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THE TIKTOK BAN HEADS TO THE SUPREME COURT TOMORROW. HERE'S WHAT TO KNOW

TikTok will argue its case before the Supreme Court today in a case that will decide whether the government can ban the platform if it doesn't sever ties with China. The US government wants to ban TikTok due to concerns about China's control over the app. TikTok says the ban violates its First Amendment right to free speech and that the US government's security concerns are too vague and hypothetical to justify an infringement of its rights. If TikTok is banned on January 19, people who don't already have the app on their devices will no longer be able to download it from Google or Apple app stores. The law also bars US internet hosting services and data-storage providers from supporting the app. There are workarounds, but they are limited.

X LAUNCHES GROK'S IPHONE APP IN THE US

xAI has released an iOS app for its Grok chatbot in the US. It can perform the same functions as the chatbot built into the X app. The company has been testing the app in a handful of countries since December. There is no word on when it might come to Android. xAI is also working on a dedicated website for Grok.

A TALLER, HEAVIER, SMARTER VERSION OF SPACEX'S STARSHIP IS ALMOST READY TO FLY

SpaceX plans to test Starship's payload deployment mechanism on its seventh test flight, which could be launching as soon as January 13. The upcoming flight test will launch a new generation ship with significant upgrades. In addition to testing the payload deployment mechanism, SpaceX plans to fly multiple reentry experiments geared towards ship catch and reuse, and launch and return the Super Heavy booster. Details about the upgrades on the new generation ship are available in the article.

BLUE ORIGIN'S FIRST ORBITAL LAUNCH NOW TARGETING SUNDAY

Blue Origin is aiming to launch its first orbital rocket on Sunday. The launch was delayed due to rough seas in the Atlantic, where the company hopes to land its first stage booster on a ship. The rocket, New Glenn, will carry a prototype of Blue Ring, a US Defense Department funded spacecraft. The launch will mark Blue Origin's long-awaited entry into the orbital launch market and escalate the rivalry between Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.

WHY AREN'T WE ALL SERVERLESS YET?

The industry pivot to serverless compute hasn't really happened despite an appealing value proposition. Friction against serverless is caused in part by fatigue from the last paradigm shift to microservices. Caution in the industry is reasonable as a shift to serverless will amplify the same type of challenges that were caused by microservices, many of which still aren't fully resolved. The main incentive for broad serverless is financial, not technical, it is unlikely for someone from the engineering department to sponsor the idea.

MY ROLE AS A FOUNDER CTO: YEAR SEVEN

Miguel Carranza, founder of RevenueCat, writes a post every year looking back over the last twelve months. 2024 was a good year for RevenueCat, possibly its best since 2020. While the journey was a lot rockier than Carranza had imagined, it was clear the company succeeded in its goals. The post discusses the company's performance last year, the lessons it learned (on culture, hiring, company building, and scaling as a founder), and its plans for the future.

THE NEW $30,000 SIDE HUSTLE: MAKING JOB REFERRALS FOR STRANGERS

There's a growing underground market connecting job seekers to anonymous company insiders willing to help them get a foot in the door. While a referral is not a guarantee of a job offer, it can substantially improve the odds. There are several sites available that let people get in touch with verified employees of their target employer to discuss job referral opportunities. Many companies say that this is completely fair practice, but others, like Google and Goldman Sachs, disagree.

LINUX FOUNDATION BANDS TOGETHER CHROMIUM BROWSER MAKERS IN A “NEUTRAL SPACE”

'Supporters of Chromium-Based Browsers' is an initiative started by the Linux Foundation that will provide funding and development support for industry leaders, academia, developers, and the broader open source community working on open Chromium projects. It will have an open governance model based on transparency, inclusivity, and community-driven development. Google has slowly loosened its control over the Chromium project over the years, allowing outside developers into its leadership, softening its stance on non-Google-derived features, and opening up its 'Goma' development scheme for Chromium.

HOOGLEE AFTER GOOGLE: ERIC SCHMIDT LAUNCHES A NEW STARTUP TO COMPETE WITH TIKTOK IN THE FIELD OF AI VIDEO

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt created an artificial intelligence startup called Hooglee to change the AI video generation and social media market.

