OpenAI Nearly Doubles Valuation to $157 Billion in Funding Round (4 minute read)
OpenAI has raised $6.6 billion in new funding, with investors valuing the startup at $157 billion. Investors in the round include Thrive Capital, Microsoft, SoftBank, and Nvidia. The startup was last valued at $86 billion early this year. Investors have the right to withdraw their money if OpenAI fails to convert to a for-profit company within two years.
|
Did Apple Just Kill Social Apps? (6 minute read)
iOS 18 will allow users to select which contacts to share with an app instead of revealing their entire address book. Apple doesn't think the change will hurt developers, but some startups have seen contact sharing drop significantly since the iOS 18 change. The ability to quickly connect new users with friends can mean the difference between success and failure for apps. This change could mean friend-based social apps may eventually be replaced by apps like TikTok which show users content based on what they like rather than who they're connected to.
|
|
Science & Futuristic Technology
|
Google is taking its rivalry with OpenAI to another level (2 minute read)
Teams at Google have made progress on software for AI models with humanlike reasoning abilities in recent months. The company is using chain-of-thought prompting, which allows large language models to solve multistep problems using a series of intermediate reasoning steps, to give models the ability to solve more complex math- and company-programming-related inquiries. OpenAI's new o1 model also uses chain-of-thought prompting. Google employees were worried last year that the company had fallen behind in the AI race, but they are now less concerned now that Google has unveiled more products to compete with.
|
Largest brain map ever reveals fruit fly's neurons in exquisite detail (5 minute read)
Researchers now have a map of the brain of a single female fruit fly that includes nearly 140,000 neurons and captures more than 54.5 million synapses. The map was described in a package of nine papers by a consortium known as FlyWire, which is co-led by neuroscientists Mala Murthy and Sebastian Seung at Princeton University in New Jersey. It has been in development for more than four years. The map shows how neurons connect through chemical synapses but doesn't offer any information about electrical connectivity between neurons or how neurons chemically communicate outside synapses.
|
|
Programming, Design & Data Science
|
Pipet (GitHub Repo)
Pipet is a tool for scraping and extracting data from online assets. Made for hackers, the command line-based web scraper supports HTML parsing, JSON parsing, and client-side JavaScript emulation. It can be used to track shipments, receive notifications, monitor stock prices, and much more.
|
We need more zero config tools (3 minute read)
This blog post lists several command-line tools that just work out-of-the-box. These include Fish, Helix, Lazygit, and Zellij. Developers should strive to make the default experience of their apps work really well for most people.
|
|
Automattic demanded a cut of WP Engine's revenue before starting WordPress battle (3 minute read)
Automattic asked WP Engine to hand over 8% of its revenue each month in a deal sent on September 20. WP Engine was given the choice to pay the 8% cut as a royalty fee to Automattic or as salaries for WP Engine employees who would contribute to the WordPress.org open-source project. It didn't accept the proposal as it believes that its use of the WordPress trademark and 'WP' abbreviations meet fair use guidelines. Automattic says that the main issue is over trademarks, not the use of open source software.
|
How North Korea Infiltrated the Crypto Industry (28 minute read)
North Korean IT workers infiltrating tech companies rake in as much as $600 million annually for the regime. Hiring and paying the workers, even inadvertently, violates UN sanctions and is illegal in the US and in numerous other countries. These workers have been aggressively targeting crypto companies in particular. More than a dozen crypto companies have admitted to accidentally hiring workers from North Korea who used fake IDs, successfully navigated interviews, passed reference checks, and presented genuine work histories.
|
|
TinyJS (GitHub Repo)
TinyJS is a JavaScript library that allows developers to generate any standard HTML tag programmatically, apply properties, append content, and select DOM elements with ease.
|
Offline UX Patterns (10 minute read)
This post discusses how to allow users to do as much as possible when offline even when everything the user does in an app is related to an API request.
|
|
|
Love TLDR? Tell your friends and get rewards!
|
|
Share your referral link below with friends to get free TLDR swag!
|
|
|
|
|
Track your referrals here.
|
|
Want to advertise in TLDR? 📰
|
If your company is interested in reaching an audience of tech executives, decision-makers and engineers, you may want to advertise with us.
If you have any comments or feedback, just respond to this email!
Thanks for reading,
Dan Ni & Stephen Flanders
|
|
|
|