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PERPLEXITY SAYS ITS AI PERSONAL SHOPPER ‘PUTS YOU FIRST'

Perplexity launched a free AI-powered shopping feature for US users, allowing direct purchases through PayPal.

ALIBABA AND BYTEDANCE ALLEGEDLY TRAIN QWEN AND DOUBAO LLMS USING NVIDIA CHIPS, DESPITE EXPORT CONTROLS

Chinese technology giants are increasingly training their most advanced artificial intelligence models in Southeast Asia in data centers equipped with high-end Nvidia GPUs.

CLAUDE SCIENTIFIC SKILLS

This repository contains a collection of over 123 ready-to-use scientific skills for Claude.

THE IMPOSSIBLE PROMPT THAT'S EASY FOR HUMANS

This post presents a rare prompt with a simple, objective answer that is trivially verifiable, in which LLMs fail 100% of the time, but most humans can produce a correct answer.

INTELLIGENCE

The topic of intelligence is too high-dimensional for any low-dimensional narrative to be perfectly accurate.

ETHEREUM LIFTS BLOCK GAS LIMIT TO 60M AHEAD OF FUSAKA

Ethereum validators have collectively raised the L1 block gas limit from 45M to 60M, roughly doubling base-layer transaction capacity versus a year ago. The change was enabled by protocol safeguards (EIP-7623), client optimizations, and testnet evidence that the network can safely handle larger blocks. It lands just days before the Fusaka hard fork, which introduces PeerDAS and further rollup throughput gains.

UPBIT HIT BY $37M SOLANA HOT-WALLET HACK

South Korea's largest exchange, Upbit, detected about 54B KRW (~$37M) in “abnormal withdrawals” of Solana-ecosystem tokens to an unknown external wallet and has halted all deposits and withdrawals on Solana. The exchange says it moved remaining funds to cold storage. It has already frozen ~$8.2M of LAYER. Upbit will fully compensate affected users from its own reserves.

POLYMARKET SECURES CFTC APPROVAL FOR RETURN

Polymarket has received a CFTC Amended Order of Designation, enabling US users to trade through futures commission merchants and traditional brokerages under a full federal regulatory framework. The approval follows Polymarket's 2022 decision to block US access amid regulatory pressure. It reflects growing regulatory acceptance of prediction markets as a mature financial product and positions the platform alongside other federally supervised exchanges with intermediated access rather than direct retail participation. The company previously signaled November relaunch plans.

FROM CHAINS TO NETWORK ECONOMIES: ZKSYNC INTEROP & ZK TOKEN UTILITY

The real crypto opportunity is a shared cryptographic messaging fabric connecting L2s. Today, global finance runs on siloed messaging rails that can't verify each other, creating huge coordination costs. ZKsync Interop + “Prividium” private L2s aim to replace that fragmentation with verifiable cross-chain messages anchored to Ethereum, creating a base for ZK token utility via interop fees.

POST-TGE SCORECARD FOR 2025'S BIG TOKEN LAUNCHES

Across 2025's major TGEs, only a handful of tokens (AVICI, YieldBasis, SAHARA, and LMTS) are still within ~20–60% of their ATHs and count as clear “winners.” Most launches have retraced 70–90%, making them headline flops for anyone who didn't sell early. This thread ranks projects from S to D tier based on drawdown from ATH, time since peak, and liquidity. Post-launch PnL has been brutal for typical buyers.

S&P DOWNGRADES TETHER'S USDT STABILITY

S&P Global Ratings downgraded Tether's USDT stability assessment to 5, the weakest level, warning that bitcoin's 5.6% share of reserves exceeds the 3.9% reserve buffer from Q3 attestations, meaning a material BTC drawdown could leave USDT undercollateralized. Riskier assets, including bitcoin, gold, secured loans, and corporate bonds, climbed to 24% of reserves from 17% a year earlier, with S&P flagging persistent gaps in transparency around custodians, counterparties, and asset composition despite short-term treasuries comprising the majority of holdings. CEO Paolo Ardoino rejected the assessment, claiming Tether is "overcapitalized" and "extremely profitable" while criticizing legacy rating models, as the agency applies similar bitcoin-linked liquidity risk concerns. Strategy received a B-minus speculative-grade rating last month.

