Articles

Built on the principle that 'Traffic accelerates, product drives,' this article provides AI startups with a comprehensive guide to move from 'no users' to 'organic user acquisition.' It highlights that the key to 2C AI products is a compelling first-time user experience and manageable customer acquisition costs. It also compares user acquisition methods, such as advertising (fast but expensive) versus content/social referral (low cost, high trust). The author emphasizes building a dissemination mechanism within the product, leveraging public relations and media endorsements, and fostering channel partnerships. Furthermore, the article analyzes user acquisition characteristics and localization strategies in markets like China, the US, and Japan, and advises startups to integrate CPI, retention, conversion, and payment into a cohesive strategy, calibrate with real data, and ultimately make the product shareable to achieve organic advertising.

This issue of Morning Brief delves into how AI technology profoundly impacts various fields of technology and business. In consumer electronics, the iPhone Air's depreciation rate hits a new high, while the controversial Doubao AI Phone sparks mixed industry reviews. To address the demands of AI data centers, memory giant Micron is strategically exiting the consumer-grade business. The company will fully focus on enterprise-grade and High Bandwidth Memory (HBM). At the AI application level, Google Search is seamlessly integrating conversational AI features, Alibaba Qianwen is upgrading document and PPT generation, Doubao is launching the Seedream 4.5 model to strengthen image generation, Google Workspace Studio is launching a low-code AI Agent platform, and Ant Lingguang is achieving mini-game generation in 30 seconds, all showcasing the enormous potential of AI in office efficiency, content creation, and entertainment. In addition, the Morning Brief also covers Apple executive changes, Xiaomi Auto trends, Australia's social media ban, AI-generated fraudulent claims, and the latest progress of multiple movies.

The article details the innovative features and practical applications of Meitu's AI design tools, particularly RoboNeo, in AI Poster design. The author first points out the common pain points of current AI Poster design, such as difficulties in secondary editing, deformation of complex products, complex design workflows, and low stability of prompts. Subsequently, the article showcases RoboNeo's solutions through numerous examples: the intelligent layering function can accurately separate the foreground and background and perform seamless filling; the seamless text editing function can modify text content while maintaining the font style; for E-commerce scenarios, the tool can generate multi-size, multi-angle product suite images in a streamlined process while maintaining product consistency; it also demonstrates virtual model try-on, generating personalized posters based on the subject, multi-language poster creation, and Text-to-Poster and Dynamic Poster generation. The article emphasizes that these tools greatly simplify the design process, improve the work efficiency of E-commerce, operations, and content creators, making AI Poster design more convenient and controllable, and transforming creative ideas into practical results.

This article introduces CS146S "Modern Software Developer," a new course offered by Stanford University's Computer Science Department. The course presents an innovative requirement for students: all development tasks throughout the semester must primarily rely on AI, and AI conversation logs must be submitted for verification. The course is taught by Mihail Eric and features guest lectures from multiple AI domain experts. Developed over 10 months, it is the first course among top universities to focus on the principles and practices of AI software, aiming to teach students how to become the most efficient software developers using AI coding. The course materials, including the homepage and a curated reading list, have been fully released online, providing valuable self-learning resources for learners with a solid programming foundation.

The article uses the Car of the Year list from the renowned automotive media TopGear as an introduction, detailing award-winning models such as the BMW iX3, Dacia Hipster, Kia PV5, Mercedes-Benz Electric CLA, Audi A6 Avant, Land Rover Defender OCTA, Ferrari 296 Speciale, Ford Mustang GTD, and Yangwang U9. After introducing these models and the reasons for their accolades, the article's core point is that in the New Energy Era (the era of electric and alternative energy vehicles), significant differences have emerged between overseas and Chinese markets in the perception of vehicle aesthetics, functionality, and pricing. Through specific examples, such as the varying evaluations of the BMW iX3 and Mercedes-Benz GLC EV in Central European markets, it emphasizes that the era of traditional automakers' standardized global car is long gone, and future product strategies must highly value localization needs.

