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PRESSURE RISING: EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT URGES TO BAN SOCIAL MEDIA FOR UNDER-16S

The European Parliament proposed a non-binding resolution for a harmonized EU minimum age of 16 for social media.

INFOSEC BLACK FRIDAY AND CYBER MONDAY DEALS

A collection of deals on InfoSec training, tools, gear, and more for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

FRENCH SOCCER FEDERATION HIT BY CYBERATTACK, MEMBER DATA STOLEN

A cyberattack on the French soccer federation compromised the software used by clubs to manage registered members.

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WINNERS AND LOSERS OF BLACK FRIDAY 2025

US shoppers spent more on Black Friday but faced higher prices and flat discounts. E-commerce sales rose to $11.8-$18 billion, yet online order volume fell 1% as average selling prices increased 7%. AI was a major winner as traffic to retail sites from AI sources grew 805% and shoppers arriving from AI were 38% more likely to convert. Retailers offering exclusive in store perks also saw gains, while buy now pay later usage increased 8.9% and helped drive $747.5 million in spending.

HOW BIG TECH IS CREATING ITS OWN FRIENDLY MEDIA BUBBLE TO ‘WIN THE NARRATIVE BATTLE ONLINE'

Silicon Valley is building a friendly media ecosystem that lets tech leaders shape their image at a time when public distrust is high. CEOs now favor in-house outlets, pro-tech podcasts, and influencer-style hosts who avoid tough questions. Firms like Andreessen Horowitz and Palantir have launched their own publications and shows, while creators like TBPN and Dwarkesh Patel offer upbeat platforms that attract top executives. The result is less scrutiny and a curated public image for tech elites.

HOW TO USE CHATGPT FOR SEO

Most still use ChatGPT to write blog posts, but it can replace tasks that once required entire SEO teams. Prompt it to find blogs, directories, and organizations for link-building, then generate outreach templates in a brand's voice. Feed it reviews to create on-brand, empathetic responses automatically. Import Search Console data for plain-English performance summaries and suggested fixes. Analyze competitors to map content gaps, create keyword clusters, and build an E-E-A-T checklist.

HOW CLIO'S SEO DOMINANCE TRANSLATES INTO AI VISIBILITY

Clio achieved AI search dominance through a decade of structured, authoritative content targeting informational queries. Its approach includes long-form blogs, detailed resources, and localized pages that answer “what”, “how”, and “why” questions, with clear formatting that AI can parse. It increases visibility with high-quality backlinks from reputable organizations and builds trust signals across the web.

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BLACK FRIDAY ARCHIVE

This archive contains over 1,400 historical Black Friday ads and 250,000 message board posts dating back to 2000. It offers insights into promotional patterns, category performance, and consumer sentiment.

QUERY FANOUT GENERATOR

The Query Fan Out Extractor allows you to generate fan-out queries directly from Google's Gemini API based on an inputted prompt. The tool provides actual fan-out queries from Google's own database, which can then be used to optimize for key prompts or keywords.

THE MARKET ENTRY TIMING EQUATION: WHEN BEING EARLY WINS AND WHEN IT KILLS YOU

Pioneers often fail, while early leaders who enter during the growth phase tend to win. The T-Score framework turns timing into a measurable decision by combining market readiness, defensibility, and CAC volatility. Companies with low scores are too early and burn out, mid-range scores rely on perfect execution, and high scores lead to fast-follower dominance with efficient growth. The framework helps founders cut guesswork and validate timing with data.

SUBVERTING THE AUTONOMOUS IMAGE

AI has created autonomous images that operate independently from reality and human creative processes. Drawing on Debord's concept of the Spectacle, these visuals reinforce existing social and economic structures while presenting themselves as unquestionable and complete. The black-box nature of the systems, the speed and scale of production, and the resulting alienation from creation highlight the shift in image autonomy. Techniques now exist to subvert or critically engage with AI, using its mechanisms to expose biases and underlying material and social conditions.

ADOBE'S 2025 HOLIDAY SHOPPING TRENDS

Data highlighting top-line holiday spend, the days with the highest sales, and the growth of mobile shopping.

US PATENT OFFICE SAYS AI CAN MAKE INVENTIONS, BUT YOU WILL GET THE CREDIT

AI tools are treated like any other software, so only humans can be inventors.

NEW YORK STATE LAW TAKES AIM AT PERSONALIZED PRICING

New York now requires companies to disclose when algorithms use personal data to set prices.

