The Roundup
Everything you missed this past week on Product Hunt: Top products, spicy community discourse, key trends on the site, and long-form pieces we’ve recently published.
Hey there! Aaron here to fill you in on everything you might have missed in the tech world last week.
Quick update: I’m testing a new format by giving you the low-down on the rest of our newsletters. I’m hoping it will be more valuable to you as the reader. Happy reading!
Cybercrime is a real and growing threat. According to the World Economic Forum, the global cost of malicious hacking is expected to rise to $23 trillion. To put that into perspective, in 2022, the global cost was estimated to be $8 trillion. A meagre number in comparison to what the future holds.
I mean, it seems like every other day there’s a new data breach. That’s why an Indie-maker named Jack decided to take things into his own hands. He recently realized he was sitting on over three billion entries of data breaches on the dark net due to his job as an ethical hacker and red teamer and decided to put that data to use for good.
“Do hackers know me?” is a website that lets you query that exact data to see what hackers know about you. The goal is to see yourself through the hacker's eyes so you can quickly rectify any vulnerabilities.
You can scan the dark net for leaks involving things like your email address, phone number, bank details, social security number, and more. From there, the site will get to work trawling through the three billion records, and if it finds something, it will present you with exactly what was leaked, what site or service it was leaked from, and help you rectify it so that it doesn’t happen again.
If you’re curious about your data, you can test it out for free by using the email check option.
Social media is a hard nut to crack as a founder. To go up against titans like Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat and carve out a piece of the pie is no easy feat. How many new social apps have we seen wind down just as fast as they pop up?
That’s why a new social app, built by Gen-Z whisperer, investor, and former Product Hunt employee Tiffany Zhong, is raising eyebrows. Noplace is an app backed by Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian that aims to bring back the more whimsical days of social media and friend-finding. It opened to the masses last week and immediately shot to the top of the App Store charts, clinching the number one spot.
Noplace is like old-school MySpace, where users can create colorful and customizable profiles to share anything from mundane status updates to what they’re listening to and their relationship status. It’s designed to appeal to a younger generation and create more community amongst young people.
It doesn’t have more features than traditional social media—it has fewer, and that’s where I see the appeal. Noplace is entirely text-based, so there are no photos, videos, or files. It also has no vanity metrics such as likes or reposts. All you have is a number that shows how many responses a post gets.
Noplace also ditches the algorithms other social apps use to keep us hooked on the endless flow of content. Instead, it uses AI to moderate and curate content between two feeds: one made up of your friend's posts and the other, which is kind of like a global messaging board where you see original posts and ones in response to them.
Profiles follow the same theme of simplicity. You get a profile picture, a bio section, an add friend button, and your wall — the home for everything you post.
AI is rapidly transforming our lives with automated tools and innovations, such as AI girlfriends, assistants, travel guides, and even AI social networks.
Dot fits somewhere into these genres, but it’s a little different. Dot is not a therapist or a girlfriend — it’s more of a friend, a companion, and a confidant who strives to learn as much as possible about you. This allows it to give advice and complete tasks beyond the typical responses of other chatbots.
When you first boot up Dot, you’ll go through an onboarding process. Your new companion will ask “getting to know you” questions, like “What do you do for work?” “What’s your favorite hobby?” or “How do you like to wind down in the evening?”
Once you answer, the AI will ask deeper questions. I mentioned that I love cooking, leading Dot to ask, “What’s your earliest memory of home-cooked food?” You can tell Dot to move on, but the more questions you answer, the more you, Dot, becomes
“It’s meant to be a tool for self-introspection, accountability, personal growth — but not to replace human relationships,” co-founder Samantha Whitmore told TechCrunch. Miller previously headed engineering at the AI startup Kensho, and her cofounder, Jason Yuan, is a former Apple designer. Their new company, New Computer, is backed by the OpenAI Fund and other angel investors.
So what’s Dot good for? My immediate use case was as a journal. It’s good for externalizing thoughts and feelings, and since the AI gets to know you, it can sympathize better than other chatbots. Its follow-up questions genuinely lead to introspection.
If you want to try out an AI version of yourself, Dot is available on the iOS app store.
Remember when The Beatles got together for one last song? It got mixed reviews, but the fact that one of the biggest bands of all time embraced AI set a precedent. AI was going to change the music industry. From writing songs to generating entire tracks, many predicted an AI-powered musical revolution.
TwoShot is one of those AI apps looking to make its mark on the music scene. Launched last week, It is focused on making music accessible to all by letting you craft tracks with your voice, text prompt, or just by humming into a mic.
