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the New Relic blog

IF YOU'RE USING POLYFILL.IO CODE ON YOUR SITE – LIKE 100,000+ ARE – REMOVE IT IMMEDIATELY

Polyfill.io is being used to infect websites with malware. Websites running any JavaScript code from the domain are advised to remove it immediately. The site previously offered code that added functionality to older browsers. A Chinese organization bought the domain earlier this year. Some popular CDN providers have created mirrors of the domain so sites can continue to use it without having to load the malicious code.

FIGMA ANNOUNCES BIG REDESIGN WITH AI

Figma has announced a major UI redesign, new generative AI tools, and a built-in slide show functionality. The UI redesign includes a new toolbar, rounded corners, and 200 new icons. The new generative AI tools allow users to quickly get started with a design. Figma Slides is a Google Slides-like feature that allows users to build and share presentations inside the app. It has interactive features for audience members and allows designers to present app prototypes right from the deck. Figma Slides is free while the feature is still beta - it will eventually become a paid feature once officially launched.

THE A.I. BOOM HAS AN UNLIKELY EARLY WINNER: WONKY CONSULTANTS

Many businesses think that AI can help them, but they are uncertain about how. Wonky consultants help businesses figure out how generative AI can help them. The management consulting industry in the US is expected to collect $392.2 billion in sales this year. The work that consultants are enlisted to do varies from business to business and the results have been mixed. Many businesses have shut down AI-powered projects after experiencing too many issues, such as the AI giving incorrect information to customers.

SOFTWARE DEFAULTS

Software defaults define the experience for everyone out of the box. Most customers buy something they just want to work - configuration is a drag, not a desire. A company's stock product represents how the company thinks about its product, its customers, and the experience it imagines is the best one. Developers should be careful about the default paths that they choose.

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STAMP: A MINI-LANGUAGE FOR PROJECT TEMPLATES

Stamp is a mini-language that makes it as concise as possible to write, edit, share, and expand project templates.

EVOLVE BANK & TRUST HAS ALLEGEDLY BEEN THE VICTIM OF A RANSOMWARE ATTACK AND DATA BREACH

Russian hacker group LockBit released around 33 terabytes of data from Evolve's systems after its demands weren't met.

GOOGLE IS TESTING FACIAL RECOGNITION TECHNOLOGY FOR CAMPUS SECURITY, STARTING AT SITE NEAR SEATTLE

Google is collecting facial data from its interior security cameras at one of its sites in Kirkland, Washington, to help identify people who may pose a security risk to its people, products, or locations.

NATURE PUBLISHED TWO PAPERS ON BRIDGE EDITING, THE NEW GENOME ENGINEERING TECHNOLOGY

Bridge recombination allows scientists to write directly to the genome, inserting whatever they want wherever they want without making a single cut.

WINDOWS ON ARM FINALLY HAS LEGS

The Windows on Arm experience has improved dramatically since the Surface Pro X was introduced in 2019.

CONTRA ACEMOGLU ON AI

This article looks at the economic growth effects of AI and the differing views between academic economists.

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YOUTUBE TRIES CONVINCING RECORD LABELS TO LICENSE MUSIC FOR AI SONG GENERATOR

YouTube is negotiating with major record labels for licenses to use their music in AI song-generation tools. It is offering substantial upfront payments but facing resistance from artists worried about devaluing their work. The platform, which trialed a generative AI tool called "Dream Track," aims to expand its AI music capabilities, potentially integrating them into YouTube Shorts. Meanwhile, the music industry is pushing back against unlicensed AI usage, with leading companies suing AI startups Suno and Udio for copyright infringement.

EVOLUTIONARY SCALE RAISES $142M SERIES A

Evolutionary Scale, a biology startup, just emerged from stealth with big backers. It also announced the release of its foundation model, ESM 3, which is a 98B parameter model trained on 771B biology tokens for 10^24 Flops. It used the model to discover a novel fluorescent green protein unlike any known in nature.

WAYMO ONE IS NOW OPEN TO EVERYONE IN SAN FRANCISCO

Waymo One now allows anyone in San Francisco to hail a ride with its autonomous vehicles. The company is scaling up operations after offering tens of thousands of trips weekly. Its all-electric fleet supports the local economy and its sustainability goals. Citing enhanced safety, Waymo says its vehicles are involved in significantly fewer crashes compared to human drivers.

