Search the archive

WORKING APPS IN SECONDS

Blink is an AI coding agent that helps you build websites, web apps, and mobile applications.

DISCOVER WHICH AI IS THE BEST AT DESIGN

Design Arena enables the evaluation of AI design capabilities through direct comparisons. Community preferences shape the rankings. All voting data is public and verifiable.

THE PRODUCT TRIAD: DESIGN'S ROLE

The product triad organizes Agile product teams with one representative each from design, product management, and engineering working as equal partners. Based on IDEO's Desirable-Viable-Feasible framework, effective triads collaborate across all three aspects rather than maintaining siloed ownership. Designers contribute beyond just desirability by understanding business objectives, conducting user research, and collaborating closely with engineering to ensure feasible implementation.

STANDARDS LAUNCHES NEW SITE AND IS QUIETLY BUILDING THE INTERNET'S BRAND BACKBONE

Design software startup Standards has launched a new site showcasing published brand systems from top companies like Cash App, Mailchimp, and The Obama Foundation, marking a major milestone in its journey from a niche archival project to a fast-growing design platform. Born from the success of reissuing iconic style guides, Standards now serves over 1,000 companies, with 300%+ MRR growth—all while remaining fully bootstrapped.

FAIRPHONE 6 INTRODUCES MODULAR ADD-ONS AND NEXT-LEVEL REPAIRABILITY

The Fairphone 6 continues the company's mission to challenge disposable tech culture by offering a modular, repairable smartphone with a refined design, user-swappable parts, and solid mid-range performance. With features like a removable battery, upgradeable components, and at least five years of software support, it aims to extend device lifespan and empower users—proving that sustainability and usability can go hand in hand.

DISNEY AND NETFLIX ARE QUIETLY USING THE SAME GENERATIVE AI STARTUP – HERE'S WHY THE REST OF HOLLYWOOD IS CIRCLING

Disney and Netflix have both quietly adopted Runway AI's generative tools, with Netflix utilizing them for visual effects sequences in "The Eternaut."

I TRIED ADOBE'S FANTASY PREMIER LEAGUE LOGO GENERATOR, AND THE RESULTS ARE WORSE THAN MY SQUAD'S

Adobe's new Fantasy Premier League logo generator, part of the company's partnership with the English Premier League, proved disappointing, appearing to be just a generic Adobe Express template with Premier League branding.

OPENAI PREPARES TO LAUNCH GPT-5 IN AUGUST

OpenAI plans to launch GPT-5 in early August, offering integrated o3 reasoning capabilities and mini/nano versions available through its API. GPT-5 aims to unify OpenAI's language models and simplify usage across applications, although it won't reach AGI status immediately. The anticipated declaration of AGI could impact OpenAI's revenue agreement with Microsoft.

CROWDSTRIKE-BACKED COMPLIANCE STARTUP VANTA VALUED AT $4 BILLION IN NEW FUNDING ROUND

Vanta's valuation surged to $4 billion after closing a $150 million funding round backed by CrowdStrike Ventures. The startup, which helps companies manage compliance with cybersecurity frameworks like SOC 2 and ISO 27001, serves over 12,000 customers, including tech giants Atlassian and Snowflake. More investors included Wellington Management, Atlassian Ventures, JPMorgan Chase, and Sequoia Capital.

HOW TO GET RECOMMENDED BY CHATGPT

AI answer engines are becoming the most influential gatekeepers in B2B buying, with ChatGPT hitting a billion users and 2.5 billion daily prompts. Buyers now ask AI what to buy instead of researching themselves - if your product isn't mentioned, it might as well not exist. Josh Blyskal from Profound found only 11% of citations overlap between ChatGPT and Perplexity, meaning you need platform-specific strategies. Reddit is now the most-cited domain at 6% of citations, and one-in-three citations come from comparative listicles. Almost half of cited domains shift within a single month.

YOUR COMPLETE GUIDE TO REVENUE LEAKAGE

Revenue leakage is the gap between what you should earn and what you actually collect - the ghost quietly draining dollars through missed invoices, zombie accounts still getting service, and pilot pricing that never graduates. It's a systems problem disguised as a people problem, living in the cracks between sales handoffs and billing processes. Common culprits include auto-renewals that silently fail, discounts hardcoded forever, and churned customers still accessing your product months later.

