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GOOGLE IS A VERY STRANGE MONOPOLIST

Google acts like a monopoly but without harming consumers, a fact that could pose some problems on appeal.

INSIDE THE COMPANY THAT GATHERS ‘HUMAN DATA' FOR EVERY MAJOR AI COMPANY

Staffing firm Turing's work played an important role in helping OpenAI create ChatGPT.

X OFFICIALLY KILLS ITS SAN FRANCISCO HEADQUARTERS, WILL RELOCATE WORKERS TO SOUTH BAY

X's engineering workers will share an office in Palo Alto with xAI while the remaining employees will be routed to existing offices in Santana Row.

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_SNHU is currently only accepting US students._

OPENAI CO-FOUNDER JOHN SCHULMAN SAYS HE WILL LEAVE AND JOIN RIVAL ANTHROPIC

OpenAI co-founder John Schulman recently announced that he will leave OpenAI to join Anthropic to deepen his focus on AI alignment. The move comes less than three months after OpenAI disbanded a superalignment team that focused on ensuring that AI systems can be controlled. Schulman has worked at OpenAI since receiving a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 2016. Greg Brockman, another co-founder of OpenAI and its president, announced on Monday that he was taking a sabbatical for the rest of the year.

‘YOU ARE A HELPFUL MAIL ASSISTANT,' AND OTHER APPLE INTELLIGENCE INSTRUCTIONS

Apple's latest developer betas contain a handful of the generative AI features that were announced at WWDC. The files for these prompts show how these features work. This article contains screenshots of some of the prompts and makes guesses at what features the prompts are related to. Instructions for how to locate the files within the macOS Sequoia 15.1 developer beta are available.

FIGURE REDESIGNS ITS HUMANOID ROBOT FROM THE GROUND UP FOR SLICK NEW F.02

Figure's second-generation humanoid robot is aimed at production lines in commercial settings. Its engineers took a ground-up hardware and software redesign approach to developing the robot that included upgrades to the AI systems, computer vision, battery pack, electronics, sensors, and actuators. The robot now has microphones and speakers that allow it to have one-on-one conversations with humans. A video trailer from Figure showing off the robot is available.

CHINA BEGINS LAUNCHING A MEGACONSTELLATION, AND IT SOUNDS A LOT LIKE STARLINK

There are two serious efforts underway in China to develop a rival to SpaceX's Starlink project. The first batch of 18 satellites for one of those projects launched into low-Earth orbit on Tuesday on a Long March 4A rocket. Besides providing civilians with internet, the network could be used for military applications and as a diplomatic tool. The full deployment of these networks will require a significant increase in China's launch capacity.

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PREDICTIONS FOR THE FUTURE OF SOFTWARE ENGINEERING

Software engineering will likely look radically different in a few years. The introduction of coding agents that complete tasks end-to-end will change how engineers work, making them more like engineering managers who spend more time on the higher level parts of coding. This will have many effects, like creating more software, more engineers, and productivity gains for companies. Marketing may even start being directed to AI agents as companies try to get them to choose their products over a rival's.

OPENAI: INTRODUCING STRUCTURED OUTPUTS IN THE API

OpenAI has introduced two new ways to guarantee valid inputs. The first is a new 'strict' option for function definitions and the second is a new feature option for the 'response_format' field that lets users pass a JSON schema to specify a required output. OpenAI's models will now return a 'refusal' message if a model denies a request. The new gpt-4o-2024-08-06 model is 50% cheaper on inputs and 33% on outputs compared to gpt-4o-2024-05-13. It also supports up to 16,384 tokens, up from 4,096.

RETURN-TO-OFFICE MANDATES HURT EMPLOYEE RETENTION, PRODUCTIVITY, SURVEY SAYS

Employee retention improves when employees have a say in where they work. A recent survey on employee satisfaction found that those who are allowed to choose between in-person, remote, or hybrid work are three times more likely to want to stay at their company. It also found that workers facing return-to-office mandates are 14 times less likely to 'quit and stay'. Several other studies have found similar results.

DELL MAKES CUTS TO BOOST AI PIVOT, REPORTEDLY LAYING OFF 12,500 EMPLOYEES

Dell is cutting around 10% of its workforce. Impacted employees were mostly in the company's sales and marketing teams. The company is switching up its sales teams to put more emphasis on AI products and changing how it handles data center sales. This is the second round of mass layoffs for the company in the past 15 months.

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FAIR SOURCE

Fair Source aims to legitimize the practice of companies meaningfully sharing the code for their core software products while retaining control of their roadmaps and business models - it is not to be confused with Free and Open Source Software.

