Parse notes
The US Supreme Court has agreed to hear arguments on a law that would effectively ban TikTok if ByteDance doesn't sell it. TikTok is arguing that the law violates the US Constitution's free speech protections. Oral arguments are scheduled for January 10, nine days before the law is set to take effect. Congress passed the law due to concerns that TikTok's Chinese ownership presented a national security risk.
Apple has halted work on a project to build an iPhone hardware subscription service. The service would have allowed customers to pay a monthly fee and receive a new phone each year. It would have competed with Apple's wireless carrier partners, who rely on installment programs to sell devices and retain customers. Apple may have canceled the program due to stricter rules by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Gameto's Fertilo procedure differs from traditional IVF because it takes ovarian support cells derived from human induced pluripotent stem cells and co-cultures them with an immature egg to mimic the natural egg maturation process in the lab. It significantly improves egg maturation and embryo formation. The procedure avoids 80% of the hormone injections that traditional IVF requires and reduces the duration of a treatment cycle to three days. The first live human baby conceived using the technique was recently born. Gameto has partnered with Australian IVF clinic chain IVFAustralia to make the procedure available to patients at select clinics throughout the country.
Seagate has been experimenting with heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) since at least 2002. The company is set to release HAMR hard drives based on its Mozaic 3+ platform in standard drive sizes. Getting from the theoretical concept of HAMR to an actual drive required countless engineering hours. Seagate has not released prices yet, but the product page for the Exos M shows 30 and 32TB capacities.
Microsoft has launched a free version of its popular Copilot code completion/AI pair programming tool that will ship by default with VS Code. The free version is geared towards occasional users and not major work on big projects. It gives developers access to 2,000 code completions per month. Users on the free plan are restricted to Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet and OpenAI's GPT-4o. The free version of Copilot Chat is limited to 50 chat messages.
Genesis is a physics platform designed for general purpose Robotics/Embodied AI/Physical AI applications. It comprises a universal physics engine, a lightweight and user-friendly robotics simulation platform, a powerful and fast photo-realistic rendering system, and a generative data engine that transforms user prompts into various modalities of data. The project is aimed at lowering the barrier to using physics simulations, unifying a wide spectrum of state-of-the-art physics solvers into a single framework, and minimizing human effort in collecting and generating data for robotics and other domains.
Despite mandating that office workers start working in the office five days a week starting in January, Amazon still doesn't have enough office space to accommodate its employees. The company has delayed return-to-office dates for personnel in at least seven cities. Some offices won't have sufficient space until April or May. Amazon claims that most employees will have office space by January 2 and that most of the pushed-back return-to-office days are related to buildings being laid out differently for part-time workers rather than insufficient physical space.
Flipboard's team has been overhauling the Flipboard platform over the last year or so to make it part of the social web, or the fediverse. It plans to transition into a fully decentralized way to discover and read stuff from across the internet. Flipboard's Surf app is a browser for the social web. It helps users discover and explore feeds across the fediverse. Surf is now rolling out in beta to some curators and creators.
Modern computer memory does not resemble perfect random-access memory.
Helldivers 2's new Anti-Tank Emplacement weapon contains 30 highly accurate and extremely powerful explosive shells, but it has some major weaknesses.
1-800-CHATGPT (1-800-242-8478) allows anyone in the US to call to talk to ChatGPT via voice chat for up to 15 minutes for free - people outside the US can send text messages to the same number for free using WhatsApp.
We won't be talking about AI in five years because of its success.
yadm is a tool for managing dotfiles based on Git, with a full range of Git's features, that supports system-specific alternative files or templated files, encryption, customizable initialization, and customizable hooks.