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MY DEFAULT APPS OF 2024

This person tracked their default apps throughout the year to see how their app use changed.

ASK HN: ARE YOU UNABLE TO FIND EMPLOYMENT? (HACKER NEWS THREAD)

This Hacker News thread contains a discussion on the state of employment for software engineers and the effect that offshore/immigrant workers are having on the industry.

HOW I RUN LLMS LOCALLY

Running large language models locally gives you total control over your data.

TEN THINGS IN TECH I FOUND JOY IN DURING 2024

Listing the things that you found joy in throughout the year can be a cathartic exercise.

AI NEEDS SO MUCH POWER, IT'S MAKING YOURS WORSE

PEOPLE WHO ARE GOING TO CHANGE THE WORLD

A list of people who are going to change the world, along with links to their work and X accounts.

LEAKED DOCUMENTS SHOW OPENAI HAS A VERY CLEAR DEFINITION OF ‘AGI'

Microsoft and OpenAI's definition of artificial general intelligence (AGI) is 'a system that can generate at least $100 billion in profits'. The companies agreed on the definition in 2023 as part of an agreement which had a clause that stated that OpenAI would stop allowing Microsoft to use any new technology it develops after AGI is achieved. OpenAI and Microsoft have been on diverging paths for some time now. Microsoft needs its own proprietary tech and OpenAI needs more money.

DEEPSEEK-V3 IS NOW THE BEST OPEN SOURCE AI MODEL

DeepSeek, a Chinese AI research lab, has released DeepSeek-V3, a Mixture-of-Experts model that features a total of 671B parameters. The model was trained on 14.8 trillion tokens. It has been released on GitHub along with a detailed paper outlining its capabilities. The model outperformed Meta's flagship Llama 3.1 405B parameter model and many other closed-source models on benchmark scores.

CHINA LAUNCHES 1ST SET OF SPACECRAFT FOR PLANNED 13,000-SATELLITE BROADBAND CONSTELLATION

China launched 10 internet satellites on a Long March 5B rocket earlier this month. The satellites entered their predetermined orbits smoothly and the mission was a complete success. They are the first batch for Guowang, a broadband megaconstellation in low earth orbit (LEO) that will eventually consist of nearly 13,000 spacecraft. Guowang will be one of two Chinese versions of SpaceX's Starlink LEO megaconstellation.

STARTUPS BEGIN GEOENGINEERING THE SEA

Captura is a company that plans to electrochemically strip carbon dioxide out of the ocean, store or use it, then return the water to the sea, where it will naturally absorb more carbon dioxide from the air. It will start pumping as much of the Pacific ocean as it can in a few months at Hawaii's Keāhole Point. Besides Captura, there are dozens of similar field trials and pilot projects that will start scaling up their facilities in 2025.

GHOSTTY

Ghostty is a terminal emulator that doesn't force you to choose between speed, features, or native UIs. It can be used as a drop-in replacement for your existing terminal emulator. In addition to being a standalone terminal emulator, Ghostty is also a C-compatible library for embedding a fast, feature-rich terminal emulator in any 3rd party project.

ACTUAL WEB RENDERING IN TERMINAL

awrit is a full graphical web browser for Kitty terminal with mouse and keyboard support. It works best with Kitty v0.28 or newer. awrit can be used to display documentation from DevDocs, watch the changes from Vite come to life, create a tiled layout without a tiling window manager, and add fancy UI using web technologies.

THOUGHTS ON THE EVE OF AGI

The release of o3 suggests the next few years are going to be insane. This post details some predictions about how AI will change the world over the next few years. The predictions cover areas such as AI agents, the software engineering industry, science and research, war and societal chaos, what happens if AI goes rogue, and more.

WHY GOOGLE BOUGHT CHARACTER AI

Google may have bought Character AI because Character AI had figured out how to run its models without costing a fortune. Character AI was able to serve millions of users without bleeding money. Google is now giving away flash models for free on AI Studio - this wouldn't be possible without figuring out how to make inference really cheap. Pre-training has hit diminishing returns, so companies are shifting toward chain-of-thought prompting and inference-time optimizations.

