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JCO

Jco is a fully native JavaScript toolchain for working with WebAssembly (Wasm) Components in JavaScript that can transpile Wasm component binaries into ES modules.

IF YOU CAN CODE, YOU CAN WRITE!

Coding and writing are fundamentally similar because both have the potential for impactful change and require clarity, efficiency, readability, and structure.

CAN WE HAVE CUSTOM MEDIA QUERIES, PLEASE?

"Custom media queries" in CSS would allow developers to define reusable media query aliases, making CSS more maintainable.

DETECT CAPS LOCK WITH JAVASCRIPT

Users may accidentally have Caps Lock enabled when typing their passwords - developers can use JavaScript's getModifierState method to detect this and provide a helpful warning.

AIRPODS PRO TO GAIN 'HEARING AID MODE' IN IOS 18

Apple's AirPods Pro will reportedly gain a new 'hearing aid mode' with iOS 18. The device already offers a Conversation Boost feature, but Apple has not advertised it as a hearing aid device as that requires FDA regulatory approval. It is unclear whether Apple will need FDA clearance to make explicit or implicit claims about the 'hearing aid mode' or whether it will adopt that exact name. The FDA approved a new category of over-the-counter hearing aids called Personal sound amplification products in August 2022 that doesn't require legal registration by manufacturers or listing with the FDA. iOS 18 is set to be previewed in June and released sometime in September.

ELON MUSK SAYS XAI WILL OPEN SOURCE GROK THIS WEEK

xAI will open source Grok this week. The move follows Elon Musk's complaint that OpenAI has deviated from its open source roots. Musk has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI claiming that OpenAI, which was supposed to make its technology freely available to the public, has become closed-source and has shifted its focus to maximizing profits for Microsoft. Musk has long been a proponent of open source - Tesla has open sourced many of its patents. It is unclear what aspects of Grok will be open sourced.

COVARIANT ANNOUNCES A UNIVERSAL AI PLATFORM FOR ROBOTS

Covariant has announced a robotics foundation model that gives robots a human-like ability to reason. The 8 billion parameter RFM-1 can expand its abilities through more data consumption. It incorporates images, video, joint angles, force reading, suction cup strength, and more into its prediction engine to produce images, videos, or a series of commands for a robot. It can be used as a simulation tool, generating action sequences that are both realistic and accurate. With enough data, it could be a useful world simulation tool more capable than one built from the ground up. Covariant aims to make the model be able to do any task in any body.

PARKINSON'S DRUG REDUCES DISEASE MARKERS IN BREAKTHROUGH TRIAL

A novel therapy for Parkinson's disease has shown promise in early clinical trials. UB-312 is designed to clear toxic clumps of a protein thought to be responsible for the disease. It has been shown to be generally safe with relatively mild side effects. There are currently no treatments that address the underlying condition of Parkinson's. The therapy's initial success is exciting as it suggests that scientists are on the right path to finding a safe and effective means of improving quality of life for Parkinson's patients.

HOW WE ENGINEER FEEDBACK AT FIGMA WITH ENG CRITS

TYPE UNIONS DON'T ALWAYS COMPOSE WELL

TypeScript lets developers write type unions that often feel more ergonomic compared to other languages, which may force them to tag the union. These untagged unions often lead to cleaner user-side APIs that don't require boilerplate boxing up of values. However, if you have overlaps when using them, the result type might hold less information than you think. To get the composition to actually represent something like what you get with data types in other languages, make sure there is no overlap between the types.

WHY SIGNAL ‘TURNED OUR ARCHITECTURE INSIDE OUT’ FOR ITS LATEST PRIVACY FEATURE

The decision to add usernames to the upcoming version of Signal was nowhere near as simple as it sounds. Many countries around the world are making it increasingly difficult to obtain phone numbers. Using phone numbers as an identifier is also a security risk for some users. Signal had to implement usernames without having to deal with large-scale moderation obligations. Its system is far more limited than on other platforms that have usernames as canonical identifiers for users. Beta users can claim their usernames now.

TIKTOK SHAREHOLDERS WHO MAKE ANY ‘DISPARAGING STATEMENT’ ABOUT THE COMPANY RISK HAVING THEIR ENTIRE HOLDINGS SEIZED

TikTok's shareholder agreement bans current and former employees from criticizing the company or risk losing any stock they own. While the non-disparagement provision is unusual, it isn't illegal as long as it doesn't prevent, intimidate, or punish employees for filing complaints with government agencies. The terms in the agreement defining disparagement are vague. It is unknown whether TikTok has ever seized stock from any shareholders.

