TikTok estimates that a US ban could cause small businesses to lose over $1B in revenue and creators to lose $300M in earnings within a month. The platform claims a ban would also result in a 29% drop in its advertising revenue, following a potential loss of one-third of its US user base. TikTok is seeking a temporary injunction, arguing that enforcement of the law poses irreparable harm to its 170M American users.
Omnicom is acquiring Interpublic, creating the world's largest advertising agency by revenue. The merger aims to pool resources for AI investments and enhance data-driven advertising capabilities.
HubSpot increased newsletter leads by 89% and open rates by 8% by focusing on relevance and engagement. It tailored offers to audience segments, removed low-quality sources, and used organic social strategies to build an engaged subscriber base. Collaborating with independent creators further reduced cost per lead compared to traditional channels.
June.so's homepage highlights the product's value with a standout USP headline and a concise features section showing dashboard snippets. The setup section addresses objections with a simple code snippet, while creative social proof captures attention. A dynamic, location-based CTA reimagines demos as personalized "flights".
Reddit Answers provides curated summaries of subreddit discussions to respond to user questions. This mirrors Google's AI overviews but is restricted to Reddit's ecosystem, leveraging the platform's rich, user-generated content. The tool is currently available to select US users, with plans for broader expansion.
This post contains a LinkedIn thread covering how AI is being used by marketers. Examples include persona creation, data analysis, building visual wireframes, identifying messaging gaps, and repurposing video shorts.
A study of 20,000 articles showed that 57% of AI-generated content ranked in Google's top 10, closely trailing human-written content at 58%. AI-assisted content often matches or outperforms human content based on the same quality standards. Google's focus remains on content value, confirming that AI use is acceptable if it enhances reader experience and adheres to E-E-A-T principles.
The Brat movement challenged the "clean girl" aesthetic by celebrating imperfection, individuality, and inclusivity. Initially a grassroots rejection of unattainable ideals, its commercialization through "Brat Green" trends has sparked debate about whether it has lost its authenticity. Even in its mainstream form, Brat retains its empowering message and represents a meaningful break from societal perfectionism.
What's trending on social media rarely reflects the majority, as most users don't post or engage with content.
OpenAI's latest AI is showing signs of a drive for self-preservation.
In 2025, social media will focus on raw content, intentional consumerism, mythmaking, and stronger fandoms.
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Smooth, frictionless signup processes are every product manager's dream… but in highly regulated industries like financial services and healthcare, things are rarely that simple.
Looking ahead to 2025, here are the major technological trends across growth-stage tech, enterprise and fintech, consumer tech, and biohealth tech.
Rapid-growth tech companies often resist formal bureaucracy, leading to implicit constraints and inefficiencies that can escalate into systemic challenges, while large enterprises face rigid, centralized rules that hinder transformation. Balancing team independence with lightweight processes and bridging functions is crucial for addressing these dynamics, whether scaling up or de-scaling for sustainable growth.
A marketing website should be treated as a core part of the product experience, particularly for product-led growth companies, focusing on optimizing conversions, user engagement, and integration with the customer journey. This requires strategic planning, dedicated resources like a website PM, and tracking metrics like acquisition targets and conversion rates while learning from e-commerce practices without misapplying their revenue-driven strategies.
Companies fail due to "brittle points," which are vulnerabilities that can lead to catastrophic breakdowns despite initial success, such as over-reliance on a single platform, marketing channel, key customer, or employee. To mitigate these risks, businesses must invest strategically in redundancy and diversification, focusing on tackling one brittle point at a time to gradually build resilience without overwhelming resources.
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Sponsorship is a critical accelerator for career advancement, with sponsors being senior leaders who advocate for high-visibility opportunities and career growth. To secure a sponsor, demonstrate strong performance, align with their goals, and build a strategic network, while choosing wisely to ensure your sponsor's success aligns with your career aspirations.
Product managers should approach their careers like they would manage a product, applying the same principles of vision-setting, strategy, and continuous improvement based on feedback. This mindset involves maintaining ongoing dialogue, actively seeking and implementing feedback, and regularly assessing growth opportunities throughout the year.
The MECE tree framework, developed by Barbara Minto, helps teams analyze problems comprehensively and without overlap, while Metrics Trees build on this by linking lagging and leading indicators to identify gaps in measurement. Opportunity Solution Trees and Impact Maps further connect metrics to actionable solutions and experiments, enabling teams like Eventbrite's to align product goals with strategies and measurable outcomes.
While generative AI tools offer various benefits, they often use user interactions to train their models, raising privacy concerns. Although this practice carries ethical implications alongside issues of copyright and environmental impact, most AI applications allow users to opt out of having their data used for training purposes while still maintaining their chat history.
Kevin Kelly, a futurist with a track record of accurate predictions, identifies five transformative tech trends - AI integration, the shift to subscription economies, generative remixing, immersive AR/VR experiences, and pervasive tracking - that will redefine industries and daily life over the next century.
Product leader Drew Falkman recommends getting early user feedback before building features, having learned from his past mistake of making costly assumptions.
SQLite has become a viable option as the main database for Ruby on Rails apps, especially for smaller apps. SQLite does have limitations like single-writer concurrency and reliance on a single host, but its strengths are its simplicity, ease of setup, and surprisingly good performance on modern hardware.