CHATGPT SEARCH VS. GOOGLE: A DEEP DIVE ANALYSIS OF 62 QUERIES

ChatGPT search is surprisingly competitive when it comes to informational queries, but Google is better at almost all queries except content gap analysis.

EVEN APPLE WASN'T ABLE TO MAKE VR HEADSETS MAINSTREAM IN 2024

While Apple keeps adding cool new software features, there still isn't an immediate, obvious reason to buy a Vision Pro.

SCIENTISTS EXPLORE LONGEVITY DRUGS FOR DOGS THAT COULD ALSO ‘EXTEND HUMAN LIFE'

Loyal, a US biotech start-up, plans to release LOY-002, a pill that could give dogs a minimum of one extra year of healthy life, early next year.

SECONDS SINCE THE EPOCH

POSIX time assumes the length of the day is 86,400 seconds, which is not always true.

SOME NOTES ON THE DEEPSEEK-V3 TECHNICAL REPORT :)

DeepSeek-V3's training only cost $5.576 million - it took around 55 days on a 2048xH800 cluster.

DNS NAMESERVERS

The optimal approach for a domain when considering both performance and operational resilience is for the domain to be served by two distinct dual-stack diverse anycast nameservers.

PRICE WAR INTENSIFIES AS AMAZON REPORTEDLY TARGETS CHINESE SELLERS OFFERING CHEAP GOODS ON TEMU

Amazon has reportedly instructed some of its Chinese cross-border merchants to stop listing lower-priced products on Temu. Temu has seen rapid growth in its market share in the US - it was the most downloaded free app in the country in 2024. The site's aggressive pricing strategy has forced Amazon to take action. Amazon has responded to the rumors by stating that sellers have the freedom to determine their own sales strategies and can set prices for their products on Amazon and other sales channels.

META TO ADD DISPLAYS TO RAY BAN SMART GLASSES IN 2025

Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses may get displays as soon as the second half of 2025. The new displays will be used to show notifications and responses from Meta's virtual assistant. Plans to turn Orion, its augmented reality glasses prototype, into a consumer product have been brought forward, though a release is still likely to be years away. More big tech firms, like Qualcomm, Samsung, and Google, are entering into the mixed-reality glasses space. Apple may be releasing a cheaper version of the Apple Vision Pro at some point after 2027.

AI DECODES THE CALLS OF THE WILD

Animal communications have patterns and structures that convey information to other members of that animal's species. A growing number of biologists and computer scientists are applying AI to animal sounds to reveal what they are saying to each other. AI-assisted studies have found that both African savannah elephants and common marmoset monkeys give names to their companions. As these computer models improve, they may enable scientists to investigate animals' self-awareness.

TRANSPARENT BAMBOO: A FIREPROOF AND WATERPROOF ALTERNATIVE TO GLASS

Chinese scientists have turned bamboo into a transparent material that is resistant to fire and water and suppresses smoke. The team used the same method used to turn wood transparent to turn the bamboo transparent - bamboo's internal structure and chemical composition is very similar to wood. The resulting transparent bamboo can be used as a building material. When used as a substrate for perovskite solar cells, it acts like a light management layer, boosting cells' power conversion efficiency by 15.29%.

SHORTEST

Shortest is an AI-powered natural language end-to-end testing framework. It lets developers write tests in plain English and let AI handle the execution. Shortest uses Anthropic's Claude API. It is built on Playwright and has GitHub integration with 2FA support.

A CSS WISHLIST FOR 2025

2024 was a great year for CSS. Several features, including cross-document view transitions, scroll-driven animations, anchor positioning, and animate to height: auto were introduced. This article suggests more CSS features that developers want, such as a conditional if() statement, CSS mixins, anchor positioning in more browsers, and a way to balance flex-wrap.

