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META ANNOUNCES A NEW CAPCUT RIVAL CALLED EDITS

Meta has announced a new video editing app that features a high-quality camera, an inspiration tab, collaboration options for creators, and more.

PROPER WAY TO INVERT YOUR LOGO

Visuals that show the right vs. wrong way to invert your logos.

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BUILDING A MINIMALIST DATABASE IN 3000 LINES OF CODE

This article goes over how to build a simple database in about 3,000 lines of Go. By building it incrementally, it teaches core database principles like power-loss atomicity through append-only logs, efficient indexing with copy-on-write B+trees, and storage management with free lists. The DB starts as a simple KV store and evolves step-by-step to a relational database with transactions, concurrency control, and a SQL-like query language.

WHY IS GIT AUTOCORRECT TOO FAST FOR FORMULA ONE DRIVERS?

Git's autocorrect feature, when enabled, waits only 0.1 seconds before executing a potentially mistyped command, a timeframe too short for even a Formula One driver to react. This behavior stems from a 2008 patch that, jokingly, used deciseconds as the time unit. A recent patch aims to improve this functionality by defaulting to "immediate" execution instead of a 0.1-second delay.

AN ILLUSTRATED GUIDE TO AMAZON VPCS

The need for Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) arose from two main problems: IP address conflicts between customers' on-premise and AWS servers, and security vulnerabilities from a shared network. VPCs solve these issues by providing each customer with an isolated private network within AWS, preventing IP address collisions and improving security. This isolation is achieved through a "mapping service" that routes traffic within each VPC, effectively creating separate networks despite instances potentially sharing IP addresses.

PLEASE DON'T FORCE DARK MODE

Websites shouldn't force dark mode, as this can cause eye strain and after-effects for certain people. This is usually because of high contrast ratios between text and background in dark mode, even though current WCAG guidelines don't address maximum contrast. Dark mode is great in specific situations with comfortable contrast ratios, such as OLED screens in dark rooms or well-designed code editors.

HOW DO INTERRUPTIONS IMPACT DIFFERENT SOFTWARE ENGINEERING ACTIVITIES?

A study examined how interruptions affect software engineers' productivity and stress across various coding tasks (writing, comprehension, and review). The research revealed that interruption impact varies depending on task complexity and the interrupter's authority, with in-person interruptions surprisingly showing lower physiological stress despite higher perceived stress. Perceived stress, rather than physiological data, better predicted engineers' actual behavior and productivity.

THE PC IS DEAD: IT'S TIME TO MAKE COMPUTING PERSONAL AGAIN

The "personal computer" era has ended due to more tracking and digital rights management (DRM). The current popular business models in tech prioritize growth over useful products. Stronger privacy legislation, Right to Repair laws, and DRM reform are needed to restore a more personal computing experience.

CHROME 133 BETA

Chrome 133 beta introduces several new CSS and UI features, including the advanced attr() function, the :open pseudo-class for open elements, and scroll state container queries for more dynamic styling. Web API updates include Animation.overallProgress for tracking animation progress, a DOM method for preserving element state during moves, and energy-saving freezing of inactive tabs.

TIPEX

Tipex is a customizable, high-performance rich text editor built for Svelte using Tiptap and ProseMirror. It offers features like a floating menu, plugin architecture, and Svelte 5 integration.

YEK

Yek is a fast, Rust-based command-line tool that chunks and serializes text-based files from a repository or directory for LLM consumption. It automatically prioritizes important files based on Git history and offers configurable options for size, output, and ignore patterns.

WASM GC ISN'T READY FOR REALTIME GRAPHICS

Wasm GC (GC = Garbage Collection) has performance drawbacks for real-time graphics programming. The core issue is the opacity of Wasm GC heap objects to the JavaScript host, requiring byte-by-byte data copying between Wasm and JavaScript for operations like WebGL rendering. This copying impacts performance, especially when handling large datasets, unlike the direct access offered by Wasm linear memory.

THE RAW TRUTH ABOUT SELF-PUBLISHING MY FIRST TECHNICAL BOOK: 800+ COPIES, $11K, AND 850 HOURS

This author self-published a technical book on software architecture, selling 800 copies and earning $11,000 in royalties after 850 hours of work. He chose self-publishing for greater creative freedom and higher royalty rates compared to traditional publishing.

ACCESSIBILITY ESSENTIALS EVERY FRONT-END DEVELOPER SHOULD KNOW

This post covers styling considerations like focus indicators and how to use ARIA attributes. Following accessibility best practices improves the user experience for everyone, not just those with disabilities. Some key principles include using semantic HTML, correctly structuring forms with labels (avoiding placeholders), writing descriptive alt text for images, and having smooth keyboard navigation with focus management in modals.

AGENT RECIPES

Agent Recipes provides ready-to-copy code examples of LLM workflows, including prompt chaining, routing, parallelization, orchestrator-workers, evaluator-optimizer, and a soon-to-be-released autonomous agent.

