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Announcement reads
Announcement posts on Yomu, summarised newest first.
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- 20 companies
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Announcement posts
Introducing Shop the look: eBay curating personalized outfits with AI
eBay introduces Shop the look, a generative AI-powered fashion feature that curates personalized outfit carousels from customers’ shopping histories. Interactive hotspots reveal similar items and outfit inspirations, combining new and pre-owned apparel and luxury goods. The experience uses images, items, decades of data, customer insights, and billions of images to adapt recommendations as tastes change, while supporting wardrobe visualization and exploration. It is available on iOS for US and UK shoppers who viewed at least 10 fashion items in the past 180 days; Android is planned later this year. eBay says the feature was developed with its Responsible AI team and RAI Principles, and plans further personalization plus possible expansion beyond fashion.
eBay's Responsible AI Principles
eBay sets out principles for developing and using AI-powered customer tools and services while addressing safety and community needs. Its framework covers reliability, safety, security, inclusivity, equity, fairness, accountability, lawfulness, privacy by design, and transparency. The company says it rigorously tests AI technologies, protects confidential data used to train or operate systems, includes measures to avoid excluding groups, and applies quality and safety checks to datasets. It also calls for human oversight throughout development, launch, and monitoring, risk-based decisions, regulatory compliance, and privacy-focused design using state-of-the-art methods. For users, eBay says transparency may involve disclosures within an experience or broader communication, depending on lifecycle stage and the audience.
Fly Kubernetes does more now
Fly Kubernetes is moving from early access to a closed beta as a managed Kubernetes service backed by Fly.io infrastructure. It provides the Kubernetes API while mapping core primitives to Fly resources: containers become Firecracker microVMs through flyd and Firecracker, pods become Fly Machines, networking uses an internal WireGuard mesh, services use the Fly Proxy, and storage uses Fly Volumes. Virtual Kubelet, running alongside K3s, receives pod requests and deploys them through the Fly Machines API, removing user-managed node capacity planning and hardware management. The beta supports workloads, including GPUs, across available regions, with Deployments/ReplicaSets, Services, DNS, and ephemeral and persistent volumes, but only part of the Kubernetes API. Missing capabilities include multi-container pods, StatefulSets, network policies, horizontal pod autoscaling, and emptyDir volumes; pricing is free during beta and planned at $75 per cluster monthly afterward, excluding resource costs.
Podcast: Nitzan Mekel-Bobrov on AI, the Future of Shopping Online, and the Value of Building In-House
eBay Chief AI Officer Nitzan Mekel-Bobrov discusses his role, artificial intelligence’s changing landscape, and eBay’s position in ecommerce. He says the company’s powerful private cloud, combined with integration with public cloud providers, supports AI at scale and in real time. As a two-sided marketplace, eBay can apply AI to sellers and buyers through a magical listing tool for complex specifications, assistance finding hard-to-find items, and image generation that improves and expands user-provided visuals. For buyers, it can also interpret a vehicle problem, identify needed items and options, and present them without requiring a search through listings. Looking ahead, Mekel-Bobrov describes AI shopping assistants as category-informed chatbots that may act autonomously toward desired outcomes rather than merely execute assigned tasks.
Meet the Winners of the 5th eBay University Machine Learning Challenge
The 2023 eBay University Machine Learning Challenge brought together 1,439 students from 206 universities in 887 teams to develop solutions for real-world ecommerce problems. The winning team, NullPointer, comprised five graduate students from universities across the United States and earned summer internships at eBay. Its project used Named Entity Recognition (NER) to identify, extract, and label named entities—including people, places, brands, and sizes—in a dataset of 10 million eBay Germany sneaker-category item titles. At eBay, NER is commonly used to automatically extract key information from listings and search queries. The event recorded its largest turnout yet, and students can register for the next competition via EvalAI in late spring.
Globally Distributed Object Storage with Tigris
Globally distributed object storage is presented as a way to avoid the latency and application complexity that arise when modern apps route uploads and downloads through a single-region S3 bucket. Tigris addresses this with redundant FoundationDB clusters for object tracking, Fly.io NVMe volumes as a first-level raw-byte cache, and a queueing system modeled on Apple’s QuiCK paper that sends data to replicas, in-demand regions, and third-party stores such as S3. Objects smaller than about 128 kilobytes are instantly global by default, while the platform also provides inter-region routing, consistency guarantees, instant purge, and relay regions. Its S3-compatible API means existing S3 libraries can be reused, and fly storage create injects the required AWS configuration and secrets. Fly.io says the partnership delivers object storage under its billing system without requiring a separate account.
GPUs on Fly.io are available to everyone!
