Search the archive

DO ADS EVEN WORK ON DEVS?

The common perception is that developers dislike being sold to and are allergic to anything resembling an ad. This article explains how to work around this and use ads effectively.

BY THE END OF 2025

GM FOLLOWS FORD IN ADOPTING TESLAS EV CHARGING STANDARD

FIRST MISSION TO ‘TOUCH’ THE SUN CATCHES THE SOLAR WIND

ROBOT CAN RIP THE DATA OUT OF RAM CHIPS WITH CHILLING TECHNOLOGY

CREATE NEXT STACK

GUARDRAILS

Guardrails is a Python package for specifying structure and type and validating and correcting the outputs of large language models. It does pydantic-style validation of LLM outputs, takes corrective actions, and enforces structure and type guarantees. Developers specify LLM output using a file format and a lightweight wrapper implements the spec.

THE VISION PROS BIGGEST ADVANTAGE ISN'T APPLE'S HARDWARE

APPS

THE ASYMMETRY OF OPEN SOURCE

TWITTER HAS REPORTEDLY REFUSED TO PAY ITS GOOGLE CLOUD CONTRACT

LEAKED TESLA REPORT SHOWS CYBERTRUCK HAD BASIC DESIGN FLAWS

OPENOBSERVE

SILICON VALLEY ESCALATES THE BATTLE OVER RETURNING TO THE OFFICE

ALGORITHMS

META LEADS OPEN-SOURCE AI WITH NEW TEXT-TO-MUSIC MODEL

CEO Mark Zuckerburg recently discussed his goals with open-sourcing significant expensive AI tools in a podcast. This collection of music generation code, model weights, and evaluations is an example of just that. It allows you to generate both melody conditioned and text conditioned music. The code is fully open sourced, but model weights are not commercially open.

STABLE DIFFUSION TAKES STEREOTYPES TO THE EXTREME

Bloomberg journalists found that Stable Diffusion takes racial and gender disparities to extremes that are even worse than those found in the real world, stroking fears that generative AI will perpetuate biases.

KHAN ACADEMY KHANMIGO

Khan Academy has introduced an AI-powered chatbot, Khanmigo, which aims to provide personalized tutoring to students. Powered by GPT-4, the bot offers guidance on a broad range of subjects and uses the Socratic method to encourage learners to solve their problems independently. While proponents believe such bots could revolutionize education, concerns about the technology's potential for error and impact on teachers' roles persist and its effectiveness is currently being studied ahead of a broader rollout in U.S. schools.

NEW MULTIMODAL TEXT/VISION MODEL FROM SINGAPORE

A lot of new acronyms are introduced in this work. The gist is that researchers collected a new dataset for visual instruction tuning, trained a model, and made some algorithmic tweaks along the way. The demo is really impressive, especially after the AR reveal from Apple. An exciting peak at what AI assistants might look like in the future.

MAKING LANGUAGE MODELS MORE TRUTHFUL AT TEST TIME

Language models are well known for confidently confabulating (sometimes called hallucinating). It turns out that these models have an internal representation for truthfulness and by tweaking the model activations you can elicit a truthful response. The researchers found that by using this technique on the instruction-tuned Alpaca model, they improved TruthfulQA performance from 32.5% to 65.1%.

SPQR: A TECHNIQUE FOR HIGH-EFFICIENCY LLM COMPRESSION

The paper presents Sparse-Quantized Representation (SpQR), a new format and technique that allows almost lossless compression of large language models (LLMs), overcoming the usual accuracy losses from quantization. SpQR enables powerful LLMs to run on common devices like laptops and mobile phones without performance degradation, offering over 4x memory compression gains and faster inference than traditional methods.

MATTE ANYTHING

Advances in computer vision seemed to slow after autonomous vehicle research lost some steam, but things are picking up again. This novel technique uses a hydra of three image models to enhance the performance of natural image matting. The results are quite compelling.

BREAKTHROUGH IN DENSE PIXEL WISE TRACKING, EVEN WITH OCCLUSIONS

In 2015, there was a breakthrough in representing continuous values with a 6D number. This work rhymes in that they propose representing videos as a 3D volume. By matching between that representation and pixel space, they can perform quite long term tracking of arbitrary pixels in a video.

LANARKY

Lanarky is an open-source framework to deploy LLM applications in production.

