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ELON MUSK'S XAI STARTUP IS VALUED AT $50 BILLION IN NEW FUNDING ROUND

xAI has raised $5 billion in a funding round that values the startup at $50 billion. It was valued at $24 billion when it raised $6 billion in the spring. Investor interest in Elon Musk's companies has increased since Donald Trump won the presidential election. Musk spent hundreds of millions of dollars boosting Trump's campaign and is co-leading an effort to cut government spending.

HOW MARK ZUCKERBERG HAS FULLY REBUILT META AROUND LLAMA

The Llama story could be a pivotal chapter in the ongoing philosophical debate between open-source AI models and closed models. Llama is at the core of a complete strategic pivot by Meta to go all in on generative AI. The release of Llama 2 in July 2023 marked the beginning of a remarkable comeback for Meta and Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg is now seen as a champion of tech democratization.

SPACEX JUST GOT EXACTLY WHAT IT WANTED FROM THE FAA FOR TEXAS STARSHIP LAUNCHES

The Federal Aviation Administration has indicated that it will grant SpaceX permission to increase the number of Starship launches in South Texas to 25 per year from the current limit of five. SpaceX will likely be allowed to continue increasing the size and power of the Super Heavy booster stage and Starship upper stage. The FAA's environmental review is ongoing and not yet finalized. If finalized, SpaceX will have the regulatory greenlight to meet its aspirations for launches in 2025.

SCIENTISTS IDENTIFY TOMATO GENES TO TWEAK FOR SWEETER FRUIT

Scientists in China have created gene-edited versions of domesticated tomatoes that are large but also sweet. They had identified two genes that stop sugar production during ripening. Preventing these genes from working properly increased sugar content in fruits by up to 30% compared to unmodified plants. The new tomatoes could be in supermarkets within three to five years.

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FIREDUCKS

FireDucks is a compiler-accelerated dataframe library for Python with a fully-compatible pandas API. It allows developers to accelerate pandas without any manual code changes. FireDucks can reduce cloud usage fees and lower the environmental impact of cloud computing.

AWS LAMBDA TURNS 10: A RARE LOOK AT THE DOC THAT STARTED IT

Amazon has an expectation that, regardless of role or seniority, if you have a good idea, you put pen to paper and craft a compelling narrative. Writing forces authors to be clear, precise, and detailed. The strategy of writing down good ideas is a proven method that can produce great products. This article contains a slightly modified version of the document that launched one of AWS' foundational services, Lambda. Many things have changed since the document was written as the service has evolved quite a bit in the last decade.

HOW GOOGLE SPENT 15 YEARS CREATING A CULTURE OF CONCEALMENT

Google systematically told employees to destroy messages, avoid certain words, and copy lawyers into communications as often as possible in an attempt to avoid antitrust suits. The company made deletion the default in its internal communications. This article looks at how Google developed this distrustful culture. While companies would like instant messages to be as ephemeral as real-life conversations, regulators and litigants see them as fair game.

A CHINESE LAB HAS RELEASED A ‘REASONING' AI MODEL TO RIVAL OPENAI'S O1

DeepSeek has released a preview of DeepSeek-R1, a reasoning model the firm claims is competitive with OpenAI's o1. DeepSeek-R1 can reason through tasks, plan ahead, and perform a series of actions that help the model arrive at an answer. The company plans to open source DeepSeek-R1 and release an API. It is backed by a Chinese quantitative hedge fund called High-Flyer Capital Management.

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CALL FOR DEVELOPER PROJECTS

This post lists projects that would be a good fit for Bluesky's AT Protocol.

BUSINESS SPENDING ON AI SURGED 500% THIS YEAR TO $13.8 BILLION, SAYS MENLO VENTURES

OpenAI ceded market share in enterprise AI while Anthropic doubled its share from 12% to 24%.

OPENNEXT

OpenNext is a Next.js adapter for AWS that takes the Next.js build output and converts it into packages that can be deployed across a variety of environments.

FACEBOOK MESSENGER GAINS SIRI INTEGRATION, AUDIO AND VIDEO VOICE MESSAGES, AND MORE

Facebook Messenger has been updated with Siri call integration, new AI features, support for HD video calls, and audio and voice messages.