Fly.io has made GPU instances available to everyone, adding datacenter-grade accelerators to its globally distributed compute platform. Users can select Ampere A100 variants with 40GB or 80GB of memory, or a Lovelace L40s with 48GB, by setting an app or process’s vm.size to the corresponding GPU kind. The post demonstrates an Ollama deployment using an L40s, a 100GB persistent volume mounted at /root/.ollama, and HTTP service settings that allow machines to stop and start automatically with zero minimum running machines. These instances are positioned for large language model inference, text transcription, and image generation; lower-cost A10 GPUs are planned for the next few weeks, while some organizations may need additional verification based on account age and payment history.
Introducing Notion Calendar – an integrated calendar for work and life
Notion has renamed Cron as Notion Calendar, introducing a calendar designed to connect work and personal time with the rest of a Notion workspace. It links meetings to Notion documents, project timelines, task due dates, and database items, while integrating with Google Calendar, Zoom, and Google Meet. Focus-oriented features include a computer menu-bar view for schedules and meeting access, plus command-menu controls and keyboard shortcuts; event blocking and auto-blocking combine commitments across calendars and prevent scheduling conflicts, while a built-in scheduling tool shares availability. The product is available now for free, and the announcement says its longer-term vision is to bring a time layer to notes, projects, and tasks across Notion.
New Social Caption Generator Uses AI to Help Sellers Post More Easily
For eBay sellers, social media promotion can make listings more visible, but composing effective captions may be difficult. Its new generative AI feature adds a “Use AI Caption” button in the Social page of Seller Hub, where it drafts item-focused posts with hashtags and emojis. Sellers can ask for rewrites, manually keep or remove those extras, and publish posts containing listing links and item images. The capability is fully available in the US, UK, Germany, and Australia for sharing individual listings, categories, promotions, and stores, while an announced auto-posting option will later automatically publish new listings when they go live. The company reports a positive response from early users.
Introducing Fly Kubernetes
Fly.io introduces Fly Kubernetes (FKS), an implementation of Kubernetes that runs on its globally distributed container platform for users who want Kubernetes tooling and declarative orchestration. Fly.io says its earlier Nomad-based approach struggled with global scheduling at more than 200,000 applications and with placing workloads in users’ requested regions, so it moved state to individual workers and exposed the Fly Machines API, whose placement requests fail quickly rather than retry elsewhere. FKS combines K3s with Virtual Kubelet, mapping pod lifecycle operations to Fly Machines API calls while running K3s and Virtual Kubelet on one Fly Machine. A generated kubeconfig enables kubectl access, and Pods run on separate Fly Machines as the platform scales the cluster. The design provides declarative replica, autoscaling, and volume definitions plus automatic recovery for failed Machines, while retaining Fly Machines’ trade-off of failing when requested placement is unavailable.
Fly.io has GPUs now
Fly.io announces GPU support for its cloud, extending its near-user deployment model to AI and machine-learning workloads at the edge. The offering attaches Nvidia A100 GPUs with 40GB or 80GB of RAM, CUDA support, eight AMD EPYC CPU cores, and volumes up to 500GB; L40s are also listed as coming soon and then noted as available. A sample fly.toml deploys Ollama with a 100GB model volume, while auto-start and auto-stop settings can reduce min_machines_running to zero when idle. GPU apps can scale across supported regions, retaining the same public IP address and TLS certificates, with an Amsterdam example using fly scale count 2 --region ams. Listed prices are $2.50 per hour for A100 40GB and $3.50 for A100 80GB, with reserved-instance and dedicated-host discounts available.
Launching to Victory
Fly.io introduces a streamlined version of its fly launch command for deploying applications near their users. The CLI now infers desired infrastructure from application source code and offers opinionated defaults or alternative options when it cannot apply the same shape. Previously, the launch flow asked a series of questions; the change reduces guesswork by folding varied frameworks, languages, and toolchains into a few basic infrastructure shapes. A Rails application using SQLite is given an example set of defaults that developers can build from, while other applications can be configured through a confirmation webpage. Once settings are accepted, the app is built and deployed unless --no-deploy is supplied, and the CLI provides a link to the running app.
Winners of the AI and Identity Okta Hackathon 2023
The AI and Identity - Okta Hackathon 2023 challenged developers to build applications combining identity standards with AI, drawing 576 registrants, 22 submissions, and nine eligible entries. Judges selected Facets Wellness App for first place and $10,000 plus a future Okta Dev Advocacy Podcast appearance; IHealthHist took second with $5,000, and AITrainsYou.com took third with $3,000. Facets provides snippet-based wellness modules for emotional regulation and intelligence, journaling, values, and goals, while the other winning projects address medical-history storage and AI-powered team learning. converse.ai received the $500 honorable mention for document conversations, with judging comments citing implementations of OIDC, SCIM, and AI across the winners. Separate “most supportive hacker” prizes went to Hong Tran, Monish Basaniwal, and Deependra Gaur for forum support and guidance.
