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THE COMPANY BEHIND ARC IS NOW BUILDING A SECOND, MUCH SIMPLER BROWSER

The Browser Company is working on a more proactive, powerful, and AI-centric browser.

FEDERAL INVESTIGATORS PROBE CRYPTOCURRENCY FIRM TETHER

Tether is being investigated for possible violations of sanctions and anti-money-laundering rules.

ALPHABET'S SELF-DRIVING UNIT WAYMO CLOSES $5.6 BILLION FUNDING ROUND AS ROBOTAXI RACE HEATS UP IN THE U.S.

Waymo is the only company testing autonomous vehicles that operates a commercial robotaxi service in several major metro areas.

SECURITY BUGS ENGULF SHIPFAST, A POPULAR INDIE HACKER'S PRODUCT, IN DRAMA

An indie hacker has been publicly posting about ShipFast's vulnerabilities, sparking debates about the unwritten rules around bug reporting.

OPENAI PLANS TO RELEASE ITS NEXT BIG AI MODEL BY DECEMBER

OpenAI plans to launch its next frontier model, Orion, by December. The model has been teased by an OpenAI executive as potentially up to 100 times more powerful than GPT-4. Orion will initially be released to companies that OpenAI works closely with so they can build their own products and features. Engineers inside Microsoft are preparing to host the model on Azure as early as November. It is unclear if OpenAI will call the model GPT-5, despite it being seen internally as GPT-4's successor.

APPLE TEASES ‘WEEK' OF MAC ANNOUNCEMENTS STARTING ON MONDAY

Apple SVP Greg Joswiak has teased a week of Mac announcements that will start on Monday morning. Apple likely plans to announce a suite of Macs powered by M4 chips, including a low-end 14-inch MacBook Pro, high-end 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros, a new iMac, and a new Mac Mini. Russian YouTubers have posted videos of what looks to be new MacBook Pros with M4 chips. Apple revealed its M3 chips and computers at an event on Halloween last year.

TSMC'S ARIZONA CHIP PRODUCTION YIELDS SURPASS TAIWAN'S IN WIN FOR US PUSH

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) has achieved early production yields at its first plant in Arizona that surpasses similar factories back home. The share of chips manufactured at the facility that are usable is about four percentage points higher than comparable facilities in Taiwan. The yield is critical as it determines whether companies will be able to cover the enormous costs of a chip plant. The accomplishment is a sign of progress for US efforts to revitalize local semiconductor manufacturing.

ANALYSIS: WHY ABU DHABI IS BETTING ON FUSION

Scientists appear to be on the verge of unlocking commercial fusion. The technology would be a major inflection point if it can be deployed at scale as it unlocks limitless, cheap energy. This would significantly threaten the fossil fuel industry. As a major oil exporter, the United Arab Emirates is not ignoring or undermining the technology - it is investing in it, exploring how to secure access to crucial fuels, and embedding itself into the fusion supply chain.

EMBEDDINGS ARE UNDERRATED

Embeddings, numerical representations of real-world objects that machine learning systems use to understand complex knowledge domains, give technical writers the ability to discover connections between texts at previously impossible scales. This article presents an overview of how embeddings work and how to use them. It is geared towards technical writers who are learning about embeddings for the first time.

ATTACKING BROWSER EXTENSIONS

Browser extensions are everywhere - it's common for even the average user to have at least one extension installed. Research into browser extension security is mostly scattered around the internet. This post talks about the structure of browser extensions and the vulnerabilities that are present in the ecosystem. It discusses the progression of security in the extension space and highlights attack surfaces and mitigations. The post ends by recommending best practices for ensuring the security of extensions.

HOW I GOT A DIGITAL NOMAD VISA FOR JAPAN

Japan introduced a Digital Nomad visa in April. It allows visitors to legally work remotely from within Japan, with some requirements. This article details how a remote worker gained one of these visas and moved to Japan to work. It covers each step of their journey, including the application process, how they got the paperwork to fulfill the visa requirements, and what the visit to the embassy was like. Workers on the Digital Nomad visa will not be taxed on their income as they are not residents.

HOW INTEL GOT LEFT BEHIND IN THE A.I. CHIP BOOM

enablement and win rate. Take a quick tour!

RSBUILD

Rsbuild is a high-performance build tool that provides rich build features and supports Module Federation, image compression, type checking, PostCSS, Lightning CSS, and more.

