Search the archive

GCSS

Gcss is CSS written in Pure Go.

A PHILOSOPHY OF SOFTWARE DESIGN": A MUST-READ FOR MASTERING COMPLEXITY AND REDUCING TECHNICAL DEBT

Design deeper layer APIs to be more generic, use documentation to guide design and reduce obscurity, and try out multiple designs to incorporate the best ideas.

2 weeks left to invest - learn more here.

TIKTOK PREPARING A US COPY OF THE APP'S CORE ALGORITHM

TikTok is working on a clone of its recommendation algorithm for US users. This may result in a version that operates independently of its Chinese parent, which may make it more palatable to lawmakers who want to ban it. Work on the project started before the bill to force a sale of TikTok's US operations began gaining steam in Congress this year. While the project could lay the groundwork for a divestiture of TikTok's US assets, the company has no plans to sell its US assets.

SPACEX SENT STARSHIP TO ORBIT — THE NEXT LAUNCH WILL TRY TO BRING IT BACK

SpaceX's Starship's next test flight could be on June 5. The main objective of the test will be to evaluate the second stage's reusable heat shield as the vehicle tries to safely reenter the atmosphere for the first time. Composed of around 18,000 ceramic hexagonal tiles, the heat shield is vulnerable to even the loss of a single tile in most places. SpaceX still needs to receive a commercial launch license from the US FAA before the launch can move ahead.

‘SMART' ANTIBIOTIC CAN KILL DEADLY BACTERIA WHILE SPARING THE MICROBIOME

Gram-negative bacteria are often hardy, virulent, and quick to evolve resistance to antibiotics. Scientists have developed an antibiotic that kills pathogenic Gram-negative bacteria without impairing the gut microbiome. Still untested in humans, the compound's usefulness will depend on whether the bacteria will develop resistance to it in the long run. The time from an antibiotic's discovery to its approval for clinical use can be more than two decades, and there is not much money to be made with a novel antibiotic - around ten to twenty new Gram-negative antibiotics have been discovered in the past decade but none have gained approval from the US FDA.

1-BIT LLMS COULD SOLVE AI'S ENERGY DEMANDS

Large language models are demanding more and more energy and computational power as they get better. These models need to shrink to become cheap, fast, and environmentally friendly. Researchers use a process called quantization to compress networks by reducing the precision of their parameters. They are now pushing the envelope to single bit, producing models that are faster and more energy efficient than their full-precision counterparts. The quantized versions of the models perform almost as well as their original versions.

travel this year. Sign up now!

UNEXPECTED ANTI-PATTERNS FOR ENGINEERING LEADERS

Engineering teams consisting of a couple hundred people might cost $50 to $100 million a year in salary, so it is frustrating for executives when they hear that engineering is an art and that outcomes are unpredictable. The misalignment between engineering leaders and other executives often stems from a lack of flexibility - too many well-meaning engineering leaders go by the book of conventional leadership advice. Applying rules too universally turns them into anti-patterns. The key to effective leadership lies in figuring out which scenarios are worth deliberately defying conventional logic and when to simply follow the rules.

DON'T DRY YOUR CODE PREMATURELY

Before applying DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself), consider whether the deduplication is truly redundant or if the functionality will need to evolve independently over time. Applying DRY principles too rigidly leads to premature abstractions that make future changes more complex than necessary. While two sections of code may look the same, they could serve different contexts and business requirements that evolve separately over time. Keep code separate until enough common patterns emerge over time to justify coupling the code together. Tolerate a little duplication in the early stages of development and wait to abstract.

CHASING UTOPIA, STARTUP STYLE

Silicon Valley's tech barons have several projects to develop new frontiers for human life. The projects are based on the desire to withdraw from existing societies and their high taxes and regulations. Stemming from a yearning for new forms of self-governance and citizenship, these political exit projects illuminate the real problems of society, like the failure of nation-states to respond adequately to modern crises, disintegrating social cohesion, and the epidemic of loneliness. While the idea of being a sovereign individual may sound appealing to Silicon Valley billionaires, the world's most poor and desperate often experience such lawless locales as antithetical to freedom as some of the worst abuses flourish in the absence of the state.

GOOGLE WILL ROLL OUT CHROME'S NEW EXTENSION SPEC NEXT WEEK

Google will begin phasing out Manifest V2 on the Chrome Beta, Dev, and Canary channels starting on June 3. Extensions will still work, but Google says it will disable them in browsers in the coming months before removing the ability to use them completely. A full rollout is scheduled for the beginning of 2025. Manifest V3 has faced pushback over concerns it could limit the effectiveness of ad blockers. Google has attempted to address developers' main concerns by adding support for user scripts and increasing the number of rule sets for an API used by ad blocking extensions.

