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BOOSTING PERFORMANCE: FAIRE'S TRANSITION TO NEXTJS

Faire's migration to the NextJS framework improved its web application's load performance by leveraging server-side rendering and other modern techniques. This transition reduced its page load times and abandonment rates, while improving metrics like Largest Contentful Paint. The migration also included custom solutions for localization and maintaining compatibility with existing systems, setting the stage for future performance optimizations.

HOW TO UNDERSTAND/RETAIN COMPLEX CONCEPTS 10X BETTER

This article presents a learning technique for understanding and retaining complex concepts: iterative compression through repeated explanation. The idea is to repeatedly explain a concept, with the goal of simplifying it and making it easier to understand. This process involves refining your explanation, focusing on clarity and using first principles, eventually reaching a point where you can explain it from scratch. By doing so, you create a deeper understanding of the concept and make it easier to work with.

SHOULD THE DAILY STAND-UP DIE?

The daily stand-up meeting has become a tedious and time-consuming ritual in many organizations. However, many agile coaches and leaders argue that the stand-up itself isn't the problem, but rather the way it is implemented. They advocate for a shift in focus from status reporting to collaboration and communication instead, making changes for the team's specific needs.

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ISO20022.JS

iso20022.js is a low-dependency, open-source Node library that helps companies communicate with banks using open ISO20022 standards. You can send a SWIFT payment in three lines of code.

EMOJI-PICKER-ELEMENT

The emoji-picker-element is a web component for selecting emojis, with support for Emoji v15.1 and custom emoji. It has a small bundle size and efficient memory usage thanks to IndexedDB. It also offers customization options for styling and functionality, and can be used with or without frameworks by including a `script` tag.

JS-PYTORCH

JS-PyTorch is a JavaScript library that emulates PyTorch's functionality and supports GPU acceleration using GPU.js. It allows users to perform deep learning tasks in JavaScript, with features for tensor operations, autograd, and model management.

GOOGLE MONOPOLIZED SEARCH THROUGH ILLEGAL DEALS, JUDGE RULES

A US judge ruled that Google illegally monopolized the search market by paying billions to make its search engine the default on smartphones and web browsers, effectively blocking competitors. This decision is the US government's first major antitrust case win against a US tech giant in over two decades. Judge Amit Mehta found that Google's exclusive deals with companies like Apple and Samsung foreclosed competition and enabled the company to raise advertising prices without consequence.

KALMOGOROV-ARNOLD NEURAL NETWORKS SHAKE UP HOW AI IS DONE

Researchers have developed a new type of neural network called Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs), which offer greater interpretability and accuracy compared to traditional neural networks. KANs learn complex functions at each connection, allowing them to represent data more efficiently and with fewer parameters. This new architecture has shown promising results in scientific tasks like solving partial differential equations and predicting topological knot attributes, outperforming traditional networks with significantly fewer parameters.

OPENAI CO-FOUNDER LEAVES FOR ANTHROPIC

OpenAI co-founder John Schulman is leaving OpenAI to pursue AI alignment research at Anthropic.

PIE MENU

Pie Menu is a radial menu of shortcuts for macOS.

DARPA SUGGESTS TURNING OLD C CODE AUTOMATICALLY INTO RUST – USING AI, OF COURSE

DARPA is developing TRACTOR, an AI-powered tool to automatically convert legacy C code into the more memory-safe Rust language to improve security.

SQLPAGE

SQLpage is an SQL-only web builder meant for data scientists, analysts, and business intelligence teams to build data-centric applications quickly.

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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.

the full findings and analysis

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.

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"WE RAN OUT OF COLUMNS" - THE BEST, WORST CODEBASE

The world of 'professional development' is not always what you'd expect.

TESLA DOJO: ELON MUSK'S BIG PLAN TO BUILD AN AI SUPERCOMPUTER, EXPLAINED

Elon Musk recently said that Tesla's team is going to 'double down' on Dojo as the company gets ready to reveal its robotaxi in October.

GREENMASK

Greenmask is a utility designed for logical database backup dumping, obfuscation, and restoration that offers extensive functionality for backup, anonymization, and data masking.

