TLDR

TLDR 2023-12-11

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01GENERAL

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02BIG TECH & STARTUPS

APPLE CUTS OFF BEEPER MINI’S ACCESS AFTER LAUNCH OF SERVICE THAT BROUGHT IMESSAGE TO ANDROID

Beeper Mini, an app that brought iMessage to Android, recently experienced an outage. It appeared that Apple found a way to make the app stop functioning. The service is now back online. Apple claims that the app poses significant risks to user security and privacy. Beeper claims that its service increases iPhone security as without it, texts would be sent to Android devices unencrypted.

techcrunch.com3 min read

THE REAL RESEARCH BEHIND THE WILD RUMORS ABOUT OPENAI’S Q* PROJECT

OpenAI's Q* model can reportedly perform math on the level of grade-school students. While Q* might not be the crucial breakthrough that will lead to artificial general intelligence, it might be an important step towards an AI with general reasoning abilities. This article takes a look at the area of AI math research and explains why step-by-step reasoning techniques designed for math problems could have much broader applications. Building a general reasoning engine will require a way for language models to learn new abstractions that go beyond their training data and have these evolving abstractions influence the model's choices as it explores the space of possible solutions.

arstechnica.com15 min read

03SCIENCE & FUTURISTIC TECHNOLOGY

WHY SCIENTISTS ARE MAKING TRANSPARENT WOOD

Transparent wood could soon find uses as super-strong screens for smartphones, glowing light fixtures, and structural features like color-changing windows. The material outperforms plastic and glass in tests measuring how easily materials fracture or break under pressure. It is a far better insulator than glass, so windows made out of the material could help buildings retain heat or keep it out. For now, transparent wood still has a higher environmental impact than glass, but scaling up manufacturing and embracing greener production schemes could help make it more sustainable.

arstechnica.com7 min read

FDA APPROVES FIRST CRISPR THERAPY

The FDA has approved two gene therapies for treating sickle cell disease. These treatments have been shown to be highly effective at preventing vaso-occlusive events and crises. One of the treatments, the first CRISPR/Cas9 therapy approved in the US, turns on the production of fetal hemoglobin to replace deformed red blood cells. The other therapy uses a Lentiviral vector to insert the genetic code for a modified type of hemoglobin designed to be anti-sickling.

arstechnica.com3 min read

04PROGRAMMING, DESIGN & DATA SCIENCE

MEDIA QUERIES IN HTML VIDEO

This article demonstrates how to serve videos using some of the features used for serving content based on user preferences and accessibility features. It presents alternate versions of a video for assorted media queries. Each example embeds the video with its alternate version, shows the HTML code used, and provides the alternate version alone. The examples are designed so developers can compare and confirm whether changes made to their browsers, systems, or within dev tools were successful.

adrianroselli.com18 min read

FRANKENPHP V1.0 IS HERE

FrankenPHP is a modern PHP application server that can create a production-grade PHP server with just one command. It has native support for Symphony, Laravel, WordPress, and more. Most popular PHP extensions should work with FrankenPHP.

laravel-news.com2 min read

05MISCELLANEOUS

IS THE TEXAS BOOM TOWN OF AUSTIN LOSING ITS LUSTER?

Investors and startup founders flocked to Austin during the COVID-19 pandemic due to its lower cost of living, hip lifestyle, and business-friendly environment. Some are now leaving or looking to leave the city. The weather and economy were not as favorable as they'd expected. This article looks at a few of the companies that are leaving and the reasons why.

techcrunch.com5 min read