and leading to the popping noises.

GITHUB DMCA NOTICES

This GitHub repository transparently publishes DMCA takedown notices received by GitHub.

APPLE INTRODUCES NEW IMAC SUPERCHARGED BY M4 AND APPLE INTELLIGENCE

Apple announced a new iMac with the powerful M4 chip and Apple Intelligence, improved performance, a nano-texture display option, a 12MP Center Stage camera, Thunderbolt 4 connectivity, and more.

I HUMBLY SUBMIT AN OPTION FOR THE NEW 'CLICK TO CANCEL' LAW (REDDIT POST)

A funny rendition of an impossible “click to cancel” implementation.

'IT IS FINE NOT TO LIKE A PIECE OF FREE SOFTWARE' AND OTHER OFT-UNSTATED FOSS-RELATED FREEDOMS

"Free software" users and developers have the freedom to engage or disengage with software in any way they choose, including criticizing it, refusing to contribute, or simply not using it, without being harassed or pressured.

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GOOGLE PLANS TO ANNOUNCE ITS NEXT GEMINI MODEL SOON

Google is aiming to release its next major Gemini model in December. Gemini 2.0 will be widely released at the outset as opposed to being rolled out in phases. While the model isn't showing the performance gains experts had hoped for, it will likely still have some interesting new capabilities. It appears that the top AI developers will continue to race to release ever-bigger and more expensive models even as performance improvements start leveling off.

THIS IS THE MAC MINI'S BIG MOMENT

Apple's Mac Mini's dimensions have remained the same since 2010, when it still had an optical drive. The incredible efficiency of Apple's new chips allows for all sorts of hardware designs that were technically unfeasible a handful of years ago. The new M4-powered Mac Mini is rumored to have a footprint similar to that of the Apple TV. The M4 Pro variant will include a total of five USB-C ports and an HDMI port, but will not have a USB-A port.

AWARD-WINNING IMAGE REVEALS A HIDDEN CULPRIT BEHIND ALZHEIMER'S

A neuroscientist at Augusta University has captured the precise moment brain tumor cells from mice interact in images by staining cellular components to reveal disruptions in support and transport structures. The research revealed how disruptions in a protein linking two cytoskeleton components together result in damage to the transport system, similar to what is seen in neurodegenerative diseases. Restoring normal cytoskeleton actin and myosin levels allowed the cells to transport their components normally again. The study shows how scientific imaging can help expose biological mysteries.

HUMANS ARE EVOLVING RIGHT BEFORE OUR EYES ON THE TIBETAN PLATEAU

Humans living in the high altitudes of the Tibetan Plateau, where oxygen levels in the air are notably lower than where humans usually live, have changed in ways that allow them to make the most of their atmosphere. Their adaptations maximize oxygen delivery to cells and tissues without thickening the blood. These traits developed due to ongoing natural selection. Learning about populations like these helps scientists better grasp the processes of human evolution.

SHOULD JAVASCRIPT BE SPLIT INTO TWO LANGUAGES? NEW GOOGLE-DRIVEN PROPOSAL DIVIDES OPINION

A proposal to split JavaScript into two languages has been presented to Emca TC39, the official standardization committee. The proposal argues that the foundational technology of JavaScript should be simple because security flaws and the complexity cost of the runtimes affect billions of users. New language features only benefit developers and applications that actually use those features to their advantage - adding them almost always worsens security, performance, and stability. The proposal suggests changing JavaScript's approach to one where most new features are implemented in tooling rather than in the JavaScript engines.

TYPESET

Typeset is an HTML pre-processor for web typography that provides typographic features used traditionally in fine printing. It features real hanging punctuation, optical margin alignment, small caps detection, soft hyphen insertion, and punctuation substitution. Typeset doesn't require any client-side JavaScript and uses less than a kilobyte of CSS. Examples are available on the website.

ENG ORG SENIORITY-MIX MODEL

One of the trademarks of private equity ownership is the expectation that either the company maintains its current margin and grows revenue at 25-30% or instead grow slower and increase its free cash flow year over year. Engineering costs have a major impact on free cash flow in many organizations. One of the largest contributors to engineering headcount costs is an organization's seniority mix. This article looks at how various policies impact an organization's seniority mix. To create a healthy seniority mix, stop hiring at senior-most levels, implement a 'backfill at N-1' policy, and cap the maximum number of individuals at the senior-most level.

WHY OPENAI'S $157B VALUATION MISREADS AI'S FUTURE

OpenAI's $6.6 billion fundraise earlier this month was a statement about where AI will create value and who stands to capture it. Its investors are betting that AI is so transformative that the usual rules of focus and specialization don't apply - the first company to achieve AGI will win everything. However, there are many barriers to overcome before its goal can be achieved. This article looks at the challenges that OpenAI faces and where the most promising opportunities in AI for investors and startups lie. New technologies, no matter how revolutionary, don't automatically translate into sustainable businesses.