Say you’re working on a lo-fi track to stimulate productivity. You can instruct TwoShot to generate a “melody of flutes inspired by nature” and then pair it with a chill drum line by beatboxing into your mic. The AI will turn it into a full-fledged, professional-sounding track.
It also comes with a library of over 200,000 samples, ranging from rock to country music and everything in between, that you can grab for inspiration or even use the AI to remix into something new to create your next banger.
One of the most powerful features is TwoShot's plethora of different models. While building your track, you can swap your chosen AI model at any stage for a different one, including ones built by big names. Say you want your lyrics to have a female voice. You can load up the “Grimes” model with your prompt or existing sounds, and it will work it into a more Grimes-esque sound.
Alongside that, these models are “ethically trained,” according to the team, meaning they usually have attained artist permission to use their likeness or have worked with them to create the model itself, like in the case of the Grimes one above.
As someone who writes about AI, one of the most common questions I get is "How are artists going to survive AI?"
Well, I’m not sure, but an influx of startups is trying to crack that nut. For example, last month I wrote about Replica, a voice AI platform that trains its LLMs off of the work of fairly compensated voice actors. Now Cara is here, offering a digital bubble for visual artists that AI can’t touch.
Cara is a social app for artists and it's gone viral, earning a bunch of media coverage after jumping from 40k to 650k users in a week (it hit 900k users last week). Cara is not too dissimilar from Instagram + Threads — artists can upload portfolios, but the UI is akin to IG posts, plus you can post text updates like Threads or X. The big difference is that Cara won’t use your work to train any LLMs, and the platform filters out generative AI images.
If you try to upload an AI-generated image, you’ll get a message that says it's not allowed, which you can appeal if it’s a mistake. Cara also has a partnership with The Glaze Project, a product from researchers at the University of Chicago that subtly alters the pixels of your artwork to prevent original work from being scraped. Artists have the option to apply Glaze to their work upon uploading it.
So how has Cara gone so viral? The team’s anti-Meta approach has helped it gain followers from fed-up artists. Founder and designer Jingna Zhang explained to TechCrunch that her anger level was increased upon seeing that EU artists can opt out of giving Meta permission to train its AI with their posts, but Meta won’t apply the same rules to other territories. Zhang is well suited to lead an artist movement as someone who puts her time where her mouth is. She’s part of multiple lawsuits that fight for rights on behalf of herself and other artists, including one against Google for using copyrighted work to train Imagen.
Cara’s sudden growth has come with some public pain points, but protecting original art is a hard issue to solve, so I’m personally hoping the app can generate some momentum for the underdog.
Since founding Oculus VR and eventually selling it to Meta, Palmer Luckey has continued experimenting with unusual tech, like this VR headset that could kill you if you lose a game. Now, he's focusing on a much safer and fun project: the ModRetro Chromatic.
The ModRetro Chromatic is a handheld console designed to run any Nintendo Game Boy cartridges. While it retains the nostalgic look of Nintendo’s handheld gaming era, the Chromatic features several modern enhancements aimed at bringing the childhood console into the modern era
It’s housed inside a magnesium alloy case and sapphire crystal cover glass, which keeps the original Game Boy’s size, resolution, pixel structure, and color balance. With 1,000 nits of brightness and an outdoor-friendly LCD screen, you can game to your heart’s content in most lighting conditions.
The ModRetro Chromatic’s FPGA technology allows it to play any official Game Boy and Game Boy Color cartridges, just like the original devices. Additionally, each console includes an officially licensed version of Tetris, featuring updated versions of the iconic theme song and Link Cable multiplayer support. It also comes in a number of fun color options and a USB-C port to charge the AA batteries needed to power it.
This isn't the first reimagining of classic handheld devices. The Analogue Pocket has been a fan favorite for gamers everywhere since it dropped. Where the two differ, according to Luckey, is in the fine details: “The color temps are actually right, the clock rate isn’t slightly off, the pixel structure isn’t totally wrong in a way that ruins subpixel aware sprites, etc,” he told The Verge.
🐶 The dog behind the doge meme and dogecoin has passed away at 18.
🎵 Spotify is shutting down its ‘Car Thing’ product, and users want refunds.
💰 Humane is looking for a buyer after the company’s underwhelming debut.
🤖 Google has started rolling out new AI tools to Android and iOS for free.
🤖 According to documents, OpenAI didn’t use ScarJo’s voice for GPT-4o.
💰 Meta, Match, and Coinbase are teaming up to fight online scams.
