TLDR 2024-11-26

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SPACEX: CELLULAR STARLINK SERVICE IS READY TO GO

SpaceX now has enough satellites in Earth's orbit to offer commercial services for its cellular Starlink system. The company now has over 320 'direct to cell' Starlink satellites in space. The service will work with normal mobile phones without any extra equipment or special apps. SpaceX is partnering with T-Mobile to offer cellular satellite technology to consumers. The company still needs approval from the FCC before it can operate a commercial cellular service.

'IPHONE 17 AIR' RUMORED TO SURPASS IPHONE 6 AS THINNEST IPHONE EVER

The iPhone 17 Air will be around 6mm thick, according to rumors. This will make it the thinnest iPhone ever. Most sources agree that it will have around a 6.6-inch display. The device is expected to have a standard A19 chip, a Dynamic Island, a single rear camera, and an Apple-designed 5G modem. The iPhone 17 Air will likely be unveiled in September 2025.

MUSK'S NEURALINK LAUNCHES STUDY OF MIND-CONTROLLED ROBOTIC ARM

Neuralink is starting to test a technology that could allow paralyzed people to control a robotic arm. It is conducting an early-stage study aimed at letting patients with Neuralink devices implanted in their brains manipulate robotic arms. Neuralink's device allows patients to control computer cursors, iPads, and similar digital tools. It is currently implanted in at least two humans.

US SUPERSONIC JET SOARS TO RECORD 25,040 FEET, FUELS SPEEDY TRAVEL DREAMS

Boom Supersonic's XB-1 demonstrator aircraft recently completed its eighth flight and set a new altitude record. It reached an altitude of 25,040 feet during the 54 minute flight and a top speed of Mach 0.82, tying its previous speed record. Boom Supersonic has planned a few more subsonic flights before it will attempt to break the sound barrier. While the XB-1 will be capable of exceeding Mach 1, the company plans to fly its aircraft at Mach 0.94 over land to avoid the disruptive noise caused by sonic booms.

INTRODUCING THE MODEL CONTEXT PROTOCOL

Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP) is a new standard for connecting AI assistants to data systems. It is aimed at helping frontier models produce better, more relevant responses. MCP provides a universal open standard for connecting AI systems with data sources, resulting in a simpler, more reliable way to give AI systems access to the data they need. It uses a straightforward architecture that allows developers to either expose their data through MCP servers or build AI applications that connect to these servers.

AMAZON S3 ADDS NEW FUNCTIONALITY FOR CONDITIONAL WRITES

Amazon S3 can now perform conditional writes that evaluate if an object is unmodified before updating it. This will help developers coordinate simultaneous writes to the same object and prevent multiple concurrent writers from unintentionally overwriting the object without knowing the state of its content. Conditional writes simplify how distributed applications with multiple clients concurrently update data across shared datasets. The new conditional header can help improve the efficiency of large-scale analytics, distributed machine learning, and other highly parallelized workloads by offloading compare and swap operations to S3. The new conditional-write functionality is available at no additional charge in all AWS regions.

THE PROBLEM WITH REASONERS

o1 reasoners are the most exciting models to come out since the original GPT-4, but they suck on important problems. o1 uses a reinforcement learning (RL) environment where reasoning steps are actions, previous tokens are observations, and reward is the solution's correctness. RL is great for games, high-frequency trading, protein folding, and other problems, but not for open-ended thought without clear feedback. RL-based reasoners struggle to perform in domains outside of their training, which is most fields. Transformative AI will likely come from scaling rather than through reasoning models.

VALVE, STEAM, AND THE ENTIRE PC GAMING INDUSTRY WERE SAVED BY A SINGLE INTERN

Valve recently released a documentary to celebrate the Half-Life 2's 20th birthday. One of the facts shared in the documentary was that the entire PC gaming industry as we know it today wouldn't have been possible if it wasn't for a single Korean-speaking intern named Andrew. Andrew found a document that proved that a company Valve was fighting against in a lawsuit was destroying evidence related to the case. The company had buried Valve in documents to slow down the process, with many of the documents written in Korean. Andrew's discovery helped Valve win the lawsuit, securing Valve the rights to the Half-Life and Counter-Strike franchises, ultimately leading Steam to evolve from a small software client into the largest digital distribution platform and storefront.

GOOGLE IS INSERTING SEARCH LINKS INTO WEBPAGES IN THE GOOGLE APP NOW

The Google App for iOS is automatically converting some website text into links to Google Search results without explicitly asking users or site owners first.

THE TWO FACTIONS OF C++

There's a growing rift between the two factions in C++ - those with good tooling that can effortlessly build from source vs those with poor tooling who can't build from source - that likely won't be closing anytime soon.

WESQL

WeSQL is a MySQL distribution with a storage backed by S3 that can run on any cloud.

TESLA APPEARS TO BE BUILDING A TELEOPERATIONS TEAM FOR ITS ROBOTAXI SERVICE

Tesla is hiring a software engineer to help develop a teleoperations system that will allow human operators to remotely access and control the company's upcoming robotaxis and humanoid robots.

NOTICE OF BREAKING CHANGES FOR GITHUB ACTIONS

There are several significant changes coming to GitHub Actions, including the migration of the 'ubuntu-latest' label to 'ubuntu 24' starting on December 5.

HAS GOOGLE'S TENSOR PROJECT FAILED?

Google's next two generations of smartphones will continue to leave power users wanting in many regards.