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UI COLORS

A Tailwind CSS color generator. Enter a hex code to create a custom color scale.

OGL

OGL is a small, effective WebGL library aimed at developers who like minimal layers of abstraction and are interested in creating their own shaders. Written in ES6 modules with zero dependencies, its API shares many similarities with ThreeJS. However, it is tightly coupled with WebGL and comes with much fewer features.

UBICLOUD

Ubicloud is an open, free, and portable cloud. Think of it as an open alternative to cloud providers, like what Linux is to proprietary operating systems. Ubicloud enables IaaS cloud features on bare metal providers, such as Hetzner, OVH, and AWS Bare Metal.

THE AMAZON PRIME DAY 2023 AWS BILL

ELON MUSK'S CREEP SHOW

HOW THE IMAC SAVED APPLE

HTMX IS PART OF THE GITHUB ACCELERATOR!

MINIMUM VIABLE SECURE PRODUCT

A minimum security baseline checklist for enterprise-ready products and services.

GENERATIVE AI

Google's AI-powered Search Generative Experience will soon be able to summarize articles on the web. The new feature is being rolled out as an early experiment in Google's opt-in Search Labs program. It will first be available in the Google app on Android and iOS, with a desktop launch for the Chrome browser planned for later. The feature will only work on articles that are freely available to the public.

Microsoft is rolling out a new Office default theme to Microsoft 365 subscribers next month. Aptos will replace Calibri as the default after more than 15 years. Yellow has been removed from the color palette and replaced with a dark green and one of the lighter blues has been replaced with a dark teal. The default style in Word and Outlook will now be easier to read and navigate. An image showing the difference between the old and new themes is available in the article.

META’S AI AGENTS LEARN TO MOVE BY COPYING TODDLERS

Meta has released the MyoSuite 2.0 collection, a project that applies machine learning to biomechanical control problems. The MyoSuite platform includes a collection of baseline musculoskeletal models and tasks for researchers to attempt. Emulating the human body is extremely complicated. The research could help develop more capable robots and realistic avatars for the metaverse.

INTUITIVE MACHINES SAYS IT IS READY TO FLY TO THE MOON

Intuitive Machines is ready to launch its Nova-C lander to the Moon. The company is competing with other US companies for NASA-funded missions to deliver science experiments and other payloads to the surface of the Moon. Intuitive Machines has booked a flight on SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket and is expected to launch in November. It has a backup window in December in case of any issues.

LAYERFORM

Layerform is a Terraform wrapper for building reusable infrastructure. It uses plain Terraform files and layers to allow teams to reuse core pieces of infrastructure. Engineers are able to spawn only the infrastructure layers they need. Layerform makes development infrastructure much cheaper and quicker to spin up.

THE COST OF CONVENIENCE

Abstractions can end up causing frustrations with developers if not done right. This blog post takes a look at what makes a good developer experience. Developers should think about their target audience and what skills the audience is likely to bring to the table when creating abstractions. The abstraction should rely on these skills to minimize cognitive friction.

REVENUE SHARE

Apple could be forced to open up iOS to third-party app stores in the EU next year. Setapp has officially announced its mobile app store and is now taking applications from developers. It is offering developers access to a dedicated community of users, seamless onboarding, and the ability to offload commerce and distribution. Developers have the potential to earn up to 90% of revenue from user fees per month.

SAYS SLACK REPORT

Workers in Asia spend the most time on performative work according to a survey of more than 18,000 desk workers. Performative work involves spending time appearing busy rather than doing work. South Korea and the US are tied in first place as countries where workers spent the least amount of time doing performative work. Worker focus on appearing busy is likely influenced by the way productivity is measured.

GOOGLE'S NEXT BIG SWING AT AI RUMORED TO LAUNCH THIS FALL

Gemini combines the text generation capabilities of large language models with image generation to create a multifunctional product that is able to create contextual images.

HOW IS LLAMA.CPP POSSIBLE?

This article explains how LLaMa.cpp is able to run on consumer devices even though large models are supposed to require expensive GPUs.

ITS BIGGEST BOTTLENECK

America's power grid is under unprecedented strain due to climate change and it desperately needs modernizing.

OpenAI is using GPT-4 to build a scalable, consistent, and customizable content moderation system that can aid in developing policies and swiftly iterating on policy changes.

THINKING FAST AND SLOPES

Prospect theory, an explanation for how people make decisions, may not be entirely applicable to the current economic landscape - embracing both caution and boldness allows people to navigate this new era of uncertainty and capitalize on the opportunities it presents.