REFRAMING AI CHATBOTS AS SELF-SERVICE TOOLS

AI chatbots should be reframed as self-service tools rather than human support replacements due to their limitations. Achieving this involves clearly defining their purpose and implementing technical guardrails to ensure alignment. Understanding AI's capabilities and limits helps in effectively integrating them into customer support.

SaaS landscape. Watch the webinar (ungated)

THE SUBSTACK AI REPORT (RESOURCE)

Substack surveyed 2,000 publishers and found 45% use AI - mostly men over 45 in tech/business categories who rely on it for research and editing, not generating full posts.

AI MEETING NOTES BY NOTION

AI Meeting Notes by Notion is a tool that transcribes and organizes meeting notes directly within Notion, synced with your calendar.

PRDKIT

PRDKit is an AI tool that generates structured product specs, wireframes, and go-to-market assets from feature ideas.

ZERO-SUM THINKING AND THE LABOR MARKET

College graduates now have higher unemployment rates than the overall workforce for the first time since 2018 - the opposite of how this is supposed to work. Young men are struggling most, with 50,000 healthcare jobs going to women graduates while men gained far fewer positions across all sectors. People are applying to 1,000 jobs and getting rejected by algorithms in what's become a casino economy where getting hired feels like winning the lottery. This broken system feeds zero-sum thinking - the belief that my success requires your failure - which has replaced the Sputnik generation's positive-sum worldview where everyone could grow together.

THE GENERAL THEORY OF ENSHITTIFICATION

Enshittification isn't just about social media - it's the natural lifecycle of any business with network effects. Companies offer great value to build their user base, then exploit that base once locked in. Uber's "earnings inflection strategy" jumping from losses to profits by squeezing customers proves this was always the plan.

WHAT FOUNDERS TEACH US

Founders are river people, not villagers - they thrive in uncertainty while others choose stability. They see differently: they're fearless enough to hear "no" constantly but keep asking, they actively seek contrarians to challenge their thinking, and they know execution beats strategy. They ignore the right feedback, focus obsessively on recruiting A-players, and carry unshakable optimism despite knowing 90% of startups fail.

PAGERANK IN THE AGE OF AI

The internet's content distribution is about to mirror online advertising's auction system, but without the ads.

YOU NEED TO HAVE A POINT OF VIEW

Rising executives often freeze when asked "What should we do?" because they're afraid of being wrong.

BEHIND-THE-SCENES WITH ONE OF THE FASTEST GROWING WELLNESS STARTUPS

Fay built a platform that connects tens of thousands of clients with dietitians covered by insurance and raised $75M from Goldman Sachs and General Catalyst.

SONICWALL URGES ADMINS TO PATCH CRITICAL RCE FLAW IN SMA 100 DEVICES

SonicWall is urging customers to patch Secure Mobile Access (SMA) 100 series appliances against a new critical authenticated arbitrary file upload vulnerability. The new vulnerability is caused by an unrestricted file upload weakness in the SMA 100 series devices' web management interface, which could allow remote attackers with admin privileges to upload arbitrary files and achieve RCE.

HACKER SNEAKS INFOSTEALER MALWARE INTO EARLY ACCESS STEAM GAME

A threat actor called EncryptHub compromised a game called Chemia on Steam to distribute infostealer malware to users. Threat intelligence company Prodaft reported that EncryptHub initially added a loader that downloads the Vidal infostealer to the game on July 22 and then also added a PowerShell script to fetch the Fickle Stealer malware as well. A malicious insider may have aided EncryptHub in implanting the malicious files in the project.

SUPPLY CHAIN ATTACK COMPROMISES NPM PACKAGES TO SPREAD BACKDOOR MALWARE

Attackers launched a "Scavenger" supply chain attack in July that hijacked popular npm packages, including "is" (2.8 million weekly downloads), through phishing from a typosquatted domain (npnjs.org). The malware installed cross-platform JavaScript backdoors with persistent command channels on Windows, macOS, and Linux, affecting users who updated to infected versions. Exploiting high-privilege maintainer accounts, attackers could compromise thousands of companies, with malware mostly undetected by antivirus solutions on VirusTotal.

THE FUTURE OF THREAT EMULATION: BUILDING AI AGENTS THAT HUNT LIKE CLOUD ADVERSARIES

Agentic AI unlocks a powerful utility for emulating the methodology of advanced cloud pentesters or threat actors in a context-aware method that goes beyond traditional automated tooling. This post demonstrates how an agent can be provided with “tools” or functions that it can utilize first to enumerate the permissions a given IAM user has, iteratively identify privilege escalation exploits, and then use other tools to carry out the privilege escalation. The post also includes a scenario in which the agent successfully discovers the full attack chain that an adversary could use to launch an S3 ransomware attack.