BILLIONAIRE FRANK MCCOURT'S PROJECT LIBERTY BIDS FOR TIKTOK AHEAD OF SUPREME COURT ARGUMENTS

Project Liberty is its partners plan to restructure TikTok to exist on an American-owned platform that prioritizes users' digital safety.

SALESFORCE WILL HIRE NO MORE SOFTWARE ENGINEERS IN 2025, SAYS MARC BENIOFF

Salesforce's Agentforce and other AI technology have increased the productivity of its engineering teams by more than 30%.

WHAT SPOTIFY'S 55 MILLION US SUBSCRIBERS MEANS FOR PODCASTERS, AUTHORS, AND MUSICIANS

Spotify has recently tweaked its platform to maximize subscription sales and to shift the incoming money to different sets of creators on the platform.

WHY AI PROGRESS IS INCREASINGLY INVISIBLE

The gap between the chatbots consumers use and the systems that researchers are documenting is widening, making it harder for the public and policymakers to gauge AI's real progress.

ANTIREZ (SALVATORE SANFILIPPO) ON TECHNICAL BLOGGING

antirez, the author of Redis, who has been blogging extensively for over 20 years, discusses why he blogs, what lessons he's learned from blogging, the role of AI in blogging, and more.

META'S LLAMA COPYRIGHTED TRAINING

A recent filing alleges that Meta's Llama team trained on copyrighted material with approval from Mark Zuckerberg, raising concerns over intellectual property use in AI training.

GOOGLE LENS TIPS

Google highlights new tips and features for Lens in 2025, showcasing its expanded capabilities in visual search and integration with everyday tasks.

STANDALONE GROK APP LAUNCHES ON IOS IN THE US

The standalone Grok app by xAI is now available on iOS in the US. It provides advanced conversational AI capabilities.

TRANSPARENT VIDEO GENERATION

The transparent generation algorithm includes the alpha channel which increases the usefulness of the model for VFX applications.

3D BIRD GENERATION

This algorithm can generate novel birds by using parts and a learned combination algorithm. The results are stunning and quite useful due to the quality of the underlying generated mesh.

GUI AUTOMATION WITH MULTIMODAL MODELS

InfiGUIAgent is a GUI automation tool that leverages multimodal large language models and a two-stage training process to enhance reasoning and interaction.

NEURAL SVG GENERATION

Many works are aimed at generating SVG images. This one specifically generated parts of objects in order such that the resulting image is clean, editable, and minimal. The output is also quite compelling.

DIFFSENSEI: BRIDGING MULTI-MODAL LLMS AND DIFFUSION MODELS FOR CUSTOMIZED MANGA GENERATION

Controllable, consistent, character and dialogue box generation for manga story creation. It operates almost like a control net for character consistency.

A NEW ADAPTATION METHOD

OGA is an online adaptation method that builds a cache of samples with low zero-shot entropy along a data stream.

AI & QUANT EXPERIMENTATION IN GROWTH MARKETING

Marketing is rapidly being transformed by AI. This article describes strategies in growth marketing that are working today, including agents that power self-improving websites and content personalization at large scale. These strategies are referred to as “quant experimentation”, a nod to quant trading, which similarly revolutionized the world of finance in the 1980s, and share parallels with the transformation happening in growth marketing.

NO, LLMS ARE NOT "SCHEMING"

In 2024, we comfortably outpaced the Turing test with AI like OpenAI's o1. AI showcases impressive conversational abilities yet lacks human-like situational awareness - there are debates over whether LLMs are mere pattern learners or entities with reasoning skills. These models excel in replicating but struggle to prioritize patterns due to a lack of contextual understanding. The focus should remain on refining model training and evaluation methods instead of attributing human-like traits or intentions to AI systems.

WHAT JUST HAPPENED

AI advancements have accelerated, with several new GPT-4 level and Gen3 models emerging, offering both revolutionary and incremental improvements. The o1 models demonstrate advanced reasoning, can catch errors in academic papers, and are able to assist in research, highlighting AI's expanding role beyond traditional tasks. AI capabilities now include real-time video interaction and improved text-to-video generation, indicating profound future implications and opportunities for integration across fields.

