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APPLE IS SNAPPING UP ONE OF THE BEST NON-ADOBE IMAGE EDITORS, PIXELMATOR

Apple is acquiring Pixelmator, a Lithuanian firm that makes popular Mac-based photo editing tools, pending regulatory approval. Regulatory approval may be an issue - several large companies have had to abandon deals due to opposition from EU regulators. It is unknown whether Apple intends to integrate Pixelmator's features into its own apps or allow the apps to remain separate standalone apps. Pixelmator Pro recently introduced a number of AI and ML tools for adjusting photos and creating masks, vector tools, and support for more RAW photo formats and other design tool files.

GOOGLE'S 'BIG SLEEP' AI PROJECT UNCOVERS REAL SOFTWARE VULNERABILITIES

Big Sleep is an AI agent designed to mimic the workflow of a human security researcher. It recently discovered a previously unknown and exploitable bug in SQLite. This may be the first public example of an AI agent finding a previously unknown exploitable memory-safety issue in widely used real-world software.

SPACEX WANTS TO TEST REFUELING STARSHIPS IN SPACE EARLY NEXT YEAR

SpaceX will attempt to transfer propellant from one orbiting Starship to another as early as next March. The capability will enable an uncrewed landing demonstration of a Starship on the moon. A crewed landing is currently scheduled for September 2026. SpaceX recently made history when it caught the Super Heavy rocket booster in mid-air using 'chopsticks' attached to the launch tower.

SEMAGLUTIDE SO EFFECTIVE AT TREATING ARTHRITIS THAT PATIENTS WERE “MORE OR LESS WERE TREATED OUT OF THE STUDY”

A trial testing semaglutide on patients with knee osteoarthritis conducted in 11 countries found that the drug was so effective at treating the condition the participants no longer needed treatment by the end of the experiment. The study involved 400 obese patients who experienced pain when walking. The patients who received the drug lost weight, felt significantly less pain, and experienced more ease of everyday mobility compared to patients who received a placebo. Many of the improvements were due to taking weight off the affected knees, but the researchers think that semaglutide's anti-inflammatory effects also played a role.

PG_FLO

pg_flo is a tool for moving and transforming data between PostgreSQL databases using logical replication. It features real-time data streaming, fast initial loads, powerful transformations, and flexible routing. pg_flo can be used for real-time data replication between PostgreSQL databases, ETL pipelines with data transformation, data re-routing, masking, and filtering, database migration with zero downtime, and event streaming from PostgreSQL.

CASH

Cash is a jQuery alternative for modern browsers that utilizes modern browser features. It provides a jQuery-style syntax for manipulating the DOM. Cash doesn't have full feature parity with jQuery, but it covers most day-to-day use cases.

WHAT IF A.I. IS ACTUALLY GOOD FOR HOLLYWOOD?

AI can be used to create films that were not possible just a few years ago. It can help create special effects that would otherwise require hundreds of VFX artists, tens of millions of dollars, and months of post-production work in just minutes. AI has the potential to disrupt many aspects of the film industry. This article takes a look at how some filmmakers are using AI to create movies and discusses the impact that AI will have on movie-making.

TOUCHSCREENS ARE OUT, AND TACTILE CONTROLS ARE BACK

Designers are reintroducing buttons to their products. This 're-buttonization' could be a response to everything becoming a touchscreen. People like physical buttons because they don't have to look at them and they offer a greater range of tactility and feedback. This article contains an interview with Rachel Plotnick, an associate professor of Cinema and Media Studies at Indiana University in Bloomington, where she discusses the history of buttons, the rise of touchscreens, the shift back to buttons and physical controls, and more.

THE BUDGET HAWK ATOP A TECH GIANT'S $64 BILLION SPENDING SPREE

Microsoft's finance team has been reviewing the progress of projects nearly daily, monitoring the status of chip orders, the construction of new data centers, and the development and sales of AI software.

INCENTIVE INFRASTRUCTURE

Positive incentives are hard to design but have long-lasting positive effects if done correctly.

C INTERMEDIATE LANGUAGE (CIL)

CIL facilitates program analysis and transformation by parsing and type-checking programs and compiling them into a simplified subset of C.

EARLY APPLE M4 PRO AND M4 MAX BENCHMARKS HINT AT A MASSIVE PERFORMANCE BOOST

The M4 Pro can smoothly outperform Mac Studio with the M2 Ultra.

LEAVING STRIPE

This post tells the story of one person's journey joining Stripe and working there for four years.

Y COMBINATOR APPLICATION GUIDE

This is a simple guide on how to build successful applications and avoid common pitfalls.

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OPENAI LAUNCHES CHATGPT WITH SEARCH, TAKING GOOGLE HEAD-ON

OpenAI has launched an upgraded web search feature for its AI assistant. Called 'ChatGPT with Search', the feature makes web searches based on user questions, providing source attributions with the answers it provides. It has the potential to streamline web search by eliminating the need for multiple search queries and link exploration. The system uses a fine-tuned version of GPT-4o.

