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NOPLACE, A MASHUP OF TWITTER AND MYSPACE FOR GEN Z, HITS NO. 1 ON THE APP STORE

noplace, an app that aims to bring the 'social' back to 'social media', has surged to the top of the iOS App Store. Launched out of invite-only mode on Wednesday, the app allows users to have colorful customizable profiles and share everything from relationship status to what they're listening or watching, what they're reading or doing, and more. It focuses on text-based updates and currently doesn't support photos or videos. The app offers a feed with friends and another global feed from everyone in the app - both are in reverse chronological order. It uses AI technology to drive suggestions and creation and create summaries for things users may have missed.

THREADS HITS 175 MILLION USERS AFTER A YEAR

Threads has reached more than 175 million monthly active users. Launched on the App Store last year on July 5, the app is still growing steadily. Meta hasn't shared daily user numbers, suggesting that Threads is getting a lot of traffic from people who have yet to become regular users. Much of the app's growth is still coming from it being promoted inside Instagram. Meta is considering turning on ads in Threads sometime next year.

SPACEX WILL ATTEMPT THE FIRST COMMERCIAL SPACEWALK

Polaris Dawn, a mission designed to purchase the limits of SpaceX's technology and help pave the way for a longer-term human presence in space, is now set to launch no earlier than July 12. It will be SpaceX's second all-civilian mission and the first in its Polaris program. The mission plans include the first commercial spacewalk, research on human health in space, and tests to equip the spacecraft with Starlink Wi-Fi. It will reach an orbit of over 800 miles above Earth, the furthest out a human has gone from the planet since the Apollo era.

‘SKINNY JABS': WEIGHT-LOSS DRUGS SET FOR NEW BOOM AS GENERIC VERSIONS EMERGE

Generic versions of Wegovy, Saxenda, Ozempic, and Victoza are set to hit the market soon at a lower cost than the original drugs. Patents for liraglutide, which is in Victoza and Saxenda, have expired. Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, the world's largest generic drugmaker, has already launched a generic version of Victoza in the US. Pfizer, Viatris' Mylan, and Novartis' Sandoz are also planning to launch their own generic liraglutide products. Ozempic and Wegovy will lose patent protection in China in 2026, in Europe and Japan in 2031, and in the US in 2032.

CLOUDFLARE DEBUTS ONE-CLICK NUKE OF WEB-SCRAPING AI

Cloudflare is now offering its web hosting customers a way to block AI bots from scraping website content and using the data without permission to train machine learning models. It is able to recognize bot activity even when operators lie about their user agent. The bot detection approach relies on digital fingerprinting. With a network that sees an average of 57 million requests per second, Cloudflare has ample data to determine which fingerprints can be trusted.

ASK HN: HAS ANYONE SUCCESSFULLY PIVOTED FROM WEB DEV TO AI/ML DEVELOPMENT? (HACKER NEWS THREAD)

Before getting into AI development, first decide whether you want to train models from scratch or build cool things on top of AI models. Knowing how to train models may not be that useful when working with generative AI - it's better to develop knowledge in other areas like prompting, evals, and using models to build production-quality apps. Calling an API is going to work better than dedicating a team to tune a private model before scaling in most cases. It is possible to obtain an AI research position without a PhD, but it will take years of study.

AI'S $600B QUESTION

AI will likely create a huge amount of economic value. Speculative frenzies are part of the technology and not something to be afraid of. Those who remain level-headed have the chance to build extremely important companies. However, not everyone is going to get rich soon because AGI is coming. There is still a long road ahead with lots of ups and downs before that happens.

THE UNDERGROUND NETWORK SNEAKING NVIDIA CHIPS INTO CHINA

There is a barely concealed network of buyers, sellers, and couriers bypassing the restrictions aimed at denying China's access to Nvidia's advanced AI chips. The flow of hardware is so steady that most of the sellers take preorders and promise delivery in weeks. Some even sell entire servers. Research institutions have been among the main buyers of the advanced AI chips. The market will likely remain robust and adaptive until viable domestically-made chips emerge in China.

MARK ZUCKERBERG EXPERIMENTS WITH SIX-WINDOW QUEST VR MULTITASKING

Version 67 of Horizon OS has an experimental feature that allows Quest owners to multitask with up to six virtual windows.

MICROSOFT LAYS OFF EMPLOYEES IN NEW ROUND OF CUTS

The latest cuts impacted multiple teams and geographies, particularly those in product and program management roles.

SUMMER 2025 TECH INTERNSHIPS BY OUCKAH & CSCAREERS

JAPAN WINS 2-YEAR “WAR ON FLOPPY DISKS,” KILLS REGULATIONS REQUIRING OLD TECH

Japan's government has eliminated the use of floppy disks in all of its systems and scrapped all regulations governing their use, except for one environmental stricture related to vehicle recycling.

