TLDR 2024-07-16

today.

APPLE RELEASES IOS 18 PUBLIC BETA FOR IPHONE — HERE'S WHAT'S NEW AND HOW TO GET IT

The iOS 18 public preview is now available. The update allows users to put icons anywhere on the home screen, change app icon color, add lock screen shortcuts for apps other than camera and flashlight, and more. It has a more customizable Control Center menu and a redesigned Photos app. The update will only run on iPhones released in 2018 or later.

ZERO TO BILLIONS: THE STARTUP ON THE VERGE OF THE BIGGEST TECH EXIT IN YEARS

Cloud cybersecurity company Wiz was founded four years ago by four former Israeli military officers. It grew quickly to become the dominant company in cloud cybersecurity and is headed toward the largest exit for any tech startup since Rivian's $77 billion initial public offering in November 2021. Google is looking to acquire the company for a $23 billion sale price. The deal will likely draw scrutiny from antitrust regulators in the US and EU.

IMMUNOTHERAPY IS CHANGING CANCER TREATMENT FOREVER

The human immune system is very good at attacking anything it registers as a disease - if it could be turned against cancer, it could eliminate tumors more thoroughly than surgery and more durably than chemotherapy. Scientists have managed to modify T cells to react to cancer as if it were a virus and destroy it. The therapy has been used to remove glioblastomas, a common type of brain cancer with a median time of diagnosis to death of just over a year.

WHERE'S THE SYNTHETIC BLOOD?

The creation of synthetic blood is one of the holy grails of biomedical research. There are two main approaches to making synthetic blood products: the biologist's approach and the chemist's approach. The biologist's approach involves coaxing stem cells into becoming blood cells, while the chemist's approach synthesizes molecules and particles that mimic the functions of blood cells. Both approaches need to overcome economic and manufacturing challenges before they can scale for use in patients.

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SCALE BY SPECTRAL COMPUTE#

SCALE is a GPGPU programming toolkit that allows programs written using the popular CUDA language to be natively compiled for AMD GPUs. It accepts CUDA programs as is and serves as a drop-in replacement for nvcc. SCALE acts as an installation of the NVIDIA CUDA Toolkit, so it will work with existing build tools and scripts. It offers opt-in language extensions that can make writing GPU code easier and more efficient.

WHY FACEBOOK DOESN'T USE GIT

Facebook uses Mercurial instead of Git, building custom workflows on top of the tool for performance. Facebook used Git years ago, but it started facing performance issues, and the response from Git maintainers wasn't cooperative, with the maintainers pushing back on improving performance and instead recommending that Facebook shard its monorepo. The Facebook team looked at its alternatives and chose Mercurial, which had a community of maintainers who were welcoming to changes made by them. The story shows how kindness and openness can go far in the world of devtools.

SAUDI MONEY MAKES A BIG SPLASH IN VIDEO GAMES

The Saudi government plans to invest $38 billion in video games by 2030 through its Public Investment Fund. It is holding the inaugural Esports World Cup this month in Riyadh, the Saudi capital. Many of the world's largest video game companies and influencers have quietly partnered with the Saudis. Photos from the event, which will run for eight weeks, are available in the article.

ASK HN: HOW DO YOU GO ABOUT FINDING A JOB? (HACKER NEWS THREAD)

This Hacker News thread takes a look at what the job market is currently like, both for recruiters and job seekers. While many respondents confirm that a lot of employment is found through direct connections rather than through job postings, many companies still require potential workers to go through the interview process. The thread contains a lot of advice for job seekers from people who have been successful at finding new employment during their careers.

GOOGLE NOW DEFAULTS TO NOT INDEXING YOUR CONTENT

MICROSOFT UNVEILS A LARGE LANGUAGE MODEL THAT EXCELS AT ENCODING SPREADSHEETS

SpreadsheetLLM uses a Chain of Spreadsheet framework that can decompose spreadsheet reasoning into a table detection-match-reasoning pipeline.

WHY, AFTER 6 YEARS, I'M OVER GRAPHQL

This article looks at why developers should avoid Graph QL and presents alternatives to use instead.

MICROSOFT CTO KEVIN SCOTT THINKS LLM “SCALING LAWS” WILL HOLD DESPITE CRITICISM

Critics in the AI community say that progress in large language models has plateaued and the development may be approaching diminishing returns.

COMPANY ABANDONS PLANS TO GIVE AI WORKERS "RIGHTS" AND ADD THEM TO ORG CHART AFTER OUTCRY FROM HUMAN EMPLOYEES

HR software company Lattice will no longer pursue digital workers in its products after backlash.

HOW CLOSE IS AI TO REPLACING PRODUCT MANAGERS?

Most people underestimate how close AI tools are to replacing the work of a human because they aren't using the latest models or making use of prompt engineering.