SA2VA MODELS FROM BYTEDANCE (HUGGING FACE HUB)

Bytedance has released 3 sizes of a new model that combine strong VLM performance with open vocabulary segmentation found in SAM2.

STUPIDLY EASY HACK CAN JAILBREAK EVEN THE MOST ADVANCED AI CHATBOTS

New research from Anthropic reveals that LLMs can be easily "jailbroken" by changing capitalization or spelling.

BYTEDANCE APPEARS TO BE SKIRTING US RESTRICTIONS TO BUY NVIDIA CHIPS

ByteDance plans to spend $7 billion on Nvidia chips in 2025, skirting U.S. restrictions by storing them outside China.

GEMINI ONBOARDS THREE MORE SENIOR EXECUTIVES AMID EUROPEAN REGIONAL EXPANSION

Gemini has appointed Mark Jennings as head of Europe, Daniel Slutzkin as head of the UK, and Vijay Selvam as the international-focused general counsel all to drive its European expansion amid evolving crypto regulations. Gemini is hiring to continue its push to navigate new regulatory frameworks like the EU's MiCA and the UK's upcoming crypto roadmap, solidifying its commitment to growth in the region.

COINBASE SUBPOENAED BY CFTC IN POLYMARKET INVESTIGATION, ALERTED USERS VIA EMAIL

Coinbase has received a subpoena from the CFTC seeking customer information related to Polymarket. The prediction market, which recorded $9 billion in 2024 trading volume despite blocking US users, has been under fire, with prior regulatory actions including a $1.4 million CFTC settlement and a recent FBI raid on the CEO's apartment. The platform reached peak activity in December with over 300,000 active traders. Concerns persist about U.S. users bypassing restrictions through VPNs.

BUIDLPAD ANNOUNCES FIRST COMMUNITY SALE FOR SOLAYER'S DEBIT CARD

Buidlpad has launched its first community sale, which features Solayer's debit card and its native $LAYER token, aimed at empowering retail investors through equitable fundraising. Solayer, a blockchain innovator with $350M+ in TVL, is offering 3% of its governance token supply via Buidlpad to foster community engagement and align interests for long-term growth.

SOLANA PUSHES VALIDATORS TO TEST EARLY 'FIREDANCER' UPGRADE

Solana is accelerating the testing phase of Firedancer, a highly-anticipated Jump Crypto-developed client upgrade that promises one million transactions per second, by requiring a supermajority of testnet validators to run Frankendancer, an early hybrid version, by week's end. The Solana Foundation is utilizing its delegation program to incentivize validator adoption, threatening to revoke delegated stake from non-compliant validators. However, early adopters report stability challenges with the new client.

A BITCOIN L2 THESIS

Bitcoin L2s have a compelling case to address a larger market than Ethereum L2s, primarily since they must provide scaling and programmability while ETH L2s only focus on scaling. Since security will be more critical and differentiated, they will capture conservative and risk-seeking capital due to Bitcoin L1's limited programmability. Some of the most promising Bitcoin roll ups will use zero-knowledge technology for enhanced security and scaling.

MEGAETH VS MONAD VS HYPERLIQUID: WHO LEADS IN INSTANT BLOCKCHAIN TRANSACTIONS?

MegaETH, Monad, and Hyperliquid are pushing blockchain's boundaries, each vying to lead in instant transactions with innovative architectures. This comparison breaks down their strengths (MegaETH's real-time Layer 2 speed, Hyperliquid's financial market focus, and Monad's decentralized parallel execution), highlighting how each addresses blockchain scalability and performance.

COMMENTARY ON COINBASE ACCOUNT FREEZES, BANKING ESCALATIONS, AND CUSTOMER RISK

This thread unpacks a rare, public example of a financial institution's escalation process, sparked by a crypto VC's account freeze and swift resolution. It dives into how financial systems bucket users, the complexities of servicing “sophisticated” clients, and why high-risk options remain tightly controlled despite user demand.

