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THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY

A survey of AI experts from 2016 on their predictions for the future of the industry.

OPENAI WANTS TO BUILD A WORK ASSISTANT

OpenAI plans to market a “personalized assistant for work,” a move that would seemingly put the buzzy startup in competition with its chief backer, Microsoft.

HOPE, FEAR, AND AI

A poll of 2,000 people about how they’re using AI, what they want it to do, and what scares them about it the most.

AI REQUIRES A NEW APPROACH TO WORK AND MANAGEMENT

Microsoft's Jared Spataro believes that AI will change the nature of work, including meetings and creative collaboration. He argues that we need to adopt a new approach to work and management in order to take advantage of the potential of AI. This includes using AI to automate tasks, personalize experiences, and make better decisions.

AI IS KILLING THE OLD WEB

Generative AI models are changing the economy of the web, making it cheaper to generate lower-quality content that is flooding the web.

USING BLOCKCHAINS AND AI TO BUILD A BETTER INTERNET

The age old question around if you should switch to AI from crypto. The real magic would be regulatory clarity for blockchain and AI - that will be the big winner.

HSBC HONG KONG NOW LETS CUSTOMERS TRADE BITCOIN AND ETHER ETFS

HSBC Hong Kong is now permitting its customers to trade Bitcoin and Ether ETFs on the Hong Kong stock exchange. With three different ETFs available, HSBC is the first platform to offer crypto exchange-traded funds in Hong Kong. This is just another step forward for the region in further opening up to crypto. Throughout the course of this year, Hong Kong has been introducing new regulations for crypto companies with an eye toward becoming a global crypto hub. Hong Kong’s banking regulator has even been pressuring major players to accept crypto exchanges for clients.

EXCHANGES

Staked ETH has surpassed ETH held on centralized exchanges for the first time, totaling almost $44 billion. Following the Ethereum network's Shapella upgrade in April, ETH held on exchanges began to decrease, while ETH staking surged. This trend, coupled with the new fee-burning mechanism that is core to ETH 2.0 is a fundamental shift in sell-pressure on ETH. While we have yet to see the full effect of this shift or where the balance between staked ETH and ETH on CEXs will balance out, it’s likely to create an interesting dynamic in the next bull run.

ECOSYSTEM

Azuki is releasing a new NFT collection, Azuki Elementals, featuring 20,000 NFTs based on the four Azuki elements: earth, fire, lightning, and water. The Dutch Auction for the collection starts at 2 ETH and will decrease by 0.1 ETH every five minutes. Some of the NFTs were airdropped to existing Azuki holders during the recent Vegas event, "Follow the Rabbit." With floor prices currently at 15.3 ETH and a potential mint proceeds of $40 million, this is likely to be one of the biggest NFT drops of the year.

SOLANA WELCOMES INSTITUTIONAL MPC WALLET

Fordefi, an institutional multi-party computation wallet company, is expanding to Solana and offering its wallet solution to applications and protocols on the chain. Fordefi's MPC wallets provide advanced security features and policy management tools tailored for institutions, allowing multiple parties to access the same wallet without revealing personal information. The platform uses transaction simulations and policy engines to define the approval process for institutions, accommodating the often-lengthy institutional approval process.

ORDER BOOK PERP DEXS

Nearly all current DEXs running perpetual contracts operate their order books off-chain, creating greater potential for manipulation and higher risk than frontrunning and sandwiching on AMMs. This thread explains how, for DEXs to provide fair and transparent trading, order books must operate fully on-chain, ensuring proper price-time priority and eliminating opportunities for manipulation by order book operators. On-chain order book execution will require fundamental infrastructure innovation and has yet to be massively adopted.

IMPLICATIONS OF EIP-4844

EIP-4844, an Ethereum improvement proposal introducing proto-danksharding, is expected to impact leading optimistic rollups on Ethereum. EIP-4844 adds blobs, raw byte strings attached to transactions, to store additional data alongside transactions temporarily. This separation of storage and computation fees allows for a more dynamic fee market, enabling a tenfold reduction in fees on leading L2s like Arbitrum and Optimism.

Despite the continued regulatory crackdown on the crypto industry in the US, some Japanese crypto sector players believe it presents an opportunity for Japan to strengthen its presence and become a hub for the sector. Japan already has an established legal framework, providing protection to investors while enforcing strict regulations on crypto exchange operators. With the country's forward-looking approach to stablecoins and its promotion of web3 - decentralized web services as they have coined it - Japan aims to create a healthy industry ecosystem while attracting businesses from across the globe.

