Thursday, August 21, 2025

Pixel 10 📱, Meta AI hiring freeze 💼, AWS myths 👨‍💻

The annual Made by Google event this year was more of a variety show, playing out like a special offbeat episode of The Tonight Show ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ 

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TLDR 2025-08-21

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Big Tech & Startups

Everything announced at Made by Google, including Pixel 10, Pixel Watch 4, and Pixel Buds 2a (8 minute read)

The annual Made by Google event this year was less of a keynote and more of a variety show, playing out like a special offbeat episode of The Tonight Show. The event mostly focused on hardware, but Google spent just as much time hyping up its Gemini AI integrations. This article presents a summary of everything announced at the event, including the new Pixel 10 lineup, the Pixel Watch 4, Pixel Buds 2a, and Gemini AI integrations.
Meta Freezes AI Hiring After Blockbuster Spending Spree (4 minute read)

Meta has stopped hiring for its artificial-intelligence division. The hiring freeze, which went into effect last week, also prohibits current employees from moving across teams inside the division. It is aimed at creating a solid structure for the company's new superintelligence efforts. It is unknown how long the freeze will last.
🚀

Science & Futuristic Technology

Coinbase Bets on The Rise of AI Payments Fueled By Digital Dollars (5 minute read)

Coinbase recently held a Crypto x AI hackathon where about 100 engineers spent the weekend building payment infrastructure with real-world purpose. Developers at the hackathon were encouraged to integrate Coinbase's x402 open-source payment protocol, which is designed to let apps, bots, or machines charge and settle instantly in stablecoins, into their projects. Coinbase wants to build the back-end infrastructure of the AI economy. The US Congress recently passed the first US law regulating stablecoins, giving them a clear legal framework, allowing developers to take them more seriously.
Building a better database to detect designer drugs (5 minute read)

Designer drugs replicate the effects of known, illicit drugs, but evade law enforcement. The variations in chemical structures help them avoid detection, but they also make them unpredictable in the body, which could pose serious health consequences. A research team has used computer modeling to create a database of predicted chemical structures for the improved detection of designer drugs. The database could someday be a publicly available supplement to the current illicit drug mass-spectral databases.
💻

Programming, Design & Data Science

Introduction to AT Protocol (47 minute read)

Bluesky is built on ATProto, or the Authenticated Transfer Protocol. This post explains all of the pieces of the network architecture and how they all fit together. It is aimed at getting readers to better understand how Bluesky and the underlying protocol work and how it differs from the Fediverse. The post is a good starting point for readers who want to start building apps or tools on ATProto.
AWS in 2025: The Stuff You Think You Know That's Now Wrong (7 minute read)

AWS is almost twenty years old, and many things have changed over the years. Even experienced veterans may find it hard to track all of the changes, and it's very easy to stumble upon outdated blog posts that talk about how things used to be. This post collects some of these changes to help keep developers current. It covers changes to EC2, S3, networking, Lambda, EFS, EBS, DynamoDB, cost saving vehicles, authentication, and more.
🎁

Miscellaneous

Economics and AI take off (9 minute read)

Many people believe that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI), and fully general humanoid robotics are just around the corner. We are at the cusp of a revolution poised to increase GDP by many times over. While nearly everyone will benefit substantially from the widespread use of AGI, a tiny minority will increase their productivity by a factor of hundreds or thousands. This creates the potential for out-of-equilibrium economic shifts.
ChatGPT is sending less traffic to websites – down 52% in a month (2 minute read)

Referral traffic from ChatGPT to websites is down 52% since July 2021. Wikipedia, Reddit, and Tech Radar account for 22% of all citations. Branded websites are losing visibility and millions of potential referable clicks as ChatGPT now seems to favor a handful of 'answer-first' sources. Brands that don't provide real answers could be squeezed out of ChatGPT answers.

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Code Review Can Be Better (4 minute read)

One of the primary issues with the GitHub code review process is poor support for stacked pull requests and interdiff reviews.
OSS Under Attack: Four Lessons in How Trust Gets Exploited (4 minute read)

The convenience of open source software comes with the hidden cost of supply chain security risks.
OpenAI CFO Sees Firm Selling AI Infrastructure Service in Future (3 minute read)

Allowing other businesses to tap into its data centers and physical infrastructure could potentially create a new revenue line that could offset some of OpenAI's immense costs.
try (GitHub Repo)

try allows users to instantly navigate through all of their experiment directories with fuzzy search, smart sorting, and auto-dating without any configuration or dependencies.
Issue counts always go up (1 minute read)

Issues are often solved to a point where the missing functionality is implemented, and then the remaining work is split into smaller issues.
Apple is reportedly making more of its new iPhones in India instead of China (2 minute read)

iPhone sub-assemblies are still mostly produced in China and then shipped to India for final assembly.

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Dan Ni & Stephen Flanders


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