TLDR 2023-10-09

AMAZON LAUNCHES FIRST INTERNET SATELLITE PROTOTYPES

Amazon launched its first Project Kuiper satellites on Friday. The project, which was announced more than four years ago, aims to build a network of 3,236 satellites in low Earth orbit to provide high-speed internet access anywhere in the world. Amazon plans to invest more than $10 billion to build the network. The company has kept the size and design of the satellites secret, only sharing photos of the shipping containers that carried them to the launch site.

AND NO CONTROLLERS

Meta's Quest headset marketing plans changed in response to Apple's Vision Pro announcement. The company plans to release a VR headset without controllers next year. It will shift away from a heavy focus on the metaverse and lean more into pushing the practical uses of the headset. The next headset should be cheaper than the Quest 3.

DECOMPOSING LANGUAGE MODELS INTO UNDERSTANDABLE COMPONENTS

Neural networks are trained on data and not programmed to follow rules. While we understand the math of trained networks, we don't understand why those mathematical operations result in the behaviors we see, making it hard to diagnose failure modes and certify that a model is truly safe. This article presents a method for analyzing language models to determine how they work that involves looking at units in small transformer models rather than at individual neurons.

The SP80 and Syroco teams have built two boats designed to beat the current world sailing speed record of 65.37 knots. Both teams are using huge kites attached to the boats and aim to achieve a target speed of 81 knots. This article takes a look at how both teams are progressing with their projects. Pictures and videos of the sailboats are available.

SURREAL

Surreal is a mini jQuery alternative with dependency-free animations and locality of behavior. It pairs with HTMX. Examples, plugins, and resources are available.

🧰

An hour of efficiency gained per day can save one month per year. This article provides tips on how to optimize software engineering workflows. The tips include optimizing everyday tasks every day multiple times a day, making aliases and autocompletions for commands, and using tools to help remember things.

WHY I BUILT ZUZALU

Zuzulu was an experiment that blended the idea of hacker houses and conferences. The project involved a pop-up mini-city that housed two hundred people for two whole months. During the event, participants built technologies and developed a community that brought together a new combination of cultures. This article talks about Zuzulu from Vitalik Buterin's perspective and discusses the lessons learned from the experiment.

UNBUNDLING AI

LLMs allow users to ask anything and almost get an answer to everything. However, the answers it returns could be wrong, and even if the answers are correct, they might not be the right way to solve the problem. They are probabilistic models that provide the most probable answers. Large language models are currently a general-purpose technology that can do some theoretically magic stuff, but for many people, they still look a bit like the PC ads of the late 1970s that promised computers could be used for anything.

HOW RENDER SCALED KNATIVE TO100K+ WEB APPS

Render is a cloud infrastructure provider that saw a surge in popularity after Heroku announced the end of its free offering in the second half of 2022.

23ANDME SAYS PRIVATE USER DATA IS UP FOR SALE AFTER BEING SCRAPED

The data allegedly contains origin estimation, phenotype, health information, photos, and identification data - 23andMe's CEO was aware the company had been hacked two months earlier but never revealed the incident.

AI-ASSISTED DECISION-MAKING

A guide on how to use ChatGPT to make better decisions.

MICROSOFT REPORTEDLY PLANS TO LAUNCH ITS OWN AI CHIP NEXT MONTH

Microsoft's new artificial intelligence chip will be similar to Nvidia's GPUs and is designed to run data servers that train and run large language models.

MEANINGLESS

Google's Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro come with the promise of seven years of OS upgrades, security updates, feature drops, and AI innovations.

FETCHBOOK

Fetchbook is a command-line tool for managing collections of HTTP requests that is based on the standard RequestInit object and runs in TypeScript with bun.sh.