The trend of rewriting JavaScript tools in "faster" languages like Rust or Go overlooks JavaScript's capabilities for optimization that haven't been fully explored. The perceived speed gap is often attributed to low-hanging fruit and the advantages provided by browser-based optimizations like bytecode caching and JIT compilation. Moving away from JavaScript would create a more complex and inaccessible ecosystem, hindering contributions and debugging.
The industry has rampant title inflation, with developers being labeled "senior" with minimal experience. This devalues the title and undermines the meaning of career milestones. The root of this problem lies in a combination of fierce competition for talent, personal branding pressures on social media, HR departments struggling to categorize specialized roles, and companies using title promotions as a retention tactic.
"Daily Reps" is a workout tracker app designed to set daily goals and track progress toward workouts, resetting each day. Built with React Native and Expo, it uses Clerk for user management and Convex for real-time data, creating a powerful cross-platform solution for fitness tracking.
Svelte 5 has been officially released. It introduces runes, a new feature that utilizes signals to simplify state management and prop handling. Runes replace Svelte 4's stores and complex syntax.
Gomponents is a Go library for building reusable HTML components that makes it easy to create web applications in Go without needing complex template languages.
Drasi is a data processing platform that simplifies detecting changes in data and taking immediate action by tracking system logs and change feeds, evaluating them for relevance, and automatically initiating appropriate reactions.
Automattic, the company behind WordPress, has been accused of open-source theft by its competitor, WP Engine, after it took ownership of a popular plugin called Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) and replaced it with a fork called Secure Custom Fields. This act involved silently migrating over 2 million users to the new plugin and is considered ethically questionable.
2024.10.21·
blog.pragmaticengineer.com·11 min read·TLDR Web Dev
Spliit is an open-source expense-splitting app that has seen over 150,000 visits and over 29,000 users sharing group links. While the app is free to use, it costs the developer around $115 per month in hosting fees, primarily for database usage. The app is currently funded through donations, ranging from $6 to $107 a month.
The AI boom is driving a surge in US investment in physical infrastructure, particularly in high-end computers and data centers. This demand is leading to record-high construction rates, increased imports of computer parts, and massive investments from companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. While the AI boom has led to increased employment in sectors like semiconductor manufacturing and construction, it has not really impacted the traditional software engineering job market.
The Internet Archive was breached again, this time through stolen access tokens to its Zendesk email support platform, exposing potentially sensitive data about users who requested content removal from their archives.
This developer describes his experiment of hosting a website entirely on solar power using a Raspberry Pi, highlighting the technical details, energy efficiency, and environmental considerations of this local-first approach to web hosting.
GenAI is no longer a future prospect — it's reshaping business strategies across industries. But how are top companies maximizing the potential of GenAI? “AI, Today” — the joint report from Dataiku and Databricks [4], based on a survey of 400 senior AI professionals, reveals critical insights on GenAI adoption, ROI, and emerging use cases. Highlights include:
Google has decided to reshuffle some of its departments to further speed up its AI development. The first part of this change involves the Gemini app team being absorbed by DeepMind. Another big change involves the Assistant teams moving to Platforms and Devices. Prabhakar Raghavan, SVP of search and ads, is changing roles to become Google's chief technologist. Nick Fox, who was a part of Raghavan's leadership team, will be taking over Raghavan's old position and be in charge of Search, Ads, Geo, and Commerce products.
Ties between Microsoft and OpenAI have started to fray. The partnership has been strained by financial pressure on OpenAI, concern about OpenAI's stability, and disagreements between employees of the two companies. OpenAI has been trying to renegotiate its deal with Microsoft to help it secure more computing power and reduce expenses, but Microsoft executives have grown concerned that the company's AI work is too dependent on OpenAI. Microsoft has started to hedge its bet on OpenAI by building its own technologies.
Colossal Biosciences, a Dallas-based company, claims to have extracted a thylacine DNA sequence that is 99.9% the same as the original from a 108-year-old specimen preserved in alcohol at a museum in Melbourne, Australia. The company aims to eventually bring back the thylacine, along with other species, back from extinction. While some argue that it is unethical to return long-extinct animals to habitats degraded by human activity, the company's research has produced beneficial advances that can be applied across current living animals. Its efforts could help protect threatened species.
Sam Altman's Worldcoin crypto project has changed its name to just 'World', potentially signaling the project's interest in expanding its identity beyond its original cryptocurrency mission. Tools for Humanity, the startup behind the project, has unveiled the next generation of its iris-scanning 'Orb' and other tools. The new Orb is easier to mass-produce, has fewer parts, and operates three times faster than the previous version. One of the new tools is called Deep Face - it is an attempt to combat online deepfakes and impersonation using Tools for Humanity's human-verification services.
