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TIKTOK IS PAYING CREATORS TO UP ITS SEARCH GAME

TikTok's new creator monetization platform, Creator Rewards, will use search value and other metrics to determine payout.

WHY FIGMA CEO DYLAN FIELD IS OPTIMISTIC ABOUT AI AND THE FUTURE OF DESIGN

More empowering software should increase the demand for human creativity, let more people in, and let those people work better and faster.

THE TECH BILLIONAIRES’ UTOPIA IN SOLANO COUNTY AIMS TO HOUSE AS MANY AS 400,000 PEOPLE

California Forever, a group comprised of VC giant Marc Andreessen, LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, Laurene Powell Jobs, and other tech giants, purchased over 60,000 acres of land about 60 miles northeast of San Francisco with the hope of creating a whole new city in the middle of the county.

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OPEN RELEASE OF GROK-1

xAI has released the weights and architecture for Grok-1. Grok-1 is a Mixture-of-Experts model with 314 billion parameters. The released model is a raw base model checkpoint from the Grok-1 pretraining phase, which means that it is not fine-tuned for any specific application. It was trained from scratch by xAI using a custom training stack.

TWO NEW AIRPODS 4 MODELS EXPECTED TO LAUNCH IN SEPTEMBER OR OCTOBER

The fourth generation of AirPods is set to begin production in May. They will likely be released in September or October. The upcoming AirPods are expected to feature a new design with better fit, improved sound quality, and an updated charging case with a USB-C port. The higher-end models will also feature active noise cancellation and a speaker in the charging case for Find My location tracking. New AirPods Pros are not expected to launch until next year at the earliest, but current models may get a new hearing aid mode with iOS 18.

VR HEADSETS ARE APPROACHING THE EYE’S RESOLUTION LIMITS

Extremely high pixel density is key for the next generation of augmented, mixed, and virtual reality headsets. More pixels means more life-like visuals and smaller, more compact displays. Building displays at this scale leads to unique technical hurdles that the industry is still learning to leap. This article looks at technological developments in the space, the specific challenges the industry is trying to overcome, and current solutions for these challenges.

TICK-KILLING PILL SHOWS PROMISING RESULTS IN HUMAN TRIAL

Tarsus Pharmaceuticals is developing a pill that could provide protection against Lyme disease for several weeks at a time. An early-stage trial has shown that it can kill ticks on people for up to 30 days after 24 hours of ingestion. The drug only kills the ticks, rather than the bacteria that causes Lyme disease. It may also protect against other tick-borne diseases.

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ASK HN: IF YOU'VE USED GPT-4-TURBO AND CLAUDE OPUS, WHICH DO YOU PREFER? (HACKER NEWS THREAD)

This Hacker News thread compares GPT-4-Turbo, the default model in ChatGPT Plus, to Claude Opus, Anthropic's competing model. Most developers seem to prefer Claude as it is apparently better at coding and engineering work. Its writing style also seems to be preferred, but part of that is due to the recognizability of GPT-4-Turbo's style. OpenAI's app functionalities, like its code interpreter and ability to search the internet, are still big reasons to continue using ChatGPT Plus.

PG_HINT_PLAN

pg_hint_plan allows developers to tweak PostgreSQL execution plans using hints in SQL comments. Planners estimate the costs of each possible execution plan for a SQL statement then execute the plan with the lowest cost. While PostgreSQL's planner does its best to select the best execution plan using its cost-based optimizer, which uses data statistics rather than static rules, it is far from perfect as it doesn't count some data properties. pg_hint_plan has hints to control scan methods, join methods, join order, behavior on join, row number correction, parallel query configuration, and more.

AFTER THURSDAY’S FLIGHT, STARSHIP IS ALREADY THE MOST REVOLUTIONARY ROCKET EVER BUILT

SpaceX's cameras recorded unprecedented views of atmospheric heating acting on Starship for a couple of minutes during Starship's descent on its third test. These views were possible thanks to Starlink terminals on the ship sending signals to satellites in low-Earth orbit, which were then sent back to Earth. The low-Earth orbit satellites were in space thanks to SpaceX's reusable Falcon 9 rocket, which conducted its first land-based landing days before Christmas in 2015. This article looks at the achievements that made Starship possible and takes a peek at the future of the project. The video of Starship reentering the atmosphere is available in the article.

STUBBORN VISIONARIES & PIGHEADED FOOLS

Both success through perseverance and failure through obstinance are convenient rationalizations. It is impossible to know the future for anything. Understanding this frees you to make decisions more easily, with less second-guessing in the moment and less guilt afterwards. You can not know whether you're in a winning or losing scenario, so the best you can do is to find out which one you are in as quickly as possible. This article presents some guiding questions to help you figure out which path you're on.