WHY DON'T YOU MOVE ABROAD?

People should live where they are the happiest - the internet allows tech workers to find a balance between career, wealth, and happiness while living wherever they want.

ZOMATO CEO DEEPINDER GOYAL IS HIRING 'HUNGRY' CHIEF OF STAFF BUT DEMANDS RS 20 LAKH TO JOIN HIM

Zomato is hiring a chief of staff - the position is not paid for the first year and the candidate will have to donate Rs 20 lakh to Feeding India, a non-profit organization that Zomato runs.

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SPACEX COMPLETES SIXTH STARSHIP FLIGHT, SPLASHES DOWN BOTH BOOSTER AND SPACECRAFT

SpaceX launched the sixth Starship test flight yesterday near Brownsville, Texas, before intentionally splashing down in the Indian Ocean an hour later. The company had originally aimed to catch the rocket's Super Heavy booster with its launch tower but decided to splash down the booster in the Gulf of Mexico instead as it did not clear the 'commit criteria' needed for the catch attempt. This was the first time Starship made a daylight splashdown in the Indian Ocean. Video of the flight test is available in the article.

META FORMS PRODUCT GROUP TO BUILD AI TOOLS FOR BUSINESSES

Meta is creating a new product unit to develop AI tools for business. It will be led by Clara Shih, who was most recently the CEO of Salesforce AI. Shih will be responsible for building new tools and getting businesses to adopt them. Most of Meta's business-facing AI tools have so far centered around ad creation and optimization. The new product group will build tools that create deeper customer relationships beyond advertising.

I'M A NEUROSCIENTIST WHO TAUGHT RATS TO DRIVE

A study in which rats were taught how to drive found that rats housed in enriched environments learned to drive faster than those in standard cages. The finding supports the idea that complex environments enhance neuroplasticity. The study found that the rats had an intense motivation for their driving training. Its results suggest that anticipating positive experiences may help drive persistence to keep searching for life's rewards. Pictures and videos of the rats and their automobiles are available in the article.

NEW FASTEST SUPERCOMPUTER WILL SIMULATE NUKE TESTING

The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has unveiled the world's fastest supercomputer, El Capitan. El Capitan can perform over 2,700 quadrillion operations per second at its peak. It will be used to model and predict nuclear weapon performance, aging effects, and safety. It will also aid in fusion and AI projects. Planning for the system began in 2018, with construction starting four years ago. El Capitan was built by Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which has built all of the current top 3 supercomputers.

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FIREPROOF REALTIME LEDGER

Fireproof is a realtime database that runs on any backend. It can create multi-player by default apps that can sync changes between browsers and backend functions. Fireproof is network aware, encrypted, and multi-writer safe. It is designed for real-time collaboration with CRDTs and offers cryptographic causal integrity for all operations. Built for the web, Fireproof has a small package size and no WebAssembly.

ANDROID 16 PREVIEW

The Android 16 Preview SDK and tools are now available for download. This page contains all the information needed to make apps compatible with the next version of Android. The final release is planned for next year. Android 16 is expected to reach Platform Stability at Beta 3 in March 2025.

US GOVERNMENT COMMISSION PUSHES MANHATTAN PROJECT-STYLE AI INITIATIVE

A US congressional commission has proposed a Manhattan Project-style initiative to fund the development of AI systems that will be as smart or smarter than humans. The Manhattan Project was a large-scale collaboration between the US government and the private sector that produced the first atomic bombs. The commission says that public-private partnerships will be key in advancing artificial general intelligence, but did not give any specific investment strategies in its report. The commission also recommends repealing the de minimis trade exemption that allows Chinese goods under $800 to bypass tariffs with minimal paperwork and inspection.

THE DEEP SEA

This site shows visitors what lies underneath the surface of the sea. Just scroll down and you will see what creatures can be found at different depths. It goes all the way down to The Challenger Deep, the deepest point in the ocean at 10,924 meters below sea level. Humans reached this level in 1960, about nine years before the moon landing.

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A YEAR AFTER DITCHING WAITLIST, STARLINK SAYS IT IS “SOLD OUT” IN PARTS OF US

The Starlink waitlist is back in certain parts of the US.