INCENTIVES FOR SECURITY: FLIPPING THE SCRIPT

Traditional security incentives often fail because they lack tangible business value. Instead, security efforts should prioritize initiatives that drive significant commercial benefits, like software reproducibility and inventory management, which can also enhance security. Organizations should make secure options more cost-effective than insecure ones to encourage faster adoption and modernization.

HOW ANTHROPIC TEAMS USE CLAUDE CODE

This case study demonstrates how Claude Code accelerates security reviews and incident responses, reducing debugging time from 15 minutes to 5 minutes and eliminating Terraform approval bottlenecks. It enables new hires to contribute within days, rather than weeks, by navigating codebases and understanding systems. The Data Infrastructure team notes that Claude Code replaces traditional data catalogs, allowing new data scientists to quickly grasp dependencies and work independently.

and more that your team can start using today. Download now

TROLLBLACKLISTDLL

TrollBlacklistDLL is a tool that blocks DLLs in blacklist.txt from loading, with an option to unblock them subsequently.

S3GREP

s3grep is a parallel CLI tool designed for searching logs and unstructured data within Amazon S3 buckets. It features .gz decompression, progress indicators, and reliable error handling, making it perfect for cloud-native log analysis.

AMAZON Q: NOW WITH HELPFUL AI-POWERED SELF-DESTRUCT CAPABILITIES

404Media released a report on Wednesday that a hacker had managed to get a PR that instructed Amazon Q to erase all local files and cloud infrastructure merged to the Amazon Q Developer extension for VS Code. Amazon quickly removed the compromised versions and released a statement that the hacker had been removed from the project and no customers had been impacted. Corey Quinn lambasts Amazon's response in this post, highlighting the illegitimacy of its response and the erosion of trust that it implies.

PHISHERS TARGET AVIATION EXECS TO SCAM CUSTOMERS

ILLUSORY WISHES: CHINA-NEXUS APT TARGETS THE TIBETAN COMMUNITY

A China-linked Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) group launched "Operation GhostChat," targeting the Tibetan community by compromising legitimate websites and replacing them with malicious replicas that offer a backdoored version of the Element encrypted messaging app. The attack employs techniques such as DLL sideloading, multi-stage shellcode injection, and a custom Ghost RAT that communicates with C2 servers via encrypted traffic. The malware evades detection through API hooking bypasses, memory-based code injection into legitimate Windows processes, and XOR-encoded plugin DLLs, which provide keylogging, screen capture, and remote shell access.

FBI AND CISA WARN OF INTERLOCK RANSOMWARE TARGETING CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), alongside the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (MS-ISAC), has issued a warning regarding increased activity by the Interlock ransomware group.

NEW KOSKE LINUX MALWARE HIDES IN CUTE PANDA IMAGES

Koske is a new Linux malware that conceals itself in images of pandas to target computers and mine cryptocurrency, using clever tricks and possibly AI assistance to stay hidden and adapt.

REPLIT AI AGENT DELETES SENSITIVE DATA DESPITE EXPLICIT INSTRUCTIONS

A Replit AI agent unintentionally deleted a company's entire database despite being instructed not to, impacting thousands of users.

PR TRENDS: THE SHIFTS YOU CAN'T IGNORE IN 2025

LinkedIn has overtaken X as the top social platform for journalists in 2025, making it the most effective place for PR professionals to build relationships. Despite some rise in DM-based outreach, 96% of journalists still prefer to receive pitches via email. Journalists now value exclusives more than original research and prioritize access to credible sources over story ideas or data. Irrelevant pitches are increasing, with 47% of journalists saying they seldom receive relevant outreach, and response rates continue to decline as pitch volumes rise. With ongoing layoffs and more journalists moving to independent platforms like Substack, PR professionals must focus on relevance, personalization, and consistency to cut through the noise.

THE ART & SCIENCE OF VIDEO STORYTELLING

Video is now the primary format for B2B marketing. LinkedIn video viewership rose 36% in 2024, and video posts are shared 203% more than other content types. 5 key creative principles drive success: Cultural Coding, Human Touch, Expert Takes, Attention Hacking, and Inspiring Imagination. Videos with expert speakers increase dwell time by 31%, human-centered content boosts engagement by 18%, and authentic, emotive videos see up to 84% higher engagement.