WHAT I LEARNED FROM LOOKING AT 900 MOST POPULAR OPEN SOURCE AI TOOLS

This review of open source AI repositories aims to give readers a big-picture view of the seemingly overwhelming AI ecosystem.

HACKINTOSH IS (ALMOST) DEAD

Apple has completely removed all traces of driver support for its oldest WiFi/BT cards in the latest macOS (Sonoma).

THE VACATION TOWN THAT LIVESTREAM SHOPPING BUILT

LAID-OFF TECHIES FACE 'SENSE OF IMPENDING DOOM' WITH JOB CUTS AT HIGHEST SINCE DOT-COM CRASH

Tech layoffs are at their highest since the 2001 dot-com crash and many job hunters are being forced to settle for pay cuts.

LLM INFERENCE SPEED OF LIGHT

Using theoretical speed of light modeling as grounding is really important for problems where the amount of computation and memory access is known a priori as it helps validate the quality of implementations and predict the impact of architectural changes.

PLENTIFUL, HIGH-PAYING JOBS IN THE AGE OF AI

It's possible that many of the jobs that humans do today will continue to be done by humans indefinitely, no matter how much better AIs are at those jobs, due to comparative advantage.

SPACEX CELEBRATES MAJOR PROGRESS ON THE THIRD FLIGHT OF STARSHIP

SpaceX's Starship rocket flew halfway around the world yesterday, accomplishing a key demonstration of its ability to carry heavy payloads into low-Earth orbit. The successful launch builds on two previous flights last year. Thursday's flight tested Starship's payload bay door and performed a precursor test of an in-orbit refueling system. Photos from the launch are available in the article.

WHO COULD BUY TIKTOK? THESE ARE THE PEOPLE WHO COULD ACQUIRE THE APP

ByteDance may have to sell TikTok in the US if a proposed bill passes the Senate. Some high-profile investors, including former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, online video platform Rumble, and former Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick, have expressed interest in acquiring the app. This article presents a list of known potential buyers along with a primer on companies that have previously tried to purchase TikTok.

EVO: DNA FOUNDATION MODELING FROM MOLECULAR TO GENOME SCALE

Evo is a long-context biological foundation model capable of both prediction tasks and generative design, from molecular to whole genome scale. The model generalizes across the fundamental languages of biology, DNA, RNA, and proteins to generate DNA sequences using a context length of 131k tokens. It is based on StripedHyena, a deep signal processing architecture designed to improve efficiency and quality over prevailing Transformer architecture. A playground is available where users can generate DNA in their browsers using Evo.

GENETICALLY MODIFIED COW MAKES MILK WITH HUMAN INSULIN

Researchers have engineered a cow capable of producing milk that contains human insulin. This could result in an alternative for insulin production. The process involves inserting human DNA coding for insulin into cow embryos. It could dramatically simplify the process and cost of producing the drug. A single cow can produce enough milk every day to supply thousands of type 1 diabetes patients with their daily insulin for an entire month. Scaling up production, ensuring the health and welfare of the transgenic cows, and navigating regulatory approvals are still huge challenges that lie ahead before the process can replace conventional methods of insulin production.

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FALSEHOODS PROGRAMMERS BELIEVE ABOUT TIME ZONES

HTTP/2 AND HTTP/3 EXPLAINED

The first HTTP draft had only one method, GET - there were no headers or status codes, and the only data format available was HTML. The protocol has evolved significantly since then. HTTP/3 is designed for unstable connections, resulting in performance tradeoffs. HTTP/2 offers better performance on reliable and stable connections than HTTP/3. Servers can accept both HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 connections so clients can make the decision of which version to use.

THE TOP 100 GEN AI CONSUMER APPS

AI-native products and companies are growing faster and engaging users more deeply than ever before. Over the coming decade, AI will likely underpin category-defining companies. This article examines data on the most popular generative AI products to uncover patterns on how consumers are using the technology. It looks at the rate of progress in the industry, emerging categories, hot niches, the mobile vs web split, and AI as a global pursuit.

THE CURSE OF THE SENIOR SOFTWARE ENGINEER

Titles help normalize pay ranges and allow for progression and evaluation. People who are not job hoppers or get stuck in the same company and title due to laziness, comfort, or other reasons are unfortunately prone to 'The Curse of the Senior Software Engineer'. This is when an engineer who has been senior for too long finds themselves between two worlds upon their next job search: they are too senior to be hired as a senior or they have too little leadership experience to be hired in a leadership position. Avoiding the curse involves either playing by corporate rules or exiting the game by switching to self-employment.

SNAPCHAT WILL ALLOW USERS TO SAVE DMS

Snapchat is experimenting with an 'Infinite Retention Mode' that will allow users to save their direct messages.

