Figma's CEO Dylan Field offered employees severance if they wanted to leave the company after its blockbuster sale to Adobe was blocked by regulators. 4% of employees took him up on the offer. While Figma appears to be in a stronger position than when it first agreed to sell to Adobe in 2022, Field also lowered the company's internal valuation to $10 billion - the same number it was in 2021. Field wants to use Adobe's $1 billion breakup fee to look at new areas for Figma to expand to.
2024.02.19·theverge.com·14 min read·TLDR The future is hard to imagine, but we shouldn't be afraid of it.
2024.02.19·juliawise.net·8 min read·TLDR Meta’s TestGen-LLM tool uses large language models to automatically improve existing human-written tests.
2024.02.19·twitter.com·3 min read·TLDR GitHub Copilot may be making accessibility on the web even worse than it already is.
2024.02.19·joshcollinsworth.com·25 min read·TLDR Muse started as a project that aimed to invent a new computing environment that would better serve people doing important knowledge work like scientists, writers, entrepreneurs, designers, and architects.
2024.02.19·adamwiggins.com·33 min read·TLDR The first official glimpse of Android 15 includes a lot of under-the-hood tweaks to strengthen communication between hardware and software.
2024.02.19·theverge.com·3 min read·TLDR What was once high-tech will eventually become background infrastructure - SaaS will eventually become the infrastructure for artificial intelligence, robotics, biotech, and reforming manufacturing and space.
2024.02.19·andercot.substack.com·14 min read·TLDR Sponsored
Learn how to successfully build generative AI pilot applications. Analysis and recommendations for product and IT leaders.
2024.02.19·landing.deepset.ai·Sponsor·TLDR AI Anthropic is testing Prompt Shield, a technology designed to redirect U.S. users of its chatbot Claude seeking political and voting information to authoritative sources like TurboVote.
2024.02.19·techcrunch.com·2 min read·TLDR AI OpenAI has been reportedly developing two types of AI agent software for over a year. The first type can be used to automate complex tasks by taking over a customer's device. The second AI agent class handles web-based tasks and can gather public data. It is unclear when the company plans to release these agents.
2024.02.19·androidauthority.com·2 min read·TLDR AI Google released a new MoE model that matches Gemini 1.0 Ultra in performance but scales up to 1m tokens in context while using less compute due to its smaller size. It is natively multimodal.
2024.02.19·blog.google·12 min read·TLDR AI It is often challenging to know which examples should be used when aligning language models using preference data. This work suggests a surprisingly robust baseline - choose the 1,000 longest examples.
2024.02.19·arxiv.org·28 min read·TLDR AI Diffusion models can be repurposed for their broad ‘knowledge’ of the world as they get better at synthesizing images and videos. This paper found a phenomenal 0.02 bits per pixel compression. The key trick here was to measure perceptual similarity along the way and resend an original video frame as needed.
2024.02.19·arxiv.org·18 min read·TLDR AI Researchers have created OpenMathInstruct-1, a new dataset for training open-source Large Language Models in math, matching the performance of closed-source models. This breakthrough, featuring 1.8 million problem-solution pairs, opens the door for more accessible and competitive math instruction AI tools.
2024.02.19·arxiv.org·19 min read·TLDR AI Andrej Karpathy released a minimal, clean, and extensible implementation of the byte pair encoding used in language model tokenizers.
2024.02.19·github.com·GitHub repository·TLDR AI GPTScript is a new scripting language that automates interactions with OpenAI large language models. The project's ultimate goal is to create a fully natural language-based programming experience.
2024.02.19·github.com·GitHub repository·TLDR AI These models, which look similar to Llama 2, are trained on 3T tokens and excel at a number of tasks. The Qwen team has released chat versions and quants. Excitingly, the models seem to excel at reasoning, math, and code.
2024.02.19·github.com·GitHub repository·TLDR AI A list of 30 papers that relate to the newly released Sora video model.