LLMS ARE GOOD AT PLAYING YOU

An exploration into the eerie human-like features of LLMs and how they hold promise for some fields and trouble for others.

CONGRESS TO CONSIDER TWO NEW AI BILLS

U.S. senators introduced two separate bipartisan artificial intelligence bills on Thursday amid growing interest in addressing issues surrounding the technology. One would require the U.S. government to be transparent when using AI to interact with people and the other would establish an office to determine if the United States is remaining competitive in the latest technologies.

CHATGPT ONLY KNOWS 25 JOKES

Two German researchers, Sophie Jentzsch and Kristian Kersting, released a paper that examines the ability of OpenAI's ChatGPT-3.5 to understand and generate humor. They discovered that ChatGPT's knowledge of jokes is fairly limited: During a test run, 90 percent of 1,008 generations were the same 25 jokes.

HEY, ALEXA, WHAT SHOULD STUDENTS LEARN ABOUT AI?

Tech giants, universities, and nonprofits are working to provide lessons on artificial intelligence to students in schools. There is currently no national consensus on what should be taught about the technology. Current curriculums cover a range of topics, from the basics of AI to how to program Alexa.

CRACKDOWN

As a result of the SEC's latest offensive against crypto exchanges, Robinhood is delisting Solana, Polygon, and Cardano after June 27. Users will be able to transfer these cryptocurrencies until the deadline, but post-deadline, Robinhood will sell the coins, crediting the corresponding USD value to users' accounts. The decision follows Robinhood's review of SEC lawsuits against Binance and Coinbase. Despite having its securities trading license, Robinhood officials acknowledged that they are not sure if this would allow them to trade the tokens the SEC is claiming are securities.

BINANCE.US SUSPENDS USD DEPOSITS, WARNS OF FIAT WITHDRAWAL PAUSE

Binance.US is suspending USD deposits and is warning users of a pause in USD withdrawals starting on June 13, due to pressure from the SEC. Its banking situation has become more complicated after the SEC issued an order to freeze Binance.US’s assets. The crypto exchange is planning to transition to a crypto-only platform. While trading, staking, deposits, and crypto withdrawals will remain operational, the firm plans to delist USD trading pairs, though Tether pairs will still be supported.

CATALYST UNIT OF LIQUIDITY

Catalyst Exchange's new whitepaper goes over an innovation called the 'Unit of Liquidity', which promises to further generalize Uniswap and Balancer AMM equations and improve cross-chain DeFi applications. Unlike existing protocols, Catalyst enables cross-chain swaps without exposing users to an intermediate token or requiring a bridge. The system executes swaps independently and uses price curves rather than a constant function. It can mimic the Balancer invariant, facilitate stable-coin swaps, enable cross-chain liquidity auctions, and more.

INSCRIPTIONS 2.0 - RECURSIVE INSCRIPTIONS COMING TO ORDINALS

A PR for recursion, merged over the weekend, allows an Ordinals inscription to request content from other inscriptions, effectively exceeding the previous 4mb limit. This creates opportunities for innovative applications such as loading parts of a larger game code, or building image inscriptions from a base layer plus traits, all on-chain. Even entire programs, like Bitcoin Core, can theoretically be uploaded and run on Bitcoin. The development of this concept opens the door for further creativity and functionality for Ordinals.

THE THREE TRANSITIONS

This article from Vitalik Buterin discusses three critical transitions Ethereum must undergo to mature: L2 scaling, wallet security, and privacy. The first relates to everyone moving to rollups, enabling faster and cheaper transactions. The second involves the transition to smart contract wallets for enhanced security. The third emphasizes privacy-preserving fund transfers. In the post, Buterin discusses the implications of these transitions on users, addresses, on-chain payments, key recovery, infrastructure, and identity.

ONCHAIN HYPERCULTURES: THE CONTEXT-FERMENTATION WINDOW

This blog discusses on-chain culture, represented by blockchains and the internet, and how it may lead to a global cultural shift by turning cultural diversity into a fruitful global society. It transforms individual and collective creativity into tangible milestones in the digital realm. For example, paying to mint, as opposed to simply uploading to servers, enhances the value of shared content. The decentralized nature of blockchains allows for endless hyperculture creation, across fields like art, journalism, music, and more. This potential, combined with collective resonance, could bring about a major cultural evolution.

THEIR CRYPTO COMPANY COLLAPSED. THEY WENT TO BALI.

