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TEMPEST

Tempest is a PHP MVC micro-framework. It handles as much framework-related code as possible so developers can focus on application code. Tempest doesn't require any config or overhead.

SORA, GROQ, AND VIRTUAL REALITY

The Vision Pro and OpenAI's Sora launched in the same month. At the same time, Groq is showing that real-time inferencing may be more attainable than previously thought. TSMC is pushing to 2nm chips and Intel is making a credible bid to join them. While we are not yet at an iPhone moment when it comes to virtual reality, a lot of the pieces are now in sight. The technology still needs a lot more work, but the path from here is almost clear.

AS YOUTUBE MARKS ONE YEAR AS NIELSEN’S TOP U.S. STREAMING PLATFORM, SENIOR EXECS NICKY RETTKE & TARA WALPERT LEVY TALK NFL, AD INNOVATION AND HOW CREATORS INVADED THE LIVING ROOM: Q&A

YouTube TV just passed 8 million subscribers and YouTube Shorts recently hit 80 billion daily views from more than 2 billion logged-in accounts. YouTube has been the number 1 streaming platform for 12 months in a row. This article contains an interview with Nicky Rettke, VP of Product Management for YouTube Ads, and Tara Walpert Levy, VP of Americas, where they discuss trends in the advertising market, partnerships with media campaigns, creators, and more. Rettke and Walpert Levy have spent more than 30 years combined at the company.

SIGNAL WILL SOON LET YOU SHARE A USERNAME INSTEAD OF YOUR PHONE NUMBER

Signal will soon allow users to connect with others without sharing their phone numbers with them.

SSDS HAVE BECOME RIDICULOUSLY FAST, EXCEPT IN THE CLOUD

Despite the performance improvements in SSD technology over the past seven years, AWS NVMe instances are still stuck at 2 GB/s per SSD.

WALMART IS BUYING SMART TV MAKER VIZIO FOR $2.3 BILLION

The acquisition will enable a profitable advertising business.

A COMPREHENSIVE GUIDE TO GAMING ON THE APPLE VISION PRO

The App Store includes some gems that shouldn't be overlooked.

SPAM ATTACK ON TWITTER/X RIVAL MASTODON HIGHLIGHTS ‘FEDIVERSE’ VULNERABILITIES

Mastodon server administrators have been advised to switch over registration to approval mode and block disposable email providers to help combat the problem.

YOUR FINGERPRINTS CAN BE RECREATED FROM THE SOUNDS MADE WHEN YOU SWIPE ON A TOUCHSCREEN

A new side-channel attack can successfully attack up to 27.9% of partial fingerprints and 9.3% of complete fingerprints within five attempts.

YOUR REFERRAL LINK - https://tldr.tech/tech?ref=2613930

GPT-4 KNOWLEDGE CUTOFF IS DECEMBER 2023

According to the new documentation on the OpenAI platform, the training data for GPT-4 models has been updated to include information up to December 2023.

SOFTBANK FOUNDER MASAYOSHI SON AIMS TO RAISE $100 BILLION FOR NEW CHIP VENTURE

Masayoshi Son's SoftBank Group Corp. is launching Izanagi, a $100 billion chip venture aimed at competing with Nvidia and focusing on AI applications.

SCRIBE $25M SERIES B

Scribe has raised a Series B funding round led by Redpoint Ventures to accelerate its AI-driven platform, which automates the creation of visual step-by-step guides and facilitates knowledge sharing within organizations. Over a million teams use Scribe, including 97% of the Fortune 100. The company is expanding its AI features to make workplace information even more accessible.

GENERATIVE REPRESENTATIONAL INSTRUCTION TUNING

The Contextual team has trained and released a model that both generates text and embeddings. It dramatically outperforms single specialist models. The model is an interesting take on the multi-modal trend where the output modality is an embedding.

DEEPDIVE: MAMBA THE HARD WAY

Sasha Rush has released an annotated tutorial for accelerating Mamba with custom Triton kernels. It doesn’t scale yet due to a bug in the Triton compiler, but it is an extreme illustration of the technology and great for those looking to dive deeper into the state space Transformer alternative world.

ENHANCING FINE-TUNING WITH LORA+

This paper presents LoRA+, an advancement over the existing Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) method for fine-tuning large models. LoRA+ achieves better performance and faster fine-tuning, without increasing computational demands, by using different learning rates for key components in the process.

3D OBJECT FROM AS FEW AS 4 PICTURES

This repository allows you to take four images and turn them into a high-quality 3d representation with Gaussian Splatting.

GENERATING IMAGES AT ANY RESOLUTION

The Flexible Vision Transformer (FiT) is a novel architecture designed to create images at any resolution and aspect ratio. Unlike traditional models, FiT treats images as sequences of variable-sized tokens, allowing it to adapt to different image sizes more effectively during training and inference.

