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VERSO

Verso is a web browser built on top of the Servo web engine.

RUST GUI LIBRARY VIA FLUTTER, DONE SIMPLE

This blog post describes a simple approach to building Rust GUIs using Flutter and the flutter_rust_bridge library.

AMAZON DEALS LET SHOPPERS BUY PRODUCTS ON TIKTOK, PINTEREST

Amazon has partnered with TikTok and Pinterest to let their users buy products on its platform without leaving the social media apps. The deal enables users to link their social media profiles to their Amazon accounts and buy products directly from ads. Users will see real time pricing, Prime eligibility, delivery estimates, and product details in-app. The deal follows similar arrangements with Meta and Snap.

M4 MAC MINI TO BECOME APPLE'S SMALLEST EVER COMPUTER WITH COMPLETE REDESIGN

The Mac mini is getting its first major redesign since 2010. The new Mac mini will be almost the size of an Apple TV and continue to feature an aluminum shell. There will be two versions, one with the standard M4 chip and one with an M4 Pro chip. The base model is set to begin shipping from suppliers this month while the high-end model will not be ready until October.

INSIDE SILICON VALLEY'S GRAND AMBITIONS TO CONTROL OUR PLANET'S THERMOSTAT

Private interests have pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into reversing climate change in recent years. These private investment organizations claim that they have been forced to act as governments and the academic world have been dawdling. There is little regulation to govern geoengineering. This article looks at different projects in the space and their challenges.

ARE SYNTHETIC WOMBS THE FUTURE OF CHILDBIRTH? NEW CHINESE EXPERIMENT SPARKS DEBATE

Chinese researchers recently announced a groundbreaking synthetic womb experiment without the use of extra corporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO). ECMO allows for oxygenation of fetus blood after removal from the mother's body, bypassing the heart and lungs, allowing these organs to rest and heal. It is expensive and comes with risks such as blood clots and infections. An ECMO-free artificial womb would significantly lower costs - the operating costs of ECMO are around $9,000 a day.

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ORBIT

ORBIT enables developers to create radial interfaces using only CSS. It is easy to learn and use and works with other CSS frameworks. ORBIT components can be combined to compose complex radial creations. Examples are available.

IS IT TIME TO VERSION OBSERVABILITY? (SIGNS POINT TO YES)

The observability industry has stuck to metrics, logs, and traces over the years because they describe the daily reality for engineers. While the language used to describe the problems and solutions has evolved, the solutions are still largely the same as they were a decade ago. While they have massively improved, they're structurally variations on the same pre-aggregated metrics. It's now getting harder and harder to speak clearly about different approaches and solutions - a problem semantic versioning was made to solve.

ENGINEERING THE FIRST FITBIT: THE INSIDE STORY

Inspired by the Wii, entrepreneur James Park came up with the Fitbit as a gadget to get people out of the house. The activity tracker has sold more than 136 million units since 2009. Google bought the company in 2021 for $2.1 billion and absorbed it into its hardware division. This article looks at the origins of Fitbit and the challenges it faced early in development.

WHY GOOGLE DECIDED NOW'S THE TIME TO MOVE ON FROM CHROMECAST

Google is phasing out the Chromecast in favor of the new Google TV streamer after more than a decade. The company decided to focus on a higher-end device because there is too much competition for inexpensive streaming devices. The Google TV steamer infuses Gemini AI smarts into the software and puts smart home controls on the TV screen. It is faster than the often-laggy Chromecast. The device will go on sale in September for $99.

OPENAI WORRIES PEOPLE MAY BECOME EMOTIONALLY RELIANT ON ITS NEW CHATGPT VOICE MODE

A report from OpenAI on the safety review it conducted on its new voice mode revealed a risk of users becoming too reliant on ChatGPT for companionship.

MAN VS. MACHINE: DEEPMIND'S NEW ROBOT SERVES UP A TABLE TENNIS TRIUMPH

Google DeepMind's AI-powered robotic table tennis player is capable of competing at an amateur human level.

DOJ ANTITRUST CHIEF IS ‘OVERJOYED' AFTER GOOGLE MONOPOLY VERDICT

This is a transcript of an interview with Jonathan Kanter, the assistant attorney general for antitrust at the United States Department of Justice, where he discusses the recent antitrust ruling against Google, what it means for the law, and what remedies he will seek to try to restore competition in search.

