Digital marketing is shifting away from low-quality, high-volume tactics driven by performance marketing and AI-generated content, which is like “peeing in the pool.” The focus must return to having a great product and earning distribution through word-of-mouth. While marketers shouldn't abandon effective channels, there is a need to prepare for declining SEO and build strategies for the next 5 years. Individuals' power is growing over institutions. Brands should highlight authentic human voices rather than relying on impersonal messaging.
Google penalized Forbes Advisor for site reputation abuse in September 2024. This caused traffic to collapse from 24M to near 0 and triggered layoffs of digital PR, editorial, and SEO staff. By May 2025, traffic had recovered to around 4M monthly visits, with recovery tied more to category-level link authority than individual pages. The site's digital PR strategy, which included statistics pages, surveys, and city indexes, built over 70K referring domains and significantly contributed to its topical authority. Recovery also involved shifting toward more user-focused, “Helpful” content and reinforcing the Forbes brand identity.
Google has updated its colorful “G” logo for the first time in almost a decade.
Study how people behave on each social platform and meet them in that context.
Aside from ROAS, businesses should track POAS, MER, contribution margin, and the LTV:CAC ratio.
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AI might make better business decisions than a CEO if it had access to all of the CEO's context, memories, and data. This challenges the idea that human judgment is inherently superior. The future of analytics and AI may lie in capturing and integrating qualitative human context - our thoughts, preferences, and messy intuition - rather than merely improving data tools or charts.
Chris Best and Hamish McKenzie are transforming media with Substack by letting creators own their work and earn through subscriptions, bypassing ad-driven algorithms. In this podcast, they discuss reshaping creator economics, using AI in content, and building deeper audience connections.
This piece explores the complexities of change and improvement, highlighting perspectives shaped by experience, context, and mindset. From openness to change despite limited experience to being informed yet struggling with practical application, each perspective has its strengths and risks, emphasizing the nuanced, context-dependent nature of growth and improvement.
AI design tools have improved since 2024, but are still far from replacing designers, with narrow-scope tools like Figma's layer renaming and copywriting being the most useful. Broader tools like wireframe generators still lack the necessary contextual understanding, and issues like short prompt limits and poor design system integration persist.
This article presents an effective approach to building a growth-focused team, starting with activation, followed by monetization, acquisition, and retention. It highlights the need for specialized growth squads, like infrastructure and experimentation teams, and recommends allocating 25% of the R&D budget to growth once product-market fit is achieved.
Figma Make is an AI tool that turns text, images, and designs into interactive prototypes, enabling quick creation of everything from galleries to simulations. It stands out with seamless Figma integration, real-time collaboration, and easy editing, with quality measured through design scores, user feedback, and analytics.
Setting effective company policies is a key responsibility for startup executives, requiring clarity, transparency, and adaptability to ensure fairness and avoid unintended consequences. Policies should be sensible, evolve with those affected, and be used sparingly to prevent bureaucracy and promote a healthy, high-trust culture.
Product marketers can boost their competitive research by building custom, low-code tools that automate tracking and analysis, saving time, cutting costs, and enabling tailored insights.
Real progress occurs when teams focus on practices that add value and reinforce each other.
Brainstorming often poses as innovation but hides a lack of focus and accountability behind colorful consensus.
There were critical vulnerabilities in the Cerca dating app that exposed sensitive user data like personal messages, passport information, and sexual preferences. Using simple techniques, this developer found an OTP bypass and unprotected API endpoints, allowing for complete account takeover and mass data extraction. The vulnerabilities were later patched.
BiomeJS is a tool that combines the functionalities of Prettier and ESLint for JavaScript code formatting and linting. It can simplify workflows and improve performance by using Rust and multithreading behind the scenes, which is helpful for large codebases.
Think of the title of a blog post you write as a "classifier" designed to attract readers who will genuinely appreciate the content and deter those who won't. Titles should give a strong signal to the intended audience that the content is specifically for them, even if it alienates a broader audience.
An accessibility specialist at Shopify uses AI in four ways: to write accessibility issue tickets, automate testing for common WCAG violations, for accessibility audits and compliance reporting across Shopify surfaces, and to implement accessibility fixes more quickly with coding assistants like Cursor.
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Node.js v24 is here. It comes with the latest V8 engine, which lets you do explicit resource management with the new using keyword. It also has a new stable permission model (out of experimental in v20), and the URLPattern API is now a global object.
Bippy is a toolkit that bypasses React's restrictions to access its internal fiber tree and other internals by mimicking React DevTools. This lets devs inspect and manipulate React components without modifying React code.
A macOS vulnerability allowed malicious applications to spoof permission prompts, making them appear to originate from a different application than the one actually receiving the granted permissions. This flaw was within the TCC (Transparency, Consent, and Control) system, specifically in how it handled Apple Events permissions. By crafting a malicious XPC message, an attacker could manipulate the user interface to display a misleading prompt while applying the user's response to a different application.
The Director of the Los Alamos Laboratory's National Security AI Office believes AI is a disruptive force reshaping science and security. Government investment in AI infrastructure is necessary for public benefit and national competitiveness. Large AI models will have a huge impact, and scientists should embrace AI as a fundamental shift in problem-solving and discovery.
Passkeys are a phishing-resistant alternative to passwords and OTPs for authentication. They can be stored on devices or in password managers like 1Password. Physical security keys (U2F) are an extra layer of security on top.
