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Shocking VC Success Rate: Over Half of Senior VCs Have Never Had a Successful Deal

2025-07-29

Shocking VC Success Rate: Over Half of Senior VCs Have Never Had a Successful Deal

A report based on data from 12,069 mid-to-senior-level VC professionals at US VC firms from 1996 to 2025 reveals a startling statistic: only 54% of senior VCs have ever been involved in a successful deal. 'Success' is defined as an investment resulting in a pre-unicorn investment in a unicorn, an exit with at least double the initial investment, or a successful IPO. This means nearly half of senior VCs have never had a successful deal, prompting reflection on the industry's success rate.

(www.linkedin.com)

Startup Success Rate Unicorns

China Embraces AI: From Taboo to Toolkit

2025-07-29

China Embraces AI: From Taboo to Toolkit

Unlike Western educators who view AI as a threat, Chinese classrooms are treating it as a skill to be mastered. The global rise of Chinese-developed AI models like DeepSeek fuels national pride. The conversation in Chinese universities has shifted from worrying about academic integrity to fostering AI literacy, productivity, and maintaining a competitive edge. A Stanford University study reveals China leads the world in AI enthusiasm, with 80% of respondents expressing excitement about new AI services. This positive attitude stems from China's long-held belief in technology as a driver of national progress. Universities are integrating AI into teaching, encouraging students to use it as a tool for writing, data analysis, and more, while emphasizing the crucial role of human judgment in achieving optimal results.

(www.technologyreview.com)

AI China-US AI attitudes

Microsoft Edge Launches Copilot Mode: AI-Powered Browsing Reimagined

2025-07-29

Microsoft Edge Launches Copilot Mode: AI-Powered Browsing Reimagined

Microsoft has released Copilot Mode for its Edge browser, an experimental feature leveraging AI to redefine web browsing. Copilot Mode integrates search, chat, and navigation into a single input box, understanding user intent for faster browsing. It analyzes context across open tabs, aiding in comparison, decision-making, and task completion. Copilot supports voice navigation and advanced actions (with user permission) accessing browser history and credentials for enhanced efficiency. Future improvements and features are planned, with the option to disable Copilot Mode in settings.

(blogs.windows.com)

Tech

Samsung Locks Down Bootloaders in One UI 8, Stifling Customization

2025-07-29

Samsung Locks Down Bootloaders in One UI 8, Stifling Customization

The Android modding community is up in arms after discovering Samsung's One UI 8 update removes the bootloader unlock option on many devices. Previously available outside the US, this feature allowed users to install custom ROMs and kernels. Evidence shows this option is gone in One UI 8 beta builds for the Galaxy S25 and stable builds for the Z Fold 7 and Z Flip 7, affecting global users. While Samsung now offers seven years of OS updates, this move prevents users from extending device life or enhancing performance through custom ROMs, a significant blow to those who appreciate deep Android customization.

(www.sammobile.com)

Development

Anker Appears to Be Abandoning Its 3D Printer Business

2025-07-29

Anker Appears to Be Abandoning Its 3D Printer Business

Anker's EufyMake brand has quietly stopped selling its AnkerMake M5 and M5C 3D printers and key accessories, leading to speculation that Anker is abandoning the 3D printing business. While Anker claims sales are paused and future models are possible, the printers are currently unavailable on the website, and critical components like the M5C hotend are also out of stock, leaving users frustrated. This follows Anker's rocky start in 3D printing, with its products plagued by quality issues. In contrast, companies like Creality and Bambu have gained market share through rapid iteration and improvement.

(www.theverge.com)

Hardware

Futurehome's Bait and Switch: Smart Home Devices Now Require Subscriptions

2025-07-29

Futurehome's Bait and Switch: Smart Home Devices Now Require Subscriptions

Smart home company Futurehome is facing backlash after unexpectedly requiring a subscription for basic functionality of its previously one-time-purchase devices. Features like controlling devices, automations, and energy services now necessitate an annual 1,188 NOK (roughly $116.56) fee. This move has angered customers who feel deceived, as core functionality is now locked behind a paywall. While Futurehome claims the subscription covers server costs, users are frustrated by the loss of local control and the potential for future limitations on access, even to features that previously worked offline. The incident sparks a wider conversation about the sustainability and ethics of subscription-based models in the smart home market.

