Uber in Talks With Its Founder, Travis Kalanick, to Fund Self-Driving Car Deal (5 minute read)
Uber is in talks with Travis Kalanick, the company's co-founder, to help fund his acquisition of the US subsidiary of Chinese autonomous vehicle company Pony.ai. Kalanick was forced out of Uber in a boardroom coup eight years ago - after, he founded CloudKitchens, where he will remain if the deal goes through. Pony.ai has permits to operate robot taxis and trucks in the US and China. Kalanick will run Pony.ai if the deal is completed. |
Google begins rolling out AI search on YouTube (3 minute read)
Google has been transforming its web search into a zero-click experience with AI, and now, the same focus is coming to YouTube. Select searches on YouTube will now return a collection of relevant videos with AI-generated summaries. Each summary will extract the information most related to users' search queries, so they may not even have to watch the videos. The AI results carousel is currently being tested with YouTube Premium subscribers and is entirely opt-in. |
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Science & Futuristic Technology |
The Failures and Futures of Cancer Vaccines (10 minute read)
The cancer vaccine field has yet to become a systematic science despite decades of work. This article speculates on why the field has failed and the next-gen approaches worth looking out for. One of the core problems in cancer vaccine development lies in the nature of neoantigens, which are often overwhelmingly similar to normal cellular proteins. The field has had some tentative early successes in pancreatic cancer, kidney cancer, and a range of solid tumors. There is potential for a startup to outcompete incumbents by exploring novel target areas outside of the field's almost singular focus on single nucleotide variants. |
The first non-opioid painkiller (11 minute read)
The FDA approved Vertex Pharmaceuticals' Journavx (suzetrigine), the first non-opioid pain reliever suitable for treating post-surgery pain, in January. Clinical trials found that patients didn't show any of the problematic side effects associated with opioids. Unlike opioids, Journavx doesn't meaningfully interact with the brain - it instead targets a specific sodium ion channel found almost exclusively on peripheral nociceptors (pain-sensing neurons), blocking them from sending pain signals to the brain. The drug is a product of 27 years of research and billions of dollars. |
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Programming, Design & Data Science |
Magnitude (GitHub Repo)
Magnitude is an AI browser automation framework that uses vision AI to enable users to control their browsers with natural language. It can navigate and interact with any interface and extract useful structured data. Magnitude has a built-in test runner with powerful visual assertions for verification. The framework can be used to automate tasks on the web, integrate between apps without APIs, extract data, test web apps, or as a building block for browser agents. |
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Scale AI's Spam, Security Woes Plagued the Company While Serving Google (9 minute read)
Scale AI's long relationship with Google was fraught with lapses in security protocols for at least 11 months between March 2023 and April 2024. Scale AI's efforts to train Google AI programs were meant to be exclusively staffed by experts in various specialties, but the program instead became flooded by spammers who abused the system by submitting transparently shoddy work that managed to evade detection. The spammers were often paid because it was too difficult to detect them due to their sheer numbers. |
I Fought in Ukraine and Here's Why FPV Drones Kind of Suck (18 minute read)
FPV drones are unmanned aerial vehicles commonly used in the Ukraine war to deliver and detonate explosive charges of up to 1.5 kilograms. While they are touted as a cheap and accessible solution for precision strikes, their actual success rate, when including pre-aborted missions, is between 20 to 30 percent. These drones are rarely successful because they are often more expensive than other options, hard to use, susceptible to electronic interference, and most don't have night-vision capabilities, which is important for a battlefield that's in the dark for 14 hours a day. |
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