EX-GOOGLE ENGINEERS WHO FOUNDED CHARACTER.AI REJOIN COMPANY WITH NEW AI PARTNERSHIP

Character.AI will provide Google with a nonexclusive license for its technology and Google will provide increased funding for Character.AI to continue growing.

ARRIVAL-TIME

arrival-time is a time estimation tool for drawing progress in the command-line, web, or mobile.

RAW INTUITIONS ABOUT STARTUPS

Insights on startups and how to build them from a first-time founder.

CHARACTER CO-FOUNDERS RETURN TO GOOGLE

Noam Shazeer, one of the authors of the original Transformer paper, is returning to Google after Character.AI licensed its tech for 2x the last funding valuation.

THREE NEW ADDITIONS TO GEMMA 2

Google is adding a new 2B parameter model, safety content classifier model, and model interpretability tool to the Gemma 2 family.

MICROSOFT SAYS OPENAI IS NOW A COMPETITOR IN AI AND SEARCH

Microsoft has classified OpenAI as a competitor in its latest annual report, despite being OpenAI's biggest investor and long-term partner, marking a shift in their relationship.

SCALING INFERENCE COMPUTE WITH REPEATED SAMPLING

AUDIO-VISUAL QUESTION ANSWERING IN VIDEOS

Researchers have developed a Temporal-Spatial Perception Model (TSPM) to improve the ability to answer questions related to visual and audio cues in videos.

REAL-TIME HIGH-QUALITY HAND AVATARS RENDERING

XHand is a new hand avatar designed for real-time rendering in virtual environments and gaming. Unlike previous models, XHand focuses on generating detailed hand shapes, appearances, and deformations.

PROMPT POET

Character AI has open sourced its prompting construction library, which is used in production to serve millions of conversations.

MINIGRID IN JAX

A popular testing bed for RL has been accelerated in JAX.

IMAGE-TEXT PAIR GENERATION FOR VISION MODELS

SynthVLM is a new data synthesis pipeline for Vision Large Language Models (VLLMs). Instead of generating captions from images, SynthVLM uses advanced diffusion models to create high-resolution images from captions.

FUTURE OF LLMS FOR AVATARS AT GENIES

Genies is harnessing LLMs for user profiling, enabling personalized experiences by mapping behaviors to foundational traits. Its advancing chatbots and NPCs in gaming create immersive, conversational scenarios. Combining conversational data with traditional personalization techniques, Genies is elevating user engagement and providing intuitive data analysis for game devs through natural language processing.

AI EXISTENTIAL RISK PROBABILITIES ARE TOO UNRELIABLE TO INFORM POLICY

This essay critiques the use of AI existential risk probability estimates for policy making, arguing that they are too unreliable and lack a solid inductive or deductive basis, often resembling educated guesses rather than evidence-based forecasts. The authors challenge the legitimacy of these forecasts in guiding public policy, especially when linked to costly or freedom-limiting actions, and advocate for an evidence-based approach that acknowledges uncertainty in AI progression. They propose focusing on definable AI milestones for more meaningful policy decisions while cautioning against leveraging speculative existential risk probabilities in high-impact decisions.

IS AI JUDGING THE FUTURE OF GYMNASTICS OR JUST A SURVEILLANCE TOOL?

The International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) has teamed with Fujitsu to launch an AI-assisted judging support system at the World Gymnastics Championships, aiming for fairer, more transparent scoring. The Judging Support System (JSS), which will not replace judges, offers 3D model-based second opinions in difficult cases and inquiry disputes, with scope for future improvements and broader applications. Despite concerns over replacing human judgment, the JSS may enhance scoring accuracy and consistency, vital in a sport where minimal point differences greatly impact rankings and athletes' careers.

NETWORKS THAT COMPRESS THEMSELVES (GITHUB GIST)

By including the size of the network in the loss function, You can train a model that improves in accuracy and is self quantized to be smaller.

GITHUB MODELS

GitHub has announced a competitor to Hugging Face's model hosting service.

REDDIT CEO SAYS MICROSOFT NEEDS TO PAY TO SEARCH THE SITE

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman is calling for tech giants like Microsoft to negotiate terms for using Reddit data in AI models, citing unauthorized scraping and misuse.