BOOSTING AI'S DEFENSE AGAINST ADVERSARIAL ATTACKS

This project introduces a new method to strengthen multi-modal models like OpenFlamingo and LLaVA against visual adversarial attacks. By fine-tuning the CLIP vision encoder in an unsupervised manner, the authors effectively shield these models from manipulative image attacks, enhancing their reliability and security in real-world applications without the need for retraining the entire model.

NEW LLM BENCHMARK

Preeminent researcher Nicholas Carlini has released the benchmark he uses for evaluating large language model performance. Interestingly, it has GPT-4 further ahead than most other benchmarks.

STRATEGIES FOR AN ACCELERATING FUTURE

The recent advancements in AI, particularly with Google's Gemini offering a context window of over a million tokens and Groq's hardware enabling almost instantaneous responses from GPT-3.5 models, signify a major leap forward in practical AI applications and underscore the urgency for leaders to understand and adapt to AI's rapidly evolving landscape.

HOW TO LOSE AT GENERATIVE AI

Generative AI, while hyped, is likely to disappoint most startups because it favors incumbents with data advantages, existing workflows, and the ability to integrate AI into these systems without major overhauls. Despite venture capital flowing into the GenAI space, startups focusing on prompt engineering and UX improvements at the workflow layer are essentially prepping the market for incumbents who can easily adopt and integrate AI innovations into their dominant platforms, suggesting a challenging path ahead for startups aiming to capture significant value in the Generative AI domain.

BOCOEL

Accurately evaluate LLMs with Bayesian Optimizations.

AMAZON AGI TEAM SAY THEIR AI IS SHOWING “EMERGENT ABILITIES”

Amazon AGI researchers developed a language model named "Big Adaptive Streamable TTS with Emergent Abilities" (BASE TTS) that shows "state-of-the-art naturalness" in conversational text, demonstrating language skills it wasn't specifically trained on.

ADGEN AI (PRODUCT LAUNCH)

AdGen AI confronts the chaos of traditional ad creation, offering a streamlined, AI-driven solution. Generate 100+ ad variations from a single URL in minutes.

YOUR REFERRAL LINK - https://tldr.tech/ai?ref=2613930

HONG KONG'S CENTRAL BANK ISSUES GUIDANCE FOR FIRMS OFFERING CRYPTO CUSTODIAL SERVICES

Hong Kong's central bank has issued guidance for firms looking to provide digital asset custody services. The guidelines require firms to undergo comprehensive risk assessment, have adequate resource allocation for custodial activities, and segregate clients' digital assets from the firm's own in the event of insolvency. The firms are also being asked to prevent client asset misuse and minimize the risk of digital asset loss due to illicit activities.

METAMASK MONTHLY ACTIVE USERS NEARS ALL-TIME HIGH — OVER 30 MILLION

Crypto wallet MetaMask saw a 55% increase in active users in the past four months, from 19 million in September to over 30 million in January - comparable to the record numbers the wallet hit in 2022. Its growing user base has coincided with a surge in crypto prices, as more users return to or find the wallet for the first time. MetaMask has rolled out Blockaid, a web3 security tool, by default for multiple blockchains to protect users against malicious transactions.

STARKNET TOKEN STRK BEGINS TRADING AT $5 AFTER MAMMOTH AIRDROP

Starknet, an Ethereum rollup, airdropped 728 million tokens to around 1.3 million addresses, marking the biggest airdrop of the year so far. STRK fluctuated in price following the airdrop, reaching a high of $5 before falling back to $3.50, putting the total supply of 10 billion tokens at an FDV of $35 billion. Its current market cap is $2.32 billion. The tokens will be progressively unlocked over 31 months starting from April. This is a faster timeline than what is typical for unlocks in the industry.

FANTASY: TRADING CARD GAME MEETS SOCIAL FINANCE

Fantasy, a new trading card game combined with social finance, lets you create a roster of crypto Twitter influencers to compete for weekly prizes based on their real-life social media performance. Players can also trade digital influencer cards to enhance their lineups and win bigger rewards. The game offers a Hero program that allows influencers to monetize their Twitter presence, earn royalties, and gain additional game points.

WHERE DOES ETHENA’S YIELD COME FROM

Ethena Labs rolled out USDe, a trust-minimized scalable stablecoin, earlier this week. It also released sUSDe, a yield-bearing version that offers a 27% yield. Ethena generates its returns using yield from staked Ethereum and financing rates from its short positions, using staked Ethereum and perpetual contracts to maintain the stablecoin’s peg. This means the yield is not without risks.

MAXIMIZING AIRDROPS IN 2024

One of the more active and vocal airdrop farmers in the space is predicting that this year will be a significant year for airdrops, with many opportunities already emerging. In an interview, this airdrop farmer shares insights on how consistent organic usage over several months is crucial for farming airdrops. He also identifies several underrated airdrops and emphasizes the marketing potential of airdrops in attracting and retaining users.

