TLDR Index
TLDR

TLDR 2024-05-31

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01GENERAL

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Where were you when Amazon acquired Ring for $1B? Or when Google bought Nest for a cool $3.2B?

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02BIG TECH & STARTUPS

TIKTOK PREPARING A US COPY OF THE APP'S CORE ALGORITHM

TikTok is working on a clone of its recommendation algorithm for US users. This may result in a version that operates independently of its Chinese parent, which may make it more palatable to lawmakers who want to ban it. Work on the project started before the bill to force a sale of TikTok's US operations began gaining steam in Congress this year. While the project could lay the groundwork for a divestiture of TikTok's US assets, the company has no plans to sell its US assets.

links.tldrnewsletter.com4 min read

SPACEX SENT STARSHIP TO ORBIT — THE NEXT LAUNCH WILL TRY TO BRING IT BACK

SpaceX's Starship's next test flight could be on June 5. The main objective of the test will be to evaluate the second stage's reusable heat shield as the vehicle tries to safely reenter the atmosphere for the first time. Composed of around 18,000 ceramic hexagonal tiles, the heat shield is vulnerable to even the loss of a single tile in most places. SpaceX still needs to receive a commercial launch license from the US FAA before the launch can move ahead.

techcrunch.com3 min read

03SCIENCE & FUTURISTIC TECHNOLOGY

‘SMART' ANTIBIOTIC CAN KILL DEADLY BACTERIA WHILE SPARING THE MICROBIOME

Gram-negative bacteria are often hardy, virulent, and quick to evolve resistance to antibiotics. Scientists have developed an antibiotic that kills pathogenic Gram-negative bacteria without impairing the gut microbiome. Still untested in humans, the compound's usefulness will depend on whether the bacteria will develop resistance to it in the long run. The time from an antibiotic's discovery to its approval for clinical use can be more than two decades, and there is not much money to be made with a novel antibiotic - around ten to twenty new Gram-negative antibiotics have been discovered in the past decade but none have gained approval from the US FDA.

nature.com3 min read

1-BIT LLMS COULD SOLVE AI'S ENERGY DEMANDS

Large language models are demanding more and more energy and computational power as they get better. These models need to shrink to become cheap, fast, and environmentally friendly. Researchers use a process called quantization to compress networks by reducing the precision of their parameters. They are now pushing the envelope to single bit, producing models that are faster and more energy efficient than their full-precision counterparts. The quantized versions of the models perform almost as well as their original versions.

spectrum.ieee.org3 min read

04PROGRAMMING, DESIGN & DATA SCIENCE

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UNEXPECTED ANTI-PATTERNS FOR ENGINEERING LEADERS

Engineering teams consisting of a couple hundred people might cost $50 to $100 million a year in salary, so it is frustrating for executives when they hear that engineering is an art and that outcomes are unpredictable. The misalignment between engineering leaders and other executives often stems from a lack of flexibility - too many well-meaning engineering leaders go by the book of conventional leadership advice. Applying rules too universally turns them into anti-patterns. The key to effective leadership lies in figuring out which scenarios are worth deliberately defying conventional logic and when to simply follow the rules.

review.firstround.com32 min read

DON'T DRY YOUR CODE PREMATURELY

Before applying DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself), consider whether the deduplication is truly redundant or if the functionality will need to evolve independently over time. Applying DRY principles too rigidly leads to premature abstractions that make future changes more complex than necessary. While two sections of code may look the same, they could serve different contexts and business requirements that evolve separately over time. Keep code separate until enough common patterns emerge over time to justify coupling the code together. Tolerate a little duplication in the early stages of development and wait to abstract.

testing.googleblog.com2 min read

05MISCELLANEOUS

CHASING UTOPIA, STARTUP STYLE

Silicon Valley's tech barons have several projects to develop new frontiers for human life. The projects are based on the desire to withdraw from existing societies and their high taxes and regulations. Stemming from a yearning for new forms of self-governance and citizenship, these political exit projects illuminate the real problems of society, like the failure of nation-states to respond adequately to modern crises, disintegrating social cohesion, and the epidemic of loneliness. While the idea of being a sovereign individual may sound appealing to Silicon Valley billionaires, the world's most poor and desperate often experience such lawless locales as antithetical to freedom as some of the worst abuses flourish in the absence of the state.

noemamag.com32 min read

GOOGLE WILL ROLL OUT CHROME'S NEW EXTENSION SPEC NEXT WEEK

Google will begin phasing out Manifest V2 on the Chrome Beta, Dev, and Canary channels starting on June 3. Extensions will still work, but Google says it will disable them in browsers in the coming months before removing the ability to use them completely. A full rollout is scheduled for the beginning of 2025. Manifest V3 has faced pushback over concerns it could limit the effectiveness of ad blockers. Google has attempted to address developers' main concerns by adding support for user scripts and increasing the number of rule sets for an API used by ad blocking extensions.

theverge.com1 min read