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HOW TRUMP'S TIKTOK NEGOTIATIONS WERE UPENDED BY CHINA AND TARIFFS

The Trump administration believed it had a plan to save TikTok last Wednesday, but the Chinese government would not let the deal proceed due to new tariffs on Chinese imports. President Trump extended the deadline for a TikTok deal into mid-June in response. ByteDance was reportedly comfortable with the new suggested plan, but even before the tariff announcement, there was no guarantee that China would approve of any deal. The talks about TikTok are likely to become even more complicated as the trade war between the two countries escalates.

INSIDE THE EV STARTUP SECRETLY BACKED BY JEFF BEZOS

Slate Auto, which could start production as soon as next year, is an EV startup that has been quietly operating since its founding in 2022. It has hired hundreds of employees, many of whom came from Ford, General Motors, Stellantis, and Harley-Davidson. The company is aiming to build an affordable two-seat electric pickup truck for around $25,000. It raised at least $111 million in a Series A round in 2023 that Jeff Bezos participated in. It is unknown how much Bezos put into the company.

ALTMAN-BACKED PRAXIS SCOUTS KYIV, ATHENS FOR TECH UTOPIA

Praxis is a self-described 'sovereign network' funded by Silicon Valley investors looking for at least 10,000 acres somewhere in the world to build its first city. Its co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Dryden Brown will visit several candidate sites in a world tour kicking off in May. The locations include Nuuk in Greenland, Buenos Aires, Rome, Athens, Auckland, Marrakesh, Tokyo, Kyiv, and the Dominican Republic capital of Santo Domingo. Once a location is announced and the host country's support has been secured, Praxis will dispatch a small delegation of supporters to move into 250 to 1,000 modular houses.

demo.

INTRODUCING THE EVALS API

OpenAI has released the Evals API for developers. The API enables developers to programmatically define tests, automate evaluation runs, and quickly iterate on prompts. It allows developers to integrate Evals anywhere in a workflow. Evals are still available in the dashboard.

APACHE ECHARTS

Apache ECharts is an open source JavaScript visualization library. It features flexible chart types, a powerful rendering engine, elegant visual design, and a healthy community. The library can automatically generate chart descriptions and decal patterns for accessibility. It provides easy ways to add intuitive, interactive, and highly customizable charts to commercial products.

ASK HN: DO YOU STILL USE SEARCH ENGINES? (HACKER NEWS THREAD)

More and more people are using large language models instead of search engines, but many developers are finding that the technology is not well suited to finding factual information. Search engines are still better at finding specific links and real information. Large language models can be helpful for many things, like helping someone unfamiliar with a topic better refine their searches by getting the terminology correct and exploring research topics. Search engines are still required for many things as large language models get lots of very important things wrong.

HOW APPLE STOCKPILED IPHONES TO AVOID TARIFFS AND KEEP PRICES LOW FOR A WHILE

Apple shipped five flights worth of Apple products in three days to the US in the last week of March to stock its warehouses. This is usually a time of the year when the company starts winding down its current-year products and starts manufacturing its September releases. The reserves that arrived at a lower duty will temporarily insulate the company from the higher prices it will need to pay under the revised tax rates. Apple is expected to take a $33 billion hit due to the Trump Administration's newly instated tariff plan.

MIRA MURATI'S AI STARTUP GAINS PROMINENT EX-OPENAI ADVISERS

Thinking Machines Lab has gained former OpenAI chief research officer Bob McGrew and Alec Radford, a former OpenAI researcher behind many of the company's more transformative innovations.

‘AN OVERWHELMINGLY NEGATIVE AND DEMORALIZING FORCE': WHAT IT'S LIKE WORKING FOR A COMPANY THAT'S FORCING AI ON ITS DEVELOPERS

Several people working in the video game industry or related fields tell stories about their daily interactions and struggles with artificial intelligence in the workplace and what it means for the jobs they've been trained and hired to do.

UNIT-TESTING AI AGENTS IN THE BROWSER

Gemini is the cheapest, most accurate, and among the fastest models on the market; GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet are pretty good, but not worth the 20-30x price premium over Gemini; and newer models like Claude 3.7 Sonnet and GPT-4.5 seem more creative and not ideal for doing exactly what you want to do.

POSTGRESQL FULL-TEXT SEARCH: FAST WHEN DONE RIGHT (DEBUNKING THE SLOW MYTH)

A look at how to correctly set up and use standard PostgreSQL Full-Text Search (FTS) for optimal performance that demonstrates the true speed of built-in FTS.

AI 2027: RESPONSES

This post collates several responses to a previous essay predicting the future of AI.

KEVIN KELLY POINTS A NEW WAY FORWARD INTO THE AGE OF AI

Kevin Kelly, a tech guru, wants to create a world where AI is decentralized and used to augment humans.

