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As the fate of TikTok hangs in the balance, U.S. TikTok users are flocking to the Chinese social media app Xiaohongshu, also called RedNote – making it the top downloaded app in the U.S.

Some of the “TikTok refugees,” as they call themselves, say the TikTok alternative, a Chinese app, is being chosen in protest of the TikTok ban. Here's what you need to know about Xiaohongshu.

It is a lifestyle social media app which allows users to post short videos, photos and texts, and it also includes functions like live-streaming and shopping.

Since most phones currently don’t have the compute to run very powerful models, and since models keep getting better and in some cases more proprietary, it is likely that much of this processing (and the data you need processed) will have to be offloaded to remote servers.

And that’s the first reason that I would say that AI is going to be the biggest privacy story of the decade. Not only will we soon be doing more of our compute off-device, but we’ll be sending a lot more of our private data.

Lawmakers have fought to end the reign of TikTok due to ties they say it has with the Chinese Communist Party. But they may have made things much worse.

The Chinese apps RedNote and Lemon8 have exploded in popularity as TikTok faces an imminent ban and the Supreme Court upheld the law forcing its sale.

The rise of the apps shows TikTok’s U.S. users are rejecting American platforms like Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts that were expected to be the beneficiaries of a ban. Instead, they’ve moved to alternatives that have even closer ties to China than TikTok, a Beijing-based company with a U.S. subsidiary and many Western investors.

Google says it has begun requiring users to turn on JavaScript, the widely used programming language to make web pages interactive, in order to use Google Search.

In an email to TechCrunch, a company spokesperson claimed that the change is intended to “better protect” Google Search against malicious activity, such as bots and spam, and to improve the overall Google Search experience for users. The spokesperson noted that, without JavaScript, many Google Search features won’t work properly and that the quality of search results tends to be degraded.

Google says it has begun requiring users to turn on JavaScript, the widely used programming language to make web pages interactive, in order to use Google Search.

In an email to TechCrunch, a company spokesperson claimed that the change is intended to “better protect” Google Search against malicious activity, such as bots and spam, and to improve the overall Google Search experience for users. The spokesperson noted that, without JavaScript, many Google Search features won’t work properly and that the quality of search results tends to be degraded.

US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s computer was infiltrated and unclassified files were accessed as part of a broader breach of the agency by Chinese state-sponsored hackers, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The attackers also hacked the computers of two of Yellen’s lieutenants, Deputy Secretary Wally Adeyemo and Acting Under Secretary Brad Smith, according to the people, who asked not to be identified discussing sensitive information. Fewer than 50 files on Yellen’s machine were accessed, one of the people said.

The Supreme Court unanimously upheld a law that threatens to shut down the wildly popular TikTok social media platform in the US as soon as Sunday, ruling that free speech rights must yield to concerns that Chinese control of the app creates a national-security risk.

The high court said Friday Congress’ “well-supported” concerns about Chinese data collection justified a law that singled out TikTok. The measure requires ByteDance Ltd. to sell the American version of the video-sharing app by Jan. 19 or face a ban.

Google has told the EU it will not comply with a forthcoming fact-checking law, according to a copy of a letter obtained by Axios. The company states that it will not be adding fact checks to search results or YouTube videos and will not use fact-checking data when ranking or removing content.

It’s important to note that Google has never really participated in fact-checking as part of its content moderation policies. The company did, however, invest in a European fact-checking database ahead of recent EU elections.

The upcoming fact-checking requirement was originally implemented by the European Commission’s new Code of Practice on Disinformation. It started as a voluntary set of “self-regulatory standards to fight disinformation” but will soon become mandatory.

General Motors and its subsidiary OnStar are banned from selling customer geolocation and driving behavior data for five years, the Federal Trade Commission announced Thursday.

The settlement comes after a New York Times investigation found that GM had been collecting micro-details about its customers’ driving habits, including acceleration, braking, and trip length — and then selling it to insurance companies and third-party data brokers like LexisNexis and Verisk. Clueless vehicle owners were then left wondering why their insurance premiums were going up.

“Cash App created the conditions for fraud to proliferate on its popular payment platform,” said CFPB Director Rohit Chopra in a statement Thursday. “When things went wrong, Cash App flouted its responsibilities and even burdened local banks with problems that the company caused.”

The sum includes $120 million to compensate consumers and a fine of $55 million that will go to the CFPB’s victims relief fund.

“We’re betting on a different path to build AI capable of true invention, adaptation, and innovation,” Chollet wrote in a series of posts on X. “We believe we have a small but real chance of achieving a breakthrough — creating AI that can learn at least as efficiently as people, and that can keep improving over time with no bottlenecks in sight.”

Ndea plans to use a technique called program synthesis, in tandem with other technical approaches, to unlock AGI. Chollet thinks that program synthesis, which allows AI to generalize problems it hasn’t seen before from only a few examples, can help to overcome the most intractable problems in AI research.

If o1 is not a chat model — what is it?

I think of it like a “report generator.” If you give it enough context, and tell it what you want outputted, it’ll often nail the solution in one-shot.

swyx’s Note: OpenAI does publish advice on prompting o1, but we find it incomplete, and in a sense you can view this article as a “Missing Manual” to lived experience using o1 and o1 pro in practice.

1. Don’t Write Prompts; Write Briefs

Meta is deleting links to Pixelfed, a decentralized Instagram competitor. On Facebook, the company is labeling links to Pixelfed.social as “spam” and deleting them immediately.

Pixelfed is an open-source, community funded and decentralized image sharing platform that runs on Activity Pub, which is the same technology that supports Mastodon and other federated services. Pixelfed.social is the largest Pixelfed server, which was launched in 2018 but has gained renewed attention over the last week.

Bluesky user AJ Sadauskas originally posted that links to Pixelfed were being deleted by Meta; 404 Media then also tried to post a link to Pixelfed on Facebook. It was immediately deleted.

The Wyoming Industrial Siting Council has granted a construction permit to TerraPower for its Natrium nuclear power plant near Kemmerer — a milestone achievement both in Wyoming and nationwide for commercial-scale “advanced nuclear” energy, the company says.

“This is the first state permit ever awarded to a commercial-scale advanced nuclear project and is a testament to the groundbreaking work of our TerraPower team,” TerraPower President and CEO Chris Levesque said in a prepared statement Tuesday.