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THOUGHTS BY A NON-ECONOMIST ON AI AND ECONOMICS

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ENABLING TRILLION-PARAMETER MODELS ON AWS EFA

Perplexity published code enabling trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts models to run efficiently across multiple AWS servers for the first time, opening up less advanced data centers to AI inference. The challenge is that large models, even many open weights models, are too large to fit on single servers, but AWS' networking hardware was too slow for the constant inter-server communication these models require.

STRUCTURED OUTPUT IN GEMINI API

Google enhanced the Gemini API with expanded JSON Schema support and improved property ordering, making structured outputs more reliable for use in multi-agent workflows and database tasks.

PINTEREST CEO TOUTS OPEN SOURCE AI: ‘TREMENDOUS PERFORMANCE' WITH REDUCED COSTS

Pinterest plans to move forward with open source models for its various use cases. They come at a fraction of the cost of the larger model providers, and they deliver value to users effectively. The company will be observing user feedback to see if people actually want AI shopping agents before implementing them. The company is planning to roll out personalized boards curated with AI.

SNAP AND PERPLEXITY SIGN $400 MILLION DEAL TO PUT AI SEARCH DIRECTLY IN SNAPCHAT

Perplexity, an AI search engine, will appear directly in Snapchat sometime in early 2026. It will become a prominent part of Snapchat's 'chat' interface. Perplexity is paying Snap $400 million for the integration. Snap may pursue similar partnerships with other AI companies.

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OPENAI CALLS FOR $1T INVESTMENT TO SECURE US AI LEADERSHIP

The US risks losing its AI leadership due to energy shortages, threatening economic growth and technological advances.

HOW TWO SILICON VALLEY A-LISTERS BECAME BILLIONAIRES BY REMAKING CUSTOMER SERVICE WITH AI

Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor started Sierra, a $10 billion startup that builds AI customer service agents, in 2023.

A SHORT LESSON IN SIMPLER PROMPTS

You can build much shorter, more effective prompts by working with AI models instead of fighting them and balancing AI with plain old engineering.

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GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN CONTINUES RISK OF DERAILING CRYPTO BILL

The US government shutdown reached a record 36 days on Wednesday, potentially delaying budget dealmaking and further pushing out crypto market structure legislation. Policy experts predict that a markup by Thanksgiving remains possible, but passage by the end of 2025 is unlikely, with legislation more likely moving through both houses by the end of 2026, as furloughed government experts leave fewer people capable of crafting legislative language. Patrick Witt, White House executive director of the President's Council of Advisors for Digital Assets, maintains optimism that Trump still wants the bill by end of 2025 and argued the shutdown paradoxically helped by allowing more time to engage lawmakers on substance "in a way that we might not have otherwise been able to, had there been a bunch of other competing priorities."

RLUSD TO POWER MASTERCARD SETTLEMENTS ON XRP LEDGER

Ripple partnered with Mastercard, WebBank, and Gemini to pilot RLUSD stablecoin settlement for credit card transactions on the XRP Ledger, potentially marking the first time a regulated US bank settles fiat card payments via stablecoin on a public blockchain. RLUSD launched in December 2024 under a New York Trust Charter with full cash backing and surpassed $1 billion in circulation, aiming to replace traditional 1-3 day settlement rails with near-instant blockchain settlement while maintaining compliance. WebBank, issuer of the Gemini Credit Card, will explore settling Mastercard transactions using RLUSD, with onboarding beginning in the coming months, pending regulatory approvals.

MONAD SETS NOV. 24 FOR MAINNET LAUNCH AND MON AIRDROP

Monad will officially launch its Layer 1 blockchain and native MON token on November 24 at 9 AM ET, marking one of the most anticipated network debuts of the year. The launch includes a massive airdrop designed to reward thousands of early community members and ~225,000 verified users across major crypto protocols, including Aave, Uniswap, Hyperliquid, Morpho, Pump.fun, and Virtuals, as well as long-term NFT holders and DAO participants.

ETHEREUM ECOSYSTEM HITS 19,000 TPS AS ZK ROLLUPS GO LIVE

Ethereum's ecosystem just reached a record 19,083 transactions per second (TPS), driven primarily by high-performance ZK rollups like Lighter, which alone contributed 4,782 TPS. Other major contributors include Base (139.8 TPS), Arbitrum (75 TPS), and Unichain (35.7 TPS), bringing total live throughput to over 5,100 TPS at press time. What was once dismissed as “ETH maxi fantasy” - scalable, secure ZK rollups - is now a reality in production, marking the arrival of Ethereum's high-throughput era.

ASYMMETRY IN CRYPTO

Asymmetric outcomes in crypto are disappearing due to four structural problems - 90%+ of assets are speculative with no compounding, October 10's $40 billion in OI liquidations exposed market structure risks deterring institutions, daily token launches fragment liquidity, and high launch valuations price perfection - leaving minimal upside for public market investors. The optimal strategy is no longer narrative chasing, but instead new asymmetric plays: farming, acquiring equity stakes in blockchain-enabled businesses, buying exchange tokens as the "only investable assets" positioned for power-law returns, and gem hunting for dirt-cheap assets with genuine value accrual mechanisms. Everyone knows the current meta is broken, but they continue repeating failed strategies. True asymmetry now requires completely different positioning than the crowd.