SCHEDULE A DEMO TO LEARN MORE

META EXEC DENIES THE COMPANY ARTIFICIALLY BOOSTED LLAMA 4'S BENCHMARK SCORES

An unsubstantiated rumor that Meta artificially boosted its Llama 4 benchmark results began circulating on X and Reddit over the weekend. Meta's VP of generative AI Ahman Al-Dahle has denied the rumors, saying that Meta did not train its models on test sets. The rumor appears to have originated from a post on Chinese social media from a user claiming to have resigned from Meta in protest over the company's benchmarking practices. Researchers have observed stark differences in the behavior of the publicly downloadable models compared with the models hosted on LM Arena.

OPENAI REPORTEDLY MULLS BUYING JONY IVE AND SAM ALTMAN'S AI HARDWARE STARTUP

OpenAI is reportedly in discussions to buy the company former Apple design lead Jony Ive is building with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Ive is working with Altman on io Products, a startup that aims to build products 'less socially disruptive than the iPhone'. OpenAI may end up partnering with io Products instead of acquiring the startup. io Products currently has a small team that includes former Apple designers. It has reportedly been working on different concepts of AI-enabled devices.

SCIENTISTS REVIVE THE DIRE WOLF, OR SOMETHING CLOSE

Dire wolves went extinct around 13,000 years ago. Scientists at Colossal Biosciences have bred gray-wolf pups that carry dire wolf genes. The three animals are currently living in captivity in the northern United States. The technology used to create them could potentially help revive other species and conserve species that have not yet gone extinct. Pictures of the dire wolf pups are available in the article.

THE 'WORLD'S MOST ADVANCED MICROCHIP' HAS BEEN UNVEILED

TSMC introduced a 2-nanometer chip on April 1, with mass production expected for the second half of the year. The chips represent a major step forward in performance and efficiency and could potentially reshape the technological landscape. They provide a 10% to 15% boost in computing speed at the same power level or a 20% to 30% reduction in power usage at the same speed as 3nm chips and increase transistor density by about 15%. The new chips enable devices to operate faster, consume electricity, and manage more complex tasks efficiently.

THE DAY I TAUGHT AI TO THINK LIKE A SENIOR DEVELOPER

AI IDEs don't actually understand codebases, they're just sophisticated autocomplete tools with good marketing. The difference becomes painfully obvious on any moderately complex project. The next generation of tools will build rich mental models from multiple perspectives, just like experienced developers do. This article discusses an approach to building an AI that understands where files should be logically placed, which patterns to follow, how to extend existing abstractions instead of creating new ones, and when to reuse code vs create new implementations.

BROWSER MCP

Browser MCP allows users to connect AI apps to their browsers to automate tasks. Automation happens locally on users' machines, resulting in better performance without network latency. Browser activity stays on-device and isn't sent to remote servers. Browser MCP uses existing browser profiles, keeping users logged into all of their services. It avoids CAPTCHAs by using real browser fingerprints.

POWER TO THE PEOPLE: HOW LLMS FLIP THE SCRIPT ON TECHNOLOGY DIFFUSION

Large language models generate disproportionate benefit for regular people while their impact is more muted and lagging in corporations and governments. It is a major multiplier to individuals' power levels across a broad range of capabilities. Frontier-grade performance is very accessible and cheap - money can't buy a better ChatGPT. This is a unique situation in the history of technology - the future is already here, and it's shockingly distributed.

REFLEXIVE AI USAGE IS NOW A BASELINE EXPECTATION AT SHOPIFY

Shopify now expects its staff to use AI. The prototype phase of any GSD project should now be dominated by AI exploration. Shopify is adding AI usage questions to its performance and peer review questionnaire to encourage staff to learn to prompt and load context. Teams must now demonstrate why they can't achieve their goals using AI before asking for more headcount and resources.

GOOGLE IS LOOKING OUT FOR #1. IT'S TIME YOU DO, TOO

Google's Store is taking more than double the AI overview real estate of its closest competitors - combined.

ASK HN: I'M AN MIT SENIOR AND STILL UNEMPLOYED – AND SO ARE MOST OF MY FRIENDS (HACKER NEWS THREAD)

New graduates are advised to widen their job searches - while you might end up taking a job below what you expect, it will likely be temporary.

WHY COMPANIES DON'T FIX BUGS

Companies don't care about bugs as they're often too busy with competing priorities, bureaucratic inertia, and profit.

Linear, Asana, etc) and ask Concierge anything. Sign up for free.

TRADE, TARIFFS, AND TECH

A war in Taiwan would effectively remove China from global supply chains and destroy Taiwan's economic output - including chips from TSMC.

