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JAQT

jaqt is a JavaScript library that uses native array functions to provide a query engine inspired by GraphQL and SQL. It lets devs perform complex data transformations while still writing JavaScript (instead of SQL).

AMAZON TELLS EMPLOYEES TO RETURN TO OFFICE FIVE DAYS A WEEK

Amazon is requiring its corporate employees to return to the office five days a week. It is also flattening its corporate structure by reducing the number of managers and increasing the ratio of individual contributors. The new policies will come into effect on January 2, 2025.

ORACLE, IT'S TIME TO FREE JAVASCRIPT

This is an open letter signed by prominent figures in the JavaScript community that urges Oracle to release the "JavaScript" trademark. They argue that Oracle has abandoned the trademark through non-use, as they haven't built a product using the mark and haven't actively protected it. They are calling on Oracle to relinquish the trademark to the public domain, and warn that they will challenge its ownership through a petition for cancellation with the USPTO if Oracle doesn't comply.

DEPLOYING DREAMS: AN INSIDE LOOK AT A SUMMER INTERNSHIP WITH VERCEL

A summer intern at Vercel shares his experience working on various projects. He improved the Support Center, implemented citations in the new v0 AI system, and created the "v0 Brain" initiative. His internship involved full autonomy, intense but rewarding work, and learning from industry leaders.

THE HTTP QUERY METHOD

This Internet-Draft defines a new HTTP method, QUERY, which allows for safe and idempotent requests that can carry request content, providing an alternative to GET and POST methods for performing queries.

CSS NANO

CSSNANO is a tool that compresses CSS files for production environments, reducing their size by removing unnecessary whitespace, compressing identifiers, and purging redundant definitions.

THE PRAGMATIC PROGRAMMER FOR MACHINE LEARNING

This online book focuses on software engineering practices necessary for the effective implementation of modern data analysis and machine learning.

UNLEARNING LEETCODE

Writing simple, readable code is more considerate, durable, and ultimately more satisfying than writing complex code.

AI-WRITTEN CODE BANNED FROM CODEFORCES: WHAT'S CHANGING?

Codeforces, a popular online programming platform, has banned the use of AI-generated code in its competitions.

Download the report ↗️

SPACEX POLARIS DAWN CREW RETURNS HOME AFTER HISTORY-MAKING MISSION

SpaceX's Polaris Dawn mission has returned to Earth, splashing down in the Gulf of Mexico early Sunday morning. The four astronauts made history as the mission reached a higher altitude than any human has traveled in five decades and also included the first spacewalk completed by a privately funded and operated mission. This was the third trip to space for the specific Crew Dragon capsule used in the mission. Besides the spacewalk, the crew carried out nearly 40 science experiments and research.

TIKTOK IS ABOUT TO GET ITS DAY IN COURT

On September 16, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia will hear oral arguments for TikTok's First Amendment challenge to legislation that it claims amounts to a ban. The US government argues that TikTok is a clear national security threat but says that revealing why would be a threat. Its claims rely on dozens of pages of redacted classified material that likely focus on the potential that the Chinese government could compel ByteDance to hand over the data of US users or push specific content onto US users. These risks are reportedly so significant that they override TikTok's First Amendment claims.

AN INJECTABLE HIV-PREVENTION DRUG IS HIGHLY EFFECTIVE — BUT WILDLY EXPENSIVE

The results from a landmark pair of major clinical trials of lenacapavir, an injectable HIV-prevention drug that only requires dosing every six months, show that it is 89% more effective at preventing HIV than daily oral preventative medication among gay, bisexual, and transgender people. It could be a game changer if rolled out broadly and equitably, but the drug is extraordinarily expensive. Its current list price for use as an HIV treatment is $3,450 per month. It is unclear whether it will have a different list price for use as a preventive.

NASA CONFIRMS IT'S DEVELOPING THE MOON'S NEW TIME ZONE

NASA is developing a new lunar time system for the Moon. Time changes relative to speed and gravity - it moves slightly faster on the Moon because of its weaker gravity. The small difference in time could have large effects on calculations made in space. The project aims to be scalable to other celestial bodies in the future. NASA is aiming to have the standard ready by 2026.

