OpenAI's former CTO Mira Murati's new startup, Thinking Machines Lab, has come out of stealth. The startup intends to build tooling to make AI work for peoples' unique needs and goals and to create AI systems that are more widely understood, customizable, and generality capable than those currently available. It will focus on building multimodal systems that can adapt to the full spectrum of human expertise and enable broader applications. Murati joins a growing list of former OpenAI execs who have launched startups.
2025.02.19·techcrunch.com·3 min read·TLDR OpenAI is considering granting new voting rights to its nonprofit board to help it fight the unsolicited takeover bid from Elon Musk. Giving the nonprofit's board outsized voting power would ensure it retains control of the restructured company and is able to overrule other investors, ensuring OpenAI can fight off hostile bids from outsiders. OpenAI could also consider a plan that would let shareholders buy up additional shares at a discount to fend off hostile takeovers.
2025.02.19·arstechnica.com·2 min read·TLDR Researchers at the University of Toronto have created a new material with the toughness of steel that weighs about as much as foam. They used AI to recognize the best configurations of nanostructures to create the tough and impossibly light material. The new nanomaterial can be mass-produced, unlike its predecessors. The lightweight nature of the material could result in more comfortable prosthetics and implants and more efficient vehicles.
2025.02.19·popularmechanics.com·3 min read·TLDR AI-driven protein design has enabled the possibility of creating things unlike anything found in nature. Scientists have successfully created an enzyme with the potential to digest plastics. Breaking down ester bonds in plastics requires four steps - getting AI to design a protein with the right configuration to do one of these steps is easy, but having it cycle through all four is much harder. The scientists overcame challenges by adding more AI models and eventually designed an esterase capable of digesting the bonds in PET, a common plastic.
2025.02.19·arstechnica.com·4 min read·TLDR Sponsored
If QA is a bottleneck on your software engineering team and you're releasing slowly because of it, you need to check out QA Wolf [10].
This article discusses a workflow that uses large language models for code generation (LLM codegen) that has been effective for building many small products. The workflow involves brainstorming a spec, making a plan, and then executing that plan using LLM codegen. The process is repeated until magic happens.
2025.02.19·harper.blog·15 min read·TLDR Kafka does poorly as a job queue. It unfairly assigns jobs to workers, even if other workers have nothing to do. Kafka is not a bad tool, it is just not designed for low volume - it was designed for scenarios where a conventional single-node message broker can't keep up. If that speed isn't required, then it's better to use a conventional broker with more suitable features (at least until Queues for Kafka comes along).
The next AI model war may be upon us, but this time it will be a smaller one as the gains, while real, have been increasingly expensive and granular. We are seemingly reaching parity among the players. While they all have more specific areas of focus and subfeatures, they are all trying to consolidate their products to simplify them for everyday use. This article ranks current AI offerings from a pure consumer perspective.
2025.02.19·spyglass.org·8 min read·TLDR Bryan Johnson's Don't Die lifestyle has grabbed the world's attention. Johnson stands out - no one else is making content about not dying. His 'Don't Die' slogan is hard to scroll past, short, and snappy. Johnson doesn't try to appeal to everyone - his extreme lifestyle polarizes people, but he only needs a small number of fanatical fans. This article looks at Johnson's marketing tactics, which have resulted in 1,440,000 YouTube subscribers, 503,000 followers on X, and 1,500,000 Instagram followers.
2025.02.19·petecodes.io·4 min read·TLDR Perplexity trained an unbiased, accurate, and factual version of DeepSeek-R1 and open sourced it.
2025.02.19·links.tldrnewsletter.com·9 min read·TLDR Tesla's first permanent public Megacharger station will have 12 stalls with Megachargers that can accommodate trucks and their trailers.
2025.02.19·electrek.co·2 min read·TLDR uv is sufficient most of the time, so developers should always try it first, then use something else or find a workaround if it doesn't work.
2025.02.19·bitecode.dev·25 min read·TLDR 2025.02.19·newatlas.com·3 min read·TLDR X's Premium+ subscription plan is now $50 per month, or $350 a year.
2025.02.19·techcrunch.com·1 min read·TLDR 2025.02.19·theverge.com·3 min read·TLDR Sponsored
Modern bots are smarter than ever [5]—executing JavaScript, storing cookies, rotating IPs, and even cracking CAPTCHAs with AI. As attacks grow more sophisticated, traditional detection just isn't enough.
xAI has released Grok 3 and unveiled new capabilities for the Grok iOS and web apps. The company used an enormous data center in Memphis that contained around 200,000 GPUs to train Grok 3. Grok 3 is a family of models: Grok 3 mini responds to questions more quickly but at the cost of some accuracy; Grok 3, which beats GPT-4o on some benchmarks; Grok 3 Reasoning, which surpasses the best investigation of o3-mini on several popular benchmarks; and Grok 3 mini Reasoning. Subscribers to X's Premium+ tier will be first to get access to Grok 3.
