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NEW NANOPARTICLE MRNA VACCINE MAY BE CHEAPER AND 100 TIMES MORE POWERFUL

Researchers at MIT have developed a new lipid nanoparticle that enhances the effectiveness of an mRNA vaccine by a hundred times compared to stand-alone effectiveness in mice. The system could be used to develop vaccines for a number of diseases, including COVID-19 and influenza. By increasing potency and reducing cost per dosage, the system could become an inexpensive way to combat many infectious diseases. It could also help improve the efficacy of some vaccines.

BUILDING MORE WITH GPT-5.1-CODEX-MAX

GPT‑5.1-Codex-Max is a new frontier agentic coding model from OpenAI. It is much faster, more intelligent, and more token-efficient at every stage of the development cycle. The model is built for long-running, detailed work. It is available in Codex today. API access is coming soon.

PYREFLY

Pyrefly is a type checker and language server for Python that provides lightning-fast type checking and IDE features. It can infer types in most locations and understand a program's control flow to refine static types. Pyrefly aims for large-scale incrementality at the module level. It is under active development with known issues.

COMPANIES ARE WARMING UP TO SAYING AI IS THE REASON FOR JOB CUTS

AI was referenced in roughly a fifth of total job cuts announced in the US last month. Executives have been touting efficiency gains from AI as a reason for a shrinking or flat workforce. Even when companies aren't saying AI helps eliminate jobs, they are mentioning it as a reason to raise the bar on new hires. There is still some uncertainty about how useful AI tools are and how to fit them into daily work - if tech firms can ease that uncertainty, it may open the door to wider corporate AI adoption.

THE FTC'S META ANTITRUST IMPLOSION

Meta worked to make Instagram and WhatsApp successful by improving their design and increasing their revenue. The company has been forced to evolve in response to competition, increasing smartphone usage, and a massive leap in AI-powered algorithms. To prove that Meta holds a monopoly would require proving that TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, and X aren't real competitors. Meta's enormous profits aren't evidence of monopoly power.

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EPIC GAMES ANNOUNCES SWEEPING CROSS-PLATFORM COLLAB' BRINGING UNITY'S GAMES AND COMMERCE PLATFORM TO FORTNITE

The collaboration will also see Unity bring Unreal Engine support to its platform.

NVIDIA SAYS THERE'S ‘NO ASSURANCE' OF FINAL AGREEMENT WITH OPENAI DESPITE $100 BILLION PACT

Despite the uncertainty of the agreement, Nvidia executives continue to sound bullish on the company's work with OpenAI.

MOJO-V

Mojo-V is a new RISC-V extension that implements secret computation, enabling secure, efficient, and data-oblivious execution.

NETFLIX'S WARNER BROS. BID WOULD INCLUDE THEATER RELEASES

Netflix will continue releasing Warner Bros. films in theaters if it is successful in buying the company.

BITTER ECONOMICS

AGI will reduce a massively broad class of technical problems to a simple matter of economics.

DELIVERY APP TIPPING ISN'T ABOUT FEEDBACK MECHANISMS

Tipping is a tool that delivery companies use to maximize the price paid by consumers.

Code Review (in beta)

BUILDING MORE WITH GPT-5.1-CODEX-MAX

GPT-5.1-Codex-Max is trained to operate across multiple context windows through "compaction", allowing it to work over millions of tokens and complete tasks spanning 24+ hours. The model achieves 77.9% on SWE-bench Verified while using 30% fewer thinking tokens than its predecessor.

ELON MUSK'S XAI IS IN ADVANCED TALKS TO RAISE $15 BILLION, LIFTING VALUATION

xAI is in advanced talks to raise $15 billion in new equity at a $230 billion valuation. The startup has raised billions of dollars to compete with OpenAI and expand the capabilities of its chatbot, Grok. The startup recently lost several senior executives. It was previously valued at $113 billion in March after it acquired social media site X.

GOOGLE HAS YOUR DATA. GEMINI BARELY USES IT

Google is dramatically under-capitalizing on the strongest context position in the industry. Gemini hides its workspace connector in its settings, treating it as an optional enhancement, not the center of the product. This is almost certainly because Google is trying to play it safe. The company has an opportunity to turn its dormant context advantage into experiences that would be impossible anywhere else.

MY GPT-5.1 PRO REVIEW

GPT-5.1 Pro is a slow, heavy-weight reasoning model that feels intelligent and can handle tough problems. It follows instructions well without going off the rails, making it feel like a contract engineer working from a spec rather than an assistant. Its biggest weakness is its interface, as is lives in ChatGPT, not in the IDE. Gemini 3 is still better for most day-to-day work. However, GPT-5.1-Pro wins in deep thought, planning, and research.

HOW EVALS DRIVE THE NEXT CHAPTER IN AI FOR BUSINESSES

OpenAI published a framework arguing that evaluation systems ("evals") are bridge between AI's probabilistic nature and business outcomes that breakdown into three phases: 1) experts defining success, 2) stress-test systems with real-world edge cases, and 3) continuous monitoring to build proprietary datasets that compound into competitive moats.