(arstechnica.com)

Tech

Anthropic Implements Weekly Rate Limits for Claude AI Coding Tool

2025-07-29

Anthropic Implements Weekly Rate Limits for Claude AI Coding Tool

Anthropic, an AI company, announced new weekly usage limits for its Claude Pro and Max subscribers, effective August 28th. This move addresses issues with users running its Claude Code AI coding tool continuously and violating usage policies through account sharing and resale. While affecting less than 5% of users, the limits highlight the constraints AI model providers face regarding computational resources and the search for sustainable service models. Other AI coding tool providers have also made similar pricing adjustments.

(techcrunch.com)

Development rate limits

Gamers Flood Visa and Mastercard with Calls After Steam and itch.io Ban Adult Games

2025-07-29

Gamers Flood Visa and Mastercard with Calls After Steam and itch.io Ban Adult Games

Following Steam and itch.io's crackdown on adult games, gamers have launched a coordinated campaign targeting payment processors Visa and Mastercard. Players are bombarding the companies with phone calls and emails, aiming to pressure them into reversing their policies. While the payment processors claim their actions are to comply with regulations, gamers argue the impact is too broad, potentially affecting other games. The campaign, heavily discussed on platforms like Reddit and Bluesky, demonstrates impressive organization, with gamers sharing strategies and even creating scripts for contacting representatives.

(www.polygon.com)

Game gamer protest

Cosmic Void: Are We Living in a Giant Void?

2025-07-29

Cosmic Void: Are We Living in a Giant Void?

New research suggests we might reside within a vast cosmic void, potentially resolving the 'Hubble tension'—the discrepancy in the universe's expansion rate. Analyzing the 'sound' of the early universe (baryon acoustic oscillations), researchers found our local region has roughly 20% lower matter density than average. This low-density void would gravitationally affect observations, making the universe appear to expand faster, aligning with measurements. The study concludes that a universe model incorporating a local void is significantly more likely than one without, offering a novel perspective on a long-standing cosmological puzzle.

(phys.org)

Tech Cosmic Void

Game Changer: First 100% Protective HIV Drug Approved

2025-07-29

Game Changer: First 100% Protective HIV Drug Approved

A 44-year battle against HIV may finally be turning the corner. The FDA has approved lenacapavir (Yeztugo), a twice-yearly injection offering nearly 100% protection against HIV infection. This capsid inhibitor prevents viral replication, marking a monumental breakthrough. Gilead Sciences is ensuring global access by offering affordable pricing and signing royalty-free licensing agreements with six generic manufacturers. This innovative approach, combined with partnerships like the one with the Global Fund to fight AIDS, aims to reach up to two million people in low- and lower-middle-income countries, signaling a potential turning point in the fight against the HIV epidemic.

(newatlas.com)

Tech HIV prevention new drug

Building Reliable AI Agents: Six Hard-Won Lessons

2025-07-29

Building Reliable AI Agents: Six Hard-Won Lessons

This article shares six crucial lessons learned in building AI agents. The author emphasizes the importance of clear instructions, lean context management, robust tool interfaces, and automated validation loops. It highlights that modern LLMs need direct, detailed context, avoiding manipulative prompting. Powerful AI agents are built by combining LLMs with tools and basic control flow operators. A two-phase algorithm—one for generation, one for validation—is recommended, with iterative improvement and error analysis crucial for reliability and recoverability.

(www.app.build)

Development

433: A Font That Replaces Text with Dots

2025-07-29

433: A Font That Replaces Text with Dots

To mask text in Ensō's Coffeeshop Mode, the author created a font called 433 that replaces all non-whitespace characters with dots. This post details the creation process, covering font design principles, Unicode encoding, and WOFF2 compression. The author shares challenges and solutions encountered, along with insights into fonts, Unicode, and multilingual support. The project stemmed from a need to handle diverse writing systems among the app's rapidly growing user base.