AI MODELS ARE GETTING SMARTER. NEW TESTS ARE RACING TO CATCH UP

Evaluations (or evals) help researchers understand what advanced AI systems can do. Designing effective evals is challenging and expensive and the field is underfunded. Modern AI systems regularly achieve top scores on many popular evals, making it harder to judge how quickly they are improving. Companies, nonprofits, and governments have created new sets of much more challenging evals in response, but AI systems are making astonishing progress, even on the most advanced tests.

MARK ZUCKERBERG WENT ALL IN ON META'S AI STRATEGY THIS YEAR. THE PRESSURE BUILDS IN 2025

Meta said in April that it would raise spending levels by as much as $10 billion to support infrastructure investments for its AI efforts. The announcement sent shares plunging, but several months later, Meta's stock price has hit a new record. AI has become Meta's top priority, directly impacting the company's business and potentially paving the way for future revenue opportunities. This all-encompassing approach to AI has led analysts to predict that Meta will be positioned for more success in 2025.

APPLE APPROACHES $4 TRILLION VALUATION AS INVESTORS BET ON AI MOMENTUM

Investors are enthusiastic about artificial intelligence as they predict that it will result in a supercycle of iPhone upgrades.

ASK HN: RESOURCES FOR GENERAL PURPOSE GPU DEVELOPMENT ON APPLE'S M* CHIPS? (HACKER NEWS THREAD)

A thread full of links to resources for learning general purpose GPU development on Apple's M-series chips.

SERVER-SENT EVENTS (SSE) ARE UNDERRATED

Server-Sent Events, a one-way communication channel from server to client over HTTP, offer a simpler, often overlooked alternative to WebSockets.

WHAT WAS THE GOLDEN AGE OF ANTIBIOTICS, AND HOW CAN WE SPARK A NEW ONE?

This article provides a history of antibiotics, describes how they were developed, explains why antibiotic development has slowed down, and gives some ideas on how to reignite antibiotic development today.

CASHING IN ON GIF BY CHARGING ROYALTIES

GIF virtually vanished from the Internet for about 10 years due to it being patented.

HONDA AND NISSAN TO MERGE, HONDA WILL TAKE THE LEAD

Nissan and Honda want to merge by 2026 to create the world's third-largest car company.

🎉 _Special Holiday Offer_ for TLDR readers! Try for $1

APPLE JOINS GOOGLE ANTITRUST FIGHT TO PROTECT $20B SEARCH PARTNERSHIP

Apple is seeking to intervene in Google's US antitrust trial over online search, saying that Google can no longer adequately represent its interests in the case. The company has concerns over its multi-billion dollar revenue-sharing agreement with Google. Apple received an estimated $20 billion from Google in 2022 for making Google the default search engine on Safari. The trial could potentially force Google to divest its Chrome browser or Android operating system to restore competition in the online search market.

GOOGLE IS USING ANTHROPIC'S CLAUDE TO IMPROVE ITS GEMINI AI

Google contractors working to improve Gemini are comparing its answers against outputs produced by Anthropic's Claude. It is unknown whether Google has permission for its use of Claude in testing against Gemini. Anthropic's terms of service forbids customers from accessing Claude to build competing products or services or train competing AI models without approval. Google is a major investor in Anthropic.

NASA SPACECRAFT JUST PLUNGED INTO THE SUN AND BROKE STUNNING RECORDS

The Parker Solar Probe swooped through the Sun's atmosphere early on Christmas Eve. Flying around 3.8 million miles above the solar surface, the probe was designed to explore how solar storms are formed. It is fitted with instruments to measure and image solar winds, which may enable us to better forecast when and where a potent coronal mass ejection or solar flare may hit. Solar storms have huge implications for energy grids and communications systems on Earth.

