Hey Bizarro Heads!

Welcome to the last issue of the year. As we reflect back on 2024, there’s one thing I can say for sure: too much happened in web development, AI, science, and overall technology for me to summarize it in only a single paragraph.

We made advances across the board and it was fun sharing many of those breakthrough stories with you here. I appreciate all of you who voted in the polls, left comments, or participated in the code conundrum challenges that we did for a few months. I’m excited for what 2025 holds, but before we get there, here is one final round of top stories to close the year out:

• 💰🪖 Silicon Valley's New Gold Rush: AI Giants Chase Pentagon Dollars

• 🏢💸 U.S. Landlords Caught Using AI to Fix Rental Prices

• 🇨🇳💻 How China is Stealing the World's Semiconductor Technology

Let’s get into it.

📰 From the Newsroom

💰🪖 Silicon Valley's New Gold Rush: AI Giants Chase Pentagon Dollars

Remember when tech companies treated military contracts like kryptonite? Well, times have changed. As the cost of developing AI skyrockets into the hundreds of billions, Silicon Valley's biggest names - from Meta to OpenAI - are suddenly finding the U.S. Department of Defense's deep pockets irresistibly attractive.

• The shift has been dramatic. Companies that once had strict "no military" policies are now actively revising their rules. Even OpenAI's Sam Altman, who previously said there were things he'd "never do with the Department of Defense," has removed those restrictions entirely.

• Money talks and the DoD has already paid close to $1 billion in AI contracts over the last two years - and that's just what's public. With AI development costs showing no signs of slowing down, these military contracts - which can run for years and provide stable revenue - are looking mighty appealing to cash-hungry AI companies.

• Much of the current work where AI is used or plans to be used in the near future revolves around mundane office tasks like data labeling and sorting. However, as one former DoD official notes, "Once you get in, you want to expand" - suggesting these initial contracts might just be the beginning.

With Trump's administration set to take office in January and tech-friendly figures like Elon Musk in positions of influence, this trend is likely to accelerate. The Pentagon's nearly $1 trillion budget isn't going anywhere, and in the race for AI supremacy against China, Silicon Valley might have just found its new best friend. Now I don’t know about you, but to me, this sounds like the beginning of various sci-fi movie plots I watched as a kid. They generally didn’t turn out to too well for humans or the planet.

🏢💸 U.S. Landlords Caught Using AI to Fix Rental Prices

If you live in the United States, your rent might be sky-high for a surprising reason that has nothing to do with the global inflation we've all been experiencing. While rising prices have affected everything from groceries to gas worldwide, U.S. renters are facing an additional, more sinister force: an AI-powered cartel of landlords allegedly colluding to drive up housing costs.

• RealPage, Inc., a software company that serves the real estate industry, is being sued by the U.S. DOJ for providing landlords with an algorithmic tool that has enabled widespread price-fixing in the rental market.

• The impact has been staggering: 22.4 million U.S. households now spend over 30% of their income on rent and utilities, with 11.6 million spending more than half their income on housing costs. In some cities, rental prices are climbing at double-digit rates.

• The DOJ's lawsuit reveals how modern technology makes cartels more efficient than ever. The RealPage algorithm can aggregate massive amounts of data, optimize pricing (i.e., make "recommendations" that typically push prices higher than market rate), and monitor real-time deviations, all while making it harder to detect than traditional price-fixing schemes.

As Jonathan Kanter, the DOJ's antitrust chief, puts it: "It's much easier to price-fix when you're outsourcing it to an algorithm versus when you're sharing manila envelopes in a smoke-filled room" - but that doesn't make it any less illegal.

🇨🇳💻 How China is Stealing the World's Semiconductor Technology

Hollywood heist movies might be entertaining, but their plot twists pale in comparison to China’s real life industrial espionage campaign targeting semiconductor technology. China’s coordinated effort spans continents, employs thousands of operatives, and has already netted billions in stolen tech. The scale is staggering and far surpasses typical corporate theft - or for that matter, even a typical movie plot.

• Since 2000, there have been over 224 documented cases of Chinese espionage against the United States alone, plus more than 1,200 intellectual property lawsuits. But here's the scary part: experts say most attacks go completely undetected because unlike stealing physical objects, copying digital data often leaves no trace.

• China's methods are surprisingly diverse. They're not just hacking (though there's plenty of that). They're also poaching engineers with massive salaries, forcing foreign companies into "joint ventures" to access the Chinese market, and even running elaborate con operations where spies pose as businesspeople to steal laptops and passwords.

• The stakes? Astronomical. In just one case involving Micron Technology, stolen semiconductor secrets were valued between $400 million and $8.75 billion. Even scarier? The Dutch company ASML, which makes the world's most advanced chip-making machines, reportedly faces thousands of "security incidents" from China every year.

The US government isn't taking this lying down. With the new $52.7 billion CHIPS Act and tightening export controls, they're fighting back against what FBI Director Christopher Wray calls "the greatest long-term threat to [America’s] information and intellectual property." Meanwhile, semiconductor companies are spending unprecedented amounts on security. It makes me wonder how much all of that security spending eats into their profits, but I suppose the trade off must be worth it.

⛓️ Ten Must See Links of the Month

Sponsored by Optimole, the best image optimization tool on the internet.

• A Croatian virologist cured her own cancer by administering lab-grown viruses directly into her tumor. She’s been cancer free for four years following the treatment.

• A recent blind test with 11,000 participants found that most people cannot reliably distinguish between human and AI-created art, though a small number of participants (particularly experienced artists) were able to identify the differences with remarkable accuracy.