WHY AI INFRASTRUCTURE STARTUPS ARE INSANELY HARD TO BUILD

Most AI infrastructure startups have ideas that sound reasonable on the surface but fail to hold up to reality or rigorous thought.

AGAINST THE BURDEN OF KNOWLEDGE

'The burden of knowledge' is a theory that new ideas are getting harder to find because people have to spend more time learning old ideas before they're ready to expand to the frontier.

free!

(SNHU only accepts students based in the United States.)

PHIL SCHILLER TO JOIN OPENAI BOARD IN ‘OBSERVER' ROLE FOLLOWING APPLE'S CHATGPT DEAL

Apple Fellow Phil Schiller has been selected for an observer role on the OpenAI board. He will be able to observe board meetings but will not have any voting power. This will allow Apple to gain insights into how decisions are made at OpenAI. The arrangement will take effect later this year - details of the situation could still change.

THIS IS GOOGLE AI, AND IT'S COMING TO THE PIXEL 9

SPACEX WANTS TO LAUNCH UP TO 120 TIMES A YEAR FROM FLORIDA — AND COMPETITORS AREN'T HAPPY ABOUT IT

Several agencies are now preparing impact statements for SpaceX's Starship launch plans. SpaceX plans to launch its Starship mega-rocket up to 44 times per year from NASA's Kennedy Space Center and up to 76 times per year from the Space Launch Complex at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Elon Musk aims to eventually launch Starship multiple times per day, with each launch delivering hundreds of tons of cargo to low Earth orbit or beyond. Blue Origin and United Launch Alliance have expressed concerns that SpaceX's high flight rate will have effects on other launch providers with infrastructure at Kennedy and Cape Canaveral.

CHANGING A SINGLE GENE GAVE MICE SUPERCHARGED HEARING

University of Michigan researchers have created mice with supercharged hearing abilities by dialing up the expression of a nerve growth gene called neurotrophin-3 (Ntf3). Previous research has shown that increasing Ntf3 expression can improve hearing in middle-aged mice and help recover some hearing in mice with damaged inner ears. The treatment works by increasing the number of connections between hair cells in the ear's cochlea and the brain. The researchers believe the treatment could potentially work in humans.

MAKO

Mako is a production-grade web bundler. It is used by companies like Ant Group and projects like Umi and Father to make web apps and websites and for bundling. Mako is extremely fast and built in Rust.

SMOOTHMQ

SmoothMQ is a drop-in replacement for SQS. It has a much smoother developer experience, a functional UI, observability, tracing, message scheduling, and rate-limiting. SmoothMQ allows users to run private SQS instances on any cloud. It is deployed as a single Go binary and can be used by any existing SQS client.

WHY ARE JAPANESE DEVELOPERS NOT UNDERGOING MASS LAYOFFS?

Japan seems immune to many of the layoffs and trends seen abroad. Employee protections play a major factor in ensuring this stability for employees. Layoffs are incredibly difficult to implement under Japanese employment law. Companies need to be under severe financial difficulty and at risk of insolvency and they have to have exhausted all other cost-saving measures. There are also cultural factors - reducing their workforce can reflect poorly on a company's reputation with the public and prospective future employees.

EARTH'S MYSTERIOUS, DEEP-DWELLING MICROBES WE'RE ONLY STARTING TO UNDERSTAND

This article looks into the history of the research into subterranean life and how it has changed the way scientists see life and the planet. Earth's crust is teeming with subterranean life that scientists are just starting to begin to understand. These microbes may closely resemble some of the earliest single-celled organisms that ever existed. They make up an estimated 10 to 20 percent of the biomass on Earth.

META DROPS ‘3D GEN' BOMB: AI-POWERED 3D ASSET CREATION AT LIGHTNING SPEED

Meta 3D Gen has the potential to reshape numerous industries and create new opportunities for innovation in 3D content creation and visualization.

“REGRESSHION” VULNERABILITY IN OPENSSH GIVES ATTACKERS ROOT ON LINUX

RegreSSHion allows for remote code execution with root system rights on Linux systems based on glibc.

MY PROGRAMMING BELIEFS AS OF JULY 2024

A collection of beliefs that covers topics like how to approach tasks, how to design software, coding details, people, careers, and more.

SOLVING A MATH PROBLEM WITH PLANNER PROGRAMMING

Planning programming involves providing an initial state, a set of actions, and a target, then using a tool to find the shortest sequence of actions that reaches the target.

WITH FIFTH BUSY BEAVER, RESEARCHERS APPROACH COMPUTATION'S LIMITS

BB(5) may be the last busy beaver number that humans discover.

OMNIPARSE

OmniParse is a completely local platform that ingests and parses unstructured data into structured, actionable data optimized for GenAI applications.