AFTER AWS AND GOOGLE, MICROSOFT SAYS IT’S REMOVING AZURE ‘EGRESS’ DATA TRANSFER FEES — BUT WITH CAVEATS

Microsoft will allow business customers to transfer data out of its Azure cloud infrastructure with no egress fees to align with stipulations set out in the European Data Act, but only for customers looking to completely end their association with Azure.

THE MOST IMPORTANT SKILL IN STARTUP ENGINEERING LEADERSHIP

The singular skill that ultimately decides the success of a leader and their team is pacing - leaders must be in tune with their and their team's abilities and stamina.

THE FUTURE OF FARCASTER WITH DAN ROMERO

Dan Romero, the founder of Farcaster, a disruptive social network, talks in this interview about competing directly against Elon Musk, nerd sniping, prediction markets, and new business models.

TO THE SPACE STATION

This page explains SpaceX's Dragon's docking and reentry procedures.

DIGITAL FORGERIES ARE HARD

Expert witnesses on both sides of the case over whether Craig Wright is Satoshi Nakamoto agree that much of the digital evidence provided by Wright is unreliable in one way or another.

SPACEX HAS A LICENSE TO LAUNCH STARSHIP—THIS TIME IT MIGHT FLY AT DAWN

The US Federal Aviation Administration has approved a commercial launch license for SpaceX's Starship rocket's third test flight. The test is scheduled for this morning at 7 am CDT, with a launch window of 110 minutes. SpaceX will target the Indian Ocean for Starship's slashdown. Details about the changes planned for flight 3 are available in the article.

DID OPENAI JUST ACCIDENTALLY LEAK THE NEXT BIG CHATGPT UPGRADE?

OpenAI appears to have accidentally published a blog post that was indexed by Bing and DuckDuckGo before it was quickly taken down. The post was an announcement for GPT-4.5 Turbo, a new model that surpasses GPT-4 Turbo in speed, accuracy, and scalability. The cached description mentions a knowledge cutoff date of June 2024 and a 256k context window. OpenAI has not commented on the leak.

FIGURE 01 CAN NOW HAVE FULL CONVERSATIONS WITH PEOPLE

Figure has implemented OpenAI's technology to allow its robots to have full conversations with people. OpenAI's models provide high-level visual and language intelligence while Figure's neural networks deliver fast, low-level dexterous robot actions. This X post contains a video showing a person talking to a Figure robot and getting it to perform tasks, explain the reasoning behind the tasks, and self-assess on how the tasks went.

MINING HELIUM-3 ON THE MOON HAS BEEN TALKED ABOUT FOREVER—NOW A COMPANY WILL TRY

Interlune, a company that has been operating in stealth since its founding by two of Blue Origin's earliest employees in 2022, aims to extract helium-3 from the Moon. The company recently came out of stealth with an announcement that it has raised another $15 million. While the funding is relatively small, its implications are potentially large. Most lunar efforts are focused on providing services to NASA, but Interlune's goal directly derives value from extracting resources on the Moon.

A COLLECTION OF DESIGN ENGINEERS

The design engineer is someone who sits at the intersection of design and engineering and works to bridge the gap between them. They know how to run a design process and have the engineering chops to implement it. This allows them to quickly iterate on ideas - their skillset is ideal for prototyping, exploratory interaction design, and building robust design systems. This blog post contains a list of people who are considered design engineers to more fully illustrate what the role entails.

DEVELOPERS ARE ON EDGE

Layoffs are still dragging on and industry veterans are finding it hard to get a callback from recruiters. However, wage gains secured during the good days are still massive, despite what inflation has eroded over the last few years. Developers are still looking mighty privileged compared to premium programmers from a decade ago. AI will have a huge impact on the industry - no profession has ever successfully resisted automation or redundancy in the face of technological advancement over the long term.

THE END OF THE MRBEAST ERA

MrBeast's influence on YouTube can be seen everywhere, from the types of content people make to the brisk editing styles populating all of YouTube's trending content to even the way YouTubers style their video thumbnails. Copycats can be seen all over the platform. While it is unlikely that MrBeast will be dethroned anytime soon, there are signs that people are growing fatigued with sensationalism and are hungry for authenticity and relatability.

WHY META COULD FINALLY HAVE ITS ANDROID MOMENT

The Vision Pro may just be an over-engineered devkit. There is some genius and audacity behind some of Apple's hardware decisions - gaze and pinch was a major industry 'a-ha' moment. However, the device's software/content story is dull and unimaginative and most people likely won't use the Vision Pro for watching media. The Vision Pro's debut was the best thing that ever happened to Meta's Quest brand as it elevated VR to a level of mainstream consumer curiosity, set new standards and pricing envelopes for VR devices, and created a competitor for Meta teams to chase.

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ECSS is a global approach to producing efficient design systems with CSS.