EMERGENCE: LET A BILLION APIS COMPOSE

Agentic emergence requires the long tail of APIs with x402 that enable LLMs to compose thousands to billions of addressable, payable building blocks. Current bottlenecks include human-gated API keys and billing that force platforms like OpenAI to curate a few integrations while ignoring the long tail, but x402's protocol for attaching stablecoin payments to any web request removes this constraint by letting intelligence do the composition instead of developers writing glue code. Merit Systems is building three components to foster emergence: The Terminal (turns open-source TODOs into funded work), Echo (model router with user-pays metering), and x402/x402scan (standard for addressing/paying web resources plus discovery index), with ecosystem support from Coinbase, Cloudflare, Vercel, Visa, and Stripe.

OPENFX HITS $34B TPV AS CROSS-BORDER PAYMENTS SURGE

OpenFX has reached an annualized $34B in total payments volume (TPV) after adding $14B in October alone, more than its previous five months combined. The firm's rapid growth is fueled by its Latin American expansion, including corridors in Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia, where 86% of transactions now settle in under 10 minutes despite volatile FX and regulatory conditions. OpenFX distinguishes its platform from “instant settlement” competitors by proving real institutional-scale settlements in minutes, not hours. Next, the company is expanding into Southeast Asia (Hong Kong, Singapore, and the Philippines) in Q1 2026, applying its deep liquidity, local rail integrations, and automated treasury model.

SOLANA'S VALIDATOR COUNT FALLS SHARPLY AS ETHEREUM EXPANDS

Solana's validator count has dropped over 60%, falling from roughly 2,500 in early 2023 to under 900 today, raising fresh concerns about the network's decentralization and security. The decline, down 33% year-to-date, reflects rising hardware costs, high bandwidth demands, and limited economic incentives for smaller validators. In contrast, Ethereum continues to grow its validator base, now nearing 1 million active validators, securing billions in real economic activity and attracting new entrants daily. While some chains scale by compromising decentralization, Ethereum's modular architecture allows it to scale through L2s without sacrificing security, reinforcing its position as the world's trusted settlement layer.

ETHEREUM DOMINATES BLOCKCHAIN LIQUIDITY

Ethereum leads all blockchains by a massive margin, with $599 billion in total app capital, over 7x more than Tron ($84B) and 11x more than Solana ($53B).

LIGHTER PUSHES ETHEREUM TOWARD 350K TPS SETTLEMENT CAPACITY

Ethereum's leading high-performance ZK rollup consumes just 1.46 bytes of blobspace per transaction, meaning it could theoretically settle 45,000 TPS on Ethereum today.

AAVE, ETHENA, AND PENDLE FORGE DEFI'S MOST POWERFUL YIELD ALLIANCE

Aave, Ethena, and Pendle have formed DeFi's most synergistic alliance, combining floating, fixed, and leveraged yields into a self-sustaining flywheel that's driving billions in TVL and record capital efficiency.

BALANCER RELEASES PRELIMINARY POST-MORTEM REPORT

FANS ARE SERIOUSLY OVERREACTING TO APPLE'S 'NEW' 3D LOGO

Apple's stacked, colorful logo for its Apple One subscription service has sparked criticism online, with some calling it ugly and childish. The playful design utilizes wooden block-like pieces to represent bundled services. Critics claim that Apple's design team lacks coherence. Defenders argue the colorful approach is a harmless departure from Apple's typically minimal aesthetic and echoes the company's retro rainbow logo.

I'M ABSOLUTELY LOVING THE AFFINITY REBRAND

Affinity recently launched a free, unified suite of three apps alongside a bold new brand identity. The rebrand, created with input from Affinity, Canva, and the design community, emphasizes creativity and attitude. It features a distinctive logo, custom typeface, playful campaign assets, and even a quirky file-naming convention, reflecting a fresh, irreverent approach that aligns with its “for creatives, by creatives” motto.

APPLE HAS LAUNCHED AN UPDATED WEB INTERFACE FOR THE APP STORE

Apple has revamped its App Store website into a central hub for exploring apps across all its platforms. The new design unifies search and browsing and offers curated collections and category filters, but still doesn't allow direct downloads from the web.

WHY I DON'T TEST DIFFERENT DESIGNS AT THE SAME TIME

Testing two designs simultaneously creates problems, such as unclear results, contaminated data from participants learning between versions, and requiring three times as many participants. Test one properly-designed version, identify its problems, and fix them rather than conducting comparative evaluations. This approach is presented as more efficient since differences that seem significant to designers often appear identical to users, making comparative testing unnecessary.

THE TIKTOK MODEL IS THE FUTURE OF THE WEB

The TikTok model of algorithmic content curation is spreading beyond social media, threatening to replace active searching with passive consumption of personalized feeds across the entire web. These algorithms prioritize company profits and engagement over user benefit, creating addictive dopamine loops while eroding shared cultural experiences and trapping users in filter bubbles. Users can resist this future by taking control of their digital experience through changing default settings, deleting exploitative apps, using ad blockers, and actively curating their own content.