GOOGLE KILLS CHROMECAST, REPLACES IT WITH APPLE TV AND ROKU ULTRA COMPETITOR

The Google TV Streamer is an HDMI set-top box that costs $100 - it adds several amenities that weren't available in the dongles, like an Ethernet port.

Y'ALL ARE SLEEPING ON HTTP/3

HTTP/3 abandons TCP in favor of a channel-aware UDP-based protocol called QUIC, which provides faster page loads, smoother video streaming, and more resilient connections.

WHAT IS THE COSTLIEST CODING ERROR ANYONE HAS EVER MADE?

A software bug from 12 years ago cost a company $457 million, leading to its dissolution.

‘THERE'S NO PRICE' MICROSOFT COULD PAY APPLE TO USE BING: ALL THE SPICIEST PARTS OF THE GOOGLE ANTITRUST RULING

This article contains a summary of the facts uncovered in the United States v. Google antitrust case.

POSTING

Posting is an HTTP client that enables efficient keyboard-centric workflows.

GOOGLE LOSES ANTITRUST CASE OVER SEARCH

A federal judge has ruled that Google illegally held a monopoly in search and text advertising. Google was found to have violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act, which outlaws monopolies. The ruling is the first anti-monopoly decision against a tech company in decades. Google plans to appeal the ruling.

CHROME'S MANIFEST V3, AND ITS CHANGES FOR AD BLOCKING, ARE COMING REAL SOON

Chrome is preparing to make Manifest V3 compulsory for extensions that want to run on its platform. Some users recently reported seeing warnings telling them that certain extensions may no longer be supported. V2 extensions started being disabled in early June on the Beta, Dev, and Canary update channels. Users will still be able to manually re-enable V2 extensions for a short time.

A PRIMER ON THE CURRENT STATE OF LONGEVITY RESEARCH

This article takes a look at how far the field of aging research has progressed since 2021. Nothing particularly useful has come from sirtuin-focused therapies and this is unlikely to change. The increase in longevity-focused research institutions/grant programs/startups hasn't led to much progress, but it's still very early. Cellar reprogramming has shown promise in animal studies, but no therapies have reached clinical trials yet. There's still a lot we don't know about biological clocks - everyday consumers should probably avoid getting their biological age tested. While epigenetic clocks seem to be useful, their interpretation is a bit complicated.

PATH TO PRECISION: TARGETED CANCER DRUGS GO FROM TABLE TO TRIALS TO BEDSIDE

There are now many targeted therapies and new techniques in the pipeline for treating various types of cancer. This article looks at the history of targeted cancer treatments to see how far the science has come. It took many preclinical studies, genetic sequencing advances, and other breakthroughs to get where we are now. The success of current treatments would not have been possible without all of the research legwork and basic science over the past few decades.

HOW POSTGRES STORES DATA ON DISK

Databases contain some immensely powerful and clever abstractions. They aren't that complicated - most of the complexity in them comes from edge cases, often around concurrency. This article looks at how databases store data on disk, with a focus on PostgreSQL. It also provides resources for further research. Understanding how databases work is useful for fine-tuning performance and data recovery.

HOW I PROGRAM IN 2024

This article shares a developer's perspective on how to program durable things. The developer found that he ended up with much better programs by giving up tests and versions. Building durably for lots of people is hard - it's much better to focus on a core set of people and features. Overuse of the same tools creates technical debt, making programs unnecessarily complex, less durable, and harder to change when the context shifts.

COOKIE BANNERS SHOW EVERYTHING THAT'S WRONG WITH THE EU

Billions of dollars have been spent on cookie banner compliance just to annoy users with no material improvement to their privacy. The EU has no mechanism for self-correcting legislative failures. Europe needs to rethink how it legislates tech as the amount of squandered potential is tragic. Very little innovation is happening in Europe and when it does, it's usually shipped to the US or elsewhere as soon as it's ready to make a real impact on the world.

OPENAI TEMPERS EXPECTATIONS WITH LESS BOMBASTIC, GPT-5-LESS DEVDAY THIS FALL

OpenAI is changing the format of its DevDay conference to a series of on-the-road developer engagement sessions. It won't be releasing its next major flagship model during the event. The conference will focus on educating developers about what's available in showcasing dev community stories. The DevDay events will take place in San Francisco on October 1, London on October 30, and Singapore on November 21. Registration costs $450 - applications close on August 15.

LEAKED DOCUMENTS SHOW NVIDIA SCRAPING ‘A HUMAN LIFETIME' OF VIDEOS PER DAY TO TRAIN AI

Nvidia has been collecting a massive amount of video data, mostly from YouTube, to train a new video foundation model called Cosmos.

