Great companies are built by great people who have great managers. This is certainly true for the engineering team at DoorDash. Defining what great engineering management looks like for DoorDash has been critical for its success as a business. This article gives you a glimpse into the core values that back its teams and managers along the way.
Python 3.12 has been released, featuring a better debugging and profiling API, flexible f-string parsing, more performance improvements, a new type annotation syntax for generic classes, and more.
OpenStatus is an open-source synthetic monitoring platform. It features both custom monitoring and alerting, with support for custom headers and fast incident alerts.
Instant.dev offers a speedy, dependable, and battle-tested Object-Relational Mapping and migration management system for Postgres 13+ in JavaScript. For individuals familiar with Ruby on Rails, instant.dev introduces functionality similar to ActiveRecord in the Node.js, Deno, and Bun ecosystems. It’s designed to work with any JavaScript stack.
Frustrated with conventional framework-based dependency injection, Daniel Somerfield, a software engineer with over 20 years of experience, has developed a composition strategy that utilizes partial application to inject context into modules. This article provides a first-person view of how Somerfield identifies and solves a technical problem within his team. By opting to fulfill dependency contracts with functions instead of classes, minimizing code sharing between modules, and guiding the design through tests, Somerfield successfully created a system composed of highly discrete, evolvable, yet still type-safe modules.
Recent developments in AI, such as Meta’s personality-driven chatbots voiced by celebrities, open the door to more immersive AI interactions. There is the potential for AI companions that are warm, empathetic, and helpful, akin to the concept popularized in the movie "Her." These AI companions could provide support and entertainment, particularly