TECH GIANTS FORM AI GROUP TO COUNTER NVIDIA WITH NEW INTERCONNECT STANDARD

The Ultra Accelerator Link Promoter Group will develop a new interconnect standard for AI accelerator chips in data centers as an alternative to Nvidia's proprietary NVLink interconnect technology.

THE DECLINE OF THE USER INTERFACE

While software looks cooler than ever, user interface design and the user experience have declined significantly.

HOW ANTHROPIC DESIGNED ITSELF TO AVOID OPENAI'S MISTAKES

As a public benefit corporation, Anthropic has a fiduciary obligation to increase profits for shareholders, but the board has legal room to prioritize safety over increasing profits and follow the company's mission to ensure that transformative AI helps people and society flourish.

SPACETOP, THE RADICAL NEW LAPTOP WITH NO SCREEN, IS READY FOR LAUNCH

The Spacetop G1, a laptop that swaps out a real display for a virtual one, will be available later this year for $1,900.

PAUL GRAHAM CLAIMS SAM ALTMAN WASN'T FIRED FROM Y COMBINATOR

Paul Graham, the co-founder of Y Combinator, has dismissed claims that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was pressured to resign from the startup accelerator in 2019 due to potential conflicts of interest.

WHITHER UTOPIA?

We should bring back the idea that life can be better and that we can work together to bring forth a utopian existence.

Up your game with LMNT ↗️

PERPLEXITY PAGES

The Perplexity search engine has announced a new product for creating long-lasting research artifacts that are shareable and created with AI.

WONDER DYNAMICS ACQUIRED BY AUTODESK

The AI VFX company with Hollywood ties has been acquired by software maker Autodesk for an undisclosed amount.

ANTHROPIC'S AI NOW LETS YOU CREATE BOTS TO WORK FOR YOU

Anthropic is introducing a "tool use" feature for its Claude AI chatbot, enabling users to create personalized assistants that can interact with any external API. This feature can analyze data, provide product recommendations, track orders, offer technical support, and even process images for applications like interior design.

YUAN 2.0-M32: MIXTURE OF EXPERTS WITH ATTENTION ROUTER

Yuan 2.0-M32 is a Mixture of Experts model with 40B parameters, 3.7B active at any time. It performs close to Llama 3 70B despite using 1/19th the compute. It was trained on 2T tokens and seems surprisingly powerful for its size.

SCALING LAWS AND COMPUTE-OPTIMAL TRAINING BEYOND FIXED TRAINING DURATIONS

The original scaling laws papers used a Cosine learning rate schedule which doesn't achieve optimal loss if the Cosine period isn't aligned with the total training steps. This makes it challenging to train enough models to create meaningful scaling laws. This paper introduces the idea of a constant learning rate with a cool down as a way to reduce GPU costs for scaling law creation.

ULTRA-HD IMAGE DERAINING

Researchers have introduced a new dataset called 4K-Rain13k that features 13,000 pairs of 4K resolution images to tackle the challenge of deraining ultra-high-definition (UHD) images.

SDXL SCRIBBLE CONTROLNET

Scribble ControlNet allows you to draw arbitrary lines as conditioning information for image generation. It was trained on substantially more post training images than other ControlNets and boasts powerful performance.

VIDEO GENERATION WITH TRANSFORMERS

EasyAnimate is a method that adapts the DiT framework for advanced 3D video generation using transformers. This project incorporates a motion module block to capture temporal dynamics, ensuring smooth motion transitions and consistent frames.

BOOSTING LANGUAGE MODELS WITH SELF-EXPLORING OPTIMIZATION

Self-Exploring Language Models (SELM) is a method that enhances preference optimization in LLMs using online feedback.

TEXT2VIDEO TURBO

Consistency Distillation applied to video models dramatically reduces the number of steps needed to generate content.

AI WON'T EAT YOUR JOB, BUT IT WILL EAT YOUR SALARY

AI threatens not just the existence of jobs but the skill premium associated with tasks, potentially reducing the wages for skilled labor. AI could re-bundle job tasks and lower the barriers to task performance, leading to commoditization and decreased ability to charge a premium salary. As AI evolves, especially through AI agents, managerial advantages may also diminish, challenging the human-in-the-loop advantage and further eroding skill premiums.

PATRONUS AI RAISES $17M SERIES A

Patronus builds automated security for language models.

