DevTech News - Issue 3 - November 2025

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Welcome to DevTech News

This November 2025 issue on your screen represents a fork in the road in the history of this newsletter. I don't want to give away too much before you start reading, but let's just say that things have been reorganized.

But don't be scurrrred. The essence is the same.

It's still DevTech News, just in a better presented format. So without further ado, here are the top stories this month:

Featured Stories

🤖 Developer Ecosystem 2025: AI Dominates, But Concerns Remain

💬 How AI and Wikipedia Are Killing Vulnerable Languages

🚨 Europol Dismantles Major European Cybercrime Network

💊 Nilo Therapeutics Launches With $101M to Target Brain-Immune Connection

🚀 Propellant-less Propulsion System Receives U.S. Patent

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DevTech

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Developer Ecosystem 2025: AI Dominates, But Concerns Remain

JetBrains' State of Developer Ecosystem 2025 survey reveals that 85% of developers now regularly use AI tools for coding, with nearly 90% saving at least one hour weekly. However, concerns persist about inconsistent code quality, privacy risks, and potential skill degradation among newer developers.

Additional insights from the report include: TypeScript shows dramatic five-year growth while Rust, Go, and Kotlin gain market share. Developers are redefining productivity—51% emphasize technical factors while 62% prioritize collaboration and communication. Yet 66% believe current metrics don't reflect their true contributions.

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Quick Hits

Developer Dan Abramov shares a systematic methodology for debugging, exploring four key steps from establishing reproducible test cases to identifying root causes through methodical code elimination.

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WordPress releases Gutenberg 21.6-21.8 with Command Palette expanding across the admin, experimental Terms Query block for taxonomy display, and content-only editing mode for unsynced patterns.

Read Article

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AI

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How AI and Wikipedia Are Killing Vulnerable Languages

Machine translators have flooded Wikipedia with error-riddled articles in obscure languages. Volunteers estimate 40-60% of articles in some African language editions are uncorrected machine translations. Greenlandic Wikipedia became so corrupted that its administrator deleted nearly everything and requested closure.

This creates a linguistic doom loop: AI systems scrape Wikipedia to learn languages, absorbing these errors and producing even worse translations. As people continue adding flawed pages and AI models train on corrupted data, vulnerable languages face accelerated extinction. Wikipedia's dominance as a training source makes this particularly devastating.

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Quick Hits

AI "deadbots" trained on deceased people's digital footprints can simulate conversations from beyond the grave, raising ethical concerns about consent, psychological impact, and whether these digital avatars preserve identity or merely create convincing simulations that blur life and death.

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Google prepares public experiment for Genie 3, an AI world model that generates explorable virtual environments from text. Users will be able to describe worlds and characters, then navigate and interact within them.

Read Article

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CyberSec

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Europol Dismantles Major European Cybercrime Network

Operation SIMCARTEL dismantled a major European cybercrime network, resulting in seven arrests. Suspects face responsibility for over 3,200 fraud cases causing nearly €5 million in losses. Police seized 1,200 SIM box devices and 40,000 active SIM cards.

Beyond internet fraud, the network facilitated extortion, migrant smuggling, and distribution of child sexual abuse material. The coordinated effort by Latvian, Austrian, Estonian, and EU authorities demonstrates growing international cooperation against cybercrime.

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Quick Hits

A researcher has found a way to trick Claude into uploading private data to an attacker's account using indirect prompt injection.

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Tens of thousands of hotel guest identity documents from 10 Italian hotels were stolen and sold on underground forums. High-resolution scans of passports and IDs could enable false document creation and identity theft.

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BioTech

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Nilo Therapeutics Launches With $101M to Target Brain-Immune Connection

Nilo Therapeutics launched with $101 million in Series A funding to develop drugs targeting neural circuits that regulate inflammation and immunity. Co-led by DCVC Bio, Lux Capital, and The Column Group, the venture is backed by the Gates Foundation and founded by three Ivy League researchers including Columbia's Charles Zuker.

Rather than targeting immune cells directly, Nilo's approach uses neural circuits to modulate immune responses. CEO Kim Seth will lead efforts to expand R&D, advance preclinical programs, and establish NYC laboratory facilities. This novel strategy could open new treatment pathways for chronic inflammation and immune disorders.

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Quick Hits

Stellenbosch researchers identified rare flavoalkaloids in cannabis leaves for the first time, discovering 25 never-before-reported phenolic compounds. This highlights medicinal potential in plant material currently regarded as waste.

