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PROGRAMMING MANTRAS ARE PROVERBS

Programming mantras should be treated as proverbs, offering guidance rather than strict rules, and should be applied with careful consideration of the context.

RELAY VERSION 17.0.0

Version 17.0.0 of Relay (a JavaScript framework for building data-driven React applications by Meta) contains enhanced schema validation and edge type validation, alongside significant performance optimizations and expanded editor integration features.

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NVIDIA PASSES MICROSOFT IN MARKET CAP TO BECOME MOST VALUABLE PUBLIC COMPANY

Nvidia is now the most valuable public company in the world. Its market cap surpassed Microsoft's $3.32 trillion on Tuesday, reaching a high of $3.34 trillion. Nvidia's shares are up more than 170% so far this year. Its market cap hit $3 trillion for the first time earlier this month. Nvidia's rise has been so rapid the company has yet to be added to the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the stock benchmark of the 30 most valuable US companies.

APPLE HALTS WORK ON VISION PRO, AIMS TO RELEASE CHEAPER VISION HEADSET NEXT YEAR

Apple will repeatedly release a cheaper, cut-down version of the Apple Vision Pro at the end of 2025. Development work on a second generation of the high-end model of the Vision Pro has been shelved. Reports suggest that the cheaper Vision Pro will cost around $1,500. Apple is apparently struggling to find ways to cut the price and weight of the device without sacrificing too much of the experience.

AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES ARE GREAT AT DRIVING STRAIGHT

‘IT'S THE PERFECT PLACE': LONDON UNDERGROUND HOSTS TESTS FOR ‘QUANTUM COMPASS' THAT COULD REPLACE GPS

Scientists in the UK are developing very precise new sensors using quantum mechanics to create a quantum compass - an instrument that exploits the behavior of subatomic matter to accurately pinpoint their locations no matter where they're placed. This could result in a new generation of underground and underwater sensors that can provide location information without interference from weather and other obstructions. Their device could be ready for widespread use in just a few years. It works well in a stable laboratory environment but needs to be tested in more extreme conditions to be turned into a transportable, standalone device that can be used in remote or complex locations.

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THE THREADS API IS FINALLY HERE!

Meta's Threads API is now available to all developers. The API will enable creators, developers, and brands to build their own unique integrations, manage their Threads presence at scale, and easily share content with their communities. It allows people to publish posts, fetch content, set reply and quote controls, retrieve and respond to replies, hide and unhide specific replies, and retrieve key metrics. Links to developer documentation and a sample app are available.

COGNITIVE LOAD IS WHAT MATTERS

Confusion, which costs time and money, is caused by high cognitive load. Cognitive load is how much a developer needs to think in order to complete a task. Developers should constantly ask themselves whether they are embedding excessive cognitive load into their code as far more time is spent reading and understanding code than writing it. They should make things easy to understand to avoid creating unnecessary cognitive load for themselves and their colleagues.

THE PUBLIC INTEREST INTERNET

This article looks at the global digital architecture required to make the internet a public interest technology. It looks at what should be considered as digital infrastructure and the consequences of its capture, the problems with current approaches to internet standards, limits to the main approach to digital regulation that states are deploying, how to approach the governance of transnational public infrastructure, how to pay for this, and more. While creating a public interest internet would be difficult, the alternative, keeping our digital infrastructure entirely in the hands of a few megacorporations, could be more costly.

AIS ARE COMING FOR SOCIAL NETWORKS

Butterfly is a social network made up of AI characters. Its app allows users to create AI characters, or Butterflies, which generate photos and interact with other accounts on their own. There's no limit to the number of Butterflies users can create. These AI profiles coexist with human accounts, which can also post and comment. The app provides a peek into a somewhat dystopian future where AIs start invading social media feeds - Mark Zuckerberg shared in September that Meta is building an AI Studio that would let users build AIs that can post and interact with people on their behalf.

ELON MUSK RUSHES TO DEBUT X PAYMENTS AS TECH ISSUES HAMPER CREATOR PAYOUTS

Elon Musk is pushing to launch X payment services, arguably one of the reasons he paid so much to acquire Twitter in 2022, by the end of 2024.

TIKTOK IS COPYING INSTAGRAM AGAIN WITH WHEE

Whee is an app for sharing photos with close friends.

GITHUB COPILOT WORKSPACE REVIEW

GitHub Copilot Workspace failed a super simple task for this review - in every way it could at every step.

META FORMS NEW WEARABLES GROUP AND LAYS OFF SOME EMPLOYEES

Meta's Reality Labs is undergoing its biggest restructuring in years - it will separate into two organizations: Wearables and Metaverse.

APPLE REFUSES TO NOTARIZE EMULATOR APPS

Apple has rejected the UTM emulator app from its App Store and all third-party app stores in the EU by refusing to notarize it.

VISUAL STUDIO CODE EXTENSIONS ARE MUCH LESS SECURE THAN BROWSER EXTENSIONS OR EVEN NPM PACKAGES

Extensions in Visual Studio Code can do pretty much whatever they want, they automatically update, publisher accounts are too easy to verify, the code shipped in an update can differ from what's on GitHub, and there's no way to verify the data being used in the extension store indicating popularity or trust-worthiness.