NEURALINK RIVAL SETS BRAIN-CHIP RECORD WITH 4,096 ELECTRODES ON HUMAN BRAIN

Precision Neuroscience claims to have set a new record for the number of neuron-tapping electrodes placed on a living human's brain at 4,096.

GOOGLE ADDS AI-POWERED FEATURES TO CHROMEBOOK

Google announced new AI features for Chromebook Plus devices, including a writing assistant, wallpaper creator, and easy access to the Gemini chatbot.

Invest in Jurny today [4] ↗️

BIDEN CAMPAIGN RAMPS UP CRYPTO INDUSTRY OUTREACH IN SURPRISING TONE 'SHIFT'

President Biden's re-election campaign has been reaching out to cryptocurrency industry leaders, seeking advice on crypto community and crypto policy. Biden has previously said he would veto the repeal of SAB 121, an SEC ruling making crypto asset custody complex for institutions to offer. This change in tone comes after the Trump campaign's pro-crypto rhetoric, which includes accepting crypto donations, protecting the right to self-custody, and anti-CBDC remarks.

SINGAPORE'S LARGEST BANK DBS IS AN ETHER WHALE WITH NEARLY $650M IN ETH

A wallet owned by DBS, Singapore's largest bank, owns over 173,000 ETH. The bank has made over $200 million on this position at current market prices. While a DBS spokesperson said this position is not on its books, the firm is familiar with crypto and offers services like custody, trading, and portfolio management.

ARWEAVE, AO, AND AI

Arweave has typically depended on external applications to bring data into its network. However, the launch of AO, a new network built on Arweave, means Arweave will have the ability to generate consistent internal demand and grow its data storage capabilities and development platform. AO separates consensus mechanisms from app computation, introducing a modular architecture that improves scalability and security customization, while also creating a marketplace where apps can acquire computational resources on-demand.

PUMP.FUN AND BUBBLEMAPS LAUNCH BLOCKCHAIN SLEUTHING TOOL

Pump.fun has partnered with bubblemaps to make it easier to investigate potential rugpulls and understand relationships between wallets interacting with specific tokens. The tool helps users generate visual bubble maps to track coin flows and examine whether developers are manipulating token distribution or using burner wallets during launches.

STARKNET ECOSYSTEM OVERVIEW

Starknet's goals for 2024 are to become the L2 with the highest TPS capacity and have an average transaction fee below 1 cent. The DeFi Spring program is allocating 40 million STRK to protocols over six to eight months. It will transition to a Volition to reduce fees, allowing developers to choose whether to store transaction data on Ethereum or Starknet.

THE 7 BIGGEST CELEBRITY RUG PULLS IN HISTORY

Numerous celebrities have been implicated in cryptocurrency scams, promoting projects that eventually failed and led to significant investor losses. High-profile individuals like Davido, Floyd Mayweather, and Shaquille O'Neal have faced legal repercussions and public backlash for their roles in these so-called "rug pulls," highlighting the risks associated with celebrity-endorsed crypto investments.

THOUGHTS ON CELEBRITY MEMECOINS - EXTRACTION IS NOT ADOPTION

The recent trend of celebrities launching memecoins has reignited debates over their impact on the cryptocurrency space, with a historical pattern suggesting such ventures often result in quick failures and are generally seen as cash grabs rather than genuine contributions. Critics argue that celebrities should demonstrate genuine interest and involvement in the crypto community before promoting their own coins, emphasizing that authentic engagement and risk-taking, as opposed to opportunistic, profit-driven launches that exploit the space, are crucial for positive adoption.

MATTER LABS FILES FOR 'ZK' TRADEMARK, INDUSTRY DEMANDS WITHDRAWAL

Matter Labs, the developers of the zkSync L2, have filed trademark applications for “zero-knowledge” and “ZK.” This has been met with backlash across the crypto industry, with zero-knowledge cryptography co-inventor and StarkWare CEO Eli Ben-Sasson calling it an “absurd IP grab.” Matter Labs' CEO Alex Gluchowski claims it filed the trademark to prevent dishonest actors from using the term.

CRYPTO ARMS RACE TO MOBILE

Crypto's increasing focus on consumer apps will transform DeFi-level protocols, integrating them seamlessly into everyday mobile applications.

A16Z DONATES ANOTHER $25M TO FAIRSHAKE

a16z has contributed an additional $25 million to Fairshake, totaling $47 million, to continue supporting bipartisan efforts for clearer digital asset regulations and to maintain U.S. leadership in blockchain innovation.