AS BITCOIN RALLIES, BANKS ARE PUSHING US REGULATORS TO CHANGE CRYPTO GUIDANCE

Major US banking associations have asked the SEC to amend its definition of crypto assets because they want to be able to serve as custodians for newly approved spot Bitcoin ETFs. The banks have asked the SEC to change guidelines issued in March 2022, which make it more costly for banks to offer large-scale crypto custody services.

MICHAEL SAYLOR NOT INTERESTED IN SELLING: ‘BITCOIN IS THE EXIT STRATEGY'

MicroStrategy's Executive Chairman Michael Saylor declared the company has no intentions of selling its bitcoin, even though it is sitting on a nearly $4 billion unrealized profit, as he considers it to be a superior asset compared to gold, real estate, and the S&P. Saylor says there is no reason to sell a winning asset. After being ridiculed throughout the bear market for being underwater on his purchases, his view has been vindicated by the entrance of institutional capital into the bitcoin ecosystem via spot ETFs.

CRYPTO HAS AN INFLUENCER PROBLEM

Many influencers do more harm than good. Users should simply ignore them, foster a more ethical and informed community, and prioritize true decentralization over quick gains.

MORE PUDGY PENGUINS TOYS COMING TO WALMART

Walmart has re-upped its agreement with Pudgy Penguins for its Pudgy Toys line, rolling out new Pudgy products across 3,100 of its stores.

CRYPTO WEEKLY ROUNDUP: ETH SEASON

This blog post provides an update on the markets and discusses general thoughts around Bitcoin and Ethereum prices, rumors of the FTX estate selling its Solana, Pudgy Penguins, and the Starknet airdrop.

CRYPTO ATTORNEY LAUNCHES SENATE BID AGAINST ELIZABETH WARREN

John Deaton is challenging Senator Elizabeth Warren for her Senate seat as a cryptocurrency advocate and attorney.

YOUR REFERRAL LINK - https://tldr.tech/crypto?ref=2613930

THE UK GOVERNMENT LOGO GETS A SUBTLE BUT CLEVER UPDATE

The UK government has quietly updated the logo on its official website to reflect King Charles III's preference for the Tudor Crown. The previous logo was based on Queen Elizabeth II's favored St Edward's Crown. The change is causing some controversy regarding its cost amidst economic concerns. Government officials have defended the update as a symbol that reflects the new monarch's reign.

ADOBE ACROBAT ADDS GENERATIVE AI TO ‘EASILY CHAT WITH DOCUMENTS’

Adobe has introduced an AI Assistant in Acrobat. The new generative AI feature enhances the digital document experience by simplifying the comprehension and retrieval of information within lengthy documents. Adobe's AI-powered chatbot can summarize documents, answer questions, recommend content, and generate citations and links. It is designed to streamline tasks associated with extensive text documents, catering to users like students, professionals, and researchers.

TESLA’S CHIEF DESIGNER HAS A SIDE HUSTLE: LEADING COWORKERS THROUGH WORKOUTS IN THE COMPANY’S PARKING LOT

Tesla's chief designer, Franz von Holzhausen, known for his work on the Cybertruck, leads wellness initiatives by conducting exercise sessions dubbed "FranzFit." Working closely with CEO Elon Musk, von Holzhausen embodies traits like decisiveness and openness to new ideas. His efforts align with a trend among tech leaders, like Will Ahmed of WHOOP and Matteo Franceschetti of Eight Sleep, who prioritize employee wellness, recognizing its impact on productivity.

INTERACTION FOOTPRINT: A NEW TOOL FOR MEASURING DESIGN

Measuring design impact is hard, especially for design outcomes that don’t go to production immediately. Designers trying to prove the improvement of a new design over the status quo can use the interaction footprint framework to prove how much the new design outperforms the old one.

OKR IN PRODUCT DESIGN

OKR is a goal-setting technique that helps teams establish measurable goals. Designers can use OKRs to drive strategic design initiatives, but they shouldn’t make them too wordy. They should be clear about their benefits to the company and be specific about when they want to achieve it.

HOW THE BIGGEST APPS DESIGN ONBOARDING: LESSONS FROM FIGMA, DUOLINGO, AND MORE

Most products simply ignore onboarding, missing an incredible opportunity to increase user retention and make customers more likely to pay. This article shows how to avoid common mistakes and engage users when they first meet your product using examples from Miro, Figma, Duolingo, and other tech companies.

NOISY GRADIENTS (FIGMA PLUGIN)

Create stunning gradient backgrounds in a variety of cool colors.

MOTION DESIGNERS' HEADQUARTERS

Motionimo is a compilation of motion design resources, tips, and inspiration.

UX CHALLENGES

This website features real-world challenges to practice crucial UX design skills.