A NEW REPORT FINDS BOEING'S ROCKETS ARE BUILT WITH AN UNQUALIFIED WORK FORCE

The lack of a qualified workforce has resulted in significant program delays and increased costs.

WHY ARE SO MANY CAR YOUTUBERS QUITTING?

Many blame private equity for creators leaving the platform.

ELON MUSK CONTINUES TO SIPHON TESLA TALENT TO TRAIN XAI'S GROK

xAI has now hired over a dozen Tesla employees to train Grok.

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HUGGING FACE ACQUIRES XETHUB

Hugging Face serves and stores a lot of data, most of it in LFS. XetHub has written its own, powerful, alternative for scaling Git repositories.

HUMANE'S DAILY RETURNS ARE OUTPACING SALES

Humane's AI Pin faced a significant return rate post-launch with negative reviews, leading to approximately 7,000 of the sold units remaining with customers. Despite raising over $200 million from tech luminaries, Humane struggled with over $1 million in returns and internal leadership turnover. Amidst financial woes, there's speculation about a potential HP acquisition and new debt fundraising efforts.

GPT-4O SYSTEM CARD

Aligning a voice system is challenging. This post highlights the ongoing efforts to ensure the multimodal model is safe and helpful.

QWEN2-MATH

The Qwen team has released a 72B math model that outperforms all open and closed models on MATH. It also outperforms Llama-3.1-405B on a number of reasoning benchmarks. It is limited to English only, with multilingual models coming soon.

SEMANTIC SEGMENTATION IN PATHOLOGY

SAM2-PATH is a new framework designed to enhance semantic segmentation in digital pathology.

A MULTILINGUAL DATASET FOR SPOKEN LANGUAGE UNDERSTANDING

Speech-MASSIVE is a new multilingual Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) dataset. It offers a speech-based counterpart to the MASSIVE textual corpus.

PYTORCH FLEXATTENTION

PyTorch has released a new API that allows any type of attention variant to be coded and compiled to Triton. This allows for better portability, performance, and research velocity on types of attention.

A LANGUAGE MODEL WITH QUICK PRE-TRAINING

The "1.5-Pints" Language Model presents a new approach to compute-efficient pre-training. By curating a high-quality dataset of 57 billion tokens, this model surpasses Apple's OpenELM and Microsoft's Phi in instruction-following tasks, as measured by MT-Bench.

VIDEO MOMENT RETRIEVAL AND HIGHLIGHT DETECTION

Lighthouse is a user-friendly library designed to tackle the challenges in video moment retrieval and highlight detection.

WHY AI HASN'T SHOWN UP IN THE GDP STATISTICS YET

AI IS COMING FOR INDIA'S FAMOUS TECH HUB

India's technology outsourcing industry is facing a pivot as AI integration threatens jobs, especially in basic tasks like call centers. Companies are challenged to ascend the value chain amidst a hiring slowdown, with some hopeful AI tools will create new opportunities in sectors like programming. The industry's future demands higher-level cognitive skills as automation continues to redefine traditional roles.

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

Breakthroughs in AI pre-training have enabled models to process massive online datasets, while subsequent supervised fine-tuning with experts helps models generalize and gain specialized knowledge. Turing's approach of using "input and output pairs" generated by subject-matter experts aims to advance AI reasoning capabilities. Anticipating an "agentic" era of AI, these models could autonomously perform complex tasks by integrating specialized knowledge across domains.

FULLY-AUTOMATIC ROBOT DENTIST PERFORMS WORLD'S FIRST HUMAN PROCEDURE

Perceptive has developed an AI-controlled autonomous dental robot that performed a complete dental procedure notably faster than traditional methods.

MICROSOFT LAUNCHES GITHUB MODELS, OFFERING 100 MILLION DEVELOPERS EASY ACCESS TO LEADING AI TOOLS

Microsoft's new "GitHub Models" offers developers access to AI models like Llama 3.1 and GPT-4 and enables AI integration within software projects.

