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META AND QUALCOMM TEAM UP TO RUN BIG AI MODELS ON PHONES

EMPLOYEES

HOW TO WRITE A GREAT README

TYPO LEAKS MILLIONS OF US MILITARY EMAILS TO MALI WEB OPERATOR

PRODUCING CHARTS WITH AI

Code Interpreter allows its users to create, edit, and analyze charts using English and it automatically sets up Python environments so users can focus on their work.

GENERATIVE AI SPACE AND THE MENTAL IMAGERY OF ALIEN MINDS

TWITTER IS WORKING ON NEW PUBLISHING TOOLS FOR LONG-FORM ARTICLES

Bankrupt crypto firm Celsius has reached an agreement with creditors and Series B investors for a $25 million settlement to be drawn from the sale of self-custody platform GK8 to Galaxy Digital. The deal may not cover all legal expenses and unfairly provides an advantage to a specific group. Celsius filed for bankruptcy after troubles following its Series B, which was led by growth equity firm Westcap and a Quebec pension fund. Former CEO, Alex Mashinsky, was recently arrested as part of an investigation into the company's collapse.

VC FUNDING IN WEB3 PLUMMETS 76%

Crunchbase reported a 76% year-over-year decrease in web3 VC funding in Q2 of this year. The downtrend looks slightly worse when looking at the full first half of 2023, where funding dropped by 78% year-over-year, with companies raising only $3.6 billion compared to last year's nearly $16 billion. This sharp decline, attributed to the crypto winter, sits in contrast to the vast amounts AI startups have raised in the same timeframe - $25 billion. Despite the decline, companies like a16z remain positive about web3's future, highlighting especially strong areas like web3 gaming.

FUTUREVERSE RAISES $54M TO MARRY AI AND THE METAVERSE

Metaverse and AI company FutureVerse recently raised $54 million in a funding round led by 10T Holdings, with Ripple in on the round as well. FutureVerse plans to continue developing its AI content generation tools that will set the base layer for the company’s metaverse with the new funding. FutureVerse, which has acquired 11 companies since its inception, recently launched the AI-powered game AI League in collaboration with FIFA and an AI-powered boxing game in partnership with Muhammad Ali Enterprises.

SYNTHETIX IS TARGETING A Q4 LAUNCH FOR PERPS V3 AND INFINEX

Synthetix, a protocol for trading synthetic assets and crypto derivatives, is planning to launch v3 of its decentralized perpetual futures exchange and its new front end, Infinex, in Q4. The upgrade aims to improve the UX by mimicking a CEX’s usability but retaining the self-custody principle of DEXs. Infinex will facilitate access to decentralized perpetuals trading without requiring an on-chain transaction for every trade. Founder Kain Warwick envisions this as another step in user migration from CEXs, given the history of such platforms facing theft and mismanagement issues.

WHY UNISWAPX COULD BE A GAME CHANGER

This Twitter thread lays out why UniswapX's new architecture could be transformative due to its efficiency and flexibility. The upgrade paves the way for better order flow auctions, returning MEV to users. While the update is seen as a crucial step towards improving off-chain order matching, more improvements are needed to enhance decentralization, competitiveness and privacy. UniswapX could pave the way for seamless cross-chain and roll-up exchanges. The new platform complements Uniswap v4, which is aimed at improving sustainable passive liquidity provision.

WHAT ARE META-TRANSACTIONS?

Coinbase Wallet recently introduced gasless sends on Polygon for USDC without relying on smart contracts or account abstraction, instead using a standard known as "meta-transactions." Defined by EIP-3009, meta-transactions offer enhanced security and usability through randomized nonces and avoid the "transferFrom/approve" pattern. Importantly, the person executing the method is not necessarily the sender, exemplifying how gasless sends work. The process illustrates how EIP-4337 is not the only standard capable of implementing gasless sends.

