OpenAI's new 'Instant Checkout' feature, which allows ChatGPT users to make Etsy and Shopify purchases within conversations, is now available in the US to ChatGPT Pro, Plus, and Free logged-in users. Users can now just tap a 'Buy' button to confirm their order, shipping, and payment details to complete a purchase. OpenAI says that the product results it surfaces are organic and unsponsored and ranked purely on relevance to the user. Merchants will be charged a fee for completed purchases.
OpenAI is preparing to release a standalone social app powered by its Sora 2 video model. The app will reportedly closely resemble TikTok but only feature AI-generated content. There will be no option for users to upload photos or videos. Users will be limited to generating 10-second-long clips. They will be able to create videos using their likeness - and receive a notification whenever their likeness is used by someone else. The app will refuse to generate some videos due to copyright restrictions.
Bone-02 is a new kind of medical adhesive created by a team of Chinese researchers. It is designed to repair broken bones quickly without the need for metal plates, screws, or big surgeries. The glue can be injected directly into a fracture site to help speed up bone repair, bonding bone fragments together in two to three minutes, even in blood-rich areas. The researchers were inspired by oysters, which have a remarkable ability to attach to hard surfaces in harsh environments. This is due to a special protein-rich adhesive that works in wet, salty, and constantly moving conditions, forming a tough bond that resists both pressure and erosion.
Physicists from the California Institute of Technology have built a quantum computing array containing 6,100 qubits, well above the thousand or so qubits previous systems contain. They used cesium atoms as their qubits, trapping them in place with a complex system of lasers that act as tweezers to keep the atoms as stable as possible. Large arrays allow for better error correction, which helps to overcome the inherent fragility of qubits by providing a surplus to double-check machine operations.
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Valkey, which was forked from Redis in April last year, is set to release its ninth iteration next month. The update promises improved resource optimization and availability. It will allow multiple logical databases in cluster mode, enabling developers to combine many different applications using the same cluster. Valkey 9 also promises unified auto-failover configuration for high availability, regardless of deployment choices, so clusters stay consistent from development to staging to production. It has a safe shutdown mode, so a shutdown command does not pull the plug on production without a deliberate, confirmed action.
Products win when user effort scales smoothly with use case complexity, usability cliffs are engineered out, and every interaction declares a meaningful piece of user intent. This requires hard tradeoffs, saying no a lot, and prioritizing user needs at the organizational level. Treating user effort like real money forces developers to design with restraint. Prioritize consumers over producers consistently to turn delight into trust, trust into loyalty, and loyalty into product-market fit.
Electronic Arts (EA) has been bought out in a $55 billion deal by a group of investors that includes Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, private-equity firm Silver Lake, and Jared Kushner's investment firm, Affinity Partners. It is the largest leveraged buyout of all time. EA stockholders will receive $210 a share in cash, a 25% premium to EA's share price at Thursday's close.
Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 4.5 can run autonomously for 30 hours straight. The new model is particularly adept in fields like cybersecurity, financial services, and research. It helped beta testers with complex, long-context tasks, from engineering in codebases to in-product features and research. Claude Sonnet 4.5 will be paired with other updates to help developers code their own AI agents.
Nvidia is still deeply embedded into Amazon and Google's cloud operations, and neither wants to surprise the person who effectively controls their AI infrastructure supply.
AI tools are powerful, and they can already generate most of the code in a project, but they don't absolve engineers of responsibility - engineers still need to review every line, shape the architecture, and carry the responsibility for how it runs in production.
You can achieve a 10x reduction in token usage while making your content more accessible and efficient for AI systems by serving lean, semantic Markdown to LLM agents.
Apple is currently using an internal ChatGPT-like iPhone app code-named Veritas to help test and prepare for a Siri overhaul planned for next year. The app is being used to quickly evaluate new features, including the ability to search through personal data and perform in-app actions. The internal tool marks a new phase in Apple's preparations for the Siri revamp, which could help reshape perceptions of its AI efforts.