LINUX 6.9 WILL BE THE FIRST TO TOP TEN MILLION GIT OBJECTS

Version 6.8 of the Linux Kernel contains 9.996 million objects.

APPLE REPORTEDLY ’ACCELERATING’ ENTRY-LEVEL VISION PRO — AND IT COULD COST $2,000 LESS

Apple is aiming to cut the cost of the headset's most expensive components, its two 4K micro-OLED displays, by as much as 50%.

DIFFUSION MODELS FROM SCRATCH, FROM A NEW THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVE

This tutorial goes through how to implement training and sampling code for a toy data set to introduce diffusion models from an optimization perspective.

MIDJOURNEY BANS ALL STABILITY AI EMPLOYEES OVER ALLEGED DATA SCRAPING

Midjourney has accused Stability AI employees of causing a systems outage earlier this month during an attempt to scrape Midjourney's data.

ZUCK INSISTS QUEST 3 IS ALSO A COMPUTER AND NOT JUST FOR GAMES IN LATEST VISION PRO CRITICISM

The top Quest apps include social apps, browsers, and video players, and there is a passionate community around fitness apps as well.

KICKSTARTER RECEIVED SECRET $100M INVESTMENT TO BECOME WEB3 COMPANY

Andreessen Horowitz led an investment round totaling $100 million to get Kickstarter to move its entire platform to the Celo blockchain.

Read more >> How AI Companies Are Embracing Enterprise Readiness

stage companies. This is a problem especially for AI companies

where speed to market can mean life or death. Prioritizing non-proprietary features over core product development can have severe consequences.

GROK FROM XAI TO BE OPEN SOURCED THIS WEEK (X POST)

Elon Musk shared on X that Grok, xAI's language model, will be open sourced in the coming days.

COVARIANT IS BUILDING CHATGPT FOR ROBOTS

Covariant has introduced RFM-1, aiming to revolutionize robotics with a large language model for robot language that enhances robots' decision-making and interaction capabilities across various industries by utilizing a massive data collection from its Brain AI platform.

COMMAND-R MULTILINGUAL MODEL

Cohere For AI has created a 30B+ parameter model that is quite adept at reasoning, summarization, and question answering in 10 languages.

ENHANCING DEPTH ESTIMATION WITH STABLE DIFFUSION

BOOSTING TEXT-TO-VIDEO QUALITY WITH VIDEOELEVATOR

Cloud

AICI

The Artificial Intelligence Controller Interface (AICI) lets you build controllers that constrain and direct outputs of large language models in real time.

VIRTUAL AVATARS

SplattingAvatar introduces a new approach to creating lifelike virtual humans by blending 3D mesh geometry with Gaussian Splatting for vivid appearances.

PERSONALIZED AND EDITABLE FACE GENERATION

Face2Diffusion (F2D) offers a new solution for creating personalized faces with enhanced editability, tackling the common issue of overfitting by filtering out non-essential identity information.

WE HACKED GOOGLE A.I. FOR $50,000

Google's LLM bugSWAT event challenged hackers to find security flaws in their AI systems. Participants Joseph "REZ0" Thacker, Justin "RHYNORATER" Gardner, and Roni "LUPIN" Carta discovered vulnerabilities in Google's AI features, including exploiting a GraphQL endpoint and leaking information from Google Workspace via Bard's new extensions. Their collective efforts earned them $50,000 with Thacker, Carta, and Gardner securing the top three competition places respectively.

AI SOLVES HUGE PROBLEM HOLDING BACK FUSION POWER

“AI WILL CURE CANCER” MISUNDERSTANDS BOTH AI AND MEDICINE

AI advancements in healthcare raise concerns about overlooking patient perspectives and deepening inequalities. Automated decision-making systems often deny resources to the needy, demonstrating biases that could propagate into AI-driven medicine. This article advocates for participatory machine learning and patient-led research to prioritize patient expertise in the medical field.

MIDJOURNEY BANS ALL STABILITY AI EMPLOYEES OVER ALLEGED DATA SCRAPING

Midjourney has banned Stability AI staff from using its service, alleging their botnet-like activity caused a system outage by attempting to scrape data.

MICROSOFT SEEKS DISMALL OF NEW YORK TIMES’S OPENAI LAWSUIT

Microsoft is defending OpenAI against The New York Times' copyright infringement lawsuit, arguing the case is based on unfounded claims and comparing the dispute to past technological advancements like the VCR.

INTERNET ARCHIVE BOOKS DATASET (HUGGINGFACE HUB)

Over 200 million OCR pages of books from the Internet archive, available for research use.