A NEW TYPE OF NEURAL NETWORK IS MORE INTERPRETABLE

Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks are smaller, more interpretable, and more accurate than traditional neural networks.

EVERY MICROSOFT EMPLOYEE IS NOW BEING JUDGED ON THEIR SECURITY WORK

Microsoft is now tying its security efforts to employee performance reviews - a lack of security focus for employees could impact promotions, merit-based salary increases, and bonuses.

TWITTER'S FUTURE IS A RETURN TO ELON MUSK'S PAST

Elon Musk's rebranding of Twitter to X was a revival of a long-held dream.

BIG TECH'S GUIDE TO "M&A" IN AI

Instead of buying companies outright, big tech has been using an 'acquihiring' strategy to avoid complications with antitrust regulators - this post describes the process.

WEAK SOFT SKILLS: WHY YOU ARE STUCK AT THE SENIOR ENGINEER LEVEL

Mastery of soft skills is the most significant difference between a senior and staff engineer.

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INTEL CEO PAT GELSINGER'S DREAM JOB TAKES A NIGHTMARISH TURN

Intel's stock ended Friday trading down 26 percent. The company recently reported financial results and an outlook with lower-than-expected revenue and profit-margin forecasts. It plans to lay off around 15,000 employees, target $10 billion in cost cuts next year, and suspend dividend payments in the fourth quarter. Intel's market value is now at a level last seen 15 years ago.

NVIDIA REPORTEDLY DELAYS ITS NEXT AI CHIP DUE TO A DESIGN FLAW

Nvidia's Blackwell B200 chips will take at least three months longer to produce than was planned. The delay is due to a design flaw that was discovered unusually late in the production process. Nvidia is now working through a fresh set of test runs and won't ship large numbers of the chips until the first quarter. Microsoft, Google, and Meta have already ordered tens of billions of dollars worth of the chips.

NEURALINK INSTALLS ITS BRAIN IMPLANT INTO A SECOND HUMAN PATIENT

Elon Musk announced on a recent podcast that Neuralink has installed its second implant into a human patient. The implant is apparently working very well. Musk said last month that there could be over 1,000 humans with Neuralink implants by 2026. A link to the podcast, in which Musk discusses Neuralink and its brain implant technology at length, is available in the article - Musk shares the news near the beginning of the four hour conversation.

CONSIDER THE EEL

Forsea Foods is an Israeli startup focused on growing eel meat in the lab. The company believes that starting with a premium offering makes the most sense due to the high costs of production. The price of eel meat is set to rise as the global population is cratering - the European eel population has fallen by 98% since 1980. Forsea's technology allows it to grow different types of cells in a single bioreactor, cutting down on both production time and costs. It plans to launch its product commercially starting in Japan in 2026.

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REAL-TIME DATABASE STARTUP CLICKHOUSE ACQUIRES PEERDB TO EXPAND ITS POSTGRES SUPPORT

ClickHouse has acquired PeerDB, a company focused on cost-effective Postgres replication and change data capture. PeerDB offers speed improvements and a number of specialized capabilities that ClickHouse didn't previously offer. Its open source components will remain open source without any change to their licenses and ClickHouse will also open source the production-grade Helm charts for PeerDB's enterprise offering. Existing commercial customers will be able to use the PeerDB Cloud service until July 24 next year.

SQLITE-VEC

sqlite-vec is an extremely small vector search SQLite extension. It can store and query float, int8, and binary vectors in vec0 virtual tables. sqlite-vec doesn't have any dependencies and runs anywhere that SQLite runs.

THERE'S A TOOL TO CATCH STUDENTS CHEATING WITH CHATGPT. OPENAI HASN'T RELEASED IT

OpenAI has a method that can reliably detect when someone has used ChatGPT to write an essay or research paper, but it hasn't released it despite it having been ready for release for about a year. The company is concerned that the tool would be unpopular with its users and disproportionately affect some groups. The tool is 99.9% effective when there is enough text. However, the watermarks it generates can be erased through simple techniques like having Google translate the text into another language and back or having ChatGPT add emojis to the text and then manually deleting them.

MISTRAL AI CEO ARTHUR MENSCH ON MICROSOFT, REGULATION, AND EUROPE'S AI ECOSYSTEM

Mistral AI has rapidly risen as a homegrown European champion over the past year. The company was valued at more than $6 billion in June. Its CEO, Arthur Mensch, has been vocal in debates over the EU's AI law, saying that lawmakers should focus on regulating how others use those models rather than regulating general-purpose AI models like Mistral's. This article contains an interview with Mensch where he discusses attracting talent, how Mistral plans to turn a profit, and what's missing from Europe's AI ecosystem.