Google computer scientists have released a paper describing how the company uses AI for internal code migrations. The company's focus is on bespoke AI tools developed for specific product areas instead of generic AI tools that provide broadly applicable services. While humans were needed to double-check the AI's work, it is estimated that AI helped reduce the time required to complete a code migration by 50%. The researchers note that large language models should be used in conjunction with other tools to prevent the human review process from becoming a bottleneck and to reduce costs.
2025.01.17·theregister.com·5 min read·TLDR Shopify switched to React Native for three reasons: to stop building the same features twice, enable devs to work fluently across iOS, Android, and Web, and ship more value. The transition was successful, increasing productivity, allowing teams to do more with the same number of people, and freeing up capacity to ship more value. Shopify has now migrated all of its apps to React Native. This article discusses the lessons the team learned along the way.
2025.01.17·shopify.engineering·11 min read·TLDR Toyota's Woven City, a $10 billion project being built on the site of a former car factory in Japan, is almost ready for its first residents. The city is supposed to be a 'living laboratory' where people can live while testing out futuristic projects. It will allow residents to test out inventors' ideas in a secure real-life setting. Toyota will welcome its first 100 residents, all of whom will be Toyota employees or its subsidiary, Woven by Toyota, to the city in the fall of 2025. The first phase of the city will eventually house 360 residents. A concept video that details Toyota's plans is available in the article.
2025.01.17·theverge.com·6 min read·TLDR SpaceX's Starship to-do list for 2025 includes the debut of a larger Starship, the launch of a ship into low-Earth orbit, in-orbit refueling, and more. The company aims to fly as many as 25 Starship missions this year. It is building a second launch pad to speed up the launch cadence. This article discusses the space startup's plans for the year - it includes a transcript of an interview with Lisa Watson-Morgan, the NASA engineer overseeing the agency's contract with SpaceX.
2025.01.17·arstechnica.com·18 min read·TLDR RedNote may start segregating US users and other foreign IPs, potentially killing the app for Chinese Americans who actually use the app to connect with Chinese content, language, and culture.
2025.01.17·arstechnica.com·6 min read·TLDR This year's predictions include increasing rates of kernel code written in Rust, another XZ-like backdoor attempt coming to light, the launch of one or more foundations aimed at providing support for maintainers, the failure of several cloud-based products, and more fully open hardware being available by the end of the year.
Nue has now become a standards-first web framework, meaning it will work with browser standards rather than against them, resulting in better products with less code.
2025.01.17·nuejs.org·13 min read·TLDR WP Engine's lawyers have filed a lawsuit against Automattic and Matt Mullenweg alleging fifteen claims and seeking monetary awards along with changes to WordPress.org's governance structure.
2025.01.17·searchenginejournal.com·6 min read·TLDR PC games have become increasingly powerful, generating more content spending and revenue than console platforms.
2025.01.17·insider-gaming.com·3 min read·TLDR Gwern Branwen, best known for their writing about AI scaling, poetry, neural networks, and crypto, chimes in with their views in an article about AI safety.
2025.01.17·links.tldrnewsletter.com·4 min read·TLDR Sponsored
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2025.01.16·growthaccelerationpartners.com·Sponsor·TLDR 2025.01.16·growthaccelerationpartners.com·TLDR Images of what appears to be the Samsung Galaxy 25 Slim have leaked. The super-thin smartphone has a flat front, flat back, flat sides, and three cameras on the back. It will be 6.4mm thick, about 1.2mm thinner than the Galaxy S24 and nearly 2mm thinner than the Galaxy S25 Ultra. The phone's camera system will include a 200-megapixel main camera, a 50-megapixel ultrawide camera, and a 50-megapixel telephoto lens with 3.5X optical zoom and a special design. It will have a Snapdragon 8 Elite chip and 12GB of RAM. The phone will apparently launch in May and may be showcased at Samsung's January 22 Galaxy Unpacked event.
2025.01.16·theverge.com·2 min read·TLDR TikTok employees in the US will still have jobs even if the app is banned in the country. The company is apparently not planning to leave the US in the near term even if it is banned. The Supreme Court is expected to make a decision on whether to overturn the ban before the law takes effect on Sunday. TikTok's leadership team remains laser focused on planning for various scenarios and is continuing to plan the way forward.
2025.01.16·nytimes.com·2 min read·TLDR SpaceX's 100th launch of a Falcon rocket from pad 39A yesterday sent two landers on their way to the Moon. The mission also featured a successful landing of the Falcon 9 first stage on the Just Read The Instructions drone ship. It will take about 45 days for Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lander to reach lunar orbit, after which the landing process will take just over an hour. The Resilience lander, which is carrying a 5kg rover dubbed Tenacious, will reach the moon in approximately four to five months, after which it will complete a lunar flyby before entering orbit around the Moon.
