TLDR 2025-01-14

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Chinese social media app RedNote is at the top of Apple's app store. RedNote is often thought of as the Chinese equivalent of Instagram. The company was founded in 2013 and had about 300 million monthly active users in July 2024. It was valued at $17 billion in July - it has raised over $900 million in total funding and has more than 2,000 employees. Many TikTok creators are rushing to find an alternative platform where they can keep posting videos while waiting to see what happens with TikTok, which faces a potential ban on January 19.

Chinese officials are evaluating a potential option that involves Elon Musk acquiring the US operations of TikTok. The plan involves X taking control of the platform and running the businesses together. It is unclear whether Musk, TikTok, or ByteDance have held any talks about the terms of any possible deal. TikTok may no longer be in ByteDance's sole control. Chinese officials recognize that they will face tough negotiations with the Trump administration, so they see the TikTok negotiations as a potential area for reconciliation.

Starlink, now available in more than 100 countries, is cheaper than the leading fixed internet service provider in at least five of the 16 African countries where the service is available. The company does not offer fixed rates - it instead adjusts prices to reflect market conditions. Its satellites are able to provide services where ground-based internet infrastructure is sparse or nonexistent. Starlink has disrupted the existing internet service provider industry in Kenya, where it became so popular that the company had to pause new subscriptions due to network overload.

Blue Origin was scheduled to lift off yesterday morning but the mission was scrubbed right before it was scheduled to launch. The company is now troubleshooting a vehicle subsystem issue and reviewing opportunities for its next launch. Blue Origin still has until January 16 to launch before the currently approved launch window elapses. Its New Glenn rocket has faced many setbacks during its over a decade of development.

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JAX is a high-performance numerical computing library with a NumPy-like API. While many PyTorch users have heard about JAX, there are not that many straightforward, easy-to-follow tutorials. This tutorial helps readers understand the basics of JAX by connecting its concepts to PyTorch building blocks. It explores the basics of the JAX ecosystem from the PyTorch user and guides users through how to train a simple neural network with JAX and PyTorch.

o1 is not a chat model - it's like a report generator: give it enough context, tell it what you want outputted, and it'll often nail the solution in one shot. People often approach chat models by starting with a simple question and some context, iterating back and forth until the desired output is achieved. o1 needs as much context as possible otherwise it will just take questions at face value and won't try to pull context from the user. The most effective way to use o1 is to treat o1 like a new hire, give it as much context as possible, and focus on explaining what you want the output to be.

Automattic has announced that it will restrict its contributions to the open source version of WordPress - it will now put in about 45 hours a week in total, down from nearly 4,000 a week. The company is aiming to match the estimated hourly contributions of WP Engine as a response to WP Engine's legal response after actions by WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg. While usually, having the community take the lead would be fine, Mullenweg has the final say over some very important parts of the WordPress community. While it is fair for Automattic to focus on for-profit projects, Mullenweg still holds all the keys to WordPress. A fork is possible, but it will require new community-driven infrastructure.

Nvidia's Project Digits will be powered by DGX OS, a customized Ubuntu Linux 22.04 distro. The desktop combines Nvidia's Blackwell GPU with a 20-core Grace CPU built on the Arm architecture. It can develop up to 1 petaflop of AI performance at FP4 precision and support 200-billion-parameter large language models. Nvidia's partnership with MediaTek will likely lead to a new generation of AI-powered PCs with significantly enhanced capabilities.

The new regulations set specific numerical limits on AI chip exports, with first-tier countries facing no restrictions.

This article contains a transcript of a podcast where CEO of Amazon Web Services Matt Garman talks about AI and Amazon.

Former Meta engineering chief Jay Parikh will lead Microsoft's new CoreAI – Platform and Tools division, which will combine the company's Dev, Div, and AI platform teams together with some employees on the Office of the CTO team to develop an AI platform and tools.

Google's search market share seems to be fairly consistent in most regions except Asia.

It has keyboard controls and should work on most browsers.

Humans learn by doing - AI short circuits the process and this could slowly erode our ability to think differently.