(untested.sonnet.io)

Development Coffeeshop Mode

Game Devlog: Simplifying Car Physics for an Arcade Racer

2025-07-29

Game Devlog: Simplifying Car Physics for an Arcade Racer

This devlog details the author's journey in simplifying car physics for their racing game. Initially attempting a realistic physics model proved too complex. The author switched to a simplified model, using basic force equations to simulate acceleration, braking, steering, and friction, fine-tuning the experience through coefficient adjustments. Substepping was implemented for increased accuracy. The final result is a controllable car model with a slide effect, further enhanced by an accumulator to simulate grip loss at varying turn intensities.

(wassimulator.com)

Game car simulation

Volt Boot: Exploiting Power Domain Isolation to Bypass On-Chip SRAM Security

2025-07-29

This paper introduces Volt Boot, a novel attack that leverages power domain isolation in modern Systems-on-a-Chip (SoCs) to compromise the security of sensitive information stored in on-chip SRAM. Traditional cold boot attacks are ineffective against on-chip SRAM, but Volt Boot achieves cross-power-cycle SRAM data retention by maintaining the voltage of the target memory domain during system reset. Experiments on three commercially available Cortex-A processors successfully extracted data from caches, CPU registers, and iRAM, demonstrating the attack's effectiveness. The research highlights new security challenges for systems relying on on-chip computation and proposes countermeasures such as eliminating power domain isolation, purging residual memory, resetting SRAM at startup, and enforcing TrustZone support.

(cacm.acm.org)

Tech chip security cold boot attack power domain isolation

Yellowstone Bacteria Defies Textbook Biology: Simultaneous Aerobic and Anaerobic Respiration

2025-07-29

Yellowstone Bacteria Defies Textbook Biology: Simultaneous Aerobic and Anaerobic Respiration

A groundbreaking discovery challenges our understanding of cellular respiration. Scientists have found a bacterium in a Yellowstone National Park hot spring capable of simultaneously performing both aerobic and anaerobic respiration—a feat previously thought impossible. This bacterium's unique metabolic pathway offers new insights into how life transitioned from anaerobic to aerobic respiration after the appearance of oxygen. It also highlights the astonishing diversity and adaptability of the microbial world. Published in Nature Communications, this research provides a new perspective on how life adapts to extreme environments.

(www.quantamagazine.org)

Tech cellular respiration

Robot Hand Outperforms Humans at Blackberry Harvesting

2025-07-29

Robot Hand Outperforms Humans at Blackberry Harvesting

Researchers at the University of Arkansas have developed a novel soft robotic gripper capable of harvesting blackberries more efficiently than humans. Inspired by the opening and closing of a tulip, the gripper features three soft fingers and force sensors to ensure gentle handling and prevent damage. By measuring the force used by human pickers, researchers optimized the gripper's picking parameters. While further development of computer vision and positioning technologies is needed, the gripper demonstrates potential to surpass human capabilities in efficiency and consistency, promising applications in other soft fruit harvesting and assistive technologies for people with limited mobility.

(news.uark.edu)

Tech automated harvesting

Truchet Tiles: Simple Geometry, Infinite Possibilities

2025-07-29

Truchet tiles, simple square tiles with non-rotationally symmetric patterns, create surprisingly complex and captivating visual effects. First described in 1704 by Sébastien Truchet, they're now widely used in information visualization and graphic design. By varying the tile orientations, diverse patterns emerge, even creating labyrinths. Their elegant simplicity extends to programming; a single line of code can generate endless variations, highlighting the beauty of concise algorithms and infinite possibilities. This makes them a prime example of generative art.