Watch the video now 👀

THIS IS BIG TECH'S PLAYBOOK FOR SWALLOWING THE AI INDUSTRY

Building leading AI models is extremely costly - raising $400 million isn't even enough to compete these days. Big Tech has the cash, but it isn't allowed to buy companies like it once did due to antitrust enforcement. It has turned to aquihiring - hiring most of a company's employees and acquiring everything in a company but its name. While the current antitrust enforcement regime will likely try to block these types of acquisitions, it may not have a strong legal argument for doing so.

GOOGLE PIXEL 9 SERIES REPORTEDLY USES THE SAME DISPLAY AS IPHONE 16 PRO

Google is reportedly planning to use the same Samsung OLED display in the Pixel 9 series as Apple will use in the iPhone 16 Pro. It will be utilizing an updated M14 OLED panel from Samsung in the Pixel 9, Pixel 9 Pro, Pixel 9 Pro XL, and Pixel 9 Pro Fold. The Pixel 9 series is set to launch on August 13, well ahead of the company's usual schedule and ahead of the launch of the new iPhones expected in September.

SCIENTISTS CREATE ROBOT CONTROLLED BY BLOB OF HUMAN BRAIN CELLS

Chinese researchers have created a robot controlled by a tiny organoid made from human stem cells. The brain tissue is hooked up to a neural interface, allowing it to pass instructions to the humanoid robot body. The setup will allow researchers to study brain-computer interfaces and help develop techniques for integrating organoids with the human brain. Organoids could one day be used to repair the human brain through transplantation.

CHINESE SPACE FIRM UNINTENTIONALLY LAUNCHES ITS NEW ROCKET

Chinese space startup Space Pioneer accidentally launched its Tianlong-3 rocket during a static fire test. The booster broke free from the test stand due to a structural failure. It flew several hundred meters into the sky before crashing explosively into a mountain 1.5 kilometers away from the test site. The test site is located about 5 kilometers away from the downtown area of a city with 800,000 people and less than a kilometer from a smaller village. The company reported that there were no casualties as a result of the accident.

JJ INIT

Jujutsu is a new version control system that is on track to replace Google's existing version control systems. It has an interesting approach to its design choices in terms of both implementation details and user interface. Jujutsu can be used with existing Git repositories. This article introduces the system and walks readers through how to use it.

PROBLEMATIC SECOND

The leap second was invented to compensate for the difference between the value measured by atomic clocks and the actual time the Earth revolves around the Sun. These seconds are usually added on the last day of June or December. Poor time synchronization can lead to data loss and other problems. Leap seconds are added rarely, so they inevitably cause problems almost every time they are added. This article looks at leap seconds and the various problems they have caused.

SUPREME COURT PROTECTS THE FUTURE OF CONTENT MODERATION

A decision issued by the Supreme Court on Monday explicitly extends First Amendment protections to how social media platforms organize, curate, and moderate their feeds. The compilation and curation of others' speech into an expressive product of its own is entitled to First Amendment protection. Platforms are making expressive choices when they use their Standards and Guidelines to decide which content to display or how the display will be ordered and organized. The government cannot get its way just by asserting an interest in better balancing the marketplace of ideas.

LIVING IN A LUCID DREAM

This article looks at lucid dreaming, the history behind its research, what the experience is like, how to get into a lucid dream, and more. More than half of adults will have a lucid dream experience or one like it at some point in their lives. It is possible to learn how to lucid dream. The path to learning the skill involves developing an awareness of the difference between waking and dreaming. This usually results in small habits that spill into dreams that help identify whether a person is dreaming.

TESLA STOCK JUMPS AND SOME THINK IT'S BECAUSE OF THIS ELON MUSK MOVE

Some believe that Tesla stock jumped because CEO Elon Musk followed Uber founder Travis Kalanick on X.

NEW WEB DEVELOPMENT. OR, WHY COPILOTS AND CHATBOTS ARE PARTICULARLY BAD FOR MODERN WEB DEV

Web development is on the verge of a paradigm shift - built-in browser APIs are much more capable than they were when React was first invented.

LET'S STOP ASKING "WHY DO YOU WANT TO WORK FOR US?" IN INTERVIEWS

Most people want to work for a company because they need money, and there's nothing wrong with that.

NETFLIX AND AMAZON DOMINATE COMMISSIONING BY STREAMERS, TILTING THE CONTENT MARKET AWAY FROM U.S., TOWARDS LOCAL: STUDY

Netflix and Amazon accounted for more than half of worldwide streamers' commissions from January to March this year.

ELON MUSK SAYS GROK 2 DUE IN AUGUST, GROK 3 BY END OF YEAR

Not too much is known about the models, but Elon Musk has mentioned that Grok 3 will be trained on 100,000 Nvidia H100s.

DOGGO

doggo is a modern command-line DNS client that outputs information in a neat concise manner and supports protocols like DoH, DoT, DoQ, and DNSCrypt.

* Unlimited parallel test runs

* 24-hour maintenance and on-demand test creation * Zero flakes, guaranteed