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HOW MANY PEOPLE ARE DOWNLOADING APPLE VISION PRO APPS?

More than 600 apps made for the Apple Vision Pro were available when the device launched on February 2. Developers are complaining that weak discovery and search functionalities in the App Store are dampening the potential success of their apps. The top paid news app receives over 300 installs a day, which is great for a headset that just launched. Promoting apps on social media appears to give transient success, but this might not be enough for consistent gains over the long run.

SHINING LASER LIGHT ON GLASS CREATES A SOLAR CELL

THE VR RACE IS BACK ON

The VR market size is growing fast but still relatively small. Retention is just OK - the technology is stickiest for use cases that most people might not understand. There is real money to be made in the space. One effective strategy seems to be using VR to create an experience that creates a lot of buzz and then add cross-platform capabilities, allowing apps to reach a much larger audience. The competition between the Apple Vision Pro and Meta Quest platforms will benefit developers and create more experimentation within the ecosystem.

CONDUCTOR

Conductor is a platform for orchestrating microservices and events. It supports a wide range of database persistence layers and queuing services and has been battle-tested in production at Netflix. Conductor provides powerful flow control constructs, client libraries in multiple languages, and a distributed scalable architecture. It features a bundled UI with an integrated interface to create, refine, and validate workflows. It also has a full-featured API for custom automations.

THE TOP OF THE DNS HIERARCHY

Not all distributed systems are decentralized - many are not. One of the easiest and most practical ways to organize a distributed system is according to a hierarchy. The most prominent example of this is one of the drivetrain mechanics of the internet: DNS. This article looks at how DNS works. It covers how domains work, root servers, anycast, attacks, and more. While DNS may seem simple, it relies on a great deal of complexity within other parts of the system.

“ACCELERATIONISM” IS AN OVERDUE CORRECTIVE TO YEARS OF DOOM AND GLOOM IN SILICON VALLEY

E/acc, or effective accelerationism, is a movement that is growing within the tech hivemind. Its founders believe that the tech world has become captive to a monoculture that is preventing it from producing meaningful benefits. E/acc encourages more ideas, growth, competition, and action. It is acting like a counterbalancing force to widespread public concerns about the risks posed by the tech industry at large. This article looks into the origins of e/acc and its impact on the tech industry.

THE COMPOUNDING SEEDS OF CREATIVITY

Creativity can't be saved for later - it has to be discharged regularly or it will spoil. Being fully engaged at work is how you best plant the seeds for your own adventures. Those who constantly use up their creativity grow their intellectual granary many times over than those who keep holding back. People who turn boring problems into interesting pursuits always end up ahead in creativity and competence.

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HOW SLACK BROUGHT THE GROUP CHAT TO WORK

Slack was a rare piece of enterprise software - it spread through word of mouth because it was actually good.

MOB SETS WAYMO CAR ABLAZE IN SAN FRANCISCO

Most of the people attacking the car had their faces uncovered and the incident was recorded by both attendees and the Waymo car's cameras.

CHESS-GPT'S INTERNAL WORLD MODEL

This study looks at how a large language model-based chess AI works.

THE SCARCITY OF THE LONG-TERM

If there was no material or energy scarcity, the only real scarcity would be a long attention span - there will be a need for tools for transmitting values and missions into the future.

MASSED MUDDLER INTELLIGENCE

Massed Muddler Intelligences are to AI what Service-Oriented Architecture is to traditional computing - similar to concepts like microservices, containers, and APIs.

ON THE PROPOSED CALIFORNIA SB 1047

This article looks at the proposed California SB 1047, a bill designed to regulate AI from a state level, examining the impact that it will have on the industry.

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REKA HAS A NEW POWERFUL MULTI-MODAL MODEL

AI startup Reka has announced a 21B parameter model that was trained completely from scratch. It is natively multimodal and surpasses Llama 70B and Mixtral on a number of key benchmarks. Importantly, given where the founders of the company used to work, it also matches Gemini Pro. The model is available for use in Reka's playground.

APPLE RELEASES MGIE, A REVOLUTIONARY AI MODEL FOR INSTRUCTION-BASED IMAGE EDITING

Apple has launched MGIE, an open-source AI model for image editing that uses multimodal large language models to interpret text instructions and execute pixel-level edits.

