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GREAT COPY USES THE RULE OF ONE

The Rule of One means sticking to one idea, one benefit, one solution, one message, and one target audience in a piece of writing.

GOOGLE WILL NO LONGER BACK UP THE INTERNET: CACHED WEBPAGES ARE DEAD

Google Search is discontinuing the cached webpages, which were initially designed to help users access pages when they couldn't load.

SNAPCHAT LAUNCHES NEW AD CAMPAIGN PITCHING ITSELF AS THE ‘ANTIDOTE TO SOCIAL MEDIA’

Snapchat’s new campaign positions itself as the antidote to the divisive popularity contest that social media has become. The campaign highlights unique features to distance Snapchat from traditional social media platforms.

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SQUEEZING LAST BIT OF JAVASCRIPT PERFORMANCE FOR MY AUTOMATION GAME

An author of a web-based factory automation and economy simulation game shares how they used various performance optimization techniques to reduce the game’s execution time from 21 seconds to 4 seconds. These techniques include replacing strings with small integers, using memoization extensively, and switching to Map/Set data structures when possible. Each optimization is walked through with a corresponding code example.

CONSISTENCY

The concept of linearizability involves translating potentially overlapping histories of operations into equivalent sequential behaviors. This is an important concept to understand when implementing queue data structures. Achieving linearizability in a distributed queue is difficult as it’s challenging to achieve consistency without trading off availability and partition tolerance. This post explains various consistency properties, including monotonic reads, read-your-writes, writes follow reads, monotonic writes, and the consistent prefix. These properties allow developers to understand how to reason about correctness in distributed systems.

INTRODUCTION TO WEB COMPONENTS AND HOW TO START USING THEM

Web components are a way to create encapsulated, reusable code blocks for web development. They are custom HTML elements that allow developers to define their own elements, register them, and control them using JavaScript. The benefits of web components are that they offer stability, independence from JavaScript frameworks, and allow for better collaboration between UX and development teams.

WRITE CODE FOR THE WEB

Apple primarily prioritizes its consumers over developers, so some developers are shifting their focus towards writing code for the web. The web is open and therefore cannot be locked down by corporations. Each company has different incentives when it comes to users, which can lead to Google not fixing certain bugs and Apple being strict about the capabilities of developers on its devices. A strategy for dealing with this is reducing your dependence on big company products when they try to put you in a zero-sum game and re-engaging more with them if they're willing to be more symbiotic.

BROWSER EXTENSIONS ARE UNDERRATED: THE PROMISE OF HACKABLE SOFTWARE

Browser extensions are a great platform for users to modify and personalize their online experiences in creative ways. Today, most users use browser extensions for utilities like ad blocking and password management. Extensions in the future should be more malleable, where users are able to control and personalize the experience each browser extension offers. This article shares some tools to help developers monetize browser extensions and also create extensions from a spreadsheet.

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TINTS

Tints is a Tailwind CSS color palette generator. Each palette is easy to create and has a unique shareable URL for teams.

HIGHLIGHT

Highlight is an open-source monitoring tool. It comes with full support for web-based session replay, error monitoring, and logging.

PKL

Pkl is a programming language for configuration files. Developers can define their data in Pkl and generate output in JSON, YAML, and other configuration formats easily. Pkl allows developers to catch errors before deployment.

THE PAIN POINTS OF BUILDING A COPILOT

AI copilots are AI assistants that use LLMs to assist with various tasks. The development process for copilots involves exploration, implementation, evaluation, and productization. However, it is a messy and iterative process due to the non-deterministic nature of LLMs. Pain points faced by developers in this process include prompt engineering, orchestration of data sources, testing difficulties, lack of best practices, safety and privacy concerns, and the developer experience. There are opportunities for tools and processes to assist developers in building copilots more effectively, such as prompt authoring and validation support, transparency and control enhancements, automated measurement methods, and a centralized platform for integrating AI into projects.

OVER THE EDGE: THE USE OF DESIGN TACTICS TO UNDERMINE BROWSER CHOICE

Mozilla commissioned a report by independent researchers that details how Microsoft hinders browser choice on Windows. Microsoft promotes its Edge browser within its operating system, using user interface design tactics to discourage users from selecting rival browsers. These tactics are not always in line with Microsoft's own design guidelines and can harm consumers and competition. The report emphasizes the need for global regulatory action to ensure browser choice and competition are restored to be more fair.