GOOGLE BRINGS GEMINI-POWERED SEARCH HISTORY AND LENS TO CHROME DESKTOP

Google is deploying new Gemini-powered features to Chrome Desktop, including Google Lens integration for visual searches, Tab Compare for streamlined shopping comparisons, and natural language processing for enhanced browsing history search.

DEBATE RAGES OVER BITCOIN POWER LAW AS CRITICS LABEL IT A ‘MAGIC TRICK'

The Bitcoin power law (which predicts consistent price growth for Bitcoin) continues to be highly debated. Skeptics continue to challenge its validity, while believers claim it's a legitimate model proven by behaviors observed on Bitcoin's network and market activities.

CRYPTO EXECUTIVES MEET WHITE HOUSE OFFICIALS TO DISCUSS POLICY, GRIEVANCES DURING VIRTUAL ROUNDTABLE

Crypto executives and top White House officials, including U.S. Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Wally Adeyemo and National Economic Council Director Lael Brainard, met virtually to discuss crypto policy, focusing on regulatory concerns, economic impact, and the upcoming election's implications for the industry. This meeting, unlike the previous one, included senior figures directly responsible for crypto policy, leading to a more productive dialogue on future regulations.

2 CHANGES TO THE PUMP FUN MECHANISM (IN BETA)

Two significant updates are being introduced to the pump fun mechanism in beta. First, coin creation is now free, with the cost being transferred to the first buyer instead of the creator. Second, coin creators will receive 0.5 SOL (around $80) once their coin completes its bonding curve, providing a financial incentive for developers to achieve 100% completion.

5 SIGNIFICANT UPGRADES TO JLP MULTIPLY

JLP Multiply on Solana has received major upgrades, solidifying its position as the top yield product on the platform. Key improvements include tracking Historical Net APY at different leverage levels, real-time PnL tracking, enhanced efficiency with Single Route, and the ability to monitor your position's Net Value over time.

A16Z TOKEN DO & DON'T

a16z discusses token launch strategies, compensation considerations, financial modeling, and provides details on how to structure deals to avoid predatory terms. They also include resources for how to better plan and execute token launches.

DEPIN CONTINUES TO GROW

The DePIN (Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks) sector has seen significant growth, with fundraising up 296% and the total market cap reaching $20 billion, a 400% increase year-over-year. Despite this, revenue growth lags, indicating demand constraints, but investors are betting on potential with major investments in DePIN-tailored Layer 1 networks like IoTeX and Peaq.

CRITICAL VULNERABILITY ON SOLANA PATCHED

A critical security vulnerability in Solana was addressed through a coordinated and confidential patching process, with 70% of the network's stake patched before public disclosure. The Solana Foundation, Anza, Jito, and other core contributors reached out to validators personally and through various communication platforms, ensuring a rapid and secure update. This swift response showcases the dedication and effectiveness of the Solana community and engineering teams in maintaining network security.

DONALD TRUMP JR. SAYS HE LOVES MEMECOINS BUT NEW PROJECT IS SOMETHING ‘MUCH BIGGER'

During a Q&A, Donald Trump Jr. discussed his appreciation for memecoins but emphasized that his new project is more substantial and distinct from the memecoin culture. He clarified that the RTR token, which briefly spiked due to rumors of Trump family involvement, is unrelated to his efforts. His project will focus on addressing banking inequalities through a decentralized finance platform, potentially named "World Liberty," with a long-term vision beyond typical meme tokens.

ANNOUNCING BRIDGED USDC AS A CUSTOM GAS TOKEN FOR ORBIT CHAINS

Arbitrum has announced that bridged USDC can now be used as a custom gas token on Arbitrum Orbit chains, offering users easier payments, price stability, and reduced gas price volatility.

OPERATION CHOKEPOINT 2.0

This thread highlights concerns over "Operation Chokepoint 2.0," alleging that U.S. regulators unfairly target the crypto industry by leveraging vague BSA/AML standards, leading to the exclusion of crypto from the banking system.

ETHEREUM BLOBSPACE LOWER THAN EXPECTED

An Ethereum researcher accurately predicted that demand for L2 blob data would be much lower than expected and take 1-2 years to reach sustainable targets.

REASONS TO BE EXCITED ABOUT CRYPTO

The chart shows the monthly active users (MAUs) for the top 20 blockchain projects, with Solana posting the highest numbers closely followed by Tron and Base.