BLOOMBERG ANALYSTS SUBSTANTIALLY LOWER LIKELIHOOD OF SPOT ETHEREUM ETF APPROVAL IN MAY TO 30%

Bloomberg ETF analysts have reduced their predicted odds of a spot Ethereum ETF approval this May to 30%. The primary reason they are reducing these odds is the lack of filing changes for these products. However, the market seems to be pricing in better odds than this as Ethereum has been keeping pace with Bitcoin, surging since the launch of the spot Bitcoin ETFs in January.

MONAD LABS IN TALKS TO RAISE MORE THAN $200 MILLION ROUND LED BY PARADIGM, VALUING THE JUMP CRYPTO–LINKED STARTUP AT $3 BILLION

Crypto venture firm Paradigm is leading a funding round for Monad Labs, a startup aiming to build an ‘Ethereum killer’. The deal, valuing Monad at $3 billion, includes over $200 million in funding, following the company’s $19 million seed round in February. If successful, it will be 2024's largest crypto fundraise to date. This not only shows that investors are interested in what Monad is building but also that VCs are starting to have an appetite for larger deals.

BASED ESPRESSO: AD-HOC SHARED SEQUENCING FOR ALL L2S, FROM BASED ROLLUPS TO VALIDIUMS

Espresso Systems is developing a marketplace for shared sequencing that will enable L2s on Ethereum to sell block space. The project aims to tackle the fragmentation that is happening in the Ethereum ecosystem without compromising the benefits of rollups and validiums, allowing for the unified and efficient execution of user intents across multiple chains. Espresso is also creating a decentralized finality gadget, HotShot, to improve transaction confirmation speeds and security. The goal of this is to facilitate greater interoperability and reduce transaction costs and latency for end-users.

PROM: ZKEVM L2 SOLUTION BRIDGING MULTIPLE L1 CHAINS

Prom is launching a new L2 that will be interoperable with both EVM and non-EVM ecosystems. It offers a cost-efficient and scalable solution by leveraging zkSNARK technology and Polygon Zero’s ZK proof tech. The Prom ecosystem will be powered by its native utility token, $PROM, which enables transactional and governance functionalities.

A SIMPLE ORDINALS THESIS

Ordinals could be the leaders as far as NFTs go this cycle due to the potential resurgence of a 2021-like NFT mania and the perceived security, decentralization, and affordability of Bitcoin. Bitcoin whales could catalyze the Ordinals’ price appreciation even further than was possible with ETH NFTs. This author predicts that most of the top 10 NFT collections will be on Bitcoin by 2025.

SIMPLE QUESTION: WHAT, WHY, AND WHERE TO DECENTRALIZE?

This thread provides a helpful lay of the land as far as decentralized AI projects go in the crypto space. It lists several projects in different verticals within decentralized AI or areas that support it. Some of the projects it goes over include Grass, Story Protocol, Bittensor, and Ora.

SOME THOUGHTS ON THE ETH ETF DECISION IN MAY

While the crypto prediction platform, Polymarket, is putting the odds of an ETH ETF approval in May at a 24% chance, the author of this thread believes the chances are much higher. ETH continues to keep pace with BTC, even though BTC has had the benefit of incredibly strong ETF inflows. Regardless of whether or not the ETF is approved in May, the author of this thread is convinced that it will happen at some point and that the market is already attempting to account for that.

THE INTERNET OF AGENTS

This article discusses the prospects of combining blockchain infrastructure with AI agents. This could lead to an "Internet of Agents" where AI-driven activities are facilitated by blockchains’ cryptographic security, incentives, composability, and decentralization. Possible applications of this approach include AI prediction markets, user intent matching, action planning, and shared funds. However, there are potential risks such as the exposure of model vulnerabilities and the steep costs of implementing secure machine learning computations.

COINBASE FILES OPENING BRIEF WITH THIRD CIRCUIT CHALLENGING THE SEC

Coinbase put out a challenge to the SEC's denial of its rulemaking petition in court, claiming the decision is unjust and violates administrative law as it continues to argue for clear regulation in the digital asset space.

MICROSTRATEGY BOOSTS BITCOIN PORTFOLIO WITH ACQUISITION OF 12,000 BTC

After announcing a new tranche of convertible notes last week, MicroStrategy acquired 12,000 BTC for $821.7 million, expanding its holdings to 205,000 BTC.

SOLANA DEFI'S KMNO AIRDROP SPARKED OUTRAGE. KAMINO RESPONDED WITH CHANGES

Kamino Finance revised its airdrop parameters after receiving feedback from unhappy users. The changes aim to manage the distribution of the KMNO token and address challenges in rewarding users fairly with a focus on long term users.