THE COMPANY BEHIND ARC IS NOW BUILDING A SECOND, MUCH SIMPLER BROWSER

The Browser Company is building a new browser from scratch - Arc will still be supported, but it won't change much anymore.

NEW ARCHITECTURE IS HERE

React Native 0.76 with the New Architecture by default is now available on npm.

HERE IS NOTION'S EMAIL CLIENT

Notion Mail can automatically organize emails and handle tedious back-and-forth exchanges such as scheduling and follow-ups.

WHY I'M LEAVING OPENAI AND WHAT I'M DOING NEXT

Miles Brundage, a researcher and manager at OpenAI, is leaving the company to spend more time working on issues across the whole AI industry.

NOTES FROM THE PROGRESS STUDIES CONFERENCE

Progress Studies is a discipline that aims to figure out what progress is and how to increase it.

TESLA HAS BEEN TESTING A ROBOTAXI SERVICE IN THE BAY AREA FOR MOST OF THE YEAR

Elon Musk revealed during Tesla's earnings call on Wednesday that the company has been testing a robotaxi service in the Bay Area. Tesla employees have been able to summon an autonomously operated Tesla vehicle for trips using the company's prototype ride-hailing app for the past few months. The vehicles are operating using the latest version of Tesla's Full Self-Driving software, which Musk claims will be 1,000 times better than human driving by the second quarter of 2025. Musk says that he expects to roll out a paid ridehailing service in California and Texas starting next year, pending regulatory approval.

APPLE'S FIRST IOS 18.2 BETA ADDS MORE AI FEATURES AND CHATGPT INTEGRATION

Apple has released the first beta of iOS 18.2, which adds tools like the ability to generate emoji with Genmoji and images with Image Playground, more AI-powered writing features, integration with ChatGPT, Visual Intelligence for searching with the camera, and more. The first batch of Apple Intelligence features, including a slightly smarter Siri and notifications summary, is set to launch next week with the official release of iOS 18.1. The macOS Sequoia 15.2 developer beta, now available, has new Apple Intelligence tools, but doesn't include Genmoji.

JEFF BEZOS' BLUE ORIGIN LAUNCHES NEXT NEW SHEPARD SPACECRAFT FROM TEXAS WITHOUT A CREW

Blue Origin completed a launch and landing of an uncrewed flight test for its next New Shepard on Wednesday morning. The spacecraft is designed for humans and has an expanded flight capacity to better meet growing customer demand. The launch carried 12 payloads, mostly for research purposes. A link to the webcast recording of the launch is available in the article.

A NEW BLUE ORIGIN: CEO DAVE LIMP IS BRINGING URGENCY AND ‘DECISIVENESS' TO JEFF BEZOS' SPACE COMPANY

While Blue Origin has not yet entered the serious rocketry game, the company is closer than ever to the long-awaited debut of its New Glenn rocket. The New Glenn launch vehicle will be able to lift up to 45,000 kilograms to low Earth orbit, double that of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket. It is designed to be partly reusable. New Glenn's first launch attempt is slated for November. The company aims to land New Glenn on its very first launch.

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YOU SHOULD PROBABLY PAY ATTENTION TO TOKENIZERS

USING RUST IN NON-RUST SERVERS TO IMPROVE PERFORMANCE

This article discusses different strategies for incrementally adding Rust into a searcher written in another language. Developers may want to do this if they identify functions not meeting their performance requirements because they're being bottlenecked by the CPU and the usual techniques of memoizing the function or improving its algorithm aren't feasible or effective. Sometimes, it's worth investigating swapping out the function implementation for something written in a more CPU-efficient language - like Rust.

ARM CANCELS QUALCOMM'S ARCHITECTURE LICENSE, ENDANGERING ITS CHIP BUSINESS

Arm has canceled Qualcomm's license for making Arm chips as part of an escalation of a fight that began in late 2022 when Arm sued Qualcomm over its acquisition of Nuvia in 2021. Qualcomm has 60 days before it will be forced to stop manufacturing and selling its Arm chips. It bought Nuvia to assist with developing high-performance Arm chips, but Arm claimed the acquisition caused Nuvia to breach its Arm licenses. Arm demanded that Qualcomm and Nuvia destroy any designs that Nuvia had created pre-acquisition, but the companies didn't comply. Qualcomm's shift to using Nuvia's designs means that Arm could make less money from the partnership than it used to.