Meta's chief technology officer, Andrew Bosworth, recently said in a meeting that he wants to focus on licensing Meta's software to other manufacturers instead of being a hardware manufacturer. Meta's new Superintelligence AI lab is working with the company's robotics group to build a 'world model' that can do software simulations to animate dexterous movements. Bosworth says that robotics will be Meta's next 'AR-sized' bet. The company has so far spent over $100 billion in cumulative investment into its augmented and virtual reality portfolio.
SpaceX currently launches and lands its Falcon family of rockets every two days on average without interrupting the operations of other launch providers. Launch sites of the future will need to be fully operationalized like an airport, with multiple launches a day from multiple providers. SpaceX is working with federal regulators, the federal ranges, and industry partners to realize this vision. Its goals will advance the entire launch industry's ability to fly rapidly and reliably, ideally from multiple locations to increase resilience.
Current projects developing humanoid robots will fail at teaching them dexterity because, in order to succeed, they need both the right data and for the robots to learn the right thing. Human dexterity relies on a rich sense of touch, and it often involves elbows, the front of the body, legs, and feet. Just using visual data is not enough. In the future, there will likely be a lot of robots with different forms for different specialized jobs that humans can do. They won't look human, but they will probably all still be called humanoid robots.
Taste is the ability to adopt the set of engineering values that fit the current project. It's different from skill - it's possible to be technically strong but have bad taste or be technically weak with good taste. Almost every decision in software engineering is a tradeoff. Often, you have to make tradeoffs between engineering values, such as resiliency, speed, readability, correctness, and flexibility, and that's where taste comes in. Bad taste is when your preferred values are not a good fit for the project.
Small Data is a movement away from Big Data toward much simpler and cheaper solutions. It is being driven by improvements in hardware and organizations that don't use that much data. Distributed systems are more overkill than ever. Developers should be considering what technologies they know well, are good enough, and are the least toilsome for the task at hand. Modern hardware will likely handle the workload just fine.
Many people look at the current state of AI, see the mistakes it makes, and then somehow jump to the conclusion that AI will never be able to do tasks at a human level. A few years ago, our current AI models were just science fiction. AI is improving at an exponential rate. It will be surprising if these improvements suddenly stop. Even a relatively conservative extrapolation of the trends suggests that by the end of 2027, models will frequently outperform experts on many tasks.
Open source has clearly won, but this wasn't a foregone conclusion 35 years ago. There were many powerful forces that wanted open source to lose. We are now at a similar juncture with social apps. Projects like Bluesky's AT Protocol are changing the relationship between the user, the developer, and the project. What open source did for code, open social does for data.
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Figma proved design doesn't need Illustrator, Descript proved editing doesn't need Premiere, and Omarchy and Framework proved developers don't need macOS.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order yesterday approving a proposal that could keep TikTok alive in the US. The deal would involve creating a new joint-venture company that will oversee TikTok's US business. China has yet to approve the terms. No representatives from ByteDance were present at the signing, and the company has not acknowledged that a transaction is taking place. There is no indication that the Chinese government has made changes to laws that would be necessary for a deal to take place.
SpaceX has proposed a flight path for its Starship rocket that would see it fly across Florida skies. The route would seriously disrupt air traffic and raise the risk of debris falling onto populated areas. Starship's test flights have so far only taken the megarocket on suborbital trajectories. SpaceX is preparing the rocket to reach low Earth orbit and complete a full trip around the planet before returning for a landing attempt.
Researchers from Nagoya University transferred the courtship behavior from one species of fruit fly to another by manipulating a single gene to create new neural connections. While both species of fly belong to the same family, they have distinct neural circuits that drive very different mating behaviors. The achievement was the culmination of nearly a decade's work by several members of the Japanese team. It is the first-ever example of humans manipulating a single gene to transfer foreign behavior to another species.
Scientists at the Arc Institute have developed a new DNA editing technology that can seamlessly write massive changes into the right place in the human genome. Bridge RNAs in bacterial 'jumping genes' allowed the scientists to make safe and arbitrary changes to every nucleotide within (up to) a 1 million base pair sequence in human DNA. They can be used to correct disease-causing DNA repeats in Friedreich's ataxia, Huntington's, and other repeat expansion disorders.