On Monday, a panel of three judges from the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit heard TikTok's arguments against a law that will force the company to find a non-Chinese buyer or be banned nationwide. It was unclear which way the court was leaning, but the judges appeared dubious of TikTok's plea that its right to free expression surpasses national security concerns. However, the judges did point out that shutting down the app could violate the rights of US TikTok users and TikTok's US operations. TikTok's strategy of trying to overturn the law by attacking Congress' legislative authority is unusual - it appears that it may be asking the court to send the law back to Congress to be amended.
A team from the Research Institute for Plant Molecular and Cellular Biology has genetically engineered lettuce to boost its nutrients. They increased levels of an antioxidant called beta-carotene, which the body uses to make vitamin A. The high levels of the antioxidant make the leaves of the lettuce a striking yellow color, giving it the nickname Golden Lettuce. Golden Lettuce has up to 30 times more beta-carotene than regular lettuce. Developing the lettuce involved accumulating the antioxidant in parts of the plant's cells where it is not normally found.
Chipotle's Autocado machine can cut, core, and peel avocados by the case. It can get an avocado of any size peeled and seeded within 26 seconds. The Autocado is currently being tested in a store in California with the aim of freeing up employees for other tasks. Chipotle is also testing a machine that builds bowls and salads, which make up about 65% of its digital orders.
QA Wolf [9] gets engineering teams to 80% automated end-to-end test coverage [9] and helps them ship 2x faster by reducing QA cycles from hours to minutes.
kty is an SSH server that makes it easy to access Kubernetes resources without using kubectl. It provides a dashboard for interacting with clusters that enables users to run shells in pods, access logs for running and exited containers in a pod, forward traffic from a local machine into a cluster or from a cluster to a local machine, access clusters from any device with an SSH client, and more. kty relies on OpenID providers to verify identity.
Python in Excel is now generally available for Windows users of Microsoft 365 Business and Enterprise. The feature makes it possible to seamlessly combine Python and Excel analytics within the same workbook. Python in Excel keeps data private by preventing Python code from knowing who users are and opening workbooks from the internet in further isolation within their own separate containers. The data does not persist in the Microsoft Cloud. This page provides examples of what is now possible with the integration.
The public discussion of Ozempic's economics has so far been consistently fatalistic. Many doubt that the drug will benefit more than just the lucky few who can afford it. The people who most need the drug often struggle to get it. As long as it is talked about primarily as a weight loss drug, insurance companies will remain incentivized to treat it as a luxury good. The drug presents a radical opportunity to change the chronic disease landscape in the US, but it may require radical policy changes to make it accessible.
Founder Mode is the culture of a company, and a culture is defined by the character of the founders. It is when the whole team is involved with the details and work - when an organizational chart becomes more like a map than a power structure. While there is job specialization, there is also a belief that everyone is equally accountable for the product. A stratification of responsibility is a red flag in any company.
OpenAI's o1 represents a new paradigm - people shouldn't expect the same pace, schedule, or dynamics of the pre-training era or for their GPT prompts to 'just work'.
Google never experienced any real pricing pressure despite knowing its fees were higher than competitors' and being aware of customer complaints about its tools due to its unshakable dominance in the market.
AMD and Intel are looking to use their own GPUs to rival Nvidia while upstarts like Cerebras and SambaNova have developed radical chip architectures that drastically improve the efficiency of generative AI training and inference.
Matt Shumer, CEO of OthersideAI, faced criticism after third-party researchers couldn't replicate the performance of his new large language model, Reflection 70B. Shumer attributed the discrepancies to issues during the model's upload process and has apologized for getting ahead of himself. The AI community remains skeptical and awaits further clarification.
Elon Musk's xAI is building "Colossus," the world's largest supercomputer, in Memphis to support its AI chatbot, Grok. The project has faced criticism for environmental oversight issues and its substantial energy and water demands. Despite these concerns, xAI aims to rapidly advance its AI capabilities while impacting the local community.
Runway announced an API to integrate its Gen-3 Alpha Turbo video-generation model into third-party platforms, with pricing at one cent per credit. Concerns over copyrighted training data persist, with Runway refusing to disclose sources and similar claims impacting competitors like OpenAI and Nvidia. Legal uncertainties continue, but AI-driven video tools are expected to disrupt the film and TV industry significantly.
Editing images can be challenging due to the continuous nature of pixels. This work builds on the great line of research on drag-based editing. It takes a set of control points given by a user and updates images accordingly. Previous works are quite slow - this paper speeds things up considerably.
There are many compression formats that reduce the quality of music, especially at low bitrates. This method proposes a way to dramatically improve music quality after it has been compressed.
DiffFAS is a new framework to tackle domain shift challenges in the face of anti-spoofing systems. By deconstructing domain shifts into image quality and style, the system generates high-fidelity attack faces and improves performance across different domains and attack types.