DEEPMIND FRAMEWORK OFFERS BREAKTHROUGH IN LLMS’ REASONING

DeepMind and USC researchers have developed SELF-DISCOVER, a new framework that significantly improves LLM reasoning capabilities, outperforming traditional methods by up to 32% on tasks with models like GPT-4. The two-stage framework allows LLMs to form and utilize reasoning structures autonomously. This advancement represents a major step toward more sophisticated AI problem-solving abilities.

CONTROLLING REAL WORLD OBJECTS WITH FLUID IN RL

"Box o Flows" introduces a novel experimental system for testing reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms in dynamic real-world settings, addressing the challenge of simulating complex fluid dynamics for RL applications. It showcases the ability of model-free RL algorithms to generate complex behaviors from simple rewards and enhances data efficiency via offline RL and paves the way for broader RL applicability in complex systems.

WEBLINX CONVERSATIONAL WEB SCRAPING DATASET

Weblinx is a dataset of 100k web-based interactions in a conversational format. It was released to improve the study of language model guided web-based navigation.

3D AVATARS WITH IMPLICITDEEPFAKE1

This paper introduces ImplicitDeepfake1, a new approach that combines deepfake technology with Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) and Gaussian Splatting (GS) to create highly realistic 3D avatars.

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GUIDING INSTRUCTION-BASED IMAGE EDITING VIA MULTIMODAL LARGE LANGUAGE MODELS

Apple released code that uses multimodal language models to improve human-provided natural language edits to images.

LAG-LLAMA: TOWARDS FOUNDATION MODELS FOR PROBABILISTIC TIME SERIES FORECASTING

Lag-Llama introduces a breakthrough in time series forecasting with a transformer-based model that excels in zero-shot and few-shot generalization, pre-trained on a broad spectrum of time series data. It surpasses existing deep learning methods in state-of-the-art performance through fine-tuning on minimal data, marking a significant advancement in foundation models for time series analysis.

LEARNING TO FLY

A repository for training end-to-end control policies using deep reinforcement learning. The training is done in simulation and is finished within seconds on a consumer-grade laptop. The trained policies generalize and can be deployed on real quadrotors.

MASSED MUDDLER INTELLIGENCE

The concept of Massed Muddler Intelligence (MMI) represents a shift from traditional monolithic AI scaling towards a model based on distributed, agent-based systems that learn and adapt in real time. Grounded in principles of embodiment, boundary intelligence, temporality, and personhood, MMI advocates for AI development that emphasizes scalable, interactive agents with a degree of autonomy and mutual governance, moving away from the current focus on accumulating larger datasets and computational resources.

AI COULD ACTUALLY HELP REBUILD THE MIDDLE CLASS

PACKING FOR LLM TRAINING

Packing in training models is a way to improve training efficiently by concatenating examples. If done incorrectly, contamination can occur between examples because the attention doesn’t know where to stop. The community has found that EOS is often sufficient, but there still can be problems. This repository provides an implementation in Hugging Face for common models to properly pack input data.

AI FORM ROAST (PRODUCT)

Free AI tool to audit and optimize online forms.

META WILL START LABELING AI-GENERATED IMAGES FROM OTHER COMPANIES

Meta plans to combat the spread of fake images on its platforms by detecting and labeling AI-generated content, even if produced by rival services.

AXOLOTL ADDS MPS SUPPORT

Axolotl is a tool used by many groups to fine-tune language models. This PR adds support for Mac M devices via Pytorch and MPS.

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FRANKLIN TEMPLETON JOINS ETHEREUM ETF RACE

Franklin Templeton has thrown its hat into the ring with an application to the SEC for an Ethereum ETF. It is entering the race alongside major competitors like BlackRock and Fidelity. This follows the firm's launch of a bitcoin ETF, which has seen less demand than its rivals so far. The SEC has continued to delay decisions on Ethereum ETFs, fueling speculation about what this could mean for Ethereum. Most people expect a final decision on the applications by May.