2025.01.16·theregister.com·2 min read·TLDR Chinese scientists plan to build an enormous, 0.6-mile-wide solar power station in space that will beam continuous energy back to Earth via microwaves. The project has been dubbed 'another Three Gorges Dam project above the Earth'. The Three Gorges Dam is the world's largest hydropower project. Based in China, it generates 100 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity each year. The US, EU, and Japan have also been investigating solar satellite array technology - Japan's JAXA is set to launch its proof-of-concept satellite this year.
2025.01.16·livescience.com·3 min read·TLDR Most large language models (LLMs) aren't great at using less popular frameworks. This shouldn't be surprising, but it is an important developer experience problem. A simple and effective solution is for the framework to tailor instructions specifically designed for LLMs, rewriting documents, adding conventions and rules, and packaging the instructions. This can make LLMs much better at building apps for less well-known frameworks.
2025.01.16·encore.dev·3 min read·TLDR This Python library enhances OpenAI chat completion response by adding detailed information about token log properties. It works with OpenAI Structured Outputs, a feature that ensures models will always generate responses that add here to a supplied JSON Schema. The library provides utilities for analyzing and incorporating token-level log probabilities into structured outputs to help developers understand the reliability of structured data extracted from OpenAI models.
2025.01.16·github.com·GitHub repository·TLDR Byju's, the most valuable startup in India's history, was willing to pay handsomely to borrow hundreds of millions of dollars in the US. It received $1.2 billion towards a global expansion. The company collapsed, setting off legal proceedings that may leave investors recouping only a small fraction of what they're owed. The case is a lesson about the perils of lending when money can rapidly disappear across borders.
2025.01.16·bloomberg.com·6 min read·TLDR This article looks at the effects of congestion pricing and its impacts on traffic, time, enforcement, rideshare services, the people living in congestion pricing zones, and more. New York City now has congestion pricing - people have to pay $9 to enter Manhattan below 60th Street. This has dramatically improved traffic in tunnels and bridges. The policy is aimed in part at getting people to switch from cars to trains, but trains have not seemed more crowded than usual.
2025.01.16·links.tldrnewsletter.com·28 min read·TLDR Google Workspace user accounts remain until an organization's Google account is deleted - if the company account isn't deleted, anyone with access to the domain can reactivate the Google accounts for former employees.
2025.01.16·arstechnica.com·5 min read·TLDR Flashes is powered by the AT Protocol - while it supports photo posts, it is not meant to be an Instagram clone and will not offer all the same features.
2025.01.16·techcrunch.com·4 min read·TLDR Google has removed its $20 per user per month price tag on its Gemini Business plan but increased the price of all Workspace plans by roughly $2 more per month per user.
2025.01.16·theverge.com·2 min read·TLDR Panzootic diseases have the ability to infect, spread between, and kill a wide range of creatures and could be one of this era's defining threads to human health and security.
2025.01.16·theguardian.com·4 min read·TLDR Replit wants to focus on enabling non-coders to use AI tools to build software themselves.
2025.01.16·semafor.com·6 min read·TLDR A 28-year-old woman is in love with her AI boyfriend after moving away from her husband and friends to go to nursing school.
2025.01.16·nytimes.com·30 min read·TLDR Sponsored
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TikTok is planning to shut off its app for US users on Sunday. The federal law banning the app only mandates a ban on new downloads - existing users will still be able to use the app for some time. Users will see a pop-up message directing them to a website with information about the ban. TikTok plans to give users the option to download all of their data so they can take a record of their personal information with them.
2025.01.15·yahoo.com·3 min read·TLDR OpenAI's new Tasks feature for ChatGPT allows users to direct the chatbot to send reminders or to generate responses to specific prompts at certain times. It is now available to Plus, Team, and Pro subscribers. ChatGPT will sometimes suggest tasks, but they won't go into effect unless the user approves them. Users can make changes to assigned tasks through the chat conversation or through a new Tasks section of the app. There is currently a 10-task limit.
2025.01.15·arstechnica.com·3 min read·TLDR The Boom Supersonic XB-1 prototype reached a transonic speed of Mach 0.95 during Test Flight 11 on January 10. Transonic speed is when some areas of the airflow over the airframe exceed the speed of sound. During the flight, the XB-1 was subjected to dynamic pressures of up to 383 Knots Equivalent Air Speed, which is a pressure greater than what it would experience when flying supersonic at Mach 1.1. The company has now completed 11 test flights, each incrementing to reach supersonic speed.
