TLDR 2023-09-12

URGENCY’ AT X, FORMERLY TWITTER

Walter Isaacson's biography of Elon Musk is set to be published today. This article contains a story adapted from the book about how X moved its server farms from Sacramento to Portland. Musk's advisors told him that it would take many months to move the servers, but Musk decided that they were wrong and opted to move the servers using cheap contractors. They managed to move the servers in under a week, but the exercise destabilized X for the next two months. Musk later admitted that the rushed move was a mistake.

Nvidia says that TensorRT-LLM, an open source software library, will double the H100's performance for running inference on leading large language models. The software is now available in early access. It will be integrated into the Nvidia NeMo LLM framework as part of the Nvidia AI Enterprise software suite when it is released to the public next month. TensorRT-LLM will also support Nvidia's A100, L4, L40, L40, and Grace Hopper Superchip GPUs.

SCIENTISTS FIGURED OUT HOW TO WRITE IN WATER

A team of German physicists has figured out a method for writing on water. The method involves putting ink directly into water using a microbead made of an ion-exchange material as a pen. The bead writes by altering the local pH value of the water, attracting ink particles to those areas. The method is at a proof of concept stage - future iterations may be able to generate highly complex patterns in fluids. Examples of images drawn in water using the method are available in the article.

WI-FI CAN READ THROUGH WALLS

Researchers from UC Santa Barbara have developed a technique that can read letters through walls with Wi-Fi. The technique focuses on tracing the edges of objects. It is able to capture details not previously possible with other Wi-Fi imaging techniques. The approach may open up new directions for Wi-Fi imaging.

DOMAIN REGISTRARS WHICH DEVELOPERS RECOMMEND

Google Domains was one of the most popular domain registrars, with 10 million domains registered globally. Users who do nothing will be migrated to Squarespace. Domain names are easily transferable, so users have a choice of where to transfer their domains to. This article looks at which domain registrars other techies recommend. It provides an overview of each registrar with an analysis of their offerings.

7 SIMPLE HABITS OF THE TOP 1% OF ENGINEERS

This article looks at the habits of successful engineers and explains how these habits make those engineers more successful. Examples include sticking to a consistent standard and style of coding to make code easier to read and understand, deep domain knowledge in at least one field, and good self-marketing. The article delves deep into coding habits and how to write good code.

WHY THERE’S NEVER BEEN A BETTER TIME TO BE A CREATOR

The health of the creator economy is judged by the likelihood of someone being able to earn a minimum viable living through being creative. There has never been a better time for creators to be creators. While it may be harder than ever for a creative to earn millions every year, it's easier than ever to make $50,000. Technology has driven the costs of tools down and platforms make it easy to monetize content. It may still not be easy, but there has never been a better time to try.

WHY NVIDIA’S AI SUPREMACY IS ONLY TEMPORARY

Nvidia's top spot in the AI world is far from secure. It is currently winning as almost nobody is running large machine learning apps, the competition hasn't matured, researchers have the purchasing power, and because of the focus on training models. In the near future, inference with CPUs will dominate over training with GPUs, engineers will have more purchasing power, and the focus will be on application costs. The winners of this shift will likely be traditional CPU platforms like x86 and Arm.

AWESOME BUN

This repository contains a curated list of resources related to Bun, an incredibly fast JavaScript runtime, bundler, transpiler, and package manager all in one.

The McDermitt Caldera could contain around 20 to 40 million metric tons of lithium.

E2EE ON THE WEB: ISOLATING PLAINTEXT

It would be better to improve code integrity/provenance/auditability for end-to-end encrypted web applications rather than trying to isolate plain text from application code.

VALE

Vale is a cross-platform and highly customizable command-line tool that brings code-like linting to prose.

BIOGRAPHY OF MUSK

A look at the relationship between two people who have both held the title of 'Richest Person in the World'.