ALEXA'S NEW AI BRAIN IS STUCK IN THE LAB

Amazon executives were confident a beta version of a new and improved Alexa was doable by early 2024. However, the timeline started slipping - the deadline has been moved to 2025. Alexa's conversational abilities have improved, but it still has issues and struggles with some tasks. Getting Alexa right is important for Amazon given the huge portion of kids and families that use Echo hardware.

META IS MAKING A ROBOT HAND THAT CAN ‘FEEL' TOUCH

Meta has partnered with GelSight and Wonik Robotics to commercialize tactile sensors for AI. The partnership aims to create devices that can learn about the world in richer detail to advance research into AI. Meta is working with GelSight on Digit 360, a tactile fingertip with human-level multimodal sensing capabilities. Its work with Wonik will focus on developing robotic hands with tactile sensors like Digit 360. These products will be available for purchase next year.

‘CLOUD-MILKING': THE ZERO-ENERGY TECHNIQUE KEEPING YOUNG TREES ALIVE

Cloud milking is a zero-energy technique for extracting water from fog. The technique mimics the way that the leaves capture water droplets from fog. It involves erecting special structures in the path of the wind to collect water droplets as the wind blows fog through them. Cloud milking is revolutionizing the recovery of forests devastated by fire and drought.

GENERATIVE AI SCRIPTING

GenAIScript is a JavaScript-ish environment with convenient tooling for file ingestion, prompt development, and structured data extraction. It can programmatically assemble prompts for LLMs using JavaScript. GenAIScript features a JavaScript toolbox for working with prompts, abstractions to make the process easy and productive, and seamless Visual Studio Code integration. A large collection of guides and examples are available.

HOW TO ACCELERATE CODE REVIEWS WITH NUDGES: INSIGHTS FROM MICROSOFT'S STUDY

Pull requests (PRs) are essential for ensuring code quality and enabling collaboration across teams, but they can become major bottlenecks. Microsoft and the Delft University of Technology conducted a comprehensive study that analyzed 22,875 pull requests to uncover the key factors that contribute to delays in PR completion. The study led to the development of Nudge, an automated system designed to send timely 'nudges' to authors and reviewers. Using Nudge reduces PR completion times by 60%. This article looks at the key insights from Microsoft's research and explores how nudges transform the code review process.

AMA WITH OPENAI'S SAM ALTMAN, KEVIN WEIL, SRINIVAS NARAYANAN, AND MARK CHEN (REDDIT THREAD)

A team from OpenAI, including CEO Sam Altman, Chief Product Officer Kevin Weil, SVP of Research Mark Chen, VP of Engineering Srinivas Narayanan, and Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki, recently participated in a Reddit AMA. The team discussed ChatGPT search, OpenAI o1 and o1-mini, Advanced Voice, OpenAI's research roadmap, the future of computer agents, AGI, and what's coming next. OpenAI has some releases planned for later this year, but these won't include GPT-5.

'A LOT OF DEMORALIZED PEOPLE': GHOST JOBS ARE WREAKING HAVOC ON TECH WORKERS

Ghost jobs are a common phenomenon in the tech industry. These fake job listings serve multiple purposes. Employers make these listings to maintain a presence on job boards and build a talent pool. They also use the listings to gauge how replaceable their employees are, look more stable during hiring freezes, make employees feel replaceable, and trick overworked employees into believing that more people will be brought on to alleviate their overwhelming workloads.

OVER 500 AMAZON WORKERS DECRY “NON-DATA-DRIVEN” LOGIC FOR 5-DAY RTO POLICY

Over 500 Amazon employees reportedly signed a letter to Amazon Web Services' CEO this week, sharing their outrage over Amazon's upcoming return-to-office policy, which will force workers into offices five days per week starting in 2025.

L3HARRIS' ROCKET MOTOR UNIT INVESTMENTS BOOSTING OUTPUT

L3Harris' investment in Aerojet, one of the only two large solid-fuel rocket makers for the Pentagon, has paid off, with revenue in L3Harris' business up 23.6% compared to the same quarter five years ago.

MICROSOFT'S FINANCIAL DISCLOSURES SHOW HOW OPENAI IS FUELING GROWTH — AND TAKING A TOLL ON PROFITS

Microsoft has made total funding commitments of $13 billion to OpenAI.

META IS USING MORE THAN 100,000 NVIDIA H100 AI GPUS TO TRAIN LLAMA-4

Mark Zuckerberg says that Llama 4 is much faster and has new modalities and stronger reasoning.

GOOGLE ACCUSED OF SHADOW CAMPAIGNS REDIRECTING ANTITRUST SCRUTINY TO MICROSOFT

An astroturf group called the Open Cloud Coalition appears to be led by a handful of European cloud providers secretly recruited by Google.