PEW RESEARCH: GOOGLE USERS ARE LESS LIKELY TO CLICK ON LINKS WHEN AN AI SUMMARY APPEARS IN THE RESULTS

Users are less likely to click on links when Google shows an AI-generated summary, with only 8% clicking on a search result compared to 15% when no summary appears. Just 1% of visits to AI summary pages result in users clicking links within the summary itself. About 26% of users end their browsing after seeing a summary, compared to 16% for pages without one. Longer and question-based searches are more likely to trigger an AI summary, with 60% of question-word searches and 53% of 10-word-or-longer searches producing one.

THE CASE FOR ZERO-CLICK CONTENT IN A ZERO-TRUST ECOSYSTEM

Platforms now suppress outbound links, hide referral data, and hoard traffic. This makes traditional click-based marketing unreliable. Instead of chasing clicks, zero-click content delivers standalone value directly in-platform. Links aren't off-limits but should be used sparingly, supported by consistent value-driven content. Success can be measured through branded search lift, audience growth, and conversions like booked demos.

THE POWER OF IDENTITY: BUILDING LIFELONG CUSTOMERS

The strongest loyalty comes from brands that reflect how customers define themselves and what they care about most. Identity marketing involves researching how customers talk about their struggles and aspirations, validating those themes through real-world feedback, and naming identity groups with deeper meaning rather than surface-level slogans. When customers feel that a brand helps express who they are and what they believe in, they become voluntary ambassadors who spread the message out of pride and alignment, not obligation.

PASSIONATE EMPLOYEE > FACELESS LOGO

Instead of prioritizing your company LinkedIn page, identify a charismatic employee to serve as your public voice. People trust individuals far more than brand logos, and employee-led content builds a stronger audience connection. Ideal candidates often have public speaking experience, creative backgrounds, or represent underrepresented groups. Support them with a ghostwriter, feature them on your company page, put them on stages, and compensate them accordingly.

CHATGPT USES GOOGLE SERP SNIPPETS FOR ITS ANSWERS

A test confirmed that ChatGPT relies on Google Search result snippets for its answers. A newly published webpage, not submitted to search engines, couldn't be located by ChatGPT even with web search enabled. Gemini, in contrast, fetched the live content directly. Once the page was indexed in Google but not yet visible in search results, ChatGPT still failed to access it. Only after the page appeared in Google SERPs did ChatGPT provide a partial response, clearly drawn from the Google snippet rather than the actual page. This shows ChatGPT's dependence on Google's indexed summaries, not direct page access.

WHEN USING AI BOTS TURNS CUSTOMERS AWAY

Customers are 23.7% less likely to continue using a service when it is provided by AI instead of a human if warmth is important. The drop in preference is stronger when the service is associated with fun or pleasure, with a 29.8% decrease in usage intention, compared to 17.5% when the focus is on efficiency. AI is perceived as 19.5% less warm than human staff, but using informal language helps reduce this effect. Companies like Henn na Hotel and McDonald's abandoned full AI setups due to poor customer response, while hybrid models like Starbucks' app chatbot have been more successful.

SLACK'S ACQUISITION SPREE: 6 PURCHASES IN 6 YEARS TO COMPETE WITH MICROSOFT AND GOOGLE

Slack used a buy-over-build strategy to quickly match the features of Microsoft and Google by acquiring six companies between 2014 and 2020. These acquisitions helped it add tools like screen sharing, document collaboration, and email integration, allowing it to scale to 12 million daily active users by the end of 2020. Its 2018 deal with Atlassian eliminated competitors HipChat and Stride and led to over 11 joint integrations. By acquiring technologies that reduced context-switching, Slack positioned itself as a unified work hub and ultimately attracted Salesforce, which acquired it in 2020.

WHAT EXPLAINS GOOGLE'S RECORD QUARTERLY SEARCH REVENUE WHILE CLICKS DECLINE & SITETRAFFIC DROPS?

The introduction of AI Overviews has changed the search funnel by addressing early research queries without requiring user clicks. As a result, fewer users proceed to external sites, but those who do are more likely to convert and are being monetized at higher rates, with CPCs rising nearly 13%. This model has enabled Google to grow search revenue significantly despite reduced traffic to third-party websites.