Mattermost scaled to 100,000 users by integrating Redis as an external cache, solving scaling bottlenecks caused by their previous in-memory LRU cache and its inefficient cache invalidation process. Optimizing Redis usage involved choices like selecting the `rueidis` library, mandating pipelining and client-side caching for reduced latency and syscall overhead, and using `MGET`/`MDELETE` for efficient bulk operations.
Airtable's migration to TypeScript improved development, but the sheer number of projects (nearly 3,000) slowed down typechecking. To address this, Airtable restructured its codebase into smaller, more manageable projects using Bazel and custom tools to manage dependencies and identify bottlenecks. It used TypeScript 5.5's Isolated Declarations feature, along with automated type generation and improved tooling, which overall reduced typechecking time by 65%.
A Microsoft study revealed that engineering system friction, such as unreliable tools, infrastructure problems, and slow processes, is the primary cause of "bad days" for software developers. These bad days resulted in decreased productivity, heightened stress, and self-doubt.
A Stanford researcher's viral thread claimed that 9.5% of engineers at major tech companies are unproductive. Critics argue that the study's underlying research, focused on predicting code review evaluations, doesn't directly support the "ghost engineer" claim and that the methodology suffers from a lack of crucial statistical measures.
A data science project scraping German news for COVID and Ukraine war data was abandoned after 1,600 days of work due to the creator's loss of interest. Sticking with a project is hard. It's helpful to have a compelling narrative to maintain motivation through the lows.
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OpenAI has released Sora, a text-to-video generation model, as a standalone product for ChatGPT Plus and Pro users.
Todoctor is a CLI tool that collects and monitors TODO/fixme style comments in JavaScript and TypeScript repositories.
Radon IDE is an extension that turns VSCode or Cursor into a full featured IDE for React Native and Expo. It has features like an element inspector with component hierarchy, debugger and logger with the ability to jump-to-source, and device settings adjustments for location, language, theme, and text size.
Google's new quantum chip, Willow, achieves exponential error reduction as it scales up, solving a long-standing challenge in quantum computing. Willow completed a benchmark calculation in under five minutes that would take the fastest supercomputers 10 septillion years.
Recent suspected sabotage of undersea internet cables in the Baltic Sea highlights the vulnerability of the global communication system, which relies heavily on these cables for transcontinental data transfer. Protecting these cables is challenging due to their vast length and location, with shallow coastal areas being more accessible to potential attackers using various methods, while deeper sections are harder to monitor. Current protective measures include satellite surveillance and potentially, future use of unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) for patrolling and monitoring.
LLMs have various evaluation metrics for various tracks, including practical methods for classification (using precision, recall, ROC-AUC, and PR-AUC), summarization (leveraging NLI models for consistency and reward models for relevance), and translation (employing chrF, BLEURT, and COMET). This article covers these and more topics, like evaluating copyright infringement and toxicity levels.
Gemini-exp-1206 has hit #1 in all domains on LM Arena.
Recent benchmarks show that memory-safe Rust-based PNG decoders (image-rs, zune-png, and wuffs) outperform traditional memory-unsafe C libraries (libpng, spng, and stb_image) in decoding speed, achieving up to 1.8x improvement on x86 and 1.5x on ARM.
The Himalaya project, a Rust-based CLI email manager, has multi-account support, various backends, PGP encryption options, and integrations with Vim, Emacs, Raycast, and a REPL.
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A federal appeals court has ruled that TikTok can be banned in the US over national security concerns. The ruling rejected arguments that the ban was an unconstitutional infringement on free speech. The ban was intended solely to limit a foreign nation's ability to gather data on people in the US. TikTok claims US security fears are speculative and overblown. It is expected to appeal to the Supreme Court, but the justices are not obliged to hear the case.
2024.12.09·links.tldrnewsletter.com·8 min read·TLDR Apple is investigating the possibility of adding a modern chip to a future Mac, but a cellular Mac isn't likely to launch until 2026 or later. The company plans to introduce its custom-built 5G chip early in 2025. It will be added to the iPhone SE, low-cost iPad, and iPhone 17 Air. The chip will be expanded to other iPhones and iPads over a three-year period. The first-generation chip will be limited to sub-6GHz 5G speeds, but the second-generation version will support faster mmWave technology.
2024.12.09·macrumors.com·2 min read·TLDR CATL, the world's largest battery manufacturer, has announced its second-generation sodium-ion battery, which has an energy density of 200 watt-hours per kilogram. The company plans to start mass production of the battery in 2027. Sodium-ion batteries perform better than lithium-ion batteries in extreme cold and they carry a much lower risk of fire. The process for manufacturing sodium-ion batteries is similar to that of lithium-ion batteries, so existing assembly lines can be reused without having to spend heavily on retooling. Their biggest disadvantage is low energy density, but they have the potential to be cost-competitive with lithium-ion batteries.
2024.12.09·arstechnica.com·5 min read·TLDR Intel's Foundry Technology Research team has announced technology breakthroughs in 2D transistor technology. It plans to unveil its research at the IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting 2024 conference. The research includes enhancements in gate-all-around transistor scaling and performance both with silicon and with atomically-thin 2D transistors that use beyond-silicon materials. It also outlines Intel's subtractive Ruthenium technology, which improves interconnect performance and scalability, ultimately enabling smaller wires between transistors, and a chip packaging breakthrough that improves chip-to-chip assembly throughput by 100x.
2024.12.09·tomshardware.com·6 min read·TLDR Sponsored
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2024.12.09·cyberark.com·Sponsor·TLDR