Over 75% of public market trades (AUM of $1T+) are now driven by data-driven algorithms, a revolution initiated by hedge funds in the 90s. Today, that data-driven approach is rapidly infiltrating venture capital, with projections indicating that over 75% of VC deal reviews will involve AI and data analytics by 2025, transforming how investments are sourced, evaluated, and managed.
2024.02.19·signatureblock.co·10 min read·TLDR AI How we talk to each other, collaborate, and undertake creative tasks has meaningfully shifted since we introduced software. We’re starting to see the beginnings of another meaningful shift with AI. How substantial this shift will be is being underestimated. Startups born with AI integration in their products from day one will have a huge advantage over existing companies adding it on top of their existing products.
2024.02.19·digitalnative.tech·11 min read·TLDR AI OpenAI has achieved an annual revenue run rate exceeding $2 billion propelled by the immense success of ChatGPT, making it one of the fastest-growing tech firms. With strong interest from enterprise clients looking to adopt Generative AI, OpenAI aims to more than double this figure in 2025.
2024.02.19·ft.com·3 min read·TLDR AI OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is working to secure US government approval for his chip project as it risks raising national security and antitrust concerns.
2024.02.19·businessinsider.com·1 min read·TLDR AI Chat with RTX now supports multiple file formats and can import content directly from YouTube playlists for convenient content querying.
2024.02.19·nvidia.com·1 min read·TLDR AI Circle and Coinbase are asking Congress to give the Treasury more authority to scrutinize the issuers of Tether, the leading stablecoin issuer, and its banking partner. The executives are accusing Tether of enabling illicit activities and promoting its own USD-backed cryptocurrencies as more compliant alternatives. Tether leads the stablecoin industry by a wide margin, but the competition between Circle and Tether has been intense over the past couple of years.
Crypto venture funding totaled $1.9 billion in Q4, a 2.5% increase from the previous quarter. This uptick comes as the prices of tokens in the crypto market and prices of crypto equities appreciated significantly starting in Q4. The quarter also included several large funding rounds for established companies like Swan Bitcoin, Blockchain.com, and Wormhole.
The DAO behind ApeCoin has voted to build its gaming-focused ApeChain on Arbitrum, a popular Ethereum scaling solution. The decision has led to a modest rally in APE's price, a slight reversal from the fairly consistent decline it has had since its launch two years ago. However, the decision sparked controversy as the top voter was Horizen Labs, the team that developed the staking mechanism for APE coin that disappointed many in the community. Horizen was also the author of the proposal and would be working on ApeChain, so some community members are accusing them of self-dealing.
Wormhole is partnering with Succinct to build an Ethereum ZK Light Client to support message verification on the Wormhole platform. This will minimize reliance on Wormhole Guardians for multi-chain message verification. Succinct's unified ZKP protocol will simplify the development process and enable easy integration for the latest proof systems.
2024.02.19·apigateway.agilitypr.com·3 min read·TLDR Crypto This thread discusses the debate over the first-ever Ordinals Collection - BitcoinShrooms, OrdinalPunks, or OrdRocks. The debate hinges on how you would define a collection - whether the collection needs to be grouped together by inscription numbers and whether it needs to be a profile picture collection or not. BitcoinShrooms was staggered in its inscriptions, with a group of them starting at inscription #19. OrdinalPunks is credited as the first PFP collection. OrdRocks has the lowest overall inscription numbers.
This thread articulates a strategy to effectively use sniping bots by ‘bribing’ to get your trades to be executed first. Key elements of this method include selecting the right sniping bot, correctly setting up features, and determining the optimal incentive to increase the chances of getting the first trade. It isn’t just enough to know how much to bribe - traders also need to try to get a good idea of what the demand for the token will be to see if it is even worth paying the bribe.
This post discusses opportunities that the crypto space has given participants in the past and anticipates that there will be opportunities on a similar scale for another couple of cycles. While returns on BTC and ETH have likely diminished, other coins can still provide significant returns. The coming bubble is likely to burst around 2025-2026 - participants need to remember to take profits.