INTEGRATE

Integrate is a Rust library for performing numerical integration of real-valued functions.

BUILDING SQL-BASED OBSERVABILITY WITH CLICKHOUSE AND GRAFANA

This post summarizes a developer's experience in serving for and implementing an optimal observability stack at their workplace.

MINECRAFT ENTERS REAL WORLD WITH $110M GLOBAL THEME PARK DEAL

Minecraft and Merlin Entertainments will open Minecraft-themed attractions in the UK and US in 2026 and 2027 - there are plans to expand to other countries and territories.

ONCALL SHIFT SHOULD BE TUESDAY TO TUESDAY

Moving oncall from Monday to Monday to Tuesday to Tuesday would improve everyone's quality of life and also improve schedule accuracy.

GITHUB PROJECTS TARGETED WITH MALICIOUS COMMITS TO FRAME RESEARCHER

Multiple GitHub projects have been targeted with malicious commits and pull requests - a few of the accounts involved in the project attempted to frame security researcher Mike Bell as the culprit.

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DOJ WILL PUSH GOOGLE TO SELL CHROME TO BREAK SEARCH MONOPOLY

Justice Department antitrust officials will ask federal judge Amit Mehta to force Alphabet to sell Google's Chrome browser as part of the ruling that Google illegally monopolized the search market. They will also ask to implement measures related to artificial intelligence and Google's Android smartphone operating system. The proposals have the potential to reshape the online search market and AI industry. States are still considering adding some proposals and some details could change. Google has plans to appeal the antitrust ruling.

NVIDIA'S DELAYED BLACKWELL AI CHIPS ARE OVERHEATING IN SERVERS

Nvidia's upcoming Blackwell GPUs are prone to overheating when connected to each other on server racks. The issue is due to the server rack designed for Blackwell, which can connect up to 72 GPUs at a time. The racks have been redesigned, but this could cause further delays. Nvidia originally said that the GPUs could ship as soon as Q2 2024 before it encountered challenges.

A.I. CHATBOTS DEFEATED DOCTORS AT DIAGNOSING ILLNESS

ChatGPT outperformed doctors in diagnosing disease in a study that looked at whether the chatbot could help doctors diagnose illnesses. Doctors who had help from the chatbot performed only slightly better than doctors without the tool, showing how doctors sometimes will stick to their diagnoses even when presented with a potentially better option. Many of the doctors didn't know how to use chatbots and treated ChatGPT like a search engine for direct questions, which could have affected results. Only a small fraction of the doctors copied the entire case history into the chatbot and asked it to answer the entire question.

SPACEX POISED FOR NEXT STARSHIP FLIGHT TEST NOV. 19

SpaceX launched three Falcon 9 rockets in less than 24 hours on November 17-18 ahead of a planned flight test of its Starship-Super Heavy vehicle today. Falcon 9 has reached 113 launches this year and 398 since it debuted in June 2010. Starship Flight 6 is slated to launch at around 5-5:30 PM from SpaceX's Starbase complex at Boca Chica Beach, Texas. SpaceX is hoping to catch the Super Heavy booster again using a pair of mechanical arms on its launch gantry and relight a Raptor engine in flight. Starship will not reach orbital velocity and will make a targeted splashdown in the Indian Ocean.

RUST FOUNDATION RELEASES PROBLEM STATEMENT ON C++/RUST INTEROPERABILITY

The Rust Foundation's problem statement on the challenges and opportunities in C++ and Rust interoperability outlines three key strategic approaches: improve existing tools and address tactical issues within Rust to reduce interoperability friction and risk in the short term, build consensus around long-term goals and develop the tactical approaches to begin pursuing them, and engage with the C++ community and committee to improve the quality of interoperation for both languages to help realize the mutual goals of safety and performance. The 'interop initiative' was launched earlier this year to make cross-language development more accessible and approachable for the wider programming community.

DOCUMIND

Documind is a document processing tool that uses AI to extract structured data from PDFs. It can handle PDF conversions, extract information, and format results as specified by customizable schemas. Documind is designed for flexible deployment on local or cloud environments.