FINALITY IS IN THE EYE OF THE BEHODLER

Finality is conditional on beliefs about the future rather than Bayesian certainty accumulation, with social finality emerging from community consensus that radical protocol changes or deep reverts will be rejected. Protocol finality divides into honest threshold finality relying on Byzantine Agreement safety properties, cryptoeconomic finality adding slashing accountability where rational coalitions avoid attacks costing more in stake than rewards, and representative finality using randomly-sampled committees with stronger assumptions about honest majorities and adaptive corruption resistance. Finality strengthens temporally as transactions progress from single-validator proposals to chain depth to committee endorsement to majority confirmation and eventually social immutability, with categorical notions capturing qualitative shifts in protective assumptions despite feedback loops between confidence and user behavior affecting reversion risk.

THE VOLUME MAP OF PREDICTION MARKETS

Polymarket and Kalshi captured 88% of prediction markets' $41.8 billion 2025 volume with $18.7 billion and $18.0 billion respectively. Q3 volumes hit $3 billion, representing 5x growth from 2024, with October crossing $7.4 billion industry-wide as binary and categorical outcomes dominate over sports and scalar formats, with Base and Polygon gaining share for smoother, cheaper trading experiences. Smaller platforms matter for next-wave innovation, including new market formats, liquidity mechanisms, and UX models, despite current volume disparities, comparing the trajectory to early crypto exchanges. PredictionIndex.xyz launched public dashboards tracking total volume, 30-day volume, and 24-hour volume for each platform as the sector accelerates toward potential trillion-dollar annual industry status before the decade's end.

POLYGON PAYMENTS HIT $1B MONTHLY VOLUME

Payment apps on Polygon PoS processed about $1 billion of transfer volume in November, a new all-time high.

NEOBANKS GET “ONE-BUTTON” LENDING VIA PORTOLA

Portola is a company that lets neobanks embed consumer lending with a single button.

VITALIK DONATES TO PRIVATE MESSAGING APPS

Vitalik Buterin donated over $700,000 to two messaging apps – Session and SimpleX – to promote digital privacy as the crypto market aligns around privacy as an important building block.

AVALANCHE ETF RACE HEATS UP

Bitwise updated its Avalanche ETF filing to include staking.

SKETCH COPENHAGEN

Sketch's Copenhagen update introduces a redesigned interface with a contextual toolbar, rewritten Inspector with floating panels and drag-to-scrub controls, and a layer list focus mode that adapts to selections. Stacks now support wrapping for horizontal or vertical layouts, with alignment options when the contents exceed the container's dimensions. The update also adds one-click background removal using on-device machine learning and replaces the previous Projects/Collections system with infinitely nestable folders for more flexible Workspace organization.

THE NEW BRONCOS LOGO WILL TRIGGER DESIGN FANS

The Brisbane Broncos have revealed their first new logo in over 20 years, aiming for a sharper, modern look that blends past and present. While some praise the refreshed identity, others criticize its details—especially the mismatched “B”s—making the rebrand both bold and divisive.

THE CONVERSATIONAL PHOTO EDITING TOOL ON GOOGLE PHOTOS IS ILLEGAL IN TWO STATES

Google's new voice-controlled photo editing tool is rolling out across Android, but users in Texas and Illinois can't access it, likely due to strict state laws governing biometric data. Experts say features like Face Groups may require storing facial data longer than these laws allow. Google's past legal issues over biometrics add to the concern.

KEYFRAMES TOKENS: STANDARDIZING ANIMATION ACROSS PROJECTS

CSS animation keyframes are consolidated into reusable "keyframes tokens" stored in a shared stylesheet, similar to design tokens for colors and spacing. This approach uses CSS custom properties to create flexible, dynamic animations that eliminate code duplication and global scope conflicts, while maintaining consistency across projects. The system supports animation composition and treats animations as part of the design language rather than scattered one-off effects.

FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE ON VANITY METRICS

Florence Nightingale entered nursing as the Crimean War exposed the British Army's failing medical system, but she soon realized the deeper problem was an information crisis: hospitals produced records that guided no decisions. She made institutional responsibility impossible to ignore by restructuring the data around clear goals and identifying patterns of preventable deaths. Her true legacy is her method: start with decisions, define signals, then gather data to turn information into real accountability.

THE ACCESSIBILITY PROBLEM WITH AUTHENTICATION METHODS LIKE CAPTCHA

CAPTCHAs were designed to block bots, but they now block people more often, especially users with disabilities. As tests grow more complex, they remain ineffective (bots routinely solve them) while becoming inaccessible for those using screen readers, assistive tech, or with visual, auditory, motor, or cognitive impairments. Developers are encouraged to move on to better options like MFA with autofill, single sign-on, magic links, or invisible checks such as Cloudflare Turnstile, and to offer multiple accessible authentication choices tested with real users.