OPENAI TESTS WATERMARKING FOR CHATGPT-4O IMAGE GENERATION MODEL

OpenAI recently started testing watermarks for images generated using ChatGPT - ChatGPT Plus users are able to save images without the watermark.

MICROSOFT'S AI MASTERPLAN: LET OPENAI BURN CASH, THEN BUILD ON THEIR SUCCESSES

Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman says that it's more cost-effective to trail frontier model builders by three to six months and build on their successes than to compete with them directly.

* Building a strong foundation for user behavior analysis

* Getting started + implementation checklist

Read the full guide here

TRUMP'S TIKTOK PLAN UPENDED BY CHINESE OBJECTIONS OVER TARIFFS

China has withheld approval for a deal that involved the launch of a new US-based version of TikTok owned and operated by a majority of American investors. White House officials had planned for President Trump to sign an executive order approving the proposal, which had the blessings of investors and ByteDance. Trump's recent tariffs have angered China and prompted retaliatory measures against the US. The deadline to reach a deal has been extended by another 75 days.

META INTRODUCES LLAMA 4 WITH TWO NEW AI MODELS AVAILABLE NOW, AND TWO MORE ON THE WAY

Meta's new Llama 4 model suite includes four new models, Maverick, Scout, Behemoth, and Reasoning. Both Maverick and Scout are available to download now from the Llama website and Hugging Face and have been added to Meta AI. Behemoth is an upcoming model that Meta claims is among the world's smartest large language models. More information about Llama 4 Reasoning will be released in the next month.

THIS BRAIN-COMPUTER INTERFACE IS NOW A TWO-WAY STREET

Scientists at Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research have developed a technology that allows brain-computer interfaces to provide touch feedback to users. The technology was implanted into a patient who was paralyzed from the chest down after a driving accident. It allowed the patient not only to control movements in his hand but also to receive touch feedback and 'feel', using those sensations to guide movements. The patient was able to pick up a cup and drink from it just by thinking about performing the task and pick up an empty eggshell without cracking it.

THE FIRST PEOPLE TO FLY IN SPACE OVER THE POLES GOT THIS STUNNING VIEW

Chun Wang, Jannicke Mikkelsen, Rabea Rogge, and Eric Philips were the first people to fly over Earth's poles in space. The private mission launched from NASA's Kennedy Space Center on a Falcon 9 rocket on March 31. While these were the first people to make the journey, low-Earth polar orbits are commonly used for weather-tracking and spy satellites. Photos and video from the mission are available in the article.

SPARKS

Sparks is a typeface for creating sparklines in text without code. It uses OpenType's contextual alternates feature to perform simple replacement operations on numbers. Sparks works on desktop and on the web without JavaScript (but it requires a browser that can make use of OpenType features in text). It is currently compatible with Microsoft Word 2010 and later, Apple Pages, Adobe Creative Cloud applications, Chrome 33+, Safari 6+, Firefox 4+, and Internet Explorer 10+.

THE CURVE IS BENDING

Model output is now actually worth more than the cost of real dev work. It's starting to make sense to throw a lot of money towards inference. This will probably cause some disruption in the junior dev job market - or at least disrupt what it means to be a junior dev. Code-writing agents are predicted to essentially match college graduates in almost all software tasks by the end of 2026.

FOUR YEARS OF RUNNING A SAAS IN A COMPETITIVE MARKET

OnlineOrNot was launched in 2021 when there were more than 200 listed alternatives to the tool its creator wanted to create. There are even more competitors today. OnlineOrNot is a self-funded and sustainable business. This post looks at the lessons learned by its creator throughout the lifetime of the business.

OPENAI SAYS IT'LL RELEASE O3 AFTER ALL, DELAYS GPT-5

OpenAI plans to release both o3 and o4-mini in a couple of weeks. The company had previously canceled the launch of its o3 reasoning model but reversed course due to its upcoming GPT-5 model. GPT-5 will now roll out later than originally anticipated as the company prepares enough capacity to support what it expects to be unprecedented demand. The model will incorporate voice, Canvas, search, deep research, and more.

in the current price.

TYPO MINIMIZING KEYBOARD

This page presents a theoretical keyboard layout that minimizes the number of valid typos.

APPLE IPHONE PRICE HIKES ARE NOW LOOKING POSSIBLE IN THE US

Apple's $999 starting price level is a psychological threshold that many consumers probably don't want to cross.

OPEN-SOURCE IS JUST THAT

Open source just means that the source is open - it doesn't mean that it's open to contributions, that support is offered, that users are entitled to feature requests or developer time - or anything, and it doesn't mean that it's free.

NVIDIA FINALLY ADDS NATIVE PYTHON SUPPORT TO CUDA

Developers can now use Python to directly execute algorithmic-style computing on GPUs.