COINBASE CEO BRIAN ARMSTRONG SET TO MEET WITH HOUSE DEMOCRATS

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong will engage in a private discussion with the New Democrat Coalition to discuss digital-asset legislation and other issues such as tax, national security, and privacy. The meeting comes amidst a lawsuit against Coinbase, one of the globe's largest cryptocurrency exchanges, by the SEC. Armstrong has been pushing for clearer rules around digital assets in Washington. Additionally, Coinbase is promoting two bills offering clearer guidance on crypto exchange registration with regulators. This gathering follows a favorable court ruling in the XRP case that dealt a significant blow to the SEC’s claims that most crypto tokens are securities.

SCAM SUPER CYCLE

This article discusses how the nature of online interactions, driven by anonymity and lack of repercussions, fosters scams and toxicity. Online scams have sadly been prominent in the crypto sector. The lack of a sense of 'presence' in digital spaces limits feelings of empathy and often enables unethical behavior. Digital information overload also hampers the ability to discern quality information from falsehoods. The article suggests that a potential solution could be introduced through the Metaverse, proposing an environment where repercussions exist and a sense of identity or 'presence' is restored, potentially reducing fraud.

MARKETPLACE 'UNLICENSED CASINO’

OpenSea halted Ether.Fi's staked-ether NFT trading, citing financial activity regulation. In return, Ether.Fi's CEO criticized OpenSea for being an 'unlicensed casino' and stressed Ether.Fi's non-custodial approach.

VC FIRM COINFUND RAISES $158 MILLION TO BACK CRYPTO STARTUPS

CoinFund has raised a $158 million fund to support early-stage crypto startups, exceeding its initial $125 million target. The firm plans to focus on the intersection of crypto and AI.

STAFF

Polychain Capital has raised $200 million for the initial close of its fourth fund. It aims to raise about $400 million total. Three research team members have been let go amid changing investment priorities.

SIMPLE AS EMAIL

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin says that modern account abstraction could simplify crypto wallets, making them as easy as email accounts. The EIP-4337 upgrade may enhance features like wallet recovery, lower transaction fees, and multisig wallets, potentially driving wider web3 adoption.

NEOBANK CONSOLIDATION BEGINS TO PICK UP

On Monday we flagged that cash-strapped tech startups are exploring sales to bigger companies in order to survive a funding crunch. Well, in fintech, it’s M&A, M&A everywhere. Neobanks are merging with one another to bolster their market share and legacy players are mopping up startups to expand their product offering and reach new customer segments.

EXPENSES

Uber Technologies Inc may face a lawsuit in California regarding the coverage of work-related expenses for drivers. If successful, what precedent does this set for the broader gig economy?

BUT SECTOR REMAINS RESILIENT

$27.3 billion has been deployed across 1,714 fintech venture deals in H1 2023. Down 14% since H2 2022.

WHEN TO DIG A MOAT

Generative AI has caused a bit of a divide on the topic of moats. Now that we can build things quickly, and often without deep engineering expertise, are we seeing the erosion of defensible moats? Packy explores the types of moats that might exist beyond the technical product.

WHY CONSUMER SUBSCRIPTIONS ARE SO HARD AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT

Retaining existing customers is important in the current market. Consumers are irrational. It’s incredibly dififcult to predict who will churn and it’s hard (and expensive) to win their attention in the first place these days. Casey Winters double-clicks on a few tactics and strategies to ensure you’re not leaving money on the table.

FOUNDER

The central theme? You guessed it, customer centricity. Listen to your customers, build a product that truly serves their needs, and acknowledge that your product likely needs to evolve as their needs change, particularly if you’re building for startups that grow up one day.

REFORGE ARTIFACTS

Reforge just launched Artifacts - a library of documents capturing lessons and insights from established founders and operators.

TO RECRUIT NEW TALENT

There seems to be an inverse correlation between the number of mandated days in the office and a company's ability to attract and retain talent. Less flexibility causes churn - who’d have thought?

SURVIVING A SLOWDOWN

We know this message has been drilled in a lot over the last year, but Sean offers some simple mental models to apply when faced with uncertainty and slow market conditions.