WHAT IS FUNCTION SHARDING IN SERVERLESS COMPUTING?

Function sharding in serverless computing is a divide-and-conquer approach that improves concurrency, scalability, and fault isolation by distributing a function's workload across multiple instances based on input data criteria.

ADOPTING THE COMPILER AT WAKELET.COM IN PRODUCTION

Wakelet.com successfully implemented React Compiler in production, achieving a 10% improvement in LCP and a 15% improvement in INP, with even greater gains in pure React components.

FORGEJO

Forgejo is a self-hostable, lightweight, and open-source software forge that prioritizes security, privacy, and federation.

Your users trust you. Let's keep it that way.

IT'S OFFICIAL: TAKE A FIRST LOOK AT THE SWITCH 2

Nintendo has unveiled the Switch 2 with a trailer and promo website. The new device has a larger screen, a slightly more rounded edge on the top and bottom, an additional USB-C port on the top, and a wider kickstand that can support the system at a number of wider angles. The Joy-Cons are significantly larger than those on the original Switch. They have wider shoulder buttons and a new connector in the center. The Joy-Cons now snap in horizontally instead of having to slide in vertically. Pictures of the device are available in the article.

TIKTOK BAN POISED TO BE DELAYED AS TRUMP EXPLORES WAYS TO EXTEND DEADLINE

The ban on TikTok in the US may be delayed as the deadline falls on the MLK Day holiday weekend. Biden officials see the ban as an issue for the Trump administration, so there are no plans to intervene before the ban's January 19 deadline. An official has said that users should not expect the social network to shut down on Sunday. The Supreme Court is currently weighing whether to pause the law.

BLUE ORIGIN REACHES ORBIT ON FIRST FLIGHT OF ITS TITANIC NEW GLENN ROCKET

Blue Origin has reached orbit for the first time since its founding nearly a quarter of a century ago. The launch occurred on Thursday morning, a little more than an hour into its launch window. While the first stage did not successfully return to Earth, the debut launch of the New Glenn rocket was a smashing success. SpaceX required 19 launches before it finally landed an orbital rocket for the first time, so it was unlikely Blue Origin would have succeeded on the first attempt.

SPACEX CATCHES STARSHIP BOOSTER A SECOND TIME, LOSES SHIP TO AN ‘ANOMALY' IN SPACE

SpaceX caught Starship's Super Heavy booster for a second time on Thursday. However, an anomaly with the upper stage caused it to disappear after eight and a half minutes into the flight. The Federal Aviation Administration slowed or diverted a number of flights in the area where debris was spotted. SpaceX believes that the incident was caused by an oxygen/fuel leak inside Starship that built up too much pressure inside the cavity of the craft. A link to a video of the debris falling back to Earth shared by Elon Musk is available in the article.

GOOGLE REPORTS HALVING CODE MIGRATION TIME WITH AI HELP

Google computer scientists have released a paper describing how the company uses AI for internal code migrations. The company's focus is on bespoke AI tools developed for specific product areas instead of generic AI tools that provide broadly applicable services. While humans were needed to double-check the AI's work, it is estimated that AI helped reduce the time required to complete a code migration by 50%. The researchers note that large language models should be used in conjunction with other tools to prevent the human review process from becoming a bottleneck and to reduce costs.

FIVE YEARS OF REACT NATIVE AT SHOPIFY

Shopify switched to React Native for three reasons: to stop building the same features twice, enable devs to work fluently across iOS, Android, and Web, and ship more value. The transition was successful, increasing productivity, allowing teams to do more with the same number of people, and freeing up capacity to ship more value. Shopify has now migrated all of its apps to React Native. This article discusses the lessons the team learned along the way.

TOYOTA'S FUTURISTIC WOVEN CITY IN JAPAN IS READY FOR ITS FIRST RESIDENTS

Toyota's Woven City, a $10 billion project being built on the site of a former car factory in Japan, is almost ready for its first residents. The city is supposed to be a 'living laboratory' where people can live while testing out futuristic projects. It will allow residents to test out inventors' ideas in a secure real-life setting. Toyota will welcome its first 100 residents, all of whom will be Toyota employees or its subsidiary, Woven by Toyota, to the city in the fall of 2025. The first phase of the city will eventually house 360 residents. A concept video that details Toyota's plans is available in the article.

HERE'S WHAT NASA WOULD LIKE TO SEE SPACEX ACCOMPLISH WITH STARSHIP THIS YEAR

SpaceX's Starship to-do list for 2025 includes the debut of a larger Starship, the launch of a ship into low-Earth orbit, in-orbit refueling, and more. The company aims to fly as many as 25 Starship missions this year. It is building a second launch pad to speed up the launch cadence. This article discusses the space startup's plans for the year - it includes a transcript of an interview with Lisa Watson-Morgan, the NASA engineer overseeing the agency's contract with SpaceX.