UNITREE B2-W ROBOT DOG GETS UPGRADED, CAN NOW PERFORM A HANDSTAND

The Unitree B2-W robot dog can now do handstands thanks to a few upgrades, including high-powered wheel motors, M107 joint modules, and replaceable wheel/foot legs. It is equipped with a 32 wire automotive-grade LiDAR, a depth camera, and an ultra large 2200Wh battery, and can achieve a top speed of 12.4 miles per hour. It can travel 31 miles with an 88 pound load and pull up to 220 pounds. A video of the robot dog performing tricks is available in the article.

AUTHORTRAIL

AuthorTrail lets users explore Git repositories' history by author. It can find and browse files users have contributed to. Once found, users are able to quickly access to view and edit them. AuthorTrail features file search by author email, hierarchical file tree visualization, a built-in code viewer with syntax highlighting, quick open in the default editor, and dark mode support.

ASK HN: PROGRAMMERS WHO DON'T USE AUTOCOMPLETE/LSP, HOW DO YOU DO IT? (HACKER NEWS THREAD)

Many IDE features, like autocomplete, language servers, and Copilot, can be taken for granted today. However, not every developer uses these tools. Some developers work in environments where they aren't able to access IDEs (for example, on remote servers that only have Vim), so they have had to learn different ways of doing things. Organizing software in a way where every piece of code has a clear and logical place is a skill - tooling that helps with code navigation can result in code that lacks structure.

HOW TO (HOPEFULLY ETHICALLY) MAKE MONEY OFF OF AGI

This article contains an interview with Will Eden from Cosmos, Zvi Mowshowitz (an economist who spent 2.5 years trading at Jane Street Capital), and Noah Kreutter, who has roughly four years of quant-y finance experience at IMC and Bridgewater. The interview covers how to construct a portfolio that will go well when Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) becomes a bigger deal, the broad market effects of AGI, career capital in an AGI world, debt in interest effect of AGI, and much more. The interview was in November last year - the interviewer recently posted an update showing that the investment advice in the interview backtested well.

I SENSED ANXIETY AND FRUSTRATION AT NEURIPS'24

Late-year PhD students and postdocs at NeurIPS'24 expressed anxiety and frustration as the job market looks and feels very different from what they expected when they were applying for PhD programs five or so years ago. Years ago, competition for artificial intelligence researchers with PhDs was fierce - companies were recruiting them to prepare themselves for a revolution. Many of the researchers, who were paid well, were free to choose what they wanted to work on and publish whatever they wanted to publish. This incentivized a large number of brilliant students to apply to PhD programs. Universities have started to train undergraduate, graduate, and master's students on these technologies, making PhDs less valuable to companies.

DON'T LOOK NOW, BUT CHINA'S AI IS CATCHING UP FAST

Despite restrictions in buying advanced chips, China is showing signs of catching up with America's leading AI models more quickly than many in the industry had expected.

ASK HN: HAVE YOU EVER TAKEN A CAREER BREAK OR GAP YEAR TO HACK? (HACKER NEWS THREAD)

Taking a career break can be good for mental health and growth, but you have to weigh the decision against the opportunity cost of lost earnings, the amount of savings you have available, and your sense of value for the time you'll take off.

NETFLIX SUES BROADCOM'S VMWARE OVER US VIRTUAL MACHINE PATENTS

Netflix says that VMware's vSphere virtualization platform for deploying and managing virtual machines infringes on its patents related to virtual-machine communications.

APPLE'S BAD BLOOD WITH NVIDIA CONTINUES, AFTER DECADES OF FIGHTING

Apple is looking to further sever its ties with Nvidia by partnering with Broadcom to design its own AI server chip.

OPEN SOURCE MAINTAINERS ARE DROWNING IN JUNK BUG REPORTS WRITTEN BY AI

AI has ushered in a new era of slop security reports for open source.

OPENAI ‘CONSIDERED' BUILDING A HUMANOID ROBOT

OpenAI closed its robotics division in 2021 but it recently explored the topic of building its own humanoid robot again.