SPOT BITCOIN ETFS SAW $1.1 BILLION OF INFLOWS LAST WEEK, COINSHARES SAYS

Bitcoin ETFs recorded an all-time high weekly inflow of $1.1 billion last week, bringing the cumulative inflow to $2.8 billion since their launch in January. Asset management firms BlackRock and Fidelity are leading these inflows. The broader crypto investment product landscape hit $59 billion in AUM, the highest that figure has been since early 2022.

DN404: DIVISIBLE NFT STANDARD

The latest ERC404 meta, dubbed the "Divisible NFT" standard, or DN404, is a promising hybrid of ERC20/721 tokens. Unlike its predecessor ERC404, DN404 operates with two contracts allowing for actions as both fungible and non-fungible tokens without breaching any standards. A concept for this standard is available in an open source repo but it has not been audited yet.

MEVAUCTION, A NEW SYSTEM TO AUCTION BLOCKSPACE

This thread details a novel system called mevAuction to auction blockspace. mevAuction allows multiple winners per block while retaining compatibility with the existing standard, mev-boost. The new model splits blockspace into two sections, offering a greater level of accessibility and efficiency. The design is currently undergoing testing on the Holesky testnet.

meme now!

ARE SOLANA AIRDROPS STILL WORTH FARMING?

This post explores whether Solana airdrops are still worth farming given the ecosystem’s meteoric rise over the past few months and the farming competition that comes with that. It outlines 5 major Solana projects - Parcl, Kamino Finance, Beoble, Drift Protocol, and Tensor - and concludes that farming these protocols can still be worthwhile, especially for those with smaller portfolios.

SPECULATION ON NARRATIVES COMES IN WAVES

This post discusses the speculative waves that are associated with narrative trends, highlighting recent narratives like Friend.tech, Ordinals, and telegram trading bots. While there may be a sharp decline after an initial wave of hype, innovation-driven narratives often experience subsequent waves driven by different catalysts. Those interested in capitalizing on trends should monitor narrative developments post-initial hype to be prepared to ride a possible second wave.

PETER THIEL’S FOUNDERS FUND MADE $200 MILLION CRYPTO INVESTMENT BEFORE BULL RUN

Billionaire Peter Thiel's venture capital firm, Founders Fund, reportedly bought $200 million worth of bitcoin and ether between the end of Summer and early Autumn last year. The move represents renewed attention from institutional investors on cryptocurrencies, following the crash of 2022. It followed the hype that ensued after BlackRock initially filed for its Bitcoin ETF in mid-Summer of last year.

AS SPOT BITCOIN ETF VOLUMES CONTINUE TO RISE, BITWISE ASSET MANAGEMENT PREDICTS A HIGH CEILING FOR GROWTH

In this article, the CIO of Bitwise, one of the firms that rolled out a spot Bitcoin ETF, gives some interesting insight into what’s going on behind the scenes with these ETFs. The inflows into the new funds have beat expectations and the strength in demand is predicted to continue over the next 18 months. This could end up being the biggest ETF launch ever.

ON BTC FLOWS THIS YEAR

This post provides an analysis of what BTC inflows could look like this year, considering components like household income, ETF inflows, and GDP growth in the analysis.

PUDGY PENGUINS APPROACH BORED APE FLOOR PRICES, BUOYED BY CEO’S EXPANSIVE APPROACH

Pudgy Penguins have been on a tear over the past year and a half, propelled by Luca Netz’s innovative approach to IP, which helped turn the struggling collection around. They are now close to surpassing Bored Ape floor prices.

WINTERMUTE AND THE BLOCK LAUNCH CRYPTO PRICE INDEX

Wintermute and The Block teamed up to launch the GMCI 30 index to track top 30 cryptocurrencies by market cap.

UNIVERSAL PLASMA AND DA CHALLENGES

This article discusses some of the challenges that Layer 2s have with data availability and goes over one of the potential solutions to those challenges, Optimistic DA.

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GOOGLE TEASES A REDESIGN FOR ITS LOGIN PAGE

Google is planning to revamp the login page for its products and services, aiming for a more modern look. The redesign will incorporate Google's Material Design 3 concepts, prioritizing a minimalist aesthetic.