HOW MUCH EQUITY SHOULD I GIVE A KEY STARTUP ADVISOR?

Finding the right advisor is hard, incentivising them accordingly even more so. How do you build skin in the game at the right level and reward experienced advisors for their time? Here’s a “back of the napkin” kinda way.

8 BEST PRACTICES FOR REACT COMPONENT DESIGN

React is one of the most popular JavaScript libraries for building user interfaces. One of the reasons it gained so much popularity is its Component-Based Architecture. React encourages building UI in reusable components, allowing developers to build complex user interfaces more efficiently. This article explores 10 best practices that will help you write cleaner, more maintainable, and reusable React components.

BRINGING HDR VIDEO TO REELS

Video quality used to diminish when uploaded to Facebook/Instagram. This is no longer the case. This article walks through how the video infrastructure team at Meta brought HDR video to Reels at scale. Some challenges included dealing with different device capabilities and image formats and accurate tone mapping.

HOW REACT 18 IMPROVES APPLICATION PERFORMANCE

React 18 has introduced concurrent features that fundamentally change the way React applications can be rendered. This article explores how these latest features impact and improve application performance.

A DEVELOPER’S GUIDE TO PROMPT ENGINEERING AND LLMS

This article tells the story of GitHub's work with large language models (LLMs) to help other developers learn how to best make use of the technology. It describes at a high level how LLMs function and how to build LLM applications. The article uses GitHub Copilot code completions as a case example of an LLM-based application.

PROGRAMMERS SHARE TIPS AND TRICKS FOR WORKING WITH AI

AI systems tend to hallucinate and produce incorrect code. There are “best practices” for using AI, such as using prompt engineering techniques and knowing which question to ask. It’s important to use tools wisely and rely on them as just tools, not things that do the entire job for you.

WHY ENGINEERS SHOULD FOCUS ON WRITING

Engineers should write in order to become better engineers. Writing helps people identify mistakes, learn things in a deeper manner, and organize thoughts in a coherent way. The only way to get better at writing is to keep doing it.

CODE INTERPRETER API

A LangChain implementation of the ChatGPT Code Interpreter.

UPTIME KUMA

Uptime Kuma is an easy-to-use self-hosted monitoring tool.

SUPERAGENT

Superagent is a powerful tool that simplifies the configuration and deployment of large language model agents to production. It provides a range of features and functionalities to make it easier for developers to build, manage, and deploy AI agents to production with features such as built in memory, document retrieval via vector DBs, powerful tools, webhooks, and cron jobs.

INTERESTING LEARNINGS FROM OUTAGES

As an engineer, it’s never a good time for an outage and it’s always cheaper to learn from other people’s outages than to learn from your own. Luckily, many tech companies publish public postmortems following widespread outages. This article examines some of these reports and extracts valuable lessons we can learn from them.

4 REASONS WHY META IS ALL-IN ON OPEN SOURCE AI

Why does Meta keep releasing open-source models? What is their incentive? Some possibilities include attracting and retaining top AI talent, building goodwill among developers, and receiving feedback to improve its model.

3 REASONS WHY TEAMS MOVE AWAY FROM AWS LAMBDA

This article dives into the three main reasons why some teams move away from AWS Lambda to lower-level computing abstractions. It also covers how you can migrate smoothly from Amazon Lambda to functions running on Amazon EKS.

LLAMA 2

Meta releases their next-generation open-source large language model Llama 2.

META IS GIVING AWAY ITS AI TECH TO TRY TO BEAT CHATGPT

Meta is open-sourcing its large language model in partnership with Microsoft.

STABLE DIFFUSION ON THE WEB

A demo of Stable Diffusion running in the web browser using WebGPU.

VAL

Val is a programming language that leverages mutable value semantics and generic programming for high-level systems programming.

ELON LAUNCHES X.AI

More details included about the secretive safety start up. Mostly we get to see who is on the team and working to help this venture. The stated goal is to “understand the universe”. We are interested to see how this plays out.