HOW CAR THEFT WENT HIGH-TECH

An overview of the vulnerabilities present in modern-day cars.

AI AND THE MEMORY WALL

The rise of LLaMA.cpp was surprising to many. Why can an ordinary MacBook run state-of-the-art models only a bit slower than a mighty A100? The answer is that when you're only doing a single batch, one token at a time, memory bandwidth is the bottleneck and the gap between the M2's memory bandwidth and the A100's is not that large.

GOOGLE UPGRADES SEARCH GENERATION EXPERIENCE

Google is rolling out a few new updates to its Search Generative Experience, the company’s AI-powered Search. These updates include automatic term definitions, programming assistance, and AI-generated summaries.

HUGGING FACE

IBM and Hugging Face are releasing IBM's geospatial foundation model, crafted using NASA satellite data, to the public. Built through a collaboration with NASA, this model aims to democratize AI's role in climate science and Earth studies, addressing the challenges of handling large environmental datasets. The model has already shown a 15% improvement in satellite data analysis and can be adapted for various tasks like tracking deforestation and monitoring greenhouse gasses.

BAYESIAN FLOW NETWORKS

Unifying the modeling of discrete or continuous data is a challenge. More so when attempting to maintain a probabilistic likelihood interpretation of the output. This new paper showcases a new class of generative models with a pile of interesting properties such as no forward pass, gradient-based sample guidance for discrete data, and competitive language modeling likelihood.

INSTRUCTION TUNING LARGE CODE MODELS

Most code models are instruction tuned on GPT-4 distillation data. This new work shows how to avoid that, introduces an extended human eval dataset, and gets 46.7 on the original human eval. While this is impressive, it showcases the extreme gap between closed and open code models.

ENHANCED VIRTUAL TRY-ON WITH DIFFUSION MODELS

Virtual try-on tasks, where clothes from one image are transferred to another, are challenging, especially at higher resolutions. Many methods use Generative Adversarial Networks. The solution presented in this paper, DCI-VTON, uses a diffusion model combined with an exemplar-based inpainting and a warping module. This combination ensures that clothing details are preserved and produces realistic virtual try-on images.

ADVANCED FOOD IMAGE SEGMENTATION

While the Segment Anything Model (SAM) excels in segmentation tasks across various datasets, it misses specific class details for masks. FoodSAM overcomes this. It combines SAM's strengths with new features to segment food images more effectively, even identifying individual food items and other objects in scenes.

OPENDREAM

OpenDream brings layering, non-destructive editing, portability, and easy-to-write extensions to your Stable Diffusion workflow.

A GUIDE TO DESIGNING AND SHIPPING AI DEVELOPER TOOLS

This article outlines ten key design principles for effective AI developer tools, drawing from GitHub’s experience designing, launching, and extending Copilot. They encompass leveraging natural language, addressing developer pain points, gathering meaningful feedback, acknowledging biases, and prioritizing customization, accessibility, performance, and continuous improvement in AI models.

CAN CHATGPT BECOME A CONTENT MODERATOR?

ChatGPT creator OpenAI has been using its most advanced large language model to enforce the company’s content policies.

HUMAN CREATIVITY AMONGST AI DOMINANCE

More marketers and content producers are turning to AI for efficiency. Over time, this will lead to a level of genericism in the market. The antidote will be authentic human production.

KNERON TO RELEASE AI CHIP THIS YEAR

Kneron, an AI edge company, announced that it will ship its new neural processing unit chips by the end of the year. The KL730 chips are specifically designed for machine learning and AI applications and they are said to be 3 to 4 times more energy efficient than previous chips.

TEACH A COMPUTER TO GHOTI

Quick read on why AI is on track to disrupt. A little cheeky too.

BINANCE FILES FOR PROTECTIVE ORDER AGAINST SEC

Binance is seeking a protective court order against the SEC amid intensifying scrutiny from the regulator. The company is arguing the SEC's requests for information are overly demanding. Binance aims to limit the regulator to four employee depositions and exclude BAM's CEO and CFO. The SEC previously accused the firm of deceiving investors and misusing customer funds, which Binance denies.