Introducing Ruvy
Ruvy is an open-source toolchain that takes Ruby code as input and produces a WebAssembly module whose exported _start function executes that code. Built on ruby.wasm, it pre-initializes the Ruby virtual machine and includes Ruby files during the build, while avoiding the need to supply a Ruby script path as a WASI argument at runtime. In Wasmtime benchmarks, Ruvy’s instantiation and _start execution took about 44.4–45.2 ms, compared with 55.8–56.9 ms for ruby.wasm plus wasi-vfs, and its Wasm-to-native compilation took about 440–457 ms versus 1.62–1.68 seconds. These results correspond to roughly 20% faster runtime performance and about 70% less compilation time in the reported tests. Ruvy currently requires users to install build dependencies and compile it because precompiled binaries are not shipped.
Automated Sentry Error Tracking
Fly.io announces Sentry as the default error-monitoring tool for its applications, with new deployments receiving an automatically provisioned Sentry project and existing apps using flyctl ext sentry create. Each organization receives one year of monthly Team Plan credits covering 50,000 error events, 100,000 performance units, 500 session replays, and 1GB of attachment storage. For Rails apps, flyctl launch installs the required gems, creates initializers, and sets the SENTRY_DSN secret, allowing boot failures, memory exhaustion, exceptions, latency issues, and crashes to reach Sentry. The post demonstrates a deliberately raised Ruby exception, then uses flyctl apps errors to open the Sentry issue dashboard and identify the bug; planned extensions include release tracking and out-of-memory events.
Supabase Beta July 2023
Supabase’s July 2023 update lists product releases, community content, and preparations for Launch Week 8, which was scheduled to begin the following week. The shipped changes include a new Android Kotlin client library, Login with Figma as an OAuth provider, Resend support as a custom SMTP provider, pgsodium 3.1.8, and PostgREST 11.1. A performance benchmark examines pgvector 0.4.0’s strengths and limitations, while noting that work on HNSW had started and was not far away. The update also features a Snowflake natural-language query application built with Python, Streamlit, Open AI, and Supabase Vector, plus tutorials, courses, community projects, and hiring announcements.
Shopify’s platform is the Web platform
Shopify now recommends Remix for building Admin apps, which merchants use to configure apps, view data, and integrate services within Shopify Admin. Because these apps run in cross-origin iframes, browser restrictions can block cookies, storage, URL updates, and direct access to the Admin interface; App Bridge uses postMessage() to restore capabilities and support deeper integration. The new App Bridge client replaces the previous package, requires only a script tag, and makes standard web APIs such as history.pushState() work with Admin apps. The Remix template uses file-based routes, server-side loaders and actions, implicit API handling, and Shopify-specific integrations supplied by @shopify/shopify-app-remix, with Prisma provided for storage and sessions. Shopify integrated the template into Shopify CLI and describes it as the beginning of broader platform and design-system reworks.
Supabase Launch Week 8 Hackathon
Supabase Launch Week 8 will run an asynchronous hackathon for new Open Source projects that use Supabase in some capacity. The event is listed as starting at 09:00 am PT on Friday 4 August 2023, with the main schedule ending on Sunday 13 August at 11:59 pm PT; the submission instructions separately give a deadline of 11:59 pm PT on Sunday 14 August 2023. Individuals or teams of up to five can build an app, tool, library, or other project in any language or framework, with all design and code created during the event. Judges will award winners and runners-up across five categories, including overall quality, AI use, technical impressiveness, visual appeal, and fun, while submissions must include source code and may earn extra points for a demo video.
What is new in PostgREST v11.1?
PostgREST v11.1 is available on the Supabase platform with configuration and querying improvements, plus a small set of documented breaking changes from v10. It lets JWT-authenticated impersonated roles such as anon, authenticated, and service_role receive ALTER ROLE settings, including statement timeouts, pg_plan_filter statement cost limits, and configurable transaction isolation levels. The release also supports bulk JSON inserts that preserve column defaults when defaultToNull is false, and adds any/all modifiers for several filters, including eq, like, ilike, and comparison filters. For HTTP clients outside Supabase libraries, Range is now ignored on non-GET requests and RPC requests no longer use the deprecated Prefer: params=multiple-objects header; existing Supabase projects can upgrade by pausing and unpausing.
Fly.io ❤️ Bun
Fly.io is preparing support for Bun as Bun 1.0 approaches, expanding beyond its ongoing Node.js work because Bun aims for complete Node.js API compatibility. With flyctl 0.1.54 and @flydotio/dockerfile 0.3.3, users can launch and deploy Bun applications through fly launch and fly deploy if Bun 0.5.3 or later is installed and package.json includes an eligible start, module/type, or main configuration. The post says applications following Bun’s Quickstart and Fly’s hands-on walkthrough can be deployed, and provides a sample. Support is beta, with noted compatibility issues including bun install lacking --prune, unsupported throwIfNoEntry in fs.statSync, and readline-based programs failing to exit; shared Dockerfile generation means fixes for either runtime generally benefit both.
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