(en.wikipedia.org)

Design geometric patterns

GLM-4.5: A New Large Language Model Unifying Reasoning, Coding, and Agentic Capabilities

2025-07-29

Zhipu AI introduces GLM-4.5 and GLM-4.5-Air, its latest flagship models unifying reasoning, coding, and agentic capabilities into a single model. GLM-4.5 boasts 355 billion parameters, while GLM-4.5-Air features 106 billion. Both employ a hybrid reasoning approach, offering a 'thinking' mode for complex tasks and a 'non-thinking' mode for quick responses. They achieve top-tier performance across various benchmarks, particularly excelling in agentic tasks like web browsing and code generation. Open weights are available on HuggingFace and ModelScope.

(z.ai)

AI

Designing Delightful Apps for Kids: Lessons from Kidz Fun Art

2025-07-29

Designing Delightful Apps for Kids: Lessons from Kidz Fun Art

This article details the lessons learned over four years developing Kidz Fun Art, a tablet-optimized drawing app for children. The author highlights unique challenges and solutions for designing child-friendly apps, including minimizing text, co-locating tools with objects, simplifying interactions, easy error correction, knowing when to involve adults, reducing the need for fine motor skills, addressing palm rejection, and incorporating delightful design elements. The author also stresses ethical monetization strategies, privacy concerns, and preventing children from directly spending money.

(shaneosullivan.wordpress.com)

Development Child App Design

SQLx: An Async, Pure Rust SQL Toolkit with Compile-Time Query Checks

2025-07-29

SQLx: An Async, Pure Rust SQL Toolkit with Compile-Time Query Checks

SQLx is an asynchronous, pure Rust† SQL crate offering compile-time checked queries without a DSL. It supports PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, and SQLite, boasting runtime agnosticism (working with async-std, tokio, and actix), built-in connection pooling, row streaming, TLS support, and asynchronous notifications. SQLx leverages macros for compile-time SQL verification and provides both high-level and low-level query APIs for developer convenience.

(github.com)

Development

Stunning JavaScript Clock Visualizations

2025-07-29

This project features stunning clock visualizations rendered in JavaScript. It displays time in multiple creative ways: binary representation of Unix timestamps, polygons showing year, month, week, day, hour, minute, and second, dynamic blobs with waves representing different time scales, a solar system model showing Earth, Moon, and Sun, and peaks and waves illustrating the passage of time. The source code is open and modifiable.

(ianto-cannon.github.io)

Development Clock

Rotring 600 Ballpoint: A Timeless Classic, Mostly

2025-07-29

Rotring 600 Ballpoint: A Timeless Classic, Mostly

The Rotring 600 ballpoint pen, a variant of the iconic Rotring 600, boasts an all-metal body and a satisfying click mechanism for extending its Parker-style refill. While generally praised for its build quality and design, one user experienced a malfunction with the included refill, though this was resolved by switching to an alternative. The writing experience is largely dependent on the refill used, but the pen's robust construction makes it a worthwhile purchase, especially if found on sale.

(www.shellshore.com)

Misc ballpoint pen writing instrument

Sub-Millisecond Game Streaming: A New Codec Emerges

2025-07-29

A developer has created PyroWave, an ultra-low-latency game streaming video codec, building upon their master's thesis. Rejecting traditional motion prediction and entropy coding, it uses Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) and block-based encoding to achieve sub-millisecond latency (encoding under 100µs, decoding under 1ms). While the bitrate is high (100+ Mbit/s), it excels in local network environments and boasts excellent error resilience. Benchmarks against NVENC show PyroWave achieving superior visual quality in some scenarios, highlighting its potential for low-latency game streaming.

(themaister.net)

Development low-latency encoding wavelet transform

Pony: A High-Performance, Secure Actor-Model Language

2025-07-29

Pony is an open-source, object-oriented, actor-model, capabilities-secure, high-performance programming language. Its unique actor model ensures safe and efficient concurrent programming. Ready to dive in? Try the Pony Playground in your browser! Learn more about Pony's design and advantages by reading its early history.

