The key success metric has shifted from follower counts to engagement and shareability. High-entertainment posts earn up to 4.5X more reach on TikTok and 13X more on Instagram. While follower growth has slowed, shares have increased by 60% on TikTok and 10% on Instagram Reels. Creators drive 6X higher engagement on Instagram and 3X more video views on TikTok than brands. AI-optimized content boosts engagement rates by 74% and shares by 66%.
Young Americans are using BNPL loans to finance discretionary expenses like Botox and concert tickets. These loans, with interest rates of up to 36%, are appealing due to easy approval and no immediate credit score impact. Klarna reported a 17% rise in credit losses, and 3% of Gen Z Affirm borrowers are not repaying in full. BNPL can encourage overspending and financial stress among a generation already facing economic pressure.
Buffer is growing a team of internal creators based on the idea that people trust individuals more than companies. By empowering its team to create authentic content, Buffer builds awareness and brand affinity from the inside out. Since launching its Creator Resources HQ, 87% of teammates have contributed over 1.1K posts, generating 411K+ impressions. Buffer also runs workshops to boost creator confidence and use AI to personalize content.
PMMs carry big responsibilities but lack formal authority. Build influence by mapping stakeholders by attitude and influence using a matrix that identifies Power Allies, Skeptical Gatekeepers, Advocacy Builders, and Quiet Resisters. Focus on delivering high-impact projects for high-influence stakeholders to build trust. Maintain influence by dedicating at least 30% of time to managing relationships through communication and collaboration.
RecCloud offers tools like screen recording, speech-to-text, text-to-speech, auto subtitles, translation, and video summarization. Users can store content in the cloud, organize it into playlists, and share via links or embeds.
Microsoft Advertising launched new exclusion tools that let advertisers block up to 10K websites per list and manage up to 100 lists per account. These tools allow bulk application of exclusions across multiple campaigns and are available for both Search Ads and Audience Ads. Advertisers can now manage exclusions at the account and campaign levels, streamlining control and improving brand safety. Microsoft is also testing a Targeted Website List feature for more precise ad placements.
Growth as a field has stagnated. Most professionals are stuck doing repeatable tasks like activation, monetization, and analytics setup. These basics should now be automated through AI-powered tools built directly into products, eliminating the need for growth teams to rebuild the same systems repeatedly. This evolution won't eliminate jobs, but it will phase out roles focused on work that machines can now do better.
Marketing lives in uncertainty because people drive markets. Billions of daily signals from consumers and companies create feedback loops and unknowns. Despite this reality, many still believe that more data or better tools will guarantee results. That belief is flawed. Outcomes in marketing have many causes, most of which are unclear. Marketers should think in probabilities, not certainties. Using diverse data, placing small bets, and accepting ambiguity leads to better decisions.
Only about 5% of the market is actively looking to buy, so identifying intent signals is key to focusing outbound efforts on high-potential leads. There are 2 types of intent signals: external signals, such as job changes or funding news, and engaged signals like repeated visits to your pricing page or webinar attendance. Engaged signals are stronger and should be prioritized because they show direct interest. A strong content ecosystem helps create and detect these signals, improving lead quality and closing rates.
Instagram now requires users to have at least 1,000 followers to use its live streaming feature.
An 18-point cheat sheet of don'ts for email marketers.
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While AI is accelerating development, it's also introducing friction in unexpected places. In Atlassian's _2025 State of Developer Experience_ report [4], 3,500 developers and managers weigh in on what's working, what's not, and how AI is reshaping the future of software teams.
OpenTelemetry (OTel) is a vendor-agnostic framework that introduces the idea of signals, primarily traces, metrics, and logs, which describe what your application is doing. It acts as a safety net for bugs, especially as systems scale.
The N+1 query problem is a performance bottleneck where a program makes one initial query and then N additional queries within a loop. The problem happens when fetching related data, resulting in excessive database traffic and slow application performance. The solutions include using a single query with a JOIN or fetching related data in batches using an IN clause, then building the relationship in code.
Claude Code changed Puzzmo's engineering over the past six weeks, with a huge reduction in maintenance costs and an increased capacity for handling technical debt. It enabled rapid prototyping and sped up triage by offering immediate pull requests. Claude Code is most effective for developers with product and technical skills who have a "full-breadth developer" mindset.