GEMINI 3 PROMPTING: BEST PRACTICES FOR GENERAL USAGE

Gemini 3 Pro responds best to direct, structured prompts with behavioral constraints placed at the top rather than scattered throughout. Unlike previous versions, it defaults to concise responses unless explicitly asked to be conversational. The model handles long contexts better when instructions appear after data rather than before and treats multimodal inputs as equal-class data requiring explicit cross-modal instructions. It benefits from explicit planning steps with self-critique loops using XML or Markdown formatting.

IT leaders at GitHub, AWS, and Red Hat on the Miro blog.

SCIENTIFIC ML IN PYTORCH

PINA, a new open-source library for Scientific Machine Learning, is now part of the PyTorch ecosystem. It offers a modular, scalable workflow for modeling scientific systems, including PDE solvers and physical simulations.

META OPEN-SOURCES SAM 3 FOR SMARTER SEGMENTATION

Meta open-sourced SAM 3 with major updates to its segmentation model, including support for text and visual prompts. It can now track and segment objects across video, enabling more flexible media workflows.

THE SECRET BEHIND GEMINI 3

The secret behind Gemini 3 is improved pre-training and post training. The pre-training team delivered a massive jump using scaling. Post-training is still a total greenfield. There is a lot of room for algorithm progress and improvement.

“WE'RE IN AN LLM BUBBLE,” HUGGING FACE CEO SAYS—BUT NOT AN AI ONE

Clem Delangue, CEO of Hugging Face, says that the LLM bubble may be bursting next year. However, that doesn't mean that 'AI' will collapse - LLMs are just a subset of AI technology. We are still at the very beginning of AI, and we'll see much more in the next few years. It is more likely that we will end up with a multitude of models that can solve many different problems rather than one type of model that will solve all problems for all companies.

ALPHAXIV RAISES $7M IN FUNDING TO BECOME THE GITHUB OF AI RESEARCH

alphaXiv has raised $7 million in seed funding in a round co-led by Menlo Ventures and Haystack. The startup aims to help engineers transform the latest academic discoveries into cutting-edge AI features by streamlining their paths from research to production. Its platform allows researchers to publish their latest papers, connecting them to engineers who use the knowledge to create new AI features. alphaXiv aims to become the de facto global workspace for AI researchers.

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A FREE VERSION OF CHATGPT BUILT FOR TEACHERS

OpenAI launched ChatGPT for Teachers, offering verified US K–12 educators free access to GPT-5.1 Auto with Google Drive and Microsoft 365 integrations, education-grade security, and admin controls.

INTERNAL DOCUMENTS SHOW HOW MANY PEOPLE ARE USING META'S VIBES AI FEED EACH DAY

Meta's Vibes AI video feed had 2 million daily active users as of early November.

LARRY SUMMERS RESIGNS FROM OPENAI BOARD AMID EPSTEIN REVELATIONS

The Former Treasury Secretary resigned from OpenAI's board following a House panel's release of years of email exchanges with Jeffrey Epstein including messages where Summers appeared to seek relationship advice.

INSTITUTIONS TRIM BTC WHILE SOLANA ETFS KEEP ABSORBING FLOWS

BlackRock's IBIT posted a record $523 million single-day outflow and has now seen $1.43 billion pulled over five days and $2.19 billion over four weeks, as institutions rebalance risk since bitcoin's slide from a $126,080 ATH and ongoing Fed rate and liquidity uncertainty. The selling drove a $372.7 million net outflow across all spot BTC ETFs and similar redemptions from ETH products. Spot Solana ETFs have quietly racked up 16 straight days of inflows totaling $420.4 million, signaling allocators rotating toward higher-yielding altcoin exposure rather than exiting crypto entirely.

KRAKEN CONFIDENTIALLY FILES FOR IPO

Kraken confidentially filed for a US IPO following an $800 million raise at $20 billion valuation, including $200 million from Citadel Securities, with proceeds earmarked for international expansion and payment services buildout. The 2011-founded exchange joins a wave of crypto companies tapping public markets under the Trump administration after Circle's $1 billion June IPO and Bullish and Gemini's listings in August and September. Kraken declined to comment on IPO timing.

HYPERLIQUID UNVEILS HIP-3 GROWTH MODE

Hyperliquid launched HIP-3 growth mode, allowing permissionless market deployment with taker fees slashed over 90% from 0.045% to 0.0045%-0.009%, potentially reaching 0.00144% for top-tier traders at maximum staking and volume tiers. Deployers must set fee scales between 0-1 and avoid overlap with existing validator-operated perpetuals to prevent parasitic volume, with growth mode locking for 30 days once activated to ensure market stability. The upgrade aims to deepen liquidity and broaden asset offerings by lowering barriers to entry for exotic markets, including real-world yields, commodities, and tokenized treasuries, though HYPE token fell 6% below $40.

COINBASE APP CODE APPEARS TO INCLUDE PREDICTION MARKETS AND STOCKS

Coinbase's mobile app code contains interfaces for prediction markets and tokenized stock trading discovered through reverse-engineering by researcher Jane Manchun Wong, with fine print indicating "Prediction markets are offered by Coinbase Financial Markets through KalshiEX LLC" pointing to a Kalshi integration. The features align with Coinbase's July "everything exchange" strategy announcement and the company's December 17 "System Update" event promising new product launches.