41 YEARS IN UX: A CAREER RETROSPECTIVE

In this article, Jakob Nielsen, a prominent figure in the field of user experience (UX), reflects on his 41-year career in UX. He traces his journey from childhood experiences with psychology and early encounters with computers to his time as a university professor and his transition into the real world of UX. Nielsen highlights three significant achievements: presenting a paper on discount usability and the 10 usability heuristics, publishing the book "Designing Web Usability," and his efforts to raise public awareness of UX. He also mentions his involvement with Google in its early days and emphasizes that while technology has evolved, the mission of making computers suitable and pleasant for humans has remained constant throughout his career.

WHY QUORA ISN’T USEFUL ANYMORE: A.I. CAME FOR THE BEST SITE ON THE INTERNET

Quora has seen a decline in quality and utility over the years due to spam, trolls, moderation issues, and the rise of AI-generated content.

BEYOND SELF-ATTENTION: HOW A SMALL LANGUAGE MODEL PREDICTS THE NEXT TOKEN

A comprehensive walkthrough with code examples on how a small language model works and how it predicts tokens.

WASM PLAYGROUND

An interactive playground to learn and experiment with WebAssembly.

WHY ISN’T THE HTML ELEMENT 100% SUPPORTED ON CANIUSE.COM?

The html element is not 100% supported on CanIUse because of some deprecated and non-standardized features associated with the element. However, that doesn’t explain it entirely and the exact reasons are unknown, though rounding errors are suspected as a possible cause. CanIUse is a site that lists what HTML tags are supported by browsers.

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ELON MUSK SAYS TESLA WILL HOLD A SHAREHOLDER VOTE TO INCORPORATE IN TEXAS AFTER DELAWARE PAY SNUB

Tesla is holding a shareholder vote on whether the company should transfer its state of incorporation to Texas. The company is currently incorporated in Delaware. The vote comes after a Delaware judge voided Elon Musk's $56 billion pay package granted in 2018. A decision to reincorporate could be challenged by shareholders as a breach of fiduciary duty according to Delaware law as it could be seen as a choice made for selfish reasons.

THE ARC BROWSER IS GETTING BETTER BOOKMARKS AND SEARCH RESULTS, ALL THANKS TO AI

The Browser Company has made some big AI-powered changes to its Arc desktop browser. The new features turn search queries into bookmarks and keep users up to date on things they care about. The Browser Company aims to make some of the many-step processes of using the internet simpler, faster, more intuitive, and more useful. A video explaining Arc's new features is available in the article.

FOR THE FIRST TIME NASA HAS ASKED INDUSTRY ABOUT PRIVATE MISSIONS TO MARS

NASA is taking its first steps towards opening a commercial pathway to Mars. Jet Propulsion Laboratory has issued a new solicitation titled 'Exploring Mars Together: Commercial Services Studies'. The request asks for proposals from the US space industry on how they would complete one of four private missions to Mars. The missions include delivering small satellites to orbit and providing imaging services around the red planet. NASA plans to award multiple contracts of $200,000 for one study or up to $300,000 for a maximum of two studies. Details about the studies are available in the article.

NEW TYPE OF CHERRY TOMATO SELF-DRIES WHILE STILL ON THE VINE

Supree, a food tech company, has created tomatoes with microscopic cracks in their skin that allow moisture to naturally evaporate from within them, resulting in tomatoes that have lost 80% of their original weight by the time they're packed. The tomatoes can be dried further after harvest to tweak their content, but that process doesn't involve the use of any additives. The dried tomatoes can be reportedly kept for a year after being frozen for shipping and storage without any negative effect on their taste, texture, or nutritional value. Supree will sell its product directly to corporate clients for now.

ACCESSKIT

AccessKit provides UI accessibility infrastructure across platforms and programming languages. It features a data schema that defines all of the data required to make a UI accessible to screen readers and other assistive technologies. The schema, largely based on Chromium's cross-platform accessibility abstraction, also defines actions that can be requested by assistive technologies.

STANCHION

Stanchion is an SQLite 3 extension that enables column-oriented storage in SQLite. It brings all of the benefits of column-oriented storage and data warehousing to anywhere SQLite is already deployed. Column-oriented storage outperforms row-oriented storage for storing and processing metric, log, and event data, time series data storage and analysis, change tracking, and anchor modeling. Stanchion uses compression techniques that significantly reduce the size of stored data, greatly reducing the cost of large data sets.

WHY TIM COOK IS GOING ALL IN ON THE APPLE VISION PRO

When Tim Cook first experienced the Apple Vision Pro maybe eight years ago, it needed a supercomputer in the other room to run. Over the years, Apple engineers shrunk the device to a pair of goggles that weigh a little more than a box of spaghetti. This article talks about what using the Vision Pro is like. The device's high-resolution displays can overlay digital objects that look real.