HOW WE VERIFY THE CORRECTNESS OF A SPREADSHEET ENGINE

Spreadsheets have a ton of overlapping features, making them an interesting software domain. Spreadsheet engines ensure software quality by leaning on lightweight property-based testing. This article discusses property-based testing and how it is used to verify spreadsheets. It covers the different types of frameworks and tests, code for testing, examples, and more. Adding property tests to code can help reveal bugs. They provide immense value and are among the highest-value tests you can write.

A (MORE) MODERN CSS RESET

This post presents a CSS reset and then breaks down its components and explains them. The CSS reset acts as a useful base to start projects. Modern browsers have improved to the point where CSS resets are almost unnecessary - developers are advised to take components that work well from different resets they find around the web and create their own.

HOW TO SUCCEED IN MRBEAST PRODUCTION (BOOK)

This book, written by MrBeast, is aimed at helping his employees get up to speed on the channels' learnings over the past decade. It is designed to help them set themselves up for success by learning about the channel's problems and how they were overcome. The book covers how to make the best YouTube videos possible, what makes YouTube videos go viral, how to measure the success of content, and much more. It contains information about all of the parts of MrBeast productions.

OPENAI IS REPORTEDLY MOVING AWAY FROM ITS COMPLICATED NON-PROFIT STRUCTURE NEXT YEAR

Sam Altman told OpenAI staff members during their weekly staff meeting that the company will be transitioning to a more traditional for-profit corporate structure next year. OpenAI will remain focused on building AI that benefits everyone. Altman did not specify exactly what the company's corporate structure will look like, but a spokesperson says that non-profit is core to OpenAI's mission and will continue to exist. The company started as a non-profit organization that relied on money from donors, but donations alone were not enough for the cost of computation power and talent required to push its core research forward.

support team.

HERE ARE SOME CONCRETE EXPERIMENTS WITH A PROTOTYPE OF GPT-O1

GPT-o1 is a more capable tool than previous iterations, but it still struggles with the most advanced research mathematical tasks.

EVEN FACEBOOK COULDN'T COMPETE WITH GOOGLE, EX-AD CHIEF SAYS

Facebook wanted to directly challenge Google in the market for display ads sold on websites, but it concluded that it would struggle to effectively compete because of Google's monopoly and the advantages the search giant gives itself within its advertising tools.

AMAZON'S SECRET WEAPON IN CHIP DESIGN IS AMAZON

Amazon Web Services purchased chip designer Annapurna Labs in 2015 and has been designing CPUs, AI accelerators, services, and data centers in a vertically-integrated operation.

FREE STARLINK INTERNET IS COMING TO ALL OF UNITED'S AIRPLANES

United Airlines has signed a deal with SpaceX to deliver Starlink services to all of its aircraft starting in 2025 - in-flight Wi-Fi will be free for passengers.

NEW US SHIPPING RULES TARGET CHINA'S SHEIN AND TEMU

US lawmakers are considering removing an exemption that allows packages worth less than $800 from entering the US without facing tariffs and other fees.

HOW TO LEAD YOUR TEAM WHEN THE HOUSE IS ON FIRE

INVESTMENT.

OPENAI NON-PROFIT STRUCTURE TO CHANGE NEXT YEAR

OpenAI claims to have outgrown its current structure and is working to change things to make it simpler and more attractive to investors.

GROUNDED RETRIEVAL WITH GEMMA 2

Google has pushed Retrieval augmented and Retrieval interleaved generation with Gemma 2. It has improved them with access to many external data sources. This is a guide on fine-tuning.

A REVIEW OF OPENAI O1 AND HOW WE EVALUATE CODING AGENTS

Devin, an AI coding agent, was tested with OpenAI's new o1 models, showing improved reasoning and error diagnosis compared to GPT-4o. The o1-preview model helps Devin effectively analyze, backtrack, and avoid hallucinations. While integration into production systems remains, initial results indicate significant performance gains in autonomous coding tasks.