2025.02.18·techcrunch.com·5 min read·TLDR A new leak claims that the iPhone 17 Air will have its cameras arranged in a horizontal bar. The iPhone 17 Pro models will use a larger but still horizontal bar. Along with the new camera layout, it's been reported that the iPhone 17 Pro will return to having curved sides. It is unclear how reliable or accurate the rumors are, but the leaker has been accurate about camera details before.
2025.02.18·appleinsider.com·2 min read·TLDR Construction has begun on the first phase of the Line, Saudi Arabia's planned 170-kilometer-long megacity in the desert. The first phase, which will stretch 2.5 kilometers, will be named Hidden Marina. It will be made up of three individual modular segments measuring 21 million square meters. Hidden Marina will host an initial population of around 200,000 residents. It will have 80,000 residential units, 9,000 hotel rooms, commercial and retail spaces, fire stations, schools, police and security services, and other amenities. Residents will have access to all daily essentials within a five-minute walk and high-speed rail will provide transit around the metropolis.
2025.02.18·newatlas.com·2 min read·TLDR Several teams around the world are working on AI systems to help humans understand animals. A group at the University of the West of England Bristol and Scotland's Rural College have developed a system called Intellipig that examines photos of pigs' faces and notifies farmers if there are signs of pain, sickness, or emotional distress, and a team at the University of Haifa is training AI to identify signs of discomfort in dogs' faces. These systems still rely on humans to do the initial work of identifying the meanings of different behaviors.
2025.02.18·techcrunch.com·1 min read·TLDR Sponsored
Learn how to validate market demand for your next SaaS idea before investing resources blindly. In this guide, we'll show you how to capture intent and keep interested parties engaged as you build towards your launch.
2025.02.18·go.clerk.com·Sponsor·TLDR WebAssembly allows server-side frameworks to run locally, blurring the boundaries of classic web development and opening up exciting new possibilities. This post walks readers through how to create a Rails application that runs fully in your browser. It covers how to bring Rails into the browser in 15 minutes, the behind-the-scenes of Rails wasmification, and the future of Rails and Wasm.
This article discusses how to debug an app with anti-debugging protections that blocked debuggers from being attached, caused an exit when any code was injected, and crashed the whole phone when run with jailbreak on. It walks through the steps of how to attach a debugger, bypass jailbreak detection, and inject code. The article is detailed and contains a lot of screenshots, logs, and code.
2025.02.18·bryce.co·31 min read·TLDR Murat Demirbas, a principal research scientist at MongoDB Research, spent a year at MIT's Computer Science department as a postdoc twenty years ago. This post details his experience working with Professor Nancy Lynch. Demirbas was young and he felt like he didn't make as much of the experience as he could have. The post includes lessons learned from the experience.
2025.02.18·muratbuffalo.blogspot.com·2 min read·TLDR Grok 3 has an around state-of-the-art thinking model that is able to solve some advanced questions. It is likely somewhere around o1-pro in terms of capability and ahead of DeepSeek-R1. DeepSearch can produce high quality responses to various research- or lookup-type questions, but it can still hallucinate information - even URLs. Overall, Grok 3 + Thinking feels somewhere around the state-of-the-art territory of OpenAI's strongest models, and slightly better than DeepSeek-R1 and Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking.
2025.02.18·threadreaderapp.com·6 min read·TLDR Sponsored
Watch QA Wolf AI [17] generate a Playwright test for Figma's prototyper in just 6 minutes compared to 29 minutes without AI.
It is still unclear whether reasoning models are really as big of a game changer for software development tasks as they are made out to be.
2025.02.18·martinfowler.com·10 min read·TLDR searchcode.com's SQLite database is 6.4 gigabytes - this post discusses how the project got to that size, the technologies it uses, and why it uses SQLite.
2025.02.18·boyter.org·6 min read·TLDR The New York Times is still in a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft as the tech companies allegedly violated copyright law by training generative AI on the publisher's content.
2025.02.18·techcrunch.com·1 min read·TLDR Open Table Formats enable a kind of virtualization - they allow for a headless architecture where different platforms can bring their own compute to the same data.
2025.02.18·jack-vanlightly.com·13 min read·TLDR Jailbreaking your Kindle will give you access to custom screensavers, custom fonts, and more apps, but there are risks, such as potentially voiding the Kindle's warranty and permanently breaking the device.
2025.02.18·kindlemodding.org·Tool·TLDR fixi.js is an experimental minimalist implementation of generalized hypermedia controls.