(www.ponylang.io)

Development

Overusing useCallback and useMemo in React

2025-07-28

Overusing useCallback and useMemo in React

This article discusses the overuse of `useCallback` and `useMemo` in React development. The author argues that in many cases, these hooks are used to achieve referential stability, but this is not always necessary and can even lead to performance overhead and code complexity. The article presents several scenarios, such as when components aren't memoized and when props are used as dependencies in effects, where using `useCallback` and `useMemo` provides no performance benefit and adds unnecessary complexity. The author suggests avoiding overuse of these hooks unless there's a clear performance bottleneck and recommends using refs or the upcoming `useEffectEvent` to handle referential stability issues.

(tkdodo.eu)

Development

Chrome's One-Tap Sign-in Dialog: Google Favoring its Browser?

2025-07-28

Many websites show annoying "Sign in with Google" banners. My browser extension, StopTheMadness Pro, hides these banners, but Chrome behaves differently. While Chrome avoids the banners, it displays a similar One-Tap dialog, which is part of the Chrome app itself and can't be hidden by extensions. Fortunately, this dialog can be disabled in Chrome's settings. This highlights yet another instance of Google seemingly favoring its own browser.

(underpassapp.com)

Development Google Sign-in

Is DJI Circumventing US Bans with the SkyRover X1 Clone?

2025-07-28

Is DJI Circumventing US Bans with the SkyRover X1 Clone?

With an unofficial US customs ban in place, DJI drones are practically unavailable in the US. Yet, a near-identical clone, the SkyRover X1, is readily available on Amazon. Investigations reveal striking similarities: identical specs, features, app, and even use of DJI's online infrastructure. Security researchers have even logged in using their DJI credentials. While the manufacturer denies a DJI connection, evidence suggests DJI's involvement, possibly through licensing or other means, mirroring past strategies using third-party manufacturers. Although not officially banned, a de facto ban looms, forcing DJI to employ creative methods to maintain market presence.

(www.theverge.com)

Tech

The Science Behind Star Wars' Special Effects: From Berkeley Lab to Industrial Light & Magic

2025-07-28

The Science Behind Star Wars' Special Effects: From Berkeley Lab to Industrial Light & Magic

This article recounts the story behind the iconic special effects of Star Wars and the contribution of UC Berkeley's Environmental Simulation Laboratory. To create more realistic environmental simulations, the Berkeley lab developed a computer-controlled camera system, later used by Industrial Light & Magic in the production of Star Wars, becoming a milestone in film special effects history. This technology not only advanced film special effects but also provided new simulation methods for urban planning, allowing for more intuitive understanding of planning proposals through precise models and camera techniques.

(www.nsf.gov)

Tech film special effects Industrial Light & Magic

Revitalizing a Relic: Modernizing the KIM-1 Microcomputer

2025-07-28

Revitalizing a Relic: Modernizing the KIM-1 Microcomputer

The author connects a 1976 KIM-1 microcomputer to a modern terminal. The KIM-1 uses an obsolete current loop interface, requiring a simple circuit modification. By modifying a readily available USB-to-RS-232 adapter, the author successfully enables communication between the KIM-1 and a modern computer, allowing program uploads using minicom and even emulating punched tape loading. The process vividly demonstrates the charm of combining hardware restoration with innovation.

(blog.jgc.org)

Hardware hardware modification serial communication

Algospeak: How Social Media Is Reshaping Language

2025-07-28

Algospeak: How Social Media Is Reshaping Language

Adam Aleksic's new book, *Algospeak*, explores how social media algorithms are transforming language. Algorithms fuel the creation and spread of new words, slang, and grammatical rules, like "rizz," "aura," and "-pilled." While the author views this "algospeak" as showcasing human adaptability and ingenuity, he also highlights potential downsides, including power imbalances and cultural homogenization – such as the mainstreaming of online subculture slang and appropriation of African American Vernacular English (AAVE). The review also touches on the algorithm's impact on the attention economy and culture, and the potential negative consequences for reading and literature.

(lareviewofbooks.org)

Tech

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