HOW SLASH WENT FROM $2M TO $150M ARR IN 24 MONTHS

YIELD-BEARING STABLECOIN LANDSCAPE

The GENIUS Act bifurcates stablecoins into non-yielding Payment Stablecoins and Yield-Bearing Stablecoins (YBS). The YBS label masks fundamentally different risk profiles across three categories: RWA-backed assets like Ondo importing T-bill yields with counterparty risk, onchain native protocols like Ethena's sUSDe generating delta-neutral returns with smart contract and funding rate risk, and actively managed strategies like Maple Finance introducing human underwriting risk. Hyperliquid's USDH exemplifies innovative value capture by keeping the stablecoin non-yielding while directing 95-100% of RWA reserve yields back to the protocol ecosystem, circumventing regulatory restrictions. Current market analysis relying on TVL and APY comparisons fails to capture these disparate qualitative risk vectors.

STABLES ARE NOT STABLE

Stream Finance's collapse in November exposed recursive lending fraud where $1.9 million USDC collateral backed $14.5 million xUSD through systematic fractional reserve expansion, triggering $93 million direct losses and $285 million cross-protocol contagion. The circular dependency with Elixir's deUSD amplified the cascade, with Stream holding 90% of deUSD supply while Elixir concentrated 65% of reserves in loans to Stream via private Morpho vaults, causing deUSD to collapse 98%. Contagion spread to TelosC with $123.64 million exposure, MEV Capital with $25.42 million, and Euler with $137 million bad debt, while yield-bearing stablecoins lost 40-50% TVL industry-wide despite maintaining pegs as users fled indiscriminately. DeFi's fundamental pattern of unsustainable yields, circular dependencies, and oracle failures remains structurally unchanged across five years of documented failures.

SOLANA ETF RACE HEATS UP

21Shares launched its Solana ETF with ticker TSOL on CBOE.

SENATE TARGETS EARLY 2026 VOTE ON CRYPTO MARKET STRUCTURE BILL

Senate Banking Chair Tim Scott says he plans committee markups of a crypto market structure bill next month.

ETH IS ETHEREUM'S TREASURY EXPORT

Just as the US “exports” Treasuries as a global store of value and source of dollar liquidity, Ethereum “exports” ETH as the asset backing its digital rule of law, property rights, and programmable financial system.

BLOCK-ACCESS-LISTS COULD SUPERCHARGE ETHEREUM SCALING

EIP-7928's Block-Access-Lists remove a key verifier bottleneck so blocks can be checked faster and more predictably.

JOE GEBBIA CONFIRMS ROLE AS AMERICA'S FIRST CHIEF DESIGN OFFICER

Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia has officially confirmed his appointment as America's first chief design officer, a role he personally pitched to the Trump administration. Reporting to White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, Gebbia now leads the newly created National Design Studio from an office adjacent to the White House. The position, announced through a Trump executive order in August, focuses on modernizing government websites and improving how Americans interact with federal services.

ADOBE TO ACQUIRE DIGITAL MARKETING PLATFORM SEMRUSH FOR $1.9 BILLION

Adobe is buying Semrush for $1.9 billion to strengthen its AI-enhanced marketing suite with deeper SEO insights and tools for visibility in AI-generated search results. The deal, expected to close in early 2026 pending regulatory and shareholder approval, follows Adobe's abandoned Figma acquisition.

START BUILDING WITH GEMINI 3

Google's Gemini 3 Pro, its most intelligent model to date, surpasses competitors on major AI benchmarks while excelling at coding tasks and agentic workflows. The model powers Google Antigravity, a new agentic development platform that enables developers to collaborate with autonomous AI agents across editor, terminal, and browser environments. Gemini 3 Pro also leads in multimodal understanding, including document analysis, spatial reasoning, and video comprehension. Pricing starts at $2 per million input tokens through the Gemini API.

GOOD VISUAL DESIGN, EXPLAINED

Appealing visual design relies on four core principles: aligning elements to a grid for cohesive layouts, establishing clear typographic hierarchy through strategic sizing, using intentional color palettes (often monochromatic for accessibility), and employing purposeful imagery that conveys brand identity without clutter. Real-site examples from Seed.com, Flamingo Estate, and Figma Shortcut demonstrate how limiting designs to three type sizes and two main colors creates balance and visual hierarchy. These deliberate choices—not chance—form the foundation of beautiful, usable interfaces.

SLOTS IN DESIGN SYSTEMS

Design systems benefit from slots—designated areas within components where custom content can be inserted—which balance fixed constraints with flexible customization options. Slots enable designers and developers to compose content within components like Modals, Cards, and Rows while maintaining consistent surrounding layout and styling, and they can nest across multiple levels from small UI elements up through entire page templates. As Figma adds native slot support, teams face architectural challenges around slot depth, quantity, code alignment, and permissiveness, but thoughtful implementation promises improved flexibility without sacrificing system consistency.