DEPART

Several executives, including CFO Jonathan Hugh, have left crypto market maker GSR as the firm has begun to scale back its crypto operations. GSR claims its retreat has mostly been due to an intense bear market and heavy regulatory scrutiny on the industry. It has been one of the main market makers in crypto since 2013, but it expanded rapidly during the latest bull market, growing its headcount to over 300 and bringing in executives from Wall Street. Sources familiar with the matter seem to imply that GSR’s pullback can be attributed to bringing these executives in at the height of the market, incurring significant costs, and being out of touch with the crypto industry.

SAFE{CORE} PROTOCOL: SOLVING THE WICKED PROBLEM OF SMART ACCOUNTS

Safe has released a whitepaper about its Safe{Core} Protocol, aimed at transitioning on-chain accounts to smart accounts. The protocol addresses several issues, such as fragmentation, vendor lock-in, and security. The Safe{Core} Protocol represents a unified standard that can support a smoother transition to smart accounts, reduce smart contract risks, ensure account portability, and maintain interoperability. This comes amid growing concerns about externally owned accounts, which are struggling with user experience problems.

Sei Labs deployed its long-awaited L1, Sei, to mainnet yesterday. The native token SEI is now on exchanges. Rather than focusing on solving technical issues, Sei’s core focus is making trading easier for social platforms, games, and NFTs. Boasting 10x the speed of Solana, Sei achieves transaction finality in 250 milliseconds. More than 200 teams have started building on Sei. 7.5m unique wallets were onboarded in the testnet phase and some large, established protocols like Sushiswap have integrated the chain into their offerings.

THE HIDDEN COSTS OF MODULAR SYSTEMS

This article challenges the prevailing view that modularity is key to scalability in crypto. It argues that modular systems significantly increase complexity for app developers both technically and socially. The article also dispels the myth that modular chains execute code faster, asserting that separating data availability and execution doesn't inherently boost performance. It challenges other popular beliefs regarding modular chains' benefits, ultimately arguing that fully integrated systems are more user-friendly and beneficial to developers.

UNDERSTANDING CRYPTO IN AFRICA

The author of this article took a nine-day trip to Kenya and Nigeria and recorded his observations on the crypto scene there. The people he met in the meetups he went to demonstrated interest in receiving payment via cryptocurrency, specifically stablecoins like USDT. The Binance P2P marketplace was a widely popular platform amongst locals to swap to and from their native currencies. It seems that Africa is ripe for even more crypto adoption as it offers a sense of stability and empowerment that many Africans do not have with their local currencies.

WITH CRYPTO VALUES?

In this essay, Vitalik Buterin discusses X's fact-checking tool Community Notes, how it works, and the crossover it has with crypto. While not crypto-related, Buterin claims the Community Notes product has the "crypto values," of open sourcing and decentralization. Community Notes is taking strides in combating misinformation and polarization with its algorithm, which determines the visibility of notes based on widespread user votes. Despite some of its flaws and complexity, the open-source nature of the project makes it verifiable and transparent.

BINANCE CONNECT IS SHUTTING DOWN ON AUG 16

Binance announced it will discontinue its Binance Connect service as of Aug 16. It will concentrate more on its primary products and long-term objectives. Binance Connect, a tool that helped merchants to accept crypto payments, supported 50 cryptocurrencies and all key payment methods. It was launched only a year ago in 2022.

GOLDMAN PENCILS IN FIRST FED RATE CUT FOR SECOND QUARTER OF 2024

Goldman Sachs predicts the Fed will begin lowering interest rates by June 2024 as inflation nears its target. It forecasts a quarterly cut pace, aiming for a 3-3.25% funds rate.

THE ARGUMENT FOR BITCOIN AND ETHEREUM AS HARD ASSETS

BTC and ETH have hit escape velocity where they are viewed as legitimate assets by the wealthy. As opposed to physical assets, they cannot depreciate, degrade, or be seized. These differentiators make these assets even more interesting as stores of value for the wealthy

TRACKING BASE’S REVENUE

Base has generated $1.25m in revenue in the past 2 weeks while Optimism and Arbitrum have only generated $404k and $424k respectively.

A NOVEL DEFENSE AGAINST ERC-4626 INFLATION ATTACKS

ERC-4626, an ERC-20 extension, introduces token vaults, susceptible to inflation attacks where attackers manipulate share values. OpenZeppelin proposes several defenses in this article.

APPLE BACKGROUND TASK MANAGER BYPASS

Patrick Wardle presented three techniques to bypass macOS' malware detection feature at DEFCON. The Background Task Manager functions by alerting users and third-party security tools when new persistent tasks are installed. Wardle discovered multiple exploit paths, including two that don’t require root access.