KNOW THIS, DESIGNERS – YOUR WORK IS ACTUALLY A HUGE INCONVENIENCE

Working in branding is as much about navigating the complex journey of bringing an idea to life as it is about the idea itself. True success comes from partnering with clients, understanding the business landscape, building consensus, adapting to challenges, and protecting the creative work through a long, often unglamorous process, so that when a rebrand finally launches, it thrives because it was fought for and supported every step of the way.

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AI VIDEO DREAMS THAT YOU CAN INTERACT WITH

Odyssey-2 is a frontier interactive video model that enables an AI-generated video that you can interact with.

THE SCOPE CREEP PROJECT

The Scope Creep is a digital experience that transforms the horrors of creative project management into an interactive fiction experience.

DANISH FOOTBALL BRANDING: IDENTITY AND VISUALS

The Danish women's football league has rebranded to elevate the sport, focusing on the game rather than gender. The rename, alongside a modular visual identity inspired by pitch lines and emotions on the field, is aimed at creating a proud, independent brand that appeals to fans and sponsors alike.

THE SHORTEST PATH FROM THOUGHT TO ACTION

Fitts' Law, originating from Paul Fitts' 1954 experiments on motor control, predicts that target acquisition time increases with distance and decreases with size. Initially foundational for mouse- and pointer-based interfaces, it now informs mobile ergonomics, touch targets, gesture-based spatial computing, and even voice and neural interfaces. Across all modalities, the core principle endures: design should minimize the effort—physical, cognitive, or emotional—between user intent and system response, making interactions feel seamless and natural.

ILLUSTRATION FINALLY GETS THE LONDON SHOWCASE IT DESERVES

The Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration will open in May 2026 in Clerkenwell, London.

AT THE MINDCRAFT PROJECT 2025 NATURE IS THE ULTIMATE DESIGNER

The Mindcraft Exhibition 2025 in Copenhagen featured 10 Danish designers who explored nature's underlying systems—geometry, balance, and physics—rather than just its aesthetic qualities.

NEW BOOK SHOWS HOW QUESTIONING THE ALPHABET CAN PUSH TYPOGRAPHY FURTHER

“Alphabetical Playground” by Nigel Cottier reframes the alphabet as a flexible, exploratory system rather than a fixed tool for communication.

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NOT SO "MINI"-DUMPS: HOW WE FOUND MISSING CRASHES ON STEAMOS

Sentry improved its game engine SDKs to capture crash reports from Windows games running on Linux via Wine/Proton, addressing a problem where crash reports were missing from Steam Deck. The issue came from Wine's Thread Environment Block (TEB) implementation, which caused Crashpad to capture excessively large stack regions in minidumps exceeding Sentry's size limit. Sentry's solution involved switching Crashpad to use the stack pointer (SP) instead of the TEB for stack capture, which accurately reflects used memory.

SUPERCHARGING THE ML AND AI DEVELOPMENT EXPERIENCE AT NETFLIX WITH METAFLOW

Netflix's Spin is a new Metaflow functionality that accelerates ML/AI development by enabling notebook-like iteration within production-ready workflows. Spin treats each `@step` as a checkpoint boundary that automatically persists state, allowing developers to resume execution from any point and iterate quickly without losing continuity.

HOW TO MANAGE CONTEXT IN AI CODING WORKFLOWS

Successful AI coding requires context engineering over prompt engineering, which means building systems that reliably provide AI with the right information automatically. The key is co-locating mandatory context (like `CLAUDE.md`, `README.md`, or system design docs) directly in your repository while centralizing access to distributed info through a single tool.

WHY STARTUPS CHOOSE REACT (AND WHEN YOU SHOULDN'T)

React dominates startup funding, capturing 88.6% of the $2.85 billion raised by software startups in 2025, despite the availability of alternative frameworks like Vue, Angular, and Svelte. While React's massive ecosystem provides significant advantages, with over 1 million active projects compared to competitors' 100K-128K, approximately 85% of projects across all framework ecosystems end up abandoned on GitHub. Interestingly, smaller frameworks like Svelte show better project survival rates (36.1% vs React's 20.7% for quality projects).

WHY YOUR BEST ENGINEERS ARE INTERVIEWING ELSEWHERE

High engineering turnover stems from executives being out of touch with on-the-ground realities due to hierarchical information filtering. This filtering prevents executives from addressing engineer concerns like overruled technical judgments, accumulating technical debt, and meaningless work, leading to disengagement and costly replacements. To combat this, it's best to have regular skip-level conversations between executives and engineers to bypass filtering and act on engineer feedback, which is cheaper than the costs associated with high turnover.

THE LEARNING LOOP AND LLMS

Software development is fundamentally a learning process that cannot be automated away, even with advanced LLMs. While LLMs can be helpful for brainstorming and reducing initial setup friction, they cannot replace the essential learning loop of observing, experimenting, and applying knowledge that developers must go through to build real expertise. True learning requires hands-on experience with failures and discoveries that AI cannot provide.

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