Reddit, which is now a publicly-traded company and subject to increased scrutiny regarding its revenue growth, is placing significant emphasis on expanding its international user base, beginning with targeting French-speaking individuals. During the company’s inaugural earnings call, CEO Steve Huffman verified that the company is presently engaged in developing real-time automatic translations of the site’s content into French, utilizing advancements in large language models.

In addition, he mentioned the expansion of the ecosystem through a few reversals in direction. Reddit aims to attract developers by offering new tools, which is unexpected considering its past approach in this area. Additionally, the company plans to reintroduce Reddit Gold, a virtual currency that it discontinued less than a year ago, which is also surprising.

These moves involve predicting the potential future of Reddit rather than focusing on its current state. Currently, the news regarding Reddit is quite positive. In the previous quarter, their revenue increased by 48% compared to the same period last year, reaching $243 million. Additionally, the number of unique users grew by 37%, reaching a total of 82.7 million. (This number encompasses both users who are currently logged in and those who are not, following a similar method that Twitter, now referred to as X, used to calculate its audience when it was publicly accessible.)

Expansion of user base and language localization
During the earnings call, Huffman stated that 50% of Reddit’s audience is located in the United States. This indicates that the company is prioritizing efforts to enhance its international presence.

“Our ratio of U.S. to non-U.S. is still 50/50, but our peers have a much higher percentage of non-U.S. members, ranging from 80% to 90%,” he stated. “I believe there is a significant opportunity available.” He proceeded to characterize automatic, AI-powered translation as “one of the significant breakthroughs for us in the near to medium future.”

“Today, we are translating our complete collection of texts, which is primarily in English, into other languages. We anticipate that this will contribute to the rapid expansion of our international presence,” he stated.

Despite the substantial allocation of resources, the speaker described the site-wide translation effort as being in a testing phase right now. Huffman observed that the content is also being included in the search results of Google for the French language, thereby increasing the number of visitors to the website. The company’s next objective is to address the Spanish language.

Reddit has been providing post-based translation since last year, supporting a total of eight languages.

Software development tools
Hearing Huffman discuss developer tools on the call felt unreal. In July 2023, the company became involved in a significant dispute with third-party client developers due to changes in the API. This led to the blackout of numerous subreddits as a form of protest against the API changes.

Currently, the social network is operating in a mode where users are expected to behave in a respectful and cooperative manner. Huffman stated that there are intentions to develop tools that have the potential to expand the limits of what a subreddit can encompass. He provided illustrations of current experiments, such as real-time scores displayed on certain sports subreddits and a live stock ticker on r/wallstreetbets, the subreddit famous for the Gamestop stock controversy.

According to him, several hundred developers are currently conducting tests on these new experiences. Reddit plans to expand its developer base by inviting more individuals from the waitlist to join this summer. Additionally, the platform intends to introduce monetization capabilities later in the year.

Additional notifications
In a recent agreement, Reddit and Google have partnered to allow the search engine giant access to the social network’s data. Huffman stated that the company intends to grant licenses to other companies for the use of their data. This has been a significant matter, often generating controversy, as users may express reluctance towards their data being utilized for purposes such as AI training or other prevalent applications. Huffman emphasized that the company is being discerning and careful in its partner selection process.

The current focus of the company is to expand its infrastructure in order to generate more revenue. Although Gold and another blockchain-based currency called community points were discontinued last year, Reddit is considering reintroducing virtual currency on its platform. This move is seen as an opportunity for Reddit to expand and diversify its business model. During the earnings call, the company announced its intention to introduce an upgraded Gold product, featuring new programs that allow users to both spend and earn money on the platform.

Black holes are enigmatic entities that, despite our extensive knowledge, continue to perplex our comprehension of physics. Physicists have proposed unconventional hypotheses to address the paradoxes encountered during the study of these phenomena. One hypothesis suggests that these paradoxes indicate that our universe is actually a holographic representation. According to this idea, everything we observe and perceive is encoded at the boundary of our universe, which is a three-dimensional representation of a two-dimensional universe, including time. Moreover, there have been suggestions that this could potentially indicate that our universe exists inside a black hole within a larger universe.

Black holes are regions of space that result from the gravitational collapse of massive stars, exhibiting such intense gravity that even light cannot escape. Their presence presented a challenge when examining them from a thermodynamic perspective. After achieving stability, a black hole’s mass, angular momentum, and electric charge are the only factors that determine its final state.

“According to French astrophysicist Jean-Pierre Luminet’s 2016 review, in classical general relativity, a black hole effectively traps any particle or form of radiation within its cosmic confinement, preventing their escape.” “To an external observer, the moment a material body passes through an event horizon, all information regarding its material properties becomes inaccessible.” Only the updated values of mass (M), angular momentum (J), and electric charge (Q) are retained. Consequently, a black hole engulfs a vast quantity of information.

It may appear straightforward—or at least as straightforward as physics can be. However, if a black hole possesses mass (which is typically substantial), it should theoretically possess a temperature in accordance with the first law of thermodynamics. Furthermore, in accordance with the second law of thermodynamics, it should emit thermal radiation. Stephen Hawking demonstrated that black holes emit radiation, now known as Hawking radiation, which is generated at the boundary of a black hole.