FORMER OPENAI STAFFER SAYS THE COMPANY IS BREAKING COPYRIGHT LAW AND DESTROYING THE INTERNET

Suchir Balaji, a former researcher at OpenAI, recently wrote in his personal blog that he believes the company is not complying with US copyright law, adding to the growing number of voices that say the company's giant data scraping business is based on shaky legal ground. Balaji worked at OpenAI for four years before leaving this summer. He says that AI companies are destroying the commercial viability of the individuals, businesses, and internet services that created the digital data used to train AI systems. OpenAI claims it builds its AI models using publicly available data in a legal and fair way. The company is currently dealing with multiple lawsuits for its use of copyright material.

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RISC-V IN 2024 IS SLOWER THAN YOU THINK

While RISC-V has the potential to reshape the CPU landscape, it is currently slow even compared to Raspberry PI boards.

TESLA IS IN TALKS FOR A ROBOTAXI TEST PROGRAM IN PALO ALTO, BUT THE SCALE IS UNDERWHELMING

Tesla's Robotaxi could be used in the Palo Alto Link rideshare program, which only has 3.1 users per hour of service.

IT'S NOT JUST YOU: AMAZON'S SHOPPING APP IS TRYING A DIFFERENT LOOK

The redesign features bigger and brighter graphics, more dynamic product curations and groupings, and an increased emphasis on horizontal scrolling.

APPLE ANALYST KUO SAYS COMPANY CUT IPHONE 16 ORDERS BY 10 MILLION UNITS

Most of the cuts affect the regular iPhone 16 - iPhone 16 production for 2H24 is now estimated to be 84 million units.

I GOT DYSENTERY SO YOU DON'T HAVE TO

'Human challenge trials', clinical trials where humans are given a disease, are very rare, but often more valuable for research - it would be very difficult to test an alternative dysentery treatment in the US in the conventional way.

STABLECOINS | THE MONETARY UPGRADE

Stablecoins have emerged as a bridge between the traditional financial system and blockchain technology.

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ANTHROPIC PUBLICLY RELEASES AI TOOL THAT CAN TAKE OVER THE USER'S MOUSE CURSOR

Anthropic's new Computer Use tool can take control of users' mouse cursors and perform basic tasks on their computers. It is now available exclusively with Anthropic's mid-range 3.5 Sonnet model via the API. It works by taking rapid successive screengrabs, so it can miss short-lived notifications and other changes and is incapable of some common actions like drag-and-drop. The tool is still cumbersome and error-prone at times. A video from Anthropic explaining the tool is available in the article.

APPLE WORKING ON NEW APP STORE-LIKE APP DEDICATED TO GAMES

Apple is reportedly working on a new App Store-like app dedicated to games that combines functionality from the App Store and Game Center in one place. It is not expected to replace Game Center, but will integrate with users' Game Center profiles. The app will allow users to find and play games and show things like challenges, leaderboards, and achievements. It will be used to promote special gaming events and information about important updates. Apple is experimenting with some kind of integration with FaceTime and iMessage on the app.

DE-EXTINCTION COMPANY PROVIDES A PROGRESS REPORT ON THYLACINE EFFORTS

Colossal, a company founded to try to restore the mammoth to the Arctic tundra, released a progress report last week on the work involved in resurrecting the thylacine, which went extinct in 1936. Marsupial biology has features that may make de-extinction somewhat easier, and it appears that the technology available for working with marsupials is expanding rapidly. Colossal has a nearly complete genome sequence from a thylacine sample and it expects to complete the genome shortly. It is working on technology that will allow marsupial embryos to develop inside artificial uteruses.

WORLD'S 1ST DONOR CELL THERAPY HELPS 3 AUTOIMMUNE DISORDER PATIENTS IN CHINA

Three Chinese patients received treatment for autoimmune disorders using engineered immune cells made from donor cells. All three recipients reported improvements to their conditions. The treatment involved genetically engineering healthy-donor-derived CD19-targeting CAR-T cells using CRISPR-Cas9 to address issues with immune rejection. The study demonstrates the high safety and promising immune modularity effect of off-the-shelf CAR-T cells in treating severe refractory autoimmune diseases.

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HOW WE BUILT A NEW POWERFUL JSON DATA TYPE FOR CLICKHOUSE

JSON has become the go-to format for handling semi-structured and unstructured data in modern data systems. While it seems simple, leveraging the format effectively at scale presents unique challenges. This article explains some of the challenges ClickHouse, one of the fastest analytical databases on the market, experienced in implementing JSON support. It outlines how ClickHouse developed a new JSON type from scratch designed to address the limitations and improve the overall functionality of the now deprecated Object('json') data type.