Timo Lehne, CEO Specialist Staffing Group, argues that artificial intelligence will create jobs rather than eliminate them, as it increases demands for uniquely-human skills. Read the full article
Researchers propose a data-efficient Vision Transformer (ViT) method for handwritten text recognition, using CNN for feature extraction and a Sharpness-Aware Minimization optimizer.
Despite initial hype, AI tools like GPT-4 have led to incremental productivity gains rather than transformative change. AI often gets "buttonified" into small, discrete tasks, limiting its impact on overall workflows. Successful startups may need to innovate beyond current applications to fully realize AI's potential.
OpenAI's new o1-preview AI, part of the "Strawberry" enhanced reasoning system, shows impressive capabilities in solving complex problems requiring planning and iteration, outperforming human experts in areas like advanced physics. While it still has limitations, such as occasional errors and hallucinations, it marks a significant leap in AI's ability to independently arrive at solutions. As AI systems become more autonomous, professionals must adapt to new roles in guiding and verifying AI-generated outputs.
The SEC has filed a proposed amendment complaint against Binance, addressing issues previously dismissed by the court and emphasizing arguments about some cryptos being offered as unregistered securities. The new filing includes more detailed allegations about Binance's role in promoting digital assets, particularly BNB, SOL, ADA, and MATIC, and argues that Binance provides selective information to encourage investment. The SEC also moved away from “crypto asset securities” to emphasize that the associated contracts, not the asset itself, can constitute a security.
With 50 days left until the U.S. election, the crypto-backed Protect Progress Super PAC has poured $7.8 million into Senate races in Arizona and Michigan to support Democratic candidates. The PAC, along with others tied to the crypto industry, aims to influence key elections as it advocates for pro-crypto regulation.
Circle has partnered with Sony Block Solutions Labs to integrate Bridged USDC on the Soneium blockchain, enhancing its use as a primary token for secure, borderless transactions. This collaboration aims to empower creators in the digital economy, leveraging decentralized technologies to drive innovation and global accessibility on Soneium, a versatile Ethereum layer 2 platform.
Grayscale has announced the launch of the first U.S. XRP Trust, providing select investors with exposure to the Ripple token. Following a similar trajectory to its Bitcoin and Ethereum trusts, which eventually became ETFs, the market is now speculating that an XRP ETF could be next.
Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks (DePIN) are emerging as a transformative force in crypto, disrupting centralized models across multiple industries through blockchain and token incentives. This report explores critical sectors, including telecom (e.g. Helium), energy (e.g. Plural Energy), compute (e.g. Akash), and others. While DePIN faces regulatory hurdles and unsustainable tokenomics, it offers opportunities for improved efficiency, democratized ownership, and innovative solutions to real-world problems. Future use cases include disaster response, healthcare, and space debris tracking.
Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks (DePIN) aim to revolutionize traditional infrastructure models by leveraging blockchain technology to enable community-driven, decentralized management and ownership of physical assets. This piece explores the potential of DePIN to disrupt established industries like telecom, energy, and data management, while acknowledging challenges such as token incentives and scaling demand and offering a detailed breakdown of six key subsectors where DePIN could have the most impact.
Early in Arbitrum's history, it was offered money from an alt L1 to build for their network in addition to Ethereum. Though Arbitrum would have had more money then, its long-term growth and adoption would have suffered. Co-founder Steven Goldfeder recommends new projects to keep their “eye on the prize” and focus on the bigger picture.
Crypto projects launching with excessively high fully diluted valuations (FDVs) often face a quick downfall. Factors like anchoring bias, inflated VC valuations, poor incentive structures, and token distribution create imbalances between early investors and public buyers. The lack of genuine price discovery harms the project's chance at long-term success. Avoiding high FDV launches, raising VC funds wisely, and ensuring product-market fit before launch can help mitigate these issues.
NFTs, despite being labeled "non-fungible," are treated as fungible assets by their creators and communities, with no real recognition of rarity in token distributions or benefits.
Over the past decade, Figma has evolved from a design tool to an ecosystem supporting entire product teams. Its new brand refresh focuses on versatile primitives, dynamic compositions, an expanded color palette, and integrated motion principles, creating a flexible visual language. Inspired by playgrounds and collaborative activities, the refreshed identity reflects Figma's diverse user base and interactions. This reimagined design system, featuring bold shapes and vibrant colors, emphasizes adaptability and collaboration, pointing to Figma's future growth.
iOS 18 is now available, with enhanced personalization for the Home Screen and Control Center, a major Photos redesign, and improved features in Messages and Mail. Users can customize app icons, widgets, and the Control Center layout, while Photos now offers on-device intelligence to organize content automatically. The new Apple Intelligence feature will roll out next month, providing privacy-focused AI tools integrated deeply into iOS 18. Additional updates include enhancements to Safari, a new Passwords app, improved connectivity options, and expanded functionalities for AirPods and Apple Pay.