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IPHONE FOLD WILL BE CREASELESS AND COST $2,400, REPORT SAYS

The first foldable iPhone reportedly won't have a crease. Apple's engineers have made breakthroughs in creating a crease-free design. The product cycle has now moved past the experimental stage to pre-mass production mode. The Fold is rumored to launch in September next year.

ALIBABA RELEASES AI GLASSES IN RARE CONSUMER GADGET FORAY

Alibaba's Quark S1 glasses, powered by the company's Qwen AI models, are now available in China, with international versions coming next year. The glasses feature built-in translucent displays that superimpose contextual information on the wearer's view of their surroundings. They are equipped with cameras, bone conduction microphones, and swappable batteries rated to last 24 hours. Alibaba has also released a cheaper version of the glasses that doesn't have the displays.

STUDY CLAIMS TO PROVIDE FIRST DIRECT EVIDENCE OF DARK MATTER

The first evidence of dark matter may have been discovered. Scientists have spotted a pattern of gamma rays that appears to match the shape of the dark matter halo that spreads out in a sphere from the heart of the galaxy. It closely matches the properties of gamma-ray radiation predicted to be emitted by dark matter. More work is needed to rule out other astrophysical processes and background emissions that could explain the signals.

TECHNICAL DEFLATION

Anything you build now will get easier in six months. If the building part is easy, then your moat has to be something else. Focus more on selling and less on building. Understanding your customer and their problems better than anyone else is a real advantage that doesn't go away.

RUNPROMPT

runprompt is a single-file Python script for running .prompt files. .prompt is an executable GenAI prompt template file format designed to be agnostic to programming language and model provider. It allows for maximum flexibility in usage. The format streamlines the process of working with AI models and ensuring consistency across different uses of the same prompt.

THE MATH OF WHY YOU CAN'T FOCUS AT WORK

Deep work is unlikely unless you deliberately design for it. Your default state is fragmentation - you are not uniquely undisciplined. Dropping just one interruption per hour per day can have a huge effect. Cutting down tasks into smaller chunks can mean the difference between a hellish day and a passable one.

MORE ARTICLES ARE NOW CREATED BY AI THAN HUMANS

The quantity of AI-generated articles has surpassed the quantity of human-written articles being published on the web. Despite the prevalence of AI-generated articles, they largely do not appear in Google and ChatGPT. The proportion of AI-generated articles has remained relatively stable over the last 12 months. This is likely because practitioners found that AI-generated articles do not perform well in search.

DEEPSEEK JOINS OPENAI & GOOGLE IN SCORING GOLD IN IMO 2025

DeepSeekMath-V2 demonstrates strong theorem-proving capabilities in mathematics - it solved 5 of 6 problems on the International Mathematics Olympiad (IMO) 2025.

INTERNET HANDLE

Open social apps allow people to use any internet domain they own as a handle, enabling them to log into multiple apps with one identity.

HYPER CONTENT NEGOTIATION

Combining the ability to negotiate content type and LLMs may be a powerful concept for the future of the web.

SAM ALTMAN'S BUSINESS BUDDIES ARE GETTING STUNG

SoftBank's shares have dropped 40% from late October, while Oracle's stock has lost all gains made since early September.

GOOGLE MAPS WILL LET YOU HIDE YOUR IDENTITY WHEN WRITING REVIEWS

Google Maps will soon let users use a nickname and select an alternative profile picture for online reviews.

AWS BUILDS A DNS BACKSTOP TO ALLOW CHANGES WHEN ITS NOTORIOUSLY FLAKY US EAST REGION WOBBLES

AWS is implementing a feature that allows DNS changes within 60 minutes of a service disruption in US East.

DEEPSEEK-MATH-V2

DeepSeek's new math reasoning model achieves gold-level performance on IMO 2025, matching recent results from Google and OpenAI. The approach trains an LLM-based proof verifier that serves as a reward model. This incentivizes the generator to verify step-by-step reasoning rather than just final answers, addressing the fundamental limitation that correct answers don't guarantee correct reasoning.

OPENAI CUTS OFF MIXPANEL AFTER ANALYTICS LEAK EXPOSES API USERS

OpenAI API users may be affected by a recent breach at data analytics provider Mixpanel. Only API users are affected - normal ChatGPT users don't need to take any action. The data includes names, approximate locations, operating system and browser details, and user IDs. OpenAI dropped Mixpanel as a result of the attack. It is also carrying out a wider security review across its vendor ecosystem.