Live coding interviews are unfair because the stress induced by being watched reduces cognitive function, specifically working memory, which is necessary for solving coding problems. A study by Microsoft showed a large decrease in performance when candidates were observed during coding. Live coding measures stress response more than actual coding ability and may lead to the rejection of qualified engineers.
For small remote teams, creating individual "ramblings" channels in their chat app allows each member to share thoughts and updates without disrupting main group channels. These channels function as personal journals or microblogs, allowing for better social connection and "water cooler talk" in the absence of in-person interactions.
LangExtract is a Python library by Google that uses LLMs to extract structured information from unstructured text documents based on user-defined instructions. It has source grounding, reliable structured outputs, and optimization for long documents with interactive visualization. LangExtract supports various LLMs, including cloud-based models like Gemini and OpenAI, as well as local open-source models.
TraceRoot is an open-source debugging platform that uses AI to help engineers resolve production issues faster by combining traces, logs, and source code. The platform has features such as real-time tracing and logging, structured logging for improved AI agent performance, and integration with tools like GitHub and Notion.
Cerebras is launching Cerebras Code, two new plans (Pro at $50/month and Max at $200/month) that offer access to the Qwen3-Coder, a recent open-weight coding model. These plans provide speeds up to 2,000 tokens per second with a large context window and no vendor lock-in.
AI researchers are being recruited like NBA stars and offered huge compensation packages. Tech companies like Meta are offering nine-figure salaries and perks to lure top AI talent, even engaging in personal recruitment efforts by CEOs. One 24-year-old researcher landed a $250M pay package to quit the startup he co-founded and join Meta's Superintelligence Lab.
2025.08.04·links.tldrnewsletter.com·10 min read·TLDR Web Dev Anthropic has identified "persona vectors" within AI models' neural networks that control character traits, allowing for control of personality. These vectors were discovered through the analysis of activity patterns associated with specific traits like "evil" or "sycophancy." They can be used to monitor personality shifts, mitigate undesirable traits during training (even acting as a "vaccine" by preemptively steering towards those traits), and flag problematic training data.
The "bitter lesson" in AI argues that general methods that use computation outperform human-centric approaches in the long run. However, the bitter lesson depends on high-quality, quantifiable data, which is often difficult to obtain in messy organizational environments. Also, prioritizing computation over efficient, purpose-built models might not always be practical or optimal in the real world.
Frustrated by a long-standing search bug on Mintlify that he couldn't fix as a vendor, this dev joined the company and finally resolved the issue using an AbortController.
The "HTML-in-Canvas" proposal introduces new HTML Canvas APIs for rendering HTML content into a canvas, addressing limitations in accessibility, internationalization, and performance when using canvas-based content.
Google is releasing "Deep Think," a more powerful version of Gemini 2.5 Pro, for Google AI Ultra subscribers and providing the gold-medal standard version to select mathematicians.
Anthropic revoked OpenAI's access to its Claude API due to OpenAI's alleged violation of terms of service by using Claude and Claude Code internally during development.
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Coinbase plans to expand its core trading app to include tokenized real-world assets, stocks, derivatives, prediction markets, and early-stage token sales. These new offers will roll out first to US users in the next few months, followed by a gradual international rollout based on jurisdictional approvals. The expansion puts the exchange in even closer competition with Robinhood, Gemini, and Kraken. The Securities and Exchange Commission recently introduced an initiative to modernize securities rules and regulations to allow for crypto-based trading activity.
Figma's shares more than tripled in its New York Stock Exchange debut yesterday. The company sold shares at $33 in its initial public offering - FIG closed at $115.50. Figma ended the day with a market cap of almost $68 billion. Adobe had agreed to acquire Figma for $20 billion in 2022, but the deal fell apart after UK regulators said it would likely harm competition.
The Lunar Surface Electromagnetics Experiment (LuSEE-Night) is a radio telescope that will be deployed on the far side of the Moon. The moon will act as a shield against the radio interference coming from Earth. LuSEE-Night is scheduled to launch as part of Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost 2 lunar lander mission late this year or early next. It is designed to detect the signals that are key to unlocking the secrets of the Cosmic Dark Ages, the period after the cosmic microwave background formed 380,000 years after the Big Bang and before the formation of the first stars and galaxies.