EVERYONE IS WRONG ABOUT THAT SLACK FLOWCHART

Slack's engineering team published an incredibly complicated flowchart in March 2017 that summarized the logic Slack uses to determine whether to send a given user a notification for a message.

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APPLE UPDATES THE MACBOOK PRO WITH M4 PRO AND M4 MAX CHIPS

Apple has announced 14- and 16-inch M4 MacBook Pros via a low-key press release. The M4 Pro-equipped laptops will start at $1,999 for the 14-inch and $2,499 for the 16-inch, with the basic 14-inch M4 MacBook Pro starting at $1,599. The M4 Pro laptops will have 24GB of base RAM while the basic M4 model will have 16GB. Preorders are available now - the new MacBook Pros will be available on November 8.

ZOOX CUSTOM ROBOTAXIS ARE FINALLY COMING TO SAN FRANCISCO AND LAS VEGAS

Zoox, which was founded a decade ago and acquired by Amazon four years ago, will start rolling out its robotaxi service in San Francisco and in Las Vegas in the coming weeks. It will start by offering employees rides in the SoMa neighborhood of San Francisco and on the Las Vegas Strip. The company has been working closely with local and federal safety regulators and will take a measured approach to rolling out its robotaxi service. It plans to scale production in 2026.

WE DIGITIZED SCENT

Scientists from Osmo have fully digitized and reprinted the scent of a fresh summer plum using AI. They created a system that can analyze air molecules to determine scents and then print the scents as a clear liquid. The printed scents smell the same as the original scents, showing that the team was able to give their computers a sense of smell. A video from Osmo explaining its technology is available.

BELGIUM IS CONSTRUCTING THE WORLD'S FIRST ARTIFICIAL ISLAND TO HARNESS OFFSHORE WIND

Belgium is constructing a massive artificial island in the North Sea. Set to be completed by 2027, the island will enhance Belgium's renewable energy capabilities, integrating an impressive 3.5 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity into the Belgian power grid, enough clean electricity to power over three million homes. The project, which will cost €650 million ($702 million), is being funded by the European Investment Bank. The initiative is a key part of the EU's plan to phase out fossil fuels and fully commit to sustainable energy.

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OCTOVERSE: AI LEADS PYTHON TO TOP LANGUAGE AS THE NUMBER OF GLOBAL DEVELOPERS SURGES

Developers are building AI models into applications and engaging with AI projects on GitHub in large numbers. Python overtook JavaScript as the most popular language on GitHub in 2024 and Jupyter Notebooks use skyrocketed. Both are technologies heavily used in data science and machine learning. The number of developers on GitHub has rapidly grown since tools like GitHub Copilot started going mainstream in early 2023, with significant gains in the global south. There are signals that AI is driving interest in software development.

CREATING AN LLM-AS-A-JUDGE THAT DRIVES BUSINESS RESULTS

This article discusses how to avoid creating bad evaluation processes. It introduces a technique called 'Critique Shadowing' for streamlining AI evaluation processes. Critique Shadowing involves finding a principal domain expert, creating datasets, and having the domain expert review the data and fix errors before building the LLM judge and performing an error analysis. The process repeats periodically or when material changes occur. The real value of the process is that it tricks people into looking at their data and performing careful analysis.

DROPBOX CUTS ITS WORKFORCE BY 20 PERCENT IN LATEST ROUND OF LAYOFFS

Dropbox is laying off 528 people amid slowing growth for its core cloud storage business. The company is making significant cuts in areas where it is over-invested or underperforming while designing a flatter, more efficient team structure overall. Affected employees will receive sixteen weeks of severance pay, equity, bonus plan lump sums, payouts of approved leave, and immigration consultation for those on work visas. Dropbox reported an increase of 63,000 paid users quarter over quarter for its second-quarter earnings this year, light compared to its total 18 million-plus user base.

HOW TIKTOK SAVED ITS E-COMMERCE BUSINESS IN INDONESIA

TikTok's e-commerce business in Indonesia was thriving, then one day, the government declared that social media platforms would no longer be allowed to process online payments, forcing TikTok to abruptly halt its e-commerce operations. Some Indonesian officials argued that TikTok was so popular it threatened to monopolize online shopping, while others said it didn't have the right license. TikTok's defenders said the government was acting on behalf of TikTok's competitors in Indonesia.TikTok Shop restarted as a pilot program under government supervision after teaming up with local company Tokopedia.

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VECTOR DATABASES ARE THE WRONG ABSTRACTION

Vector Databases create unnecessary complexity because they treat embeddings as independent data instead of derived data - it's better to treat embeddings more like database indexes.

LESSONS LEARNED FROM A SUCCESSFUL RUST REWRITE

A lot of the friction, pitfalls, and issues in C++ that Rust claims to have solved are in fact not really solved at all.

THE NEW GLENN ROCKET'S FIRST STAGE IS REAL, AND IT'S SPECTACULAR

Blue Origin rolled out the first stage of its large New Glenn rocket on Tuesday night at a launch site at Cape Canaveral, Florida.

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