INTERACTIVE DEMO PLATFORM

Guideflow, an AI Demo Automation suite, allows users to create interactive demos and step-by-step guides in seconds.

LIGHTNING-FAST AI VIDEO EDITOR

FireCut AI is a co-pilot for Adobe Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve that automates tedious tasks so users can focus on the creative work and get to their first cut faster.

COLOR PALETTE PRO

A synthesizer for color palettes.

AGENTIC AI INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS

Agentic AI systems that perform extended reasoning and tool use create usability problems in traditional chat interfaces, particularly when users lose track of their initial instructions as the AI's lengthy internal processes push content off-screen. This post introduces a new dual-scroll pane layout that separates the AI's process in the left column from results in the right column, keeping both visible simultaneously. After completion, the thinking steps collapse into a summary that can be reopened for review, with each step linking to its specific result.

ADS AND ACCESSIBILITY MISMATCH

Online advertisements consistently fail accessibility standards through poor contrast ratios (some as low as 1.01:1), missing alt-text that excludes vision-impaired users, and text that doesn't resize or gets cut off when zoomed. Common problems include images with embedded text that can't be resized, ads that don't respond to browser text-resize settings, and video content that lacks captions or audio descriptions. Solutions include using real text instead of images, writing descriptive alt-text with key information and calls to action, ensuring contrast ratios above WCAG minimums, and creating video ads with synchronized captions and verbal descriptions of visual elements.

HOW BAD UX DECISIONS CAN KILL BRAND LOYALTY

Marriott's acquisition of citizenM broke the seamless, one-app experience that made the brand special. CitizenM had built a tightly integrated flow — booking, discounts, upgrades, check-in, room controls, and playful UX all in one place — powered by a custom backend and consistent brand feel. After the acquisition, the app now redirects users to Marriott's website to book, splitting the journey in two and undermining the trust, simplicity, and delight that drove loyalty and membership. The case shows how platform integrations often prioritize corporate systems over user experience, and how disrupting a unified flow can erode a product's core value.

THE MAGNIFIQUE ‘CASTLEVANIA: NOCTURNE' ART COMES TOGETHER IN NEW ART BOOK

Netflix and Powerhouse are releasing a 208-page art book in March 2026 featuring concept artwork, production design, and storyboards from both seasons of Castlevania: Nocturne.

ARTIST CREATES PAINTINGS WHERE PLANTS, ANIMALS, AND SPACE COLLIDE, WITH DREAMLIKE COMPOSITIONS

Asheville-based painter Scott Mills blends surrealism and pop-surrealism through acrylic and oil paintings that fuse animals, plants, and cosmic imagery into quietly strange, emotionally charged narratives.

THE INPUT STACK ON LINUX (6 HOUR READ)

Input handling on Linux can be divided into two parts, separated by a common layer. Kernel-level handling deals with what happens in the kernel and how events are exposed to user-space. User-space handling includes the user-space device manager and hardware database for device management and setup, the libinput library for general input and other libraries such as XKB for keyboards, and Widgets, X Server, X11 window managers, and Wayland compositors. The middle exposed layer includes the event abstraction subsystem, devtmpfs for device nodes, sysfs for kernel objects and device attributes, and procfs for an introspection interface of the input core.

HOW JAVA VIRTUAL THREADS SIMPLIFY REACTOR APIS

Virtual threads simplify concurrency by reducing the cost of waiting threads. They allow developers to use blocking functions without needing to refactor existing code or rely heavily on reactive libraries like Reactor. By using virtual threads, developers can combine modern reactive workflows with traditional Java code, improving code maintainability and understanding.

SHRINKING WHILE LINKING

This post discusses two ways to significantly reduce the size of a static library. One uses classic tools like ld and objcopy, while the other uses LLVM-specific tools. They both produce similar-sized outputs, but there are some trade-offs. The 'classic' bintools approach works with both GNU bintools and LLVM bintools, and it's significantly faster than the LLVM tools, which need to recompile everything from the intermediate representation to machine code. However, the LLVM approach works on macOS, Linux, Windows, and probably others, making it more versatile.

WHY STRONG CONSISTENCY?