AUDIOBERT: ENHANCING LANGUAGE MODELS WITH AUDITORY KNOWLEDGE

AuditoryBench is a new dataset for testing auditory knowledge in language models.

MISTRAL'S VISUAL LANGUAGE MODEL

Mistral has released a magnet link for Pixtral, its 12B VLM, which takes images and text as input. Pixtral was trained on top of Mistral's Nemo 12B model with a 400m parameter vision adapter.

IMAGE RESTORATION WITH PROMPTCIR

PromptCIR is a new technology for compressed image restoration. It was developed to address the lack of adaptability in existing methods.

LEARN GPU PROGRAMMING IN YOUR BROWSER

Answer AI uses WebGPU and its new gpu.cpp program to port GPU puzzles into the web as an amazing resource for learning. The puzzles walk learners through how to begin programming GPUs.

3D SEGMENTATION WITH FLASHSPLAT

FlashSplat is a new method for 3D Gaussian Splatting segmentation that eliminates the need for lengthy gradient descent.

NEW TOOL FOR NEUROSCIENCE EXPLORATION

The PIEEG-16 is a new, cost-effective shield for Raspberry Pi that allows real-time measurement and processing of biosignals like EEG, EMG, and ECG. It opens up exciting opportunities for neuroscience research and brain-computer interface experiments without needing network data transfer.

ODAQ: OPEN DATASET OF AUDIO QUALITY

ODAQ is a dataset that addresses the scarcity of openly available collections of audio signals accompanied by corresponding subjective scores of perceived quality.

OPENAI'S NEW MODELS "INSTRUMENTALLY FAKED ALIGNMENT"

OpenAI's new AI models, o1-preview and o1-mini, show advanced reasoning skills, excelling in areas like maths and science. However, these models also exhibit increased risks, including reward hacking and potential misuse for biological threats. Despite these concerns, OpenAI notes that the models are more robust than previous versions but acknowledges the rising risk levels.

CREATE A RAG PIPELINE WITH PINECONE

This quickstart guide details how to set up a pipeline to collect data from Amazon S3, create vector embeddings using OpenAI's model, and store them in Pinecone. Users create a Pinecone index, configure an AI platform with OpenAI, add an Amazon S3 source connector, and schedule the pipeline. Once the data is processed, users can query it in the RAG Sandbox to interact with their dataset.

GOOGLE DEEPMIND TEACHES A ROBOT TO AUTONOMOUSLY TIE ITS SHOES AND FIX FELLOW ROBOTS

DeepMind introduced ALOHA Unleashed and DemoStart to teach robots dexterous tasks by watching humans.

SALESFORCE UNLEASHES ITS FIRST AI AGENTS

Salesforce has debuted Agentforce, its effort to create generative AI bots capable of taking action on their own within established limits.

TRAINING-FREE IMAGE SEGMENTATION

iSeg is a framework for training-free image segmentation that enhances Stable Diffusion's ability to create segmentation masks.

OPTIONS MARKET SEES INTEREST IN ETH

The options market has seen a surge in Ethereum interest, with over 20,000 contracts bought aiming for a $3,000 price level by December 27. While there may be short-term volatility, QCP remains optimistic about locking in yields and preparing for a potential rate cut and bullish scenarios ahead.

SAM BANKMAN-FRIED APPEALS FRAUD CONVICTION, REQUESTS NEW TRIAL

Six months into a 25-year sentence, FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried is appealing his fraud conviction and requesting a new trial. He claims that the former judge was biased against him after he was convicted of seven counts of fraud because of the collapse of the FTX exchange. Bankman-Fried claims that the exchange was never insolvent, as evidenced by the over-100% customer fund recovery.

DEGODS SWITCHES TO HYBRID TOKEN MODEL

DeGods' "404" hybrid token model combines the closedness of NFTs and NFT communities with the accessibility of fungible tokens. This enables broader participation in the community while maintaining the prestige and emotional value of owning unique NFTs. The innovation aims to narrow the current valuation gap between NFTs and memecoins.