Mark Zuckerberg had concerns about Facebook's declining cultural relevance and proposed strategies to revitalize the platform, including potentially overhauling its graph structure to either double down on friending, focus on groups, or switch to a following model.
JavaScript's spread syntax expands iterable elements, while rest parameters gather multiple elements.
Codigo is a repository for programming languages, providing news, rankings, and information about various languages like Python, Java, and Rust.
After a period of proprietary licensing that led to the Valkey fork, Redis is open source again with version 8 under AGPLv3, but its reputation and the adoption of Valkey may make it difficult to regain the community's trust and user base.
OpenAI and Microsoft are reworking their partnership to allow OpenAI to move forward with a restructuring plan to create a for-profit public benefit corporation controlled by its nonprofit parent. Microsoft may take a smaller equity stake in the new entity in exchange for extended access to OpenAI's technology beyond the previously agreed-upon 2030 cutoff. OpenAI plans to reduce the percentage of revenue it shares with Microsoft as part of the restructuring. It needs approval from Microsoft to proceed with its plan.
2025.05.12·links.tldrnewsletter.com·1 min read·TLDR While Elizabeth Holmes is in prison for defrauding investors through Theranos, her partner, Billy Evans, plans to start his own blood testing company. Evans is trying to raise money for a blood-testing company with a machine that bears more than a passing resemblance to Theranos' infamous blood-testing machine. The company, Haemanthus, is still in stealth, and not much information is available about it. It aims to eventually raise more than $50 million. Haemanthus plans to first address the pet health care market before progressing to humans.
2025.05.12·nytimes.com·6 min read·TLDR A group of scientists at Peking University has created what they claim is the world's fastest and most efficient transistor. Made with a slender sheet of lab-grown bismuth and a new architecture, the two-dimensional, silicon-free transistor represents a radical rethinking of what chips can be and how they can be made. Chinese firms have been blocked from buying the latest silicon chip-making equipment due to ongoing US-led export restrictions, forcing researchers to find solutions from fresh perspectives. The team is now working on scaling up production - they used existing fabrication platforms, so the barrier to mass production may not be as high as with other experimental technologies.
2025.05.12·zmescience.com·5 min read·TLDR Rocket Lab and the US Air Force Research Laboratory have planned a launch and return-to-Earth mission for Rocket Lab's Neutron rocket no earlier than 2026. The flight will test Neutron's reentry capabilities and the rocket's viability for global point-to-point cargo transportation objectives. Rocket Lab plans to debut its partially reusable Neutron later in 2025. The company has been launching its 59-foot-tall Electron rocket since 2018 and has significantly increased its launch cadence over the past few years. Neutron will stand at 141 feet tall with a 23-foot diameter.
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2025.05.12·advertise.tldr.tech·Sponsor·TLDR React Three is a React renderer for three.js. It allows developers to build scenes declaratively with re-usable, self-contained components that react to state, are readily interactive, and can participate in React's ecosystem. Everything that works in three.js will work with React Three. This site allows developers to select React Three packages to include into their projects via npm, download, or by creating a repository.
2025.05.12·react-three.org·Tool·TLDR While the role of the coder will likely still exist in 10 years, it will probably look very different from what it is today. However, it is important to remember that there is still a lot of work to be done before large language models can even replace junior developers. The role of debugging will grow as models trained on previous errors and methods won't catch bugs. AI is just another technology that claims it will change the world - it hasn't taken over yet, and it might not, just like 3D printing didn't ruin manufacturing, blockchain didn't ruin finance, and the metaverse hasn't caused mass migrations away from cities.
2025.05.12·news.ycombinator.com·TLDR Annapurna Labs was a secretive Israeli chip-design startup purchased by Amazon for about $350 million a decade ago. Amazon's entire AI strategy is now built on a foundation of chips designed by Annapurna. The company has planned more than $100 billion of capital expenditures for this year, mostly on AWS infrastructure required for AI systems using homemade silicon. This article looks at the history of the startup and how a discussion over beer and wine eventually led to one of the most consequential deals in tech history.
2025.05.12·links.tldrnewsletter.com·9 min read·TLDR Apple's former Chief Design Officer, Jony Ive, recently gave a rare interview at Stripe Sessions 2025 that offered insights into his design philosophy, his time at Apple, and his current work at LoveFrom. In the hour-long conversation, Ive reflected on the experiences that shaped his career, the principles that guide LoveFrom, the unintended consequences of the work of designers and technologists, and broader concerns about the technology industry. He did not address his collaboration with OpenAI on a new AI-focused hardware project.
2025.05.12·macrumors.com·3 min read·TLDR MileagePlus customers will get free Starlink internet with 200+ Mbps speeds.
2025.05.12·teslarati.com·2 min read·TLDR Apple is working to extend its devices' password sharing capabilities so they work on commercial and captive networks.
2025.05.12·appleinsider.com·2 min read·TLDR Tiny Corp has managed to get an AMD eGPU working over USB3 using libusb - the method works on Windows, Linux, and macOS, including devices with Apple Silicon.
2025.05.12·tomshardware.com·3 min read·TLDR Indie game developers are pushing the medium forward while big-name publishers focus on safer bets.
2025.05.12·freethink.com·28 min read·TLDR There is an apparent lack of mature engineering practices within the MCP servers and clients that are being built and published daily.
Friction is the effort it takes to move between systems.
2025.05.12·kyla.substack.com·24 min read·TLDR Sponsored
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