The article announces the release of Django 6.0, highlighting two particularly notable new features: background workers and template partials. Background workers, originating from DEP 14 and prototyped in `django-tasks`, provide native support for asynchronous task execution, crucial for modern web applications. The author references a 'first look' article by Kevin Wetzels, which includes insights into custom database-backed worker implementations. Template partials, a Google Summer of Code project, offer a clean design for defining and reusing template fragments, with an `inline` attribute for immediate definition and rendering, and the ability to render named partials directly from Python code. The author expresses enthusiasm for combining template partials with HTMX and demonstrates their practical application by using an AI tool (Claude Code) to refactor his own blog's codebase, showing how partials can de-duplicate content display. Overall, Django 6.0 brings substantial improvements for developer efficiency and application architecture.

This issue of 'ifanr' Morning News brings together multiple hot news in technology, business, and society, presenting a wide range of information coverage. Regarding technology, Huawei officially clarified the 5A (Advanced Communication Technology) of the Mate 80 series, emphasizing that it is not a 5G-A (5G-Advanced) network standard. China has achieved significant milestones in intellectual property, with the number of valid invention patents exceeding 5 million for the first time. Concerning artificial intelligence, ChatGPT celebrates its third anniversary, and its profound impact on technology and business continues, with news that it may launch advertising features. AI expert Andrew Ng shared his unique insights on the current AI bubble, distinguishing the investment prospects of the AI application layer (the user-facing applications of AI), AI inference (the process of using trained AI models), and AI training infrastructure (the hardware and software used to train AI models). In addition, Alibaba Tongyi released the efficient image generation model Z-Image, and Huawei's AI emotional companionship product 'Smart Companion' (Intelligent Hanhan) sold out instantly upon launch. In terms of business and society, XPeng's vice president believes that moving away from excessive competition ('anti-involution') is an inevitable step for the Chinese automotive industry to mature; Meituan announced its third-quarter financial report and claimed to be the most suitable platform for Instant Retail; the new national standard for electric bicycles goes live today, and 'Zootopia 2' became the highest-grossing imported animated film in Chinese film history. The article covers a wide range of topics, including technology, business, and social issues.

The article addresses a common "Error 153: Video player configuration error" encountered with YouTube video embeds, particularly in Django applications. The author identifies the root cause as Django's default `Referrer-Policy: same-origin` HTTP header, which prevents the `HTTP Referer` header from being sent for cross-origin requests. YouTube's embedded player requires this header for identification. The solution involves updating the Django `settings.py` to `SECURE_REFERRER_POLICY = "strict-origin-when-cross-origin"`, which allows the origin to be sent in cross-origin requests, thus resolving the embed issue while maintaining privacy by omitting path and query string details.

The article highlights Chris Lewis's significant progress in decompiling Nintendo 64 games, specifically 'Snowboard Kids 2', by leveraging Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.5 and Claude Code. Initially, the project employed a 'matching' decompilation process involving meticulous MIPS assembly analysis and C code reproduction. However, a pivotal shift to a one-shot approach with Claude, particularly Claude Opus 4.5 and Claude Code, led to a massive acceleration. A key strategic decision was to utilize Claude in a non-interactive mode, prioritizing the decompilation of less complex functions first, identified through a heuristic scoring system. This methodological innovation resulted in a rapid increase in matched code, underscoring the unexpected effectiveness of large language models in specialized, complex reverse engineering tasks.

The article reports the successful listing of Moore Threads, a domestic general-purpose GPU manufacturer, on the STAR Market. Its opening market capitalization surpassed 305.5 billion yuan, setting several records, including the fastest IPO approval on the STAR Market in just 88 days. Founded by Zhang Jianzhong, former general manager of NVIDIA China, Moore Threads rapidly iterates its products based on its MUSA full-featured GPU architecture. According to the prospectus, the company will allocate 8 billion yuan of raised funds primarily to the R&D of AI training-inference integration, graphics, and AI system-on-chip (AISoC) solutions. Furthermore, the article highlights Moore Threads' strategic transformation, with AI-accelerated computing products' revenue share skyrocketing to 94.85% in the first half of the year, becoming the primary growth driver, demonstrating its significant position and growth potential in the domestic chip market.