2025.08.01·newatlas.com·4 min read·TLDR Data centers are under pressure to run denser, hotter, and longer, and traditional air cooling is approaching its limit. Meeting demand now requires rethinking the entire power-thermal integration stack. Google is integrating geothermal systems directly into its next-generation data centers. If successful, the systems could help Google meet its power needs with near-constant carbon-free energy.
2025.08.01·interestingengineering.com·11 min read·TLDR The best way to convince those around you to take on a project idea is to individually talk about it with many relevant people before finally pitching it to a decision-making group. Your odds of success dramatically increase if you've talked to the decision-makers in advance and have addressed their issues or incorporated their additions. Leaders need to create buy-in from their teams to maintain team morale. Getting everyone to buy in encourages autonomous collaboration and helps iteration happen quickly, but it could also lead to groupthink, exclude oppositional peers, and cause teams to misrepresent reality.
2025.08.01·venki.dev·6 min read·TLDR Sketch experienced a series of mini-outages on July 15. An LLM had made a small but critical change during a refactor that was missed by a human reviewer. When humans refactor code, they select the original text, cut it, move it to the new file, paste it, and then make intentional changes. LLMs write two patches, a deletion and an insertion, leaving room for transcription errors. Sketch added clipboard support to its agent environment to try to prevent further issues in transcription.
2025.08.01·sketch.dev·5 min read·TLDR Figma just went public in one of the largest IPOs in Silicon Valley history. This article tells the story of Figma and its founder, Dylan Field. Field's journey was a true Silicon Valley story. It seems likely that in the near future, more and more applications will be built by designers using Figma.
2025.08.01·adamnash.blog·9 min read·TLDR Remote teams of two to 10 people could benefit from adding a personal 'ramblings' channel for each teammate. These channels let everyone share what's on their mind without cluttering group channels. They can be a great source for ideas, prototypes, or creative solutions to long-standing problems. They're also a great way to keep the human connection going within the company.
2025.08.01·stephango.com·1 min read·TLDR Sponsored
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Developers should care about quality, consistency, and the long-term effects of their work and build software, not productionize prototypes.
2025.08.01·alexkondov.com·3 min read·TLDR OpenAI has removed the feature from ChatGPT that previously allowed users to make their public conversations discoverable by search engines - the company says it was a short-lived experiment.
2025.08.01·techcrunch.com·4 min read·TLDR A jury found that Google abused its market position in smartphones to block competition from Epic and others in 2023.
2025.08.01·arstechnica.com·4 min read·TLDR Servo is a web rendering engine written in Rust built around multi-threaded operations and memory safety.
2025.08.01·spacebar.news·5 min read·TLDR MCP-Use is an open source package that connects any large language model to any MCP server.
2025.08.01·github.com·GitHub repository·TLDR A list of 50 life lessons spanning many topics.
2025.08.01·usefulfictions.substack.com·10 min read·TLDR Sponsored
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2025.08.01·amazon.jobs·Sponsor·TLDR AI China's cyber regulator recently held a meeting with Nvidia over serious security issues with the company's artificial intelligence chips. It claims that Nvidia's H20 chips, which were designed for the Chinese market to comply with US export restrictions, have location tracking and that they can be remotely shut down. Major Chinese tech groups have received informal guidance to increase purchases of domestic AI chips to reduce reliance on Nvidia and support the evolution of a rival domestic chip ecosystem.
2025.08.01·arstechnica.com·3 min read·TLDR AI Shared ChatGPT conversations are being indexed by search engines like Google and Bing, revealing private or sensitive queries that users may not expect to be discoverable.
2025.08.01·techcrunch.com·3 min read·TLDR AI OpenAI launched Stargate Norway, its first AI data center in Europe, as part of the OpenAI for Countries program. This facility will deliver 230MW capacity and 100,000 NVIDIA GPUs by 2026, leveraging Narvik's hydropower and cool climate for sustainable AI infrastructure.
2025.08.01·links.tldrnewsletter.com·3 min read·TLDR AI