GOOGLE IS PREPARING TO FULLY RENAME BARD TO GEMINI

Google appears to be ditching the 'Bard' branding altogether and switching entirely to 'Gemini'. All of Bard's phone experience was renamed 'Gemini' earlier this week. The app now says 'Bard is now Gemini' across mobile devices and the web. Bard is powered by Gemini Pro, the middle option in Google's newest family of AI models.

MAKING A PDF THAT’S LARGER THAN GERMANY

The claim that the maximum size of a PDF is 381 km x 381 km is completely false - there's no set limit to the size of a file.

THE WEB JUST GETS BETTER WITH INTEROP 2024

The Interop project aims to improve interoperability by encouraging browser engine teams to look deeper into various web technologies and their compatibility between browsers.

HOW TO LEARN UNFAMILIAR SOFTWARE TOOLS WITH CHATGPT

A guide on how to use AI to turbocharge your ability to dive into unfamiliar software tools and quickly learn how to use them.

MARK ZUCKERBERG CALLS APPLE’S DMA RULES ‘SO ONEROUS’ HE DOUBTS ANY DEVELOPER WILL OPT IN

Apple's compliance with the DMA involves reduced commissions, but the company added new fees that make going to alternate app stores too expensive.

VERSIONFOX

VersionFox is a cross-platform tool for managing SDK versions that allows users to quickly install and switch between different versions of SDKs using the command line.

YOU ARE NOT LATE TO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

A lot of people thought they were late to the internet, but there are even more opportunities now because of the advance in technology.

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NOUS RESEARCH RELEASES HERMES DATASET

OpenHermes-2.5 data has been used to train some of the best open models out there. The dataset contains 1M+ examples of high-quality data points. It has now been released.

BARD CAN GENERATE IMAGES

Bard has now expanded its service to more languages and launched an image generation service.

THE AMERICAN DYNAMISM 50: AI

a16z put together this list of 50 startups tackling some of America’s most pressing problems around defense, energy, transportation, and manufacturing. All of them are using AI in some form to accelerate their efforts. If you’re curious about real-world applications of AI, this is a great insight.

OLMO: OPEN LANGUAGE MODEL

AI2 released a fully open language model training framework. The models come with comprehensive resources including full training data, model weights, training and evaluation code, over 500 checkpoints for each model, and future plans for fine-tuning code, all released under the Apache 2.0 License. These resources are provided by AI2’s Dolma and WIMBD. They include evaluation frameworks Catwalk and Paloma and support for analysis and fine-tuning through Weights & Biases logs and HuggingFace revisions. The models are competitive with the best in class.

MOBILEDIFFUSION

Google has showcased a latent consistency diffusion model with some architectural changes that it trained to run on mobile devices with sub-second generation times.

ENHANCED VIDEO-TEXT LEARNING

Shared Network Pre-training (SNP) improves learning of video and text together. This method is more efficient and versatile than previous models and includes a unique strategy called Significant Semantic Strengthening (S3) for better understanding of key words in sentences.

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NEW STATE OF THE ART IN OPEN EMBEDDING MODEL (HUGGINGFACE HUB)

The BGE-M3 project introduces a versatile embedding model that excels in Multi-Functionality (dense, multi-vector, and sparse retrieval), Multi-Linguality (supporting over 100 languages), and Multi-Granularity (handling inputs from short sentences to documents up to 8192 tokens). It uses a hybrid retrieval pipeline that combines different methods and re-ranking for higher accuracy and generalization, leveraging its ability to perform embedding and sparse retrieval simultaneously.

HIERARCHICAL TEXT SEGMENTATION

The Segment Anything Model (SAM) has been enhanced to create Hi-SAM, a model specializing in hierarchical text segmentation. Hi-SAM excels in segmenting text across multiple levels - from strokes to paragraphs - and even performs layout analysis.

RAGS

RAGs is a Streamlit app that lets users create RAG pipelines from data sources using natural language. Users just have to describe the tasks and parameters they want from their RAG systems. The RAG can be queried and it will answer questions over the data.

BLOCKCHAIN-POWERED SOLUTION TO HELP IMPROVE TRANSPARENCY AND AUDITABILITY FOR GENERATIVE AI SYSTEMS

IBM Consulting and Casper Labs are working together to build a pioneering AI governance tool powered by blockchain. Built leveraging IBM’s watsonx.governance platform, it will introduce AI version control, advanced monitoring, permissioning, and access controls to AI models for enterprise use. This could be essential for businesses looking to de-risk AI and harness its true potential while adhering to internal or external guidelines and regulations.

YOU ARE NOT LATE TO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Just as the early days of the internet offered immense opportunities, today's AI landscape holds similar potential. The key is to shift perception to see the possibilities in existing technologies like AI and follow passion and joy to explore various paths.