IT'S STILL A BULL MARKET RELAX

In this post, Kane, founder of Infinex and Synthetix, provides an in-depth overview of crypto projects he is focused on at the start of 2025 (e.g., Infinex, Synthetix, Echo, Ethereum, and Solana, among others), highlighting their development progress, use cases, and future potential. He also shares predictions for the broader crypto market, anticipating significant growth in Bitcoin, Ethereum, and onchain activity while emphasizing the need for continued innovation and participation in the space.

COINBASE WALLET USERS CAN NOW USE APPLE PAY

Coinbase Wallet users based in the US can now use Apple Pay to purchase tokens for their wallet.

BASE IS DOING MORE VOLUME THAN ETH MAINNET

Base is outperforming Ethereum Mainnet in daily trading volume ($2.3B vs. $2.2B), with Aerodrome generating more ETH and BTC trading volume than all top Mainnet Uniswap pools combined, despite having only one-tenth the TVL.

INSIGHTFUL PODCAST FROM KAIN AND MARC

In a recent podcast, Kain and Marc discuss Ethereum's strong fundamentals, its lagging price, and how Layer 2 tokens are diluting ETH liquidity.

THE BEST BTC YIELDS MEGATHREAD

One of the highest yield opportunities for Bitcoin right now is through Pendle Finance's Berachain product, where users can opt to earn Bera points or fixed yield.

HOW TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF NARRATIVES

This post outlines the lifecycle of market narratives, starting from early innovation and gaining mindshare to market booms, retracements, hype peaks, and eventual stability.

PUMA POUNCES ON TIGER WOODS' LOGO DESIGN IN NEW LAWSUIT

Tiger Woods' new brand, Sun Day Red, which features a tiger logo with fifteen stripes, is facing a legal challenge from Puma that claims the logo is too similar to its leaping Puma design. This lawsuit follows an earlier infringement claim by cooling product company Tigeraire, though Puma's case is considered more serious due to the overlapping sportswear market. Both instances highlight the fine line between inspiration and infringement. Woods' brand could face a trial next year if no settlement is reached.

MICROSOFT ROLLS BACK ITS BING IMAGE CREATOR MODEL AFTER USERS COMPLAIN OF DEGRADED QUALITY

Bing Image Creator was updated with OpenAI's DALL-E 3 (PR16) model for faster, higher-quality image generation. However, user complaints about unrealistic, cartoonish images led to a rollback to the previous model. Microsoft acknowledged the issues and plans to revert to PR13 until improvements are made, highlighting challenges in real-world model evaluation.

YANKO DESIGN BEST OF CES 2025: EMPOWERING PEOPLE TO LIVE BETTER LIVES WITH AI

AI remains a dominant force at CES 2025. The technology is being integrated subtly into products and processes to enhance smart home features, language translation, and personal growth. The event showcased innovations demonstrating how AI when used effectively, can empower healthier, richer, and more meaningful lives.

THE BEST ADVICE TO BRING TO WORK IN 2025

Industry leaders from Ableton, Snapchat, and Coda share insights on team management and creativity. They stress the significance of seeking inspiration beyond design and prioritizing user experience over extensive tutorials to empower users as creators. They also differentiate between meeting types, highlighting the importance of balancing cadence, catalyst, and context meetings to enhance productivity.

DELL SHOULD HAVE COPIED APPLE'S BRANDING YEARS AGO

Dell is replacing its Inspiron, XPS, and Latitude lines with a simplified naming system: Dell, Dell Pro, and Dell Pro Max, which were inspired by Apple's tiered approach. The change aims to boost sales amid an 18% decline. Dell will focus on AI-ready PCs and easier-to-navigate options for customers.

IS IT JUST ME OR DOES LENOVO'S ROLLABLE LAPTOP DESIGN LOOK A LITTLE RIDICULOUS?

Lenovo's ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable AI PC, unveiled at CES, features a rollable screen, which has sparked mixed reactions from tech enthusiasts. While the super-tall display design draws attention, opinions remain divided on its practicality and appeal.

CREATE COMPLEX INTERACTIVE ANIMATIONS

Kinesis.js offers a suite of components for creating engaging animations and transformations based on user interactions, such as mouse movements, scroll events, and even audio input.