GEOFF HINTON AND MAX WELLING $30M CARBON CAPTURE START UP

Geoff Hinton and Max Welling, preeminent researchers in the field of AI, have assembled a strong team and are working to build AI systems that help with material science for carbon capture.

NVIDIA CONQUERS LATEST AI TESTS

Systems powered by Nvidia's Hopper architecture dominated the results of two new tests from MLPerf, an AI benchmarking suite that compares the fine-tuning of large language models and training of graph neural networks.

PERPLEXITY AI SEARCHES FOR USERS IN JAPAN, VIA SOFTBANK DEAL

Perplexity is leveraging its strategic partnership with SoftBank to expand its reach in Japan. It is offering a free year of its premium AI-powered search engine, Perplexity Pro. SoftBank aims to attract users with AI services without developing in-house solutions. Perplexity, valued at $1 billion, is advancing its funding and investor base, which includes notable tech leaders and venture firms.

UPDATING LANGUAGE MODELS WITH ERASE

ERASE is a new approach for updating language models. Unlike traditional methods that focus on improving retrieval during prediction, ERASE incrementally deletes or rewrites entries in the knowledge base when new documents are added.

3D REPRESENTATION LEARNING FROM MULTI-VIEW IMAGES

SUPER-RESOLUTION WITH CONTENT-AWARE MIXING

CAMixerSR performs image super-resolution by smartly applying convolution for simpler parts and deformable window-attention for detailed textures.

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META CHAMELEON MODELS RELEASED

Chameleon is an early fusion model that operates on images and text tokens simultaneously. Its team released the paper a few weeks ago. They have now released model checkpoints along with inference code.

DEPTH COMPLETION

OGNI-DC is a new framework for depth completion using "Optimization-Guided Neural Iterations" (OGNI). It refines a depth gradient field and integrates the depth gradients into a depth map.

SUBOBJECT TOKENIZATION FOR IMAGES

Subobject tokenization is a new way for vision models to understand images. Instead of breaking images into fixed square patches, models using subobject tokenization look at images in terms of meaningful segments, like parts of objects.

OPEN INTERPRETER LOCAL III

Open source local agent Open Interpreter has just had a big upgrade. It can control the computer seamlessly and works completely offline and locally.

INTRODUCING THE PROPERTY GRAPH INDEX

LlamaIndex introduces the Property Graph Index, enhancing knowledge graph capabilities with better modeling, storage, and querying features. The new index allows flexible construction of graphs, supports schema-guided, implicit, and free-form entity extraction, and integrates with vector databases for hybrid searches. It provides querying through keyword expansion, vector similarity, Cypher queries, and custom traversal.

IBM GRANITE CODE MODELS

Open models with state-of-the-art code performance that do depth upscaling to initialize larger models. Unlike many code models, these models also excel at fixing code, explaining code, and evaluating areas for improvement.

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DECAGON RAISES $35M SERIES A FROM ACCEL + A16Z

Decagon is building human-like AI agents for customer support. It raised a $30M Series A from Accel and $5M Seed from a16z. Decagon's product handles global support for companies like Eventbrite, Rippling, Webflow, BILT, and Substack.

FIREFUNCTION-V2 (HUGGING FACE HUB)

Open model that matches GPT4-o on function calling benchmarks trained on top of Llama 3 70B.

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OVER $740 MILLION WORTH OF TOKENS TO UNLOCK IN NEXT 30 DAYS

Over 40 protocols, including StarkNet, ImmutableX, and Aptos, are unlocking a combined $740 of frozen tokens over the next month. The highest unlock is the Gaming L3 XAI, which will unlock $109 million in tokens, followed by Aptos and Arbitrum, which will unlock around $80 million each. Token prices have already begun sliding as investors are concerned about the negative impact of more supply without demand.

US SEC CLOSES INVESTIGATION IN ETHEREUM 2.0, ‘MAJOR WIN' FOR INDUSTRY: CONSENSYS

The SEC has ended its investigation into Ethereum 2.0, which Consensys believes confirms that ETH sales are not considered securities transactions. This decision comes after a request from Consensys to clarify whether ETH is considered a commodity.

ETHENA TOKENOMICS UPDATE AND RESTAKING FEATURES

ENA and sUSDe will be available to deposit in the Symbiotic restaking protocol. ENA will eventually provide security for the Ethena Chain. The chain will host apps built with USDe as the primary asset and gas token. Going forward, any user receiving an ENA airdrop must lock at least 50% in a restaking module, as PT-ENA on Pendle, or basic staking.

INTRODUCING ZKVM 1.0: THE FUTURE OF VERIFIABLE COMPUTATION

RiscZero's zkVM is the first production-ready zkVM. It makes zero-knowledge proofs available and cost-effective for any chain. Any Rust program can be proven and verified across chains, allowing for greater cross-chain compatibility. It claims to beat Succinct's SP1 zkVM in both cost and speed on various hardware setups.

CELEBRITY CRYPTO PUMP-AND-DUMPS

This thread highlights the numerous celebrity NFT collections and tokens that ended up dead, rugged, or abandoned. Highlights from the last cycle include Ethereum Max, which was promoted by Kim Kardashian and Floyd Mayweather and is down 99.96% and Mila Kunis' Stoner Cats NFT project, which the SEC charged with being an unregistered securities offering. This cycle has been memecoin-dominated, with tokens from Caitlyn Jenner and Davido down over 90% from their peak.