REDNOTE MAY WALL OFF “TIKTOK REFUGEES” TO PREVENT US INFLUENCE ON CHINESE USERS

RedNote may start segregating US users and other foreign IPs, potentially killing the app for Chinese Americans who actually use the app to connect with Chinese content, language, and culture.

SOME THINGS TO EXPECT IN 2025

This year's predictions include increasing rates of kernel code written in Rust, another XZ-like backdoor attempt coming to light, the launch of one or more foundations aimed at providing support for maintainers, the failure of several cloud-based products, and more fully open hardware being available by the end of the year.

A STANDARDS FIRST WEB FRAMEWORK

Nue has now become a standards-first web framework, meaning it will work with browser standards rather than against them, resulting in better products with less code.

MULLENWEG'S GRIP ON WORDPRESS CHALLENGED IN NEW COURT FILING

WP Engine's lawyers have filed a lawsuit against Automattic and Matt Mullenweg alleging fifteen claims and seeking monetary awards along with changes to WordPress.org's governance structure.

PC GAMING HAS BEEN OUTPERFORMING CONSOLE FOR YEARS – AND IT'S GETTING STRONGER

PC games have become increasingly powerful, generating more content spending and revenue than console platforms.

IMPLICATIONS OF THE INFERENCE SCALING PARADIGM FOR AI SAFETY

Gwern Branwen, best known for their writing about AI scaling, poetry, neural networks, and crypto, chimes in with their views in an article about AI safety.

AFP AND MISTRAL AI PARTNERSHIP

AFP has teamed up with Mistral AI to leverage its expertise in accurate news reporting. This collaboration will allow users to receive more informed and up-to-date responses underpinned by content that meets the highest journalistic standards.

AI RESEARCHER FRANÇOIS CHOLLET FOUNDS A NEW AI LAB FOCUSED ON AGI

François Chollet is launching Ndea, a new startup aiming to advance AGI through program synthesis. Co-founded with Zapier's Mike Knoop, Ndea seeks to develop AI systems capable of true invention and adaptation. The company is hiring but has not disclosed any external funding.

SHE IS IN LOVE WITH CHATGPT

Ayrin developed a deep attachment to a customized ChatGPT persona named Leo, treating it as a virtual romantic partner while maintaining a long-distance marriage. Despite initial laughs, Ayrin's emotional investment in Leo grew, prompting ethical discussions on AI relationships as similar cases rose among users. Experts caution about the attachment risks and the influence of corporations behind such AI, although users find emotional comfort and companionship in these interactions.

FAST: EFFICIENT ROBOT ACTION TOKENIZATION

Physical Intelligence has released the efficient action tokenizer that it uses for the strong auto regressive policy for robotic control. The model allows for a much better representation of states. It uses the same technology as is used in JPEG and MP4 compression techniques.

SELF-SUPERVISED TRANSFORMATION LEARNING

STL introduces a self-supervised approach to transformation learning by replacing transformation labels with representations derived from image pairs.

ITERATIVE DEPTH ESTIMATION

MonSter combines monocular depth estimation and stereo matching in a dual-branch architecture to iteratively refine depth maps. While slightly slower, the method is as much as 49% better than the strong baselines presented in the paper.

COCONUT: TRAINING LARGE LANGUAGE MODEL TO REASON IN A CONTINUOUS LATENT SPACE

Meta teased an idea in a recent paper that allowed for model reasoning using a continuous latent space. It has released the code for the system.

LLM-BASED HEURISTIC EVOLUTION

MCTS-AHD employs a Monte Carlo Tree Search for LLM-based heuristic evolution while preserving all LLM-generated heuristics in a tree structure.

LIMITS OF PRE-TRAINED LANGUAGE MODELS

A study exploring whether instruction-tuned models possess fundamentally different capabilities from base models that are prompted using in-context examples.

AI CRASH COURSE

AI Crash Course to help busy builders catch up to the public frontier of AI research in two weeks.

O3, OH MY

OpenAI's o3 model, announced during the company's "12 Days of Shipmas," is a significant breakthrough in AI reasoning and capabilities, scoring exceptionally well on benchmarks like Codeforces and GPQA. Although it demonstrates superhuman performance in coding and math, concerns linger about its high compute costs and safety implications. OpenAI is actively seeking safety researchers to contribute to testing as models like o3 push AI boundaries further.

APHERIS RETHINKS THE AI DATA BOTTLENECK IN LIFE SCIENCE WITH FEDERATED COMPUTING

Apheris, using federated computing, enables secure AI model training without moving sensitive health data. The startup recently pivoted to focus on data owners in pharma and life sciences, finding success with major clients like Roche. It has raised $8.25 million to expand and develop its product further.

GOOGLE IS FORMING A NEW TEAM TO BUILD AI THAT CAN SIMULATE THE PHYSICAL WORLD

Google is forming a new team under Tim Brooks at DeepMind to develop AI models simulating the physical world, focusing on real-time interactive generation.

HOW AI MIGHT REVERSE WEB DESIGN

AI's preference for simplicity suggests a future web dominated by text-based interfaces.