“Hawking subsequently identified a paradox.” “If a black hole undergoes evaporation, a fraction of the information it possesses becomes permanently irretrievable,” Luminet elaborated. A black hole’s thermal radiation does not retain or replicate information about the matter it ate. The irrevocable loss of information contradicts one of the fundamental principles of quantum mechanics. The Schrödinger equation states that in physical systems that undergo changes over time, information cannot be created or destroyed. This property is referred to as unitarity.

This phenomenon is referred to as the black hole information paradox, and due to its apparent contradiction with our existing comprehension of the cosmos, it has been extensively examined and discussed.

Examining the thermodynamics of black holes within the context of string theory led to the discovery of an alternative solution. Gerard ‘t Hooft demonstrated that the total number of independent variables within a black hole is directly proportional to the surface area of its horizon, rather than its volume. This enables the examination of the entropy of a black hole.

“In terms of information, Luminet explains that each bit, represented as either a 0 or a 1, corresponds to four Planck areas. This correspondence enables the derivation of the Bekenstein-Hawking formula for entropy,” Luminet concludes. “To an external observer, it appears that the information regarding the entropy of the black hole, which was previously contained within the three-dimensional arrangement of objects that entered the event horizon, is no longer accessible.” However, according to this perspective, the data is encoded on the flat, two-dimensional surface of a black hole, similar to a hologram. Thus, Hooft concluded that the information consumed by a black hole could be fully recovered through the process of quantum evaporation.

Although it is consoling to know that black holes do not violate the second law of thermodynamics, this has given rise to the unusual idea that a three-dimensional space’s two-dimensional boundary can explain its physics.

It has been suggested that the universe itself could potentially function like a black hole, with all phenomena occurring at its boundary and our observations arising from these interactions. However, this concept does not apply to the space outside of a black hole. This idea is quite unconventional, with some unexpected additions. For example, there is a suggestion that gravity may emerge as a force from entanglement entropy at the boundary.

The theory falls short in its ability to provide a convincing explanation for our universe, as standard physics continues to offer the most accurate description of the observable universe. However, there are valid justifications for why individuals consider it of great importance.

In order for the model to be valid, it is crucial that the Hubble radius of the universe, which represents the radius of our observable universe, is equivalent to its Schwarzschild radius. This refers to the size of a black hole that would form if all the matter within it was compressed into a single point. These two figures are unexpectedly similar, although this could be attributed to a cosmic coincidence.

There are other factors to consider, like this comprehensive chart that indicates the possibility of our existence within a black hole within a larger universe. However, until a theory emerges with substantial evidence and predictions that surpass our current knowledge of physics, we recommend refraining from succumbing to an existential crisis. This applies regardless of whether you perceive yourself as a three-dimensional entity existing within conventional space-time or as a holographic projection originating from a two-dimensional boundary within a larger universe.

In a recent practice dogfight, a fighter jet run by artificial intelligence (AI) faced off against a jet run by a human.

The ground-breaking test flight happened in September 2023, but DARPA’s Air Combat Evolution program just recently released video of it.

The video depicts two planes performing a variety of “dynamic combat maneuvers,” such as dogfighting positions nose-to-nose, while flying at 1,931 kilometers per hour (1,200 miles per hour).

For the US Air Force Test Pilot School, Lockheed Martin Skunk Works and Calspan Corporation created the one-of-a-kind AI-guided plane model.

The project was first made as a simulator to help train pilots. It was called the X-62A or VISTA (Variable In-flight Simulator Test Aircraft). The first software had AI, but it could only work in the virtual world, making it more like a very realistic video game.

And things changed in December 2022, when the AI agents were put in charge of a real plane, letting it fly along a flight path on its own. Since then, it has done a lot of real-life test flights and a lot of practice flights, getting ready for its ultimate goal: fighting within visual range, also known as “dogfighting.”

“DARPA looked for the hardest kind of problem it could find when it came to this one, and dogfighting is a great example of how machine learning can be used.” Colonel James Valpiani, commandant of the Air Force Test Pilot School, said in the video, “If machine learning can work well in an environment as dangerous as air-to-air combat, it has a great chance to earn the trust of humans as we look to applications that are less dangerous but equally complex.”

On May 2, 2024, US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall flew on the X-62A jet on an AI-guided flight. This was another sign of the program’s progress.

To not have it is to risk your safety. “We have to have it now,” Kendall told the AP when they got off the plane.

It’s possible that AI-assisted weapons will be more accurate than human-guided ones. This could mean fewer civilian deaths, damage, and friendly fire. But this uncharted territory brings up a lot of legal, moral, security, and humanitarian problems. One big question is whether it is safe or right to leave most of the decision-making about life and death to sensors and software, which are basically killer robots, with little human oversight. Another question is whether AI systems can be held responsible if something goes wrong.

This kind of question still hasn’t been answered, and some people have called for strict rules on militarized AI before it gets out of hand. However, some people think that the AI arms race has already begun and shows no signs of stopping.