TRENDS ACROSS THE LARGEST U.S. COMPANIES

According to a joint study between The Block and Coinbase, over 52% of Fortune 100 companies have made an attempt at crypto, blockchain, or web3 initiatives since 2020. The tech, financial services, and retail sectors have led the way in web3 adoption, with NFTs driving retail's recent surge in initiatives. Crypto financial services and B2B blockchain-related services are the most commonly invested categories, making up over half of all crypto venture deals. Citi Ventures, Google Ventures, Microsoft Ventures, and Goldman Sachs have been by far the most active Fortune 100 companies in the crypto venture scene.

BURDEN

Eric Wall’s Orb Land project tokenizes his time through a unique NFT offering personal consulting. The holder surrendered it due to a burdensome 300% annual Harberger tax. Orb Land aims to revise its mechanism for smoother ownership transitions.

MANAGEMENT STRATEGY'

Hut 8 Mining, a Canadian bitcoin mining firm, has received a $50 million credit facility from Coinbase Credit to support corporate needs and its Bitcoin treasury management strategy.

HOW MANY BITCOIN ARE FOR SALE?

This Glassnode analysis of crypto exchange fund flows suggests strong Bitcoin accumulation in Asia and weaker demand in the US in 2023 and walks through some of the current supply and demand dynamics that have been playing out lately.

FTX BANKRUPTCY TEAM SAYS THE EXCHANGE OWED CUSTOMERS $8.7B

The report on the failed FTX.com exchange reveals an $8.7 billion debt to customers due to the commingling and misuse of deposits. So far, $7 billion in liquid assets have been recovered. Senior executives are accused of hiding the issue since August 2022.

WHY VUE IS A GREAT FIT FOR MODULAR SOFTWARE ARCHITECTURE

It can be difficult to decide what frontend framework to invest in. After all, decisions like this have big implications for teams that will likely be working with a certain technology for years to come. This article talks about why Vue should be one of your top contenders when choosing a frontend framework to invest in for the long haul.

BUILDING LLM APPLICATIONS FOR PRODUCTION

It’s easy to make a cool app with LLM, but making it production-ready is hard. This article discusses the key challenges and solutions around productionizing LLM apps, particularly on prompt ambiguity, inference cost, and latency. It also looks at how to compile multiple tasks with control flows (think agents and tools) and presents some promising use cases from companies building on top of LLMs.

AN INTRODUCTION TO DEBUGGING IN NODE.JS

Node.js has become increasingly popular for creating server-side web applications, build tools, command-line apps, and more. However, it can be hard to work through code errors after you write code and run it. This article will give you a thorough look at how to successfully debug your Node.js code.

STRENGTHS

Forcing yourself into a role or environment that falls outside your natural strengths will lead to you working twice as hard to make progress - while being miserable along the way. This article offers the best (and easiest) way to build a career aligned with your strengths.

PRODUCTIVITY

While it's hard enough to break out of habits, it's even harder to break free from a company culture that has bought into the meeting vortex fallacy. This article takes a look at why allowing your company culture to give your teams' brains time to digest after each meeting is crucial. It also dives into how to take back control and give your teams time to process information after meetings.

HOW TO GIVE CODE REVIEW AS A JUNIOR DEVELOPER

As a junior developer, code reviews offer a valuable learning opportunity and a chance to contribute to the team’s success. This post explains how you can provide effective code review feedback as a junior developer.

FOSSFOX

Market and opportunity explorer for open-source software engineers.

PRIMEREACT

PrimeReact provides over 90 React UI Components with top-notch quality to help you implement all your UI requirements in style.

STARRY-NIGHT

Starry-night is a syntax highlighter. It is an open source version of GitHub’s closed-source PrettyLights project. Starry-night supports 580+ grammars and it is of extremely high quality. It uses TextMate grammars, which are also used in popular editors like SublimeText, Atom, and VS Code.

OPENAI PPUS: HOW OPENAI'S UNIQUE EQUITY COMPENSATION WORKS

OpenAI's capped profit model means that the company will be able to generate more value than it would owe investors. Its employees receive a base salary and equity in Profit Participation Units (PPUs). This article explains how OpenAI's PPUs work, how OpenAI distributes them, and other benefits that OpenAI offers to employees. A link to a compensation benchmarking tool for employers is available near the end of the article.

REQUIREMENTS

With all the articles about just how amazing all the developments in AI have been, many software developers fear they’ll be replaced by artificial intelligence. The hardest part about creating software is not writing code - it’s creating the requirements, and those software requirements are still defined by humans. This article talks about the relationship between requirements and software, as well as what AI needs to produce good results.

CHATHN

ChatHN is an open-source AI chatbot that uses OpenAI Functions and the Vercel AI SDK to interact with the Hacker News API using natural language.

HOW TO WRITE BETTER CODE WITH CHATGPT

Rules to follow to write reliable code when you use ChatGPT as your coding companion.

MCKINSEY FINDS

A recent McKinsey study that looks at 850 different job roles and 2,100 tasks across occupations in 47 countries concludes that generative AI could add 4.4 trillion a year to the global economy. This would be done through automating repetitive work so humans can be freed up to do other tasks.