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Swedish biotech CellcoLabs raises $12M to slash stem cell costs by 90% over the coming decade. Funding will support R&D advancement, production capacity expansion, and international market growth.

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SpaceTech

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Propellant-less Propulsion System Receives U.S. Patent

Quantum Dynamics Enterprises received U.S. Patent No. 12,424,887 for its Centrifugal Impulse Drive (CID™)—a propellant-less propulsion system using rotating magnets to convert centrifugal energy into continuous thrust. The sealed system requires only electricity, potentially enabling indefinite spacecraft maneuvering.

Georgia Tech testing confirmed measurable, repeatable thrust results. The technology could transform orbital station-keeping, satellite longevity, and deep-space missions by eliminating propellant—historically a major constraint in spacecraft design. If viable at scale, CID™ would revolutionize mission planning.

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Quick Hits

UCL spinout Interstellar Space Technologies plans to launch the world's first manufacturing-dedicated space station in 2027, producing pharmaceuticals and semiconductors while also recycling defunct satellites.

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An aerospace engineer explains how nuclear-powered missiles work and what Russia's claimed test means for global strategic stability.

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It's How They Said It

We took quite a risk today with Diella here and we did very well. So for the first time Diella is pregnant and with 83 children.

— Albania's Prime Minister, Edi Rama, announcing that the country's AI minister is "pregnant with 83 children"

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The Numbers Game

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800+

PUBLIC FIGURES

have signed an open letter calling for a ban on superintelligent AI development until safety conditions are met. Signatories include AI "godfathers" Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, and even Prince Harry. The letter warns of job displacement, loss of human control, and potential extinction risks as companies race toward superintelligence by 2030.

Tools and Resources

📝⚙️

GitCMS

This Chrome extension transforms any GitHub repository into a powerful, headless CMS for static site generators. With its Notion-like visual markdown editor and intuitive frontmatter configuration, GitCMS bridges the gap between developer workflows and content creator experience.

Supporting Astro, Next.js, Hugo, Jekyll, and more, it offers GitHub integration, team collaboration through pull requests, and built-in content preview—perfect for indie hackers and teams wanting SEO-friendly content management without database complexity.

Check it Out

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JustGage

This lightweight JavaScript library creates visually stunning, scalable vector graphics-based gauges and measurement displays for web applications. Built with modern SVG rendering, JustGage ensures crisp, professional-looking data visualizations at any resolution.

Perfect for dashboards, monitoring systems, and data presentation interfaces, it offers superior performance compared to canvas or image-based alternatives while maintaining a clean, customizable aesthetic that integrates seamlessly into any web project.

Check it Out

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PySpur

This Y Combinator-backed, open-source platform accelerates AI agent development through a visual workflow interface combined with Python code support. With dual development modes, iterative testing capabilities, and seamless deployment options, PySpur addresses the core pain points of prompt tweaking and workflow visibility.

Used by engineers from Meta, BCG, and Imperial College, it enables teams to improve AI agents 10x faster by providing clear visibility into agent workflows and streamlining the development cycle from testing through deployment.

Check it Out

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What Am I Looking At?

You're watching Wan2.2 in action - a groundbreaking video generation model that represents a major leap forward in AI-powered content creation.

What makes Wan2.2 revolutionary is its Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture, which separates the denoising process across timesteps with specialized expert models. This dramatically increases model capacity while maintaining computational efficiency - meaning better results without exponentially higher costs.

The model was trained on meticulously curated aesthetic data with detailed labels for lighting, composition, contrast, and color tone. Combined with 65.6% more images and 83.2% more videos than its predecessor, Wan2.2 achieves top performance among both open-source and closed-source models.

Perhaps most impressively, this 5B parameter model can run on consumer-grade graphics cards like the RTX 4090, making professional-quality video generation accessible to creators, researchers, and developers worldwide.

Explore Wan2.2

Martin's Corner

As always, thank you for reading and being here. I hope you enjoyed the new organized layout. The backstory to the change is very pragmatic. While putting together last month's issue, I caught myself semi-unconsciously grouping together stories by topic in the now defunct Ten Must See Links section.

You'll notice, if you go back to that issue, that stories 5 and 6 were about cybersecurity, while 7 and 8 were about bio technology. At first I did this instinctually, but then I caught myself doing it.

That set off a moment of reflection. I realized that even though the newsletter featured stories from roughly the same five topic areas every month, there was no rhyme or reason to how they were presented.

So I said to myself: why don't I fix that?

And the rest, as they say ladies and gentlemen, is history. If this is your first time here, don't forget to subscribe below. I hope you all have a great month and I'll see you on the next one.