Amazon has reportedly instructed some of its Chinese cross-border
merchants to stop listing lower-priced products on
Temu.


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TLDR

TLDR 2024-12-26

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BIG TECH & STARTUPS

PRICE WAR INTENSIFIES AS AMAZON REPORTEDLY TARGETS CHINESE SELLERS
OFFERING CHEAP GOODS ON TEMU (3 MINUTE READ) [4]

Amazon has reportedly instructed some of its Chinese cross-border
merchants to stop listing lower-priced products on Temu. Temu has seen
rapid growth in its market share in the US - it was the most
downloaded free app in the country in 2024. The site's aggressive
pricing strategy has forced Amazon to take action. Amazon has
responded to the rumors by stating that sellers have the freedom to
determine their own sales strategies and can set prices for their
products on Amazon and other sales channels.

META TO ADD DISPLAYS TO RAY BAN SMART GLASSES IN 2025 (2 MINUTE READ)
[5]

Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses may get displays as soon as the second
half of 2025. The new displays will be used to show notifications and
responses from Meta's virtual assistant. Plans to turn Orion, its
augmented reality glasses prototype, into a consumer product have been
brought forward, though a release is still likely to be years away.
More big tech firms, like Qualcomm, Samsung, and Google, are entering
into the mixed-reality glasses space. Apple may be releasing a cheaper
version of the Apple Vision Pro at some point after 2027.

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SCIENCE & FUTURISTIC TECHNOLOGY

AI DECODES THE CALLS OF THE WILD (50 MINUTE READ) [6]

Animal communications have patterns and structures that convey
information to other members of that animal's species. A growing
number of biologists and computer scientists are applying AI to animal
sounds to reveal what they are saying to each other. AI-assisted
studies have found that both African savannah elephants and common
marmoset monkeys give names to their companions. As these computer
models improve, they may enable scientists to investigate animals' self-awareness.

TRANSPARENT BAMBOO: A FIREPROOF AND WATERPROOF ALTERNATIVE TO GLASS
(3 MINUTE READ) [7]

Chinese scientists have turned bamboo into a transparent material
that is resistant to fire and water and suppresses smoke. The team
used the same method used to turn wood transparent to turn the bamboo transparent - bamboo's internal structure and chemical composition is
very similar to wood. The resulting transparent bamboo can be used as
a building material. When used as a substrate for perovskite solar
cells, it acts like a light management layer, boosting cells' power
conversion efficiency by 15.29%.

¨

PROGRAMMING, DESIGN & DATA SCIENCE

SHORTEST (GITHUB REPO) [8]

Shortest is an AI-powered natural language end-to-end testing
framework. It lets developers write tests in plain English and let AI
handle the execution. Shortest uses Anthropic's Claude API. It is
built on Playwright and has GitHub integration with 2FA support.

A CSS WISHLIST FOR 2025 (10 MINUTE READ) [9]

2024 was a great year for CSS. Several features, including
cross-document view transitions, scroll-driven animations, anchor
positioning, and animate to height: auto were introduced. This article
suggests more CSS features that developers want, such as a conditional
if() statement, CSS mixins, anchor positioning in more browsers, and a
way to balance flex-wrap.

¨

MISCELLANEOUS

AI MODELS ARE GETTING SMARTER. NEW TESTS ARE RACING TO CATCH UP (13
MINUTE READ) [10]

Evaluations (or evals) help researchers understand what advanced AI
systems can do. Designing effective evals is challenging and expensive
and the field is underfunded. Modern AI systems regularly achieve top
scores on many popular evals, making it harder to judge how quickly
they are improving. Companies, nonprofits, and governments have
created new sets of much more challenging evals in response, but AI
systems are making astonishing progress, even on the most advanced
tests.

MARK ZUCKERBERG WENT ALL IN ON META'S AI STRATEGY THIS YEAR. THE
PRESSURE BUILDS IN 2025 (13 MINUTE READ) [11]

Meta said in April that it would raise spending levels by as much as
$10 billion to support infrastructure investments for its AI efforts.
The announcement sent shares plunging, but several months later,
Meta's stock price has hit a new record. AI has become Meta's top
priority, directly impacting the company's business and potentially
paving the way for future revenue opportunities. This all-encompassing
approach to AI has led analysts to predict that Meta will be
positioned for more success in 2025.

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QUICK LINKS

APPLE APPROACHES $4 TRILLION VALUATION AS INVESTORS BET ON AI
MOMENTUM (5 MINUTE READ) [12]

Investors are enthusiastic about artificial intelligence as they
predict that it will result in a supercycle of iPhone upgrades.

ASK HN: RESOURCES FOR GENERAL PURPOSE GPU DEVELOPMENT ON APPLE'S M*
CHIPS? (HACKER NEWS THREAD) [13]

A thread full of links to resources for learning general purpose GPU development on Apple's M-series chips.

SERVER-SENT EVENTS (SSE) ARE UNDERRATED (8 MINUTE READ) [14]

Server-Sent Events, a one-way communication channel from server to
client over HTTP, offer a simpler, often overlooked alternative to
WebSockets.

WHAT WAS THE GOLDEN AGE OF ANTIBIOTICS, AND HOW CAN WE SPARK A NEW
ONE? (14 MINUTE READ) [15]

This article provides a history of antibiotics, describes how they
were developed, explains why antibiotic development has slowed down,
and gives some ideas on how to reignite antibiotic development today.

CASHING IN ON GIF BY CHARGING ROYALTIES (7 MINUTE READ) [16]

GIF virtually vanished from the Internet for about 10 years due to it
being patented.

HONDA AND NISSAN TO MERGE, HONDA WILL TAKE THE LEAD (3 MINUTE READ)
[17]

Nissan and Honda want to merge by 2026 to create the world's
third-largest car company.

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Dan Ni & Stephen Flanders

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[4] https://technode.com/2024/12/25/price-war-intensifies-as-amazon-reportedly-targets-chinese-sellers-offering-cheap-goods-on-temu/?utm_source=tldrnewsletter
[5] https://links.tldrnewsletter.com/YO1qii
[6] https://www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-024-04050-5/index.html?utm_source=tldrnewsletter
[7] https://newatlas.com/materials/transparent-bamboo-fireproof-waterproof/?utm_source=tldrnewsletter
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[15] https://ourworldindata.org/golden-age-antibiotics?utm_source=tldrnewsletter
[16] https://dfarq.homeip.net/cashing-in-on-gif-by-charging-royalties/?utm_source=tldrnewsletter
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