ANDROID 16 COULD GET IPHONE-LIKE ‘ONGOING' NOTIFICATIONS

The Rich Ongoing Notifications API gives Android developers the ability to keep persistent notifications in the Android status bar.

OUR OPTIMIZERS NEED A RETHINK

A look at optimizers, where they fail, and how to make them better.

THE COMPANY BEHIND ARC IS NOW BUILDING A SECOND, MUCH SIMPLER BROWSER

The Browser Company is working on a more proactive, powerful, and AI-centric browser.

FEDERAL INVESTIGATORS PROBE CRYPTOCURRENCY FIRM TETHER

Tether is being investigated for possible violations of sanctions and anti-money-laundering rules.

ALPHABET'S SELF-DRIVING UNIT WAYMO CLOSES $5.6 BILLION FUNDING ROUND AS ROBOTAXI RACE HEATS UP IN THE U.S.

Waymo is the only company testing autonomous vehicles that operates a commercial robotaxi service in several major metro areas.

SECURITY BUGS ENGULF SHIPFAST, A POPULAR INDIE HACKER'S PRODUCT, IN DRAMA

An indie hacker has been publicly posting about ShipFast's vulnerabilities, sparking debates about the unwritten rules around bug reporting.

Download now → _The Definitive Guide to Onboarding_

WAYMO RAISES $5.6B

Waymo's driverless taxi service is well-loved. The company has raised extra capital to expand beyond the several cities and millions of miles already in operation.

PIXTRAL 12B WEIGHTS RELEASED

Pixtral 12B base model weights have been released on Hugging Face.

AI JEWELRY

Arcade AI has built a generative product platform for creating unique and quality jewelry items from text prompts. The best part is, you can buy what you prompt.

EVALUATING FEATURE STEERING

How do you evaluate the ability and efficacy of feature steering? Anthropic experimented with Golden Gate Claude earlier this year. It found that many features, especially similar safety ones, share common ranges for control.

CROSSCODERS

Crosscoders are an extension of sparse autoencoders that can be used to better understand internal mechanisms of language models.

RETRIEVAL-AUGMENTED TIME SERIES DIFFUSION MODEL

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NOTEBOOKLLAMA

Meta has released a quick start guide to recreate a basic version of the very popular NotebookLM system from Google.

CHART REASONING IN MLLMS

Code-as-Intermediary Translation (CIT) is a novel method for enhancing visual reasoning in multimodal language models (MLLMs) that uses code to translate chart visuals into text.

A PROBABILISTIC VISION-LANGUAGE MODEL

Probabilistic Language-Image Pre-training (ProLIP) is a vision-language model (VLM) that learns from image-text pairs probabilistically. Unlike traditional models that assume a strict one-to-one match, ProLIP captures the many-to-many relationships in real-world data.

META INTRODUCES SPIRIT LM OPEN SOURCE MODEL THAT COMBINES TEXT AND SPEECH INPUTS/OUTPUTS

Meta has launched an open-source multimodal language model designed to integrate text and speech inputs and outputs with expressive, natural-sounding speech capabilities. Meta Spirit LM aims to outperform existing voice AI by using phonetic, pitch, and tone tokens to enhance emotional expression and maintain natural expressiveness in tasks like ASR, TTS, and speech classification.

HOW I STUDIED LLMS IN TWO WEEKS: A COMPREHENSIVE ROADMAP

This article outlines a 14-day learning roadmap to understanding LLM fundamentals that covers topics like self-attention, hallucination, and advanced techniques like Mixture of Experts. It includes resources on building an LLM from scratch, various literature, and online materials, all compiled in a GitHub repository. The article emphasizes a personalized learning approach and highlights the importance of foundational math, programming, and deep learning concepts.

IBM DEBUTS OPEN SOURCE GRANITE 3.0 LLMS FOR ENTERPRISE AI

IBM is expanding its enterprise AI offerings with the new Granite 3.0 LLMs, focusing on open-source solutions and performance. These models, available on multiple platforms, include safety features and are tailored for various enterprise use cases. IBM emphasizes the importance of real open-source licensing with Apache 2.0 to enable flexible enterprise adoption and innovation.

best LLM for the job and start building

MARLY

Marly is an open-source data processor that allows agents to query unstructured data with JSON.

MICROSOFT INTRODUCES ‘AI EMPLOYEES' THAT CAN HANDLE CLIENT QUERIES

Microsoft is launching autonomous AI agents to enhance productivity, allowing businesses to build custom bots for tasks like customer service and supply chain management.

BYTEDANCE INTERN FIRED FOR PLANTING MALICIOUS CODE IN AI MODELS

ByteDance has confirmed an intern interfered with AI model training and dismissed exaggerated claims of tens of millions in losses.