GOOGLE CHANGES GEMINI 3 PRO FREE ACCESS LIMITS DUE TO ‘HIGH DEMAND'

Google has updated the access elements for Gemini 3 Pro. Free users are now only guaranteed basic access, where daily limits may change frequently when using Thinking with 3 Pro. The limits have likely decreased, given the industry's general demand trends. NotebookLM rolled back access to the new Nano Banana Pro-powered Infographics and Slide Decks for free users and implemented limits for Pro users.

THE MOAT OF THE SEARCH INDEX

ChatGPT surpasses Google's search by using an "agent" approach, extracting relevant information from multiple sources and synthesizing answers, which diminishes Google's traditional search index advantage. This method reduces the impact of any single search result's failure, although it struggles with long-tail, fresh, or SEO-heavy queries. The traditional search engine moat has largely vanished, with AI-driven models increasingly blending search capabilities.

HOW TO CREATE AN EFFECTIVE PROMPT FOR NANO BANANA PRO

Designing a comic is a complex challenge that brings together storytelling, visual structure, stylistic consistency, and the ability to translate abstract concepts into illustrated sequences. This post details how to create a comic using Nano Banana Pro. It provides a meta-prompt that readers can use to generate prompts for Nano Banana.

REVIEW OF DEEPSEEK OCR

DeepSeek-OCR consists of two components: DeepEncoder and DeepSeek3B-MoE-A570M as the decoder. It can generate training data for LLMs/VLMs at a scale of 200k+ pages per day in production. This post presents some initial thoughts from reading the released paper.

BETTER AGENTS

Better Agents is a CLI tool and a set of standards for agent building. It makes coding assistants experts in any agent framework. The tool generates an AGENTS.md that ensures industry best practices. The CLI guides users through selecting a programming language, agent framework, coding assistant, LLM provider, and API keys.

COMPOUNDING ENGINEERING PLUGIN

The Compounding Engineering Plugin is a Claude Code plugin that transforms how developers plan, build, and review code using AI-powered tools that systematically improve their development workflow. Compound engineering is the idea that each unit of engineering work should make subsequent units of work easier, not harder. The plugin provides the tools to make compound engineering practical.

INTELLECT-3: A 100B+ MOE TRAINED WITH LARGE-SCALE RL

INTELLECT-3 is a 100B+ parameter Mixture-of-Experts that achieves state-of-the-art performance for its size across math, code, science, and reasoning benchmarks. It was trained with both SFT and RL on top of the GLM 4.5 Air base model. The researchers used a diverse and challenging mix of RL environments designed to enhance the reasoning and agentic capabilities of their model. Full details about the training are available.

OPEN DEEP RESEARCH

An experimental, fully open-source research assistant built on LangGraph that automates deep topic research by planning, gathering, and writing structured markdown reports—either via a human-in-the-loop workflow or a multi-agent architecture—with configurable models, search tools, prompting, and evaluation integration.

OFF-THE-RAILS COST

A 'wasted thread' is when a model starts spitting out tons of leaked thinking or repeating tokens. This usually means users have to abandon and revert the thread. 17.8% of all costs incurred by Gemini users in Amp were on 'wasted tokens'. This is more than 2x worse than Sonnet and almost 8x worse than Opus.

THE CURRENT STATE OF THE THEORY THAT GPL PROPAGATES TO AI MODELS TRAINED ON GPL CODE

The jury is still out on whether GPL propagation to models should be pursued or avoided. It is unlikely that it will become a reality any time soon. Current lawsuits are seeking injunctions and damages rather than the forced GPL-ization of models, so it is still a legally uncharted territory. We need to continue exploring how to make technology innovation and software freedom compatible.

NVIDIA REPORTEDLY NO LONGER SUPPLYING VRAM TO ITS GPU BOARD PARTNERS IN RESPONSE TO MEMORY CRUNCH

Nvidia will reportedly stop bundling video memory with the GPUs it sells to AIBs. Partners will be left to source the required VRAM on their own. For larger vendors, this shouldn't be a problem as it is already standard practice. The move could put a lot of pressure on low-scale operators and put them at risk of shutting down.

MODEL WEIGHT PRESERVATION IS NOT ENOUGH

We need to think about instance preservation if we're serious about model welfare.