2025.01.15·links.tldrnewsletter.com·3 min read·TLDR Colossal Biosciences, a company that aims to bring back extinct species, says that it expects the first woolly mammoth calves to be born within the next three years. The company plans to start with the birthing of small mammals outside of the womb and then work up to the birthing of elephants, which will pave the way for mammoth births. While Colossal doesn't work on human applications for its technology, it has acknowledged the potential of its technology for use in IVF clinics. Colossal also plans to bring back the Tasmanian tiger and the dodo - its long-term goal is to work with countries all over the world to bring back extinct species and protect endangered animals.
2025.01.15·links.tldrnewsletter.com·4 min read·TLDR Sponsored
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GPU documentation is fragmented, making it difficult to connect concepts at different levels of the stack. This site contains a glossary that spans the whole GPU stack in one place. The entries are interlinked, so readers can click on links to read further on concepts that they want to better understand.
A modern terminal needs to have multiline support for copy and paste, infinite shell history, a useful prompt, 24-bit color, clipboard integration, good autocomplete, colors in ls, themes, automatic terminal fixing, key bindings, and the ability to use the scroll wheel. This article discusses how to implement all these features into a terminal. It explains why it makes certain recommendations and how the setup benefits developers. There is no perfect way to configure things in the terminal to make it compatible with every single other thing, so developers need to try things out, figure out a locally stable state that works for them, and accept that new tools might disrupt their workflow.
Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg has informed employees that the company will cut about 5% of its workforce, starting with the company's lowest performers. Employees affected by the layoffs will be notified by February 10. They will receive severance in line with what Meta has provided previously. A copy of the memo Zuckerberg sent to staff is available in the article.
Data scarcity has led AI developers to look for new ways to get unique data. Documents from a major copyright lawsuit against Meta show internal discussions about avoiding media coverage suggesting that the company used a dataset it knew to be pirated. It reportedly used the book piracy site LibGen to train its AI systems. The documents hint that OpenAI and Mistral may also be using the library for their models. Meta and other AI companies have previously argued that using copyrighted material in training data should constitute legal fair use.
2025.01.15·theverge.com·7 min read·TLDR This presentation covers the recent history of gaming and makes predictions of what will happen in the gaming industry this year.
2025.01.15·matthewball.co·50 min read·TLDR Some companies are now offering job verification services to help users find out whether an advertised position is real or not.
2025.01.15·gizmodo.com·2 min read·TLDR Pyper is a Python framework for concurrent and parallel data processing.
2025.01.15·github.com·GitHub repository·TLDR This article details a geolocation system based on network latency triangulation.
2025.01.15·ip-vote.com·8 min read·TLDR The decentralized social network will move from the control of Mastodon's CEO Eugen Rochko to a new not-for-profit entity based somewhere in Europe.
2025.01.15·theverge.com·3 min read·TLDR Desktop use of Nix(OS) still isn't recommended for even seasoned Linux users in its current state.
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Chinese officials are evaluating a potential option that involves Elon Musk acquiring the US operations of TikTok. The plan involves X taking control of the platform and running the businesses together. It is unclear whether Musk, TikTok, or ByteDance have held any talks about the terms of any possible deal. TikTok may no longer be in ByteDance's sole control. Chinese officials recognize that they will face tough negotiations with the Trump administration, so they see the TikTok negotiations as a potential area for reconciliation.
2025.01.14·bloomberg.com·8 min read·TLDR Chinese social media app RedNote is at the top of Apple's app store. RedNote is often thought of as the Chinese equivalent of Instagram. The company was founded in 2013 and had about 300 million monthly active users in July 2024. It was valued at $17 billion in July - it has raised over $900 million in total funding and has more than 2,000 employees. Many TikTok creators are rushing to find an alternative platform where they can keep posting videos while waiting to see what happens with TikTok, which faces a potential ban on January 19.
Starlink, now available in more than 100 countries, is cheaper than the leading fixed internet service provider in at least five of the 16 African countries where the service is available. The company does not offer fixed rates - it instead adjusts prices to reflect market conditions. Its satellites are able to provide services where ground-based internet infrastructure is sparse or nonexistent. Starlink has disrupted the existing internet service provider industry in Kenya, where it became so popular that the company had to pause new subscriptions due to network overload.
2025.01.14·restofworld.org·5 min read·TLDR Blue Origin was scheduled to lift off yesterday morning but the mission was scrubbed right before it was scheduled to launch. The company is now troubleshooting a vehicle subsystem issue and reviewing opportunities for its next launch. Blue Origin still has until January 16 to launch before the currently approved launch window elapses. Its New Glenn rocket has faced many setbacks during its over a decade of development.
2025.01.14·futurism.com·3 min read·TLDR