It's hard to stop churn a week before renewal. Much more effective: giving customers the training and knowledge to get the most out of your product from day 1. Thinkific Plus is a scalable customer education platform [10] that fuels your bottom line. Fast time to value, $0 launch fees, easy for learners and admins. See how it works
37signals brought its cloud bill down from $3.2 million a year to $1.3 million by pulling seven cloud apps out of AWS and into its own hardware. Its expenditure on all new hardware has been entirely recouped. Most of the $1.3 million spend is still on AWS S3 - the company's cloud storage contract doesn't expire until next summer and it plans to stop using AWS when the contract expires. Moving completely away from AWS is expected to save the company another $4 million over five years.
It's possible to record a screen capture of a browsing session and then use Google Gemini to extract numbers from the video. While these language models shouldn't be trusted not to make mistakes, it appears that the Gemini 1.5 Flash 002 model is sufficient enough to complete the task consistently. Extracting data from a 35-second video costs less than a tenth of a cent. Video scraping allows developers to have total control over what is exposed to the AI model. This article walks readers through how to do it.
AWS CEO Matt Garman suggested during an all-hands meeting for AWS on Thursday that employees who did not wish to work for Amazon in-office five days a week should quit. He claimed that nine out of ten workers he had spoken with supported the new 5-day-per-week in-office policy, which takes effect in January. Many Amazon employees have said that the new policy will waste time with additional commuting and that the benefits of working from the office are not supported by independent data. Garman says that it's too hard to accomplish company goals with the current mandatory three days of in-office work.
Meta has reportedly fired about 24 staff at its Los Angeles offices for using their meal credits to buy household goods. Meta usually feeds staff for free from canteens at its larger offices, but those at smaller sites are given daily credits to order food through delivery services. Some workers were found to be abusing the system, including sending food home when they were not in the office. Employees who had only occasionally broken the rules were reprimanded but were able to keep their jobs.
My recent podcast appearance on Permission to Shine discussing the origins of TLDR and the future of media. Listen on Spotify [16], Apple [17] or YouTube [18], hope you enjoy!
Unity 6 gives developers access to faster rendering, advanced lighting options, seamless multiplayer workflows, enhanced AI capabilities, and improved support for mobile web runtimes.
On October 30th, WorkOS is bringing together the tech folks who are building enterprise SaaS. This is a highly-curated, closely-vetted event [5] where you will:
NotebookLM now allows users to tailor their Audio Overview experience, giving more control over the AI hosts' focus and expertise. Businesses can apply for the new NotebookLM Business pilot program, which offers enhanced tools for professional use.
A new method combines next-token prediction and video diffusion, enabling neural networks to clean corrupted data while predicting future steps. This approach enhances a model's ability to generate high-quality video, create flexible plans for robots, and assist AI agents in navigating digital environments.
Nvidia's new AI model, Llama-3.1-Nemotron-70B-Instruct, surpasses performance benchmarks set by OpenAI and Anthropic. This model marks Nvidia's strategic expansion from hardware to sophisticated AI software. By advancing both text-only and multimodal models, Nvidia challenges existing industry leaders and reshapes the AI competitive landscape.
“Movie Gen Bench” is an evaluation benchmark for assessing both video (Video Bench) and audio (Audio Bench) performance. It consists of 1,003 prompts that cover all the different testing aspects/concepts.
Meta Decision Transformer (Meta-DT) is designed to improve generalization in reinforcement learning by combining transformer-based sequential modeling with robust task representation learning.
LongAlign improves text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models' ability to handle long text inputs by introducing segment-level encoding and decomposed preference optimization.
DiGIT is an auto-regressive generative model that predicts tokens in a latent space using self-supervised learning. It is a discrete tokenizer that improves image generation on ImageNet by clustering hidden states from DINOv2.
The FedPart method addresses the layer mismatch issue in federated learning by restricting model updates to specific layers during each training round.
Generative AI is transforming supply chain operations by efficiently processing unstructured documents, leading to significant time and cost savings. Flexport, a supply chain tech company, has successfully integrated AI to automate and streamline document handling, reducing processing time by 80%. This application of AI demonstrates its value in practical, revenue-generating tasks rather than more speculative AI advancements.
AI discourse is polarized, with opposing pro-AI and anti-AI factions dominating the conversation. Synthetical thinkers, who approach AI with nuanced perspectives beyond binary viewpoints, are currently missing from this debate. These truth-seekers may eventually return when AI becomes less controversial and more integrated into everyday life.
Recent research highlights vulnerabilities in LLMs like prompt injection and ASCII smuggling, which allow attackers to hide instructions or data that are invisible to users but readable by the models. Invisible Unicode characters can be used in AI chatbots like Claude and Copilot to embed and extract malicious payloads and sensitive data. This poses a significant security risk. While some AI platforms like OpenAI and Microsoft have implemented mitigations, the broader issue of AI processing data imperceptible to humans continues to challenge security protocols.