LOCATED

If a program uses a configuration file (or several), it should have an obvious command line way to find out where it expects to find that configuration file. Programs should fully expand and report the location they'll use given the current settings of things like environment variables.

AMAZON'S VISION: AN AI MODEL FOR EVERYTHING

Amazon's long-term strategy is to create a single point of entry for businesses to tap into both open-source and closed-source generative AI models. Matt Wood, vice president of product for Amazon Web Services, is leading Amazon's response to the AI war. This article features an interview with Wood where he discusses how Amazon views the AI market, the company's approach to winning the AI battle between the tech giants, the future of the internet, and more.

DEVELOPMENT WITH LARGER THAN 30-INCH SCREEN

Apple will launch an Apple Watch Series 9 and a second-generation Apple Watch Ultra alongside the iPhone 15 lineup this fall. Updates to the Mac lineup are not expected until later this year or early 2024. Apple is working on a new 24-inch iMac and a new iMac with a screen larger than 30 inches. The iPad Pro and iPad Air will see updates in 2024. The third-generation AirPods Pro, a new Apple TV, and other smart home products are currently in early development.

ROCKET

Elon Musk says that SpaceX needs another six weeks or so to finish implementing over a thousand changes to its Super Heavy/Starship rocket and launch pad before it will be ready for a second attempt to reach orbit. SpaceX will also need FAA clearance for the launch. The modifications include using hot staging for the stage separation system, redesigning the Raptor's hot gas manifold, and a stronger launch pad that will allow the rocket to take off at a higher throttle setting. The Super Heavy/Starship program has so far cost SpaceX over $2 billion and investment could approach $3 billion by the end of the year.

Midjourney 5.2 was released on Thursday. It includes a new zoom out feature that automatically builds larger scenes around a central synthesized image. Unlike similar features on other AI models, Midjourney's zoom out feature only works on images generated within Midjourney. The Midjourney Discord server is still the official interface for the model, but there are plans to change that. Examples of images generated with Midjourney 5.2 using the zoom out feature are available in the article.

EMBEDCHAIN

embedchain is a framework for creating large language model-powered bots over any dataset. It abstracts the entire process of loading a dataset, chunking it, creating embeddings, and then storing it in a vector database. Users can create bots by linking to media like videos, PDFs, blog posts, or websites. The project aims to make it easy for anyone to get a chatbot running over any dataset in less than a minute.

TRY

try allows users to test commands before using them on a live system. It will show the effects of a command and then prompt users to see whether they want to commit the changes made at the end of the command's execution. try is still a prototype and not a full sandbox so users should not use it to test commands that will remove everything or write zeros to a disk.

HAS XBOX REALLY LOST THE CONSOLE WARS?

Phil Spencer recently took the stand during the FTC v. Microsoft hearing to discuss Microsoft losing the console wars, competition with Sony, and Xbox's struggle to compete. Spencer's promises that Microsoft won't pull Call of Duty from PlayStation resulted in some testy exchanges with FTC's lawyer. A representative from Google also appeared at the hearing to talk about Stadia. This article takes a look at these testimonies and examines the arguments that the companies make.

OPENAI PPUS: HOW OPENAI'S UNIQUE EQUITY COMPENSATION WORKS

OpenAI's capped profit model means that the company will be able to generate more value than it would owe investors. Its employees receive a base salary and equity in Profit Participation Units (PPUs). This article explains how OpenAI's PPUs work, how OpenAI distributes them, and other benefits that OpenAI offers to employees. A link to a compensation benchmarking tool for employers is available near the end of the article.

AI

Open source licenses, which are based on copyright law, are not a good fit for large language model models and datasets so they must be updated in ways that will make sense.

AIRBNB CEO @BCHESKY SAID A LOT OF THINGS THAT WERE WORTH FURTHER THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION DURING HIS FIRESIDE CHAT WITH @ZOINK

This Twitter thread summarizes some of the key points from a recent chat between Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky and Figma CEO Dylan Field at this year's Figma Config.

GOOGLE'S NEXT GAMING PLAY MIGHT BE MINI PLAYABLES IN YOUTUBE

YouTube is internally testing a product called Playables for playing online games on mobile devices and desktop computers.

GPT-4'S SECRET HAS BEEN REVEALED

GPT-4 is actually a mixture of eight 220 billion parameter models put cleverly together.

WHY DID THE #TWITTERMIGRATION FAIL?

Many people joined the fediverse with the November 2022 influx, but most did not stick around and the number of active user numbers has dropped off a cliff.

EV BATTERY SWAPS: NOW AS FAST AS FILLING YOUR TANK

Ample's battery swapping stations can replace the battery on an electric vehicle in about five minutes.