2025.02.18·github.com·GitHub repository·TLDR Sponsored
Mobile QA cycles are painfully slow when testing is manual. Teams are stuck testing on personal devices, struggling to cover real-world scenarios, and losing entire weeks just to prep a release.
Meta is reportedly creating a new team within its Reality Labs hardware division that will build robot hardware. The company's long-term goal is to create the platform that the industry uses. It will make the underlying sensors, AI, and software for other companies to put inside their hardware. The core technologies that Meta has invested in and built across Reality Labs and AI are complementary to the development of the advancements needed for robotics.
2025.02.17·engadget.com·3 min read·TLDR Reddit's CEO Steve Huffman said during a video Ask Me Anything Session recently that the platform is actively testing ways to make some content paid. Reddit is planning to roll out a 'paid subreddit' feature later this year. The paid content model is still a work in progress - there are many issues to work out, such as how paid subreddits will be moderated, as volunteer moderators likely won't want to watch over paid content if they aren't getting paid themselves. It may be possible for Reddit to allow creators to put certain content behind paywalls - lots of creators have their own subreddits, which allow community conversation in a way that comments on Patreon posts don't totally allow for.
2025.02.17·gizmodo.com·2 min read·TLDR One of the biggest issues with CRISPR-Cas9 is that the system is too large, making it difficult to deliver the gene editor. Mammoth Biosciences' NanoCas is a version of the CRISPR-Cas9 system that is roughly one-third the size of the original, allowing the tool to be used for gene therapy inside muscles, the brain, the heart, and other tissues. The team is already exploring the system's potential for targeting brain diseases. The technology could be modified for use in epigenetic or base editing.
2025.02.17·singularityhub.com·5 min read·TLDR NASA's Blue Ghost lander is now orbiting the Moon as it prepares to make a landing on March 2. The lander holds 10 payloads - a list is available in the article. NASA also launched a rover from a Japanese company along with Blue Ghost that will carry five payloads. The rover will land at the Atlas crater in Mare Frigoris and use its equipment to conduct food production experiments, detect radiation, conduct water electrolysis, and collect regolith.
Create React App currently has no active maintainers and there are many existing programs that solve the same problems, so it is being deprecated. It will continue working in maintenance mode. Frameworks like Next.js, React Router, and Expo are recommended for new projects. Links to adoption guides for migrating apps from Create React App to Next.js, React Router, and Expo are available in the article.
2025.02.17·react.dev·9 min read·TLDR This article details Phil Eaton's journey from a web developer to a database developer and the decisions made along the way. Eaton was a web developer from 2014 to 2012 and a hands-on engineering manager from 2017 to 2021. He tried to start a company in 2021 but left in 2023 to be a co-founder at TigerBeetle. This experience eventually led to him becoming a database developer.
2025.02.17·notes.eatonphil.com·4 min read·TLDR Sam Altman and Elon Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015. Their relationship soured in 2018, and Musk left after a power struggle. The rivalry intensified when Musk launched his own AI startup, xAI, following the release of ChatGPT. Musk recently followed the Stargate unveiling by making a hostile $97.4 billion bid for the assets of the nonprofit that controls OpenAI. This article looks at Altman and Musk's rivalry through conversations with more than a dozen people familiar with their relationship over the years.
2025.02.17·links.tldrnewsletter.com·16 min read·TLDR Amazon told hundreds of thousands of workers to come back to the office full-time, but it didn't have enough desks to go around. Some employees don't have any teammates in the same location, so they are fighting other employees for private rooms to make video calls. This article looks at how Amazon's policy for employees to return to the office or find somewhere else to work has turned out. The company is short on desks and parking and employees report that the initiative hasn't helped them become more collaborative.
2025.02.17·links.tldrnewsletter.com·8 min read·TLDR Sponsored
While you're scrambling to diagnose an outage, your users are getting annoyed and leaving. Sentry will tell you something is down AND the
2025.02.17·blog.sentry.io·Sponsor·TLDR In December, SpaceX submitted a petition to turn the coastal Texas village where the Starship factory and space port operate into an incorporated city called Starbase.
2025.02.17·mashable.com·4 min read·TLDR Figure's founder last month said that the company has signed on a second commercial customer that sees the potential to ship 100,000 humanoid robots.
2025.02.17·techcrunch.com·1 min read·TLDR Fly.io's Fly GPU Machines enabled GPUs, but the project didn't live up to expectations - developers don't want GPUs, they want working large language models.
Investors including Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and Valor Equity Partners are still in talks to participate in the transaction - terms of the round have yet to be finalized and could still change.
2025.02.17·finance.yahoo.com·2 min read·TLDR OpenAI will likely replace its model-picker dropdown with an input box with no options - users would simply type something and ChatGPT will figure out their intent.
2025.02.17·spyglass.org·5 min read·TLDR