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A federal judge has ruled that Google illegally held a monopoly in search and text advertising. Google was found to have violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act, which outlaws monopolies. The ruling is the first anti-monopoly decision against a tech company in decades. Google plans to appeal the ruling.
Chrome is preparing to make Manifest V3 compulsory for extensions that want to run on its platform. Some users recently reported seeing warnings telling them that certain extensions may no longer be supported. V2 extensions started being disabled in early June on the Beta, Dev, and Canary update channels. Users will still be able to manually re-enable V2 extensions for a short time.
This article takes a look at how far the field of aging research has progressed since 2021. Nothing particularly useful has come from sirtuin-focused therapies and this is unlikely to change. The increase in longevity-focused research institutions/grant programs/startups hasn't led to much progress, but it's still very early. Cellar reprogramming has shown promise in animal studies, but no therapies have reached clinical trials yet. There's still a lot we don't know about biological clocks - everyday consumers should probably avoid getting their biological age tested. While epigenetic clocks seem to be useful, their interpretation is a bit complicated.
There are now many targeted therapies and new techniques in the pipeline for treating various types of cancer. This article looks at the history of targeted cancer treatments to see how far the science has come. It took many preclinical studies, genetic sequencing advances, and other breakthroughs to get where we are now. The success of current treatments would not have been possible without all of the research legwork and basic science over the past few decades.
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If you're into automation — as a software developer, architect, or digital transformation expert — there's no better place to be than CamundaCon [9]. Level up in technical sessions and business talks (including speakers from Forrester, Capital One, and Walmart), make valuable industry connections, and have some fun. Get your tickets early [9].
Databases contain some immensely powerful and clever abstractions. They aren't that complicated - most of the complexity in them comes from edge cases, often around concurrency. This article looks at how databases store data on disk, with a focus on PostgreSQL. It also provides resources for further research. Understanding how databases work is useful for fine-tuning performance and data recovery.
This article shares a developer's perspective on how to program durable things. The developer found that he ended up with much better programs by giving up tests and versions. Building durably for lots of people is hard - it's much better to focus on a core set of people and features. Overuse of the same tools creates technical debt, making programs unnecessarily complex, less durable, and harder to change when the context shifts.
Billions of dollars have been spent on cookie banner compliance just to annoy users with no material improvement to their privacy. The EU has no mechanism for self-correcting legislative failures. Europe needs to rethink how it legislates tech as the amount of squandered potential is tragic. Very little innovation is happening in Europe and when it does, it's usually shipped to the US or elsewhere as soon as it's ready to make a real impact on the world.
OpenAI is changing the format of its DevDay conference to a series of on-the-road developer engagement sessions. It won't be releasing its next major flagship model during the event. The conference will focus on educating developers about what's available in showcasing dev community stories. The DevDay events will take place in San Francisco on October 1, London on October 30, and Singapore on November 21. Registration costs $450 - applications close on August 15.
Nvidia has been collecting a massive amount of video data, mostly from YouTube, to train a new video foundation model called Cosmos.
Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks are smaller, more interpretable, and more accurate than traditional neural networks.
Microsoft is now tying its security efforts to employee performance reviews - a lack of security focus for employees could impact promotions, merit-based salary increases, and bonuses.
Elon Musk's rebranding of Twitter to X was a revival of a long-held dream.
Instead of buying companies outright, big tech has been using an 'acquihiring' strategy to avoid complications with antitrust regulators - this post describes the process.
Mastery of soft skills is the most significant difference between a senior and staff engineer.