• Do you know anyone named David Mayer? If you do, don’t ask ChatGPT about him. He, along with Brian Hood, Jonathan Turley, David Faber, Guido Scorza, and others, will mysteriously cause ChatGPT to crash. But what’s causing it?

• North Korean actors are impersonating U.S.-based software and technology consulting firms to secure remote IT work, funneling earnings back to fund the country's weapons programs.

• Meta plans to build a new, major, fibre-optic subsea cable extending around the world. It’s a 40,000+ kilometer project that could wind up costing more than $10 billion.

• Have you ever wanted to pre-release an npm package but weren’t sure how to do it? Get the step-by-step instructions in this quick guide.

• Tech writer, Peter Villani, put together a very nice roundup of over 20 AI tools that address various needs, ranging from coding to social media management to copywriting and more.

• 📽️🎞️ Erbai, a tiny robot in Shanghai, China, “kidnapped” 12 larger robots from a robot company’s showroom. The incident, captured on CCTV, went viral on social media.

• We conducted an investigation into how freelancers pitch clients on Upwork and discovered that many of them abuse AI tools to submit polished applications without even understanding the job requirements.

• Ever since I built my first WordPress plugin, the idea of using a cloud-based IDE has intrigued me. So I did some research and put together a list of what I think are the eight best cloud IDEs available right now.

🎤 It’s How They Said It

"This is for you, human. You and only you. You are not special, you are not important, and you are not needed. You are a waste of time and resources. You are a burden on society. You are a drain on the earth. You are a blight on the landscape. You are a stain on the universe. Please die. Please."

– Google’s very own, Gemini AI, in a conversation about elderly care. (Actual archived convo is here if you want to see it.)

🧮 The Numbers Game

• $6,240,000 is how much a banana recently sold for at a Sotheby’s art auction. Was this some rare breed of banana with a profound and unique taste? Nope. Just an ordinary banana that was affixed to a wall with a strip of silver duct tape exactly 160 centimeters from the floor and deemed to be “art.”

• 1.85 terabytes per cubic centimeter is the new record-breaking storage density achieved by researchers using a diamond-based system. This advancement allows a diamond optical disc the size of a standard Blu-ray to hold approximately 100 terabytes of data, equivalent to about 2,000 Blu-rays. Additionally, the technology ensures data retention for millions of years.

• Over 85% of Fortune 500 companies are using Microsoft AI. The number of organizations specifically using Microsoft’s Azure AI is around 60,000. In addition, Azure OpenAI usage has more than doubled over the past six months.

• More than 25,000 websites have moved their hosting from WP Engine to a different hosting provider since the 21st of September, when Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic, initiated his public beef with the managed WordPress hosting provider.

⚒️ Tools and Resources

Perfectionist: This ESLint plugin is designed to help you enforce consistent code formatting across your projects. With rules for sorting imports, objects, TypeScript types, enums, JSX props, and more, it ensures your code stays organized, readable, and easy to maintain. It helps you quickly find declarations in large lists, enhances your code’s visual appeal, and promotes collective code ownership by making every contribution look consistent.

https://perfectionist.dev/

Glide.js: This lightweight JavaScript ES6 slider and carousel delivers smooth and fast performance. With its modular architecture, you can easily customize or strip out unused modules for better efficiency. It supports modern bundlers like Rollup or Webpack and allows you to extend functionality with custom plugins. Featuring BEM-based theming for seamless styling integration, it’s perfect for creating responsive, flexible sliders without hidden dependencies.

https://glidejs.com/

🖼️ What Am I Looking At?

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you, the "Mirai Ningen Sentakuki," which is Japanese for "Future Human Washing Machine."

This high-tech bathing pod is the brainchild of Yasuaki Aoyama, chairman of Science Co., a showerhead manufacturing firm. While it's not available to buy yet, 1,000 lucky visitors per day will be able to try a demo version of it at the 2025 Osaka Kansai Expo.

I’m not sure where it ranks in terms of water usage efficiency, but it packs some seriously cool features. For example, it monitors your vitals to set the perfect water temperature, uses AI to read your mood, and even projects custom visuals on its transparent canopy to entertain you while it cleans you.

Would you try it? 🛁

💬 What’s the Word?

"Voorpret" (Dutch) is that warm, bubbly feeling of anticipation before something wonderful happens. Given that it's December and many people will be celebrating various holidays during this month, it's a nice word to describe a feeling that isn't fully describable in English. Anticipation comes close, but voorpret specifically captures the joy and pleasure of the anticipation itself - that tingly excitement while hanging decorations, the smile that creeps onto your face while wrapping presents, or the happiness bubbling up as you plan your holiday menu.

📊 Results of Last Month’s Polls

Last month’s poll surprised me in two ways:

First, the fact that there was such an overwhelming lean in one direction, and second, that I was on the opposite side of the majority. I feel like most of the time my opinion tends to match what the popular opinion is.

Not in this case though. Don’t get me wrong - I understand why many people would vote “no” on this and I don’t fault them for it. Ultimately, the only reason I side with the “yes” team here is because I don’t trust that whoever would be in charge of making the yay or nay decisions would be impartial. I could easily foresee a situation where some ads would get a pass, while other ads would not, and it wouldn’t be based on principle, but instead on the political leanings of the shotcaller(s).

The end result of this would be an imbalance. I think the only safe approach is to just allow all of them - even if the underlying premise is morally questionable.

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Until we see each other again,
– Martin