This controversial article explains how Kyle Davies and Su Zhu have enjoyed leisurely lives traveling and sightseeing following the collapse of their cryptocurrency hedge fund, 3AC. Their hedge fund's failure led to substantial losses for other companies and individual investors, but Davies and Zhu claim to have thrived since, spending time in Bali, Thailand, and Malaysia, among other locations. Despite ongoing investigations and outstanding balances to creditors to the tune of $3.3 billion, they insist they've done nothing wrong. In fact, they're even promoting their next venture, Open Exchange, a platform for traders who lost money in last year’s crypto market crash to buy and sell claims to the bankruptcy estates of defunct crypto firms. Ironically, users will be able to trade claims against 3AC on this new exchange headed up by Davies and Zhu.

CRACKDOWN ON COINBASE

The SEC's recent lawsuits against Binance and Coinbase have drawn criticism from Congress and former regulators, who accuse SEC Chairman Gary Gensler of undermining their efforts to develop a regulatory framework for the crypto industry. Critics argue Gensler's views have significantly shifted from when he taught blockchain at MIT. While Gensler emphasizes that he is trying to reign in what he views as the non-compliance of the crypto sector, others believe the SEC is wasting resources on ambiguous cases. Some in the industry are hopeful that these enforcement actions will prompt Congress to accelerate the creation of crypto regulation, though skeptics caution about betting on swift legislative action.

POLYGON LABS RESPONDS TO SEC'S CLAIM MATIC IS A SECURITY

Polygon Labs has refuted the SEC's claim that MATIC is an unregistered security, focusing its argument on the fact they didn't target the US.

A16Z EXPANDING TO THE UK

a16z announced it is opening its first non-US-based office in the UK. The firm views the UKs policies towards crypto as much more friendly than the US’s regulatory environment and wants to have a strong presence in the region.

GENERATIVE ART: A QUINTESSENTIALLY MODERN ART FORM

This piece from Sotheby’s in connection with its Grails auction explains how Generative art, created via autonomous systems and often tokenized as NFTs, is gaining popularity and earning a legitimate place amongst other modern art forms.

LIABLE

In a case alleging that Ooki DAO was operating an illegal exchange, a US court ruled that the decentralized autonomous organization is legally liable under the Commodity Exchange Act, potentially setting a significant legal precedent for other DAOs.

WEB3 IN SAAS CLOTHING

Tomasz Tunguz argues due to a severe decline in funding and modest addressable market, web3 startups will be forced to become web2 SaaS companies imbued with the unique traits that web3 technology enables.

THE FUTURE OF CREATOR COMMERCE

Rex Woodbury discusses how the rise of creator commerce is changing the way people shop. Creators are now able to sell their own products and services directly to their fans, bypassing traditional retailers. This is leading to a more personalized and engaging shopping experience for consumers.

TO BUILD A TOP PERFORMING TEAM, ASK FOR 85% EFFORT

Instead of asking for 100% effort from your team, ask for 85%. This will help your team members avoid burnout and be more productive. When team members are happy and productive, they are more likely to be creative and innovative. This can lead to better results for your team and your company.

BUILD A RUNNING LIST OF INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

To best assess a candidate in the interview process, value-question alignment and a deep survey into the candidate's past should be conducted. Entrepreneurs should have a Google Doc or Notion of their favorite interview questions as a living doc for continuous improvement.

OUR JOURNEY BUILDING A $60K/MONTH QA AND SOFTWARE TESTING FIRM

BugRaptors, founded by Yashu Kapila, is a successful startup providing quality assurance and software testing services globally. The startup’s success highlights the potential of entering niche tech markets. Kapila's advice to fellow entrepreneurs includes valuing learning, demonstrating competence, extending empathy, and spreading positivity, exemplifying how startup founders can foster growth and create impactful businesses.

INVESTING IN ARTISTS OF A COMPANY

This article argues that investing in the artists of a company is a better way to invest than investing in the company itself. The reason is because artists are the ones who create the products and services that make a company successful. When artists are happy and productive, they are more likely to create great work. As a result, investing in artists can lead to higher returns for investors.

TEST YOUR STARTUP IDEA WITH AI: MUST-KNOW TIPS AND TOOLS

AI enables startups to leverage tools and insights for market identification, persona creation, understanding customer needs, generating solution hypotheses, developing a compelling value proposition, conducting demand tests, and validating ideas, while acknowledging the significance of human engagement in the process.