Yuga Labs, the team behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club, has announced the acquisition of Proof, the NFT company behind the Proof Collective and Moonbirds. Proof has faced significant challenges over the past year and a half after a booming start. The Moonbirds assets will be integrated into Yuga's gaming universe, with potential for IP rights transfers to holders. The deal was met with polarized opinions. Many in the BAYC community have been disappointed with the team throughout the bear market.
Crypto x AI has been one of the most popular narratives as of late. This post provides a list of the best reads on the topic from a variety of sources.
Pudgy Penguins briefly surpassed Bored Ape Yacht Club in floor price over the weekend, another milestone for one of the most storied NFT collections in the space.
YC added stablecoins to its requests for startups list, highlighting that they offer low-fee, fast transactions, and are becoming integral to the future of finance.
The announcement of Sora and Sam Altman’s claim that he wanted to raise $8 trillion for OpenAI led to AI tokens across the board receiving strong bids - Worldcoin notably hit an all-time high and was up 100% on the week.
The interface for TikTok's native app in the Vision Pro will look familiar to anyone who has used TikTok’s apps, with a vertically oriented player for videos and buttons to like, comment, favorite, and share. TikTok has taken advantage of the increased screen real estate offered by the Vision Pro to spread out other interface elements. Comments and creator profiles are displayed on a pane to the right so they don’t obscure the primary video player.
An Adobe patent application seeks to balance output from generative image models for "image-to-image translation tasks" to create images with "minority attributes" properly. The design titan wants to correct the bias in generated images by oversampling images with specific minority characteristics in image datasets. These attributes can include many physical characteristics, including hair types, colors, baldness, and accessories.
The new Google Calendar has been extensively redesigned to take advantage of Material Design standards, resulting in a modern and user-friendly interface with updated icons, a vibrant color scheme, and a layout that helps you quickly find what you are looking for. Various new features simplify event planning and scheduling, including smart suggestions and enhanced integration. A simple click on the 'Use new Calendar' button initiates the transformation.
Major tech companies that were once considered leaders in design are downsizing design executives' positions due to a correction in the expectations of seasoned design leaders and a pause in hiring. Salaries for these design leaders have dropped 15% to 20% from their height two years ago when salaries were notoriously high, as companies now want more from workers while paying less for it.
There are some excellent outcomes from AI for the disability community, but the future looks bleak overall. In the health care system, algorithmic tools and AI have been working against disabled people due to the nature of their treatment. The technology community must embrace disabled people from the start, including them as designers and in other product roles, so they can contribute to shaping the technologies that mediate the world around them.
A growing number of UX tasks are being replaced by AI tools, putting the role of human UX professionals at risk. While it might make economic sense to have lean teams equipped with AI, doing so raises questions about the creativity, empathy, and nuanced understanding that humans bring. On the other hand, there's compelling evidence that UX writing and content design is still a promising field.
A set of checklists that allow designers to assess their Figma components. The content is divided into two sections: 'Design' features items that can aid in crafting a component and 'Testing' contains considerations for testing a component before final publication.
This thoughtful and helpful guide visually explains how the SwiftUI layout system works.
Imagifly enables you to instantly access your keyword library while creating a new prompt, saving it, and making an organized library with your frequently used keywords.
The Playground, a sister brand to Pangram Pangram, introduced a new experimental digital experience with physical and phenomenal products. In this post, its founder Mat Desjardins discusses the foundry's origins and its move into physical realms, a shift rooted in the desire to nurture and cross-pollinate different fields. He also talks about his future collaborations, hopes for the future, and the importance of creating what you want to see in the world.
Designers should pause and recognize their work's value to a client’s business when calculating rates. When talking with potential clients, they need to ask the right questions: How long will this work be used for? What will be the potential viewership? Will this be attracting extra business for the client?
2024.02.19·the-brandidentity.com·7 min read·TLDR Design This year marks the 30th anniversary of the ten usability heuristics, which redefined the UX design industry and remain helpful today. Jakob Nielsen, the legend who created it, provides a fascinating first-person insight into the process. Additionally, Nielsen debunks some myths about heuristics and explains why they can and should still be applied to UX today.