Eventual consistency causes pain for both customers and application builders as it leads to complex workarounds and potential bugs. Strong consistency, like that implemented in Aurora DSQL, avoids these issues by ensuring reads reflect the latest data. Aurora DSQL achieves strong consistency by ensuring storage replicas only return data for a specific timestamp once they've seen all updates up to that time, simplifying application development.

SYNCKIT

SyncKit is a sync engine that makes it trivial to build local-first applications. It can create production-ready sync in 3 lines of code. SyncKit can sync tasks across tabs instantly, even when offline. It uses true offline-first architecture to ensure apps work anywhere, even with a bad internet connection.

LOWTYPE

LowType adds type expressions to method arguments in Ruby. It treats arguments with default values that resolve to a type instead of a value as type expressions. LowType enables types in Ruby with the simplest syntax possible.

LINUS TORVALDS VS. AMBIGUOUS ABSTRACTIONS

Linus Torvalds has criticized the helper function, `make_u32_from_two_u16()`, arguing that the issue wasn't abstraction itself but the function's ambiguity. Torvalds found the helper unclear because it didn't explicitly state the word order, increasing cognitive load for the user. This post proposes a clearer alternative, `make_u32_from_msw_lsw()`, that encodes the word order in the name.

MIGRATING FROM GITHUB TO CODEBERG

The Zig programming language project is migrating its main repository from GitHub to Codeberg due to concerns about GitHub's engineering decline, buggy infrastructure, and push for AI features that violate Zig's policies. The move aims to escape vendor lock-in and support a non-profit platform in response to the increasing concentration of wealth in tech.

MANAGING SIDE EFFECTS: A JAVASCRIPT EFFECT SYSTEM IN 30 LINES OR LESS

This article introduces a JavaScript Effect System for managing side effects by describing them as data instead of executing them directly, improving testability, and allowing for centralized logging and profiling.

A PROGRAMMER-FRIENDLY I/O ABSTRACTION OVER IO_URING AND KQUEUE

TigerBeetle implemented a programmer-friendly I/O abstraction layer on top of io_uring and kqueue, enabling efficient and centralized I/O dispatch with callbacks and context management.

BETTER AUTH 1.4

Better Auth 1.4 features stateless auth, SCIM provisioning, custom OAuth state, database join improvements, secondary storage for API keys, SSO domain verification, JWT key rotation, improved generic OAuth plugin, bundle size optimizations, and UUID support.

HOW WEBSOCKETS WORK

WebSockets provide persistent, full-duplex communication channels over a single TCP connection, enabling real-time data exchange between a client and server beyond the traditional request-response model of HTTP.

FEEDBACK DOESN'T SCALE

Feedback becomes overwhelming and loses its actionable signal as the leader's direct relationships diminish, and the volume of opinions increases.

NARRATIVE POWER IN THE AI ERA

AI's narrative and technological advancements are tightly linked, with recent shifts from focusing on AGI to superintelligence reshaping industry goals. Companies like OpenAI and Meta are harnessing these narratives to drive capital investment and recruit top talent, illustrating how storytelling influences technological development and economic momentum. This evolving narrative reflects AI's ongoing progress, as recent breakthroughs demand a new frontier beyond human-level capabilities.

OUR 20+ AI AGENTS AND THEIR MOATS: REAL BUT WEAK

NOTES FROM AN INTERVIEW WITH JONY IVE

Jony Ive emphasizes care in design, valuing attention to detail even in trivial aspects like packaging to convey thoughtfulness to users. He believes products reflect interpersonal relationships within teams, underscoring the importance of a supportive work environment. Ive also values designing in personal spaces, arguing it influences creative thinking differently than traditional conference rooms.

EAT PAIN, EXCRETE PRODUCT: THE FDE PLAYBOOK

The technology vendors that win are the ones who figure out how to make the technology actually work in the messy reality of enterprise operations. Forward Deployed Engineering takes engineers who are experts in the core technology and embeds them directly with industry experts. They help build solutions that work for a specific context, then extract the generalizable pieces that can be reused across similar problems. Always build towards something reusable.

GOING TO MARKET WHEN NO MARKET EXISTS

Building a new category requires ignoring almost all standard business advice. Since nobody knows they have a problem yet, your product technically has zero value. This lures founders into a fatal pricing mistake. They lower the price to get traction, but this actually destroys the business model. You cannot sell a new idea without an expensive sales team, and a low price makes that team impossible to afford.