NAMED ENTITY RECOGNITION WITH RETRIEVAL AUGMENTED INSTRUCTION TUNING

Retrieval Augmented Instruction Tuning (RA-IT) improves information extraction using large language models.

DEEPDIVE: SPARSE AUTOENCODERS

Golden Gate Claude was a powerful example of steering and interpreting models with SAEs. This work provides an intuitive explanation of how it works and has some example code for training these models.

DATA CURATION VIA JOINT EXAMPLE SELECTION FURTHER ACCELERATES MULTIMODAL LEARNING

Actively selecting the next best batch is a challenging and open problem in pre-training. This work from DeepMind explores how to spend just 10% of the FLOPs and hard mine negative samples and still match SOTA for various tasks.

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REAL-WORLD 3D SCENE GENERATION

Director3D is a framework designed to enhance real-world 3D scene generation and camera trajectory modeling. Utilizing a Trajectory Diffusion Transformer and a Multi-view Latent Diffusion Model, Director3D generates realistic 3D scenes from textual descriptions.

A BENCHMARK FOR EVALUATING CODE REPOSITORY EDITS

RES-Q is a new benchmark for assessing the ability of large language models to edit code repositories based on natural language instructions.

PROMPT ENGINEERING TOOLKIT

A great prompting toolkit almost entirely made from Sonnet 3.5 that helps test different prompts' performance.

THE FUTURE OF LLM-BASED AGENTS: MAKING THE BOXES BIGGER

This post shares two critical approaches that help take Agents out of the playground and into the real world: long-term planning and system-level robustness. These introduce capabilities to develop higher-order plans for Agents while allowing mid-episode adaptation as well as systems approaches to intelligent orchestration of the models that provide higher accuracy and performance.

HOW AI TRANSFORMS THE TRAVEL VALUE CHAIN

Online travel has yet to crack the end-to-end trip experience. AI offers fresh strategies for rebundling travel services, potentially shifting profits. Decision support and coordination enabled by AI will be crucial for companies to assert control over the travel rebundling process. The travel industry's future may see incumbents leveraging AI for competitive advantage, while traditional travel agents face market erosion due to AI efficiencies.

AI-POWERED CONVERSION FROM ENZYME TO REACT TESTING LIBRARY AT SLACK

Slack engineers utilized a hybrid approach, combining Abstract Syntax Tree transformations and AI Large Language Models, to automate the conversion of over 15,000 unit tests from Enzyme to React Testing Library. The team achieved an 80% success rate in automated conversions by integrating Anthropic's Claude 2.1 AI model and capturing the DOM tree for React components. This innovative project underscores Slack's commitment to enhancing developer experience and productivity through the application of AI. It is part of ongoing efforts to stay ahead in the ever-evolving frontend landscape.

R2R

R2R is an RAG engine with a RESTful API and prod features.

CHATGPT FOR MAC DESKTOP (PRODUCT)

The ChatGPT desktop app for macOS is now available for all users.

MEDICAL MODEL ON PAR WITH GPT 4 (HUGGING FACE HUB)

This 7b model, trained on medical data, tied with GPT-4 on human preference evaluation when measured by medical doctors.

BITCOIN ETFS SEE $31M IN INFLOWS, BREAKING OUTFLOW STREAK

Following a week of net outflows, U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs recorded $31 million in net inflows, primarily coming from Fidelity's FBTC and Bitwise's BITB. The inflows occurred as expectations increased around the launch of spot ether ETFs.

CRYPTO GIANTS NOTCH WINS IN EXPENSIVE QUEST TO SWAY U.S. POLITICS – WITHOUT MENTIONING CRYPTO

The crypto industry has significant political influence in the 2024 US election through a $169 million campaign fund managed by the Fairshake PAC. Companies like Coinbase, Ripple, and a16z are financing the fund but rarely discuss its decision-making process. In pursuing its goal of de-politicizing crypto, it has supported over 20 congressional primary wins and is preparing to influence races beyond the 2024 election cycle.

PARADIGM RELEASES RETH 1.0

Paradigm has announced the release of Reth 1.0, a production-ready Ethereum execution client, after two years of development and a successful audit by Sigma Prime. It features reduced costs and enhanced stability, performance, security, and service performance. The team behind Reth 1.0 has invited industry players to integrate it into their Ethereum mainnet infrastructure.

WORMHOLE: THE FIRST DISTRIBUTED SECURE SERVICE ON KARAK

Wormhole has partnered with restaking protocol Karak to develop two DSSs: a decentralized validator network for token transfers and a decentralized relay network. The validator network will make transfers more secure and decentralized, while the relay network sends messages between chains cheaply. This is the first major protocol to build on Karak, demonstrating interest in restaking beyond EigenLayer.

ETH SUPPLY CHAIN FUTURE

Ethereum is moving towards a future where block attesters and proposers are different. There are a few proposals about how to achieve this meta in a decentralized manner. The design goals are to isolate timing games, incentivizing proposers to delay block proposals to make money, and burn MEV to make the protocol easier to reason about. The protocol must be conscious of not creating new economic attacks or perverse incentives that further promote centralization or block manipulation.

A DEEP DIVE INTO NFT ROYALTIES

NFT royalties, crucial for ensuring creators get paid for secondary sales, face challenges as they have never been enforced onchain. It is difficult to distinguish sales from other transfers like gifts. New designs that balance strict royalty enforcement and the flexibility of NFT interactions are being explored to address this, with innovative approaches such as incentive mechanisms and staking models being proposed to encourage respect for royalties without compromising composability.

DENMARK TO BAN ALL CRYPTO INTERFACES

The latest DeFi guidance from the Danish Financial Supervisory Authority (DFSA) suggests a move towards heavy regulation of all crypto interfaces, including Bitcoin wallets, by classifying them as interface providers that must be regulated. This regulatory guidance may lead to a ban on unregulated p2p and unhosted wallets, aligning with past regulatory suggestions seen in other parts of the EU. Given MICA regulation recently coming into play, some see this as an overreach that could harm crypto use in Denmark.

ABSTRACTION TO ADOPTION

Chain abstraction, which involves developers building infrastructure to work across dozens of different standards, has become a popular narrative. It would allow developers to deploy applications to the blockchain of their choice and users to seamlessly interact across chains. Its implementation will be a catalyzing moment for crypto and a step towards mass adoption.

BINANCE RECEIVES VASP LICENSE TO OPERATE IN DUBAI

Binance has obtained a Virtual Asset Service Provider license (VASP) from Dubai's Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (VARA) for its local exchange, Binance FZE.

HIT WEBTOON, SOLO LEVELING, TO JOIN AVALANCHE BLOCKCHAIN

Singapore-based Web3 developer OtherWorld has launched a beta version of an NFT Platform based on the hit South Korean webtoon "Solo-Leveling" on Avalanche.

VITALIK BUTERIN AND NOAH SMITH ON USING BLOCKCHAIN TO SUBVERT AUTHORITARIAN REGIMES

Vitalik Buterin and economist Noah Smith discussed how blockchain tech could be used to subvert authoritarian regimes.

U.S. GOVERNMENT SENT OVER $240M OF BTC TO COINBASE

The government sent 3,940 BTC, worth over $240 million, to Coinbase Prime on June 26.

FIGMA ANNOUNCES BIG REDESIGN WITH AI

Figma introduced a significant UI redesign, generative AI tools, and slide creation functionalities at its Config conference. The redesign includes a new toolbar, rounded corners, and 200 new icons. It aims to make the platform more approachable for new users and useful for experienced ones. The new AI tools can help users quickly create project drafts, while Figma Slides enables users to build and share presentations within the app.

GOOGLE IMPROVES SEARCH EXPERIENCE IN THE CHROME MOBILE APP

Google has announced new mobile Chrome features to enhance search, including local search shortcuts, a refreshed address bar, personalized recommendations, and live sports cards. These upgrades, aimed at improving user experience on Android and iOS, also include Chrome Actions for quicker access to tasks and enhanced tablet browsing. The rollout ensures users can see trending searches on iOS and custom shortcut suggestions based on browsing history.

VERIZON'S NEW V LOGO ARRIVES AS THE LINES BLUR BETWEEN 5G, FIOS, AND STREAMING

Verizon has refreshed its branding with a vibrant new "V" logo and released a commercial highlighting its updated tagline, "Can you hear me now?" The company also introduced new myHome internet plans, which bundle services like Disney Plus, Netflix, cloud storage, and an optional Walmart Plus subscription.

FINDING THE ESSENCE OF YOUR THINKING

Concepts in design transform abstract ideas into concrete strategies that guide everything from branding to product development. They bridge imagination and execution, helping users understand systems and enhancing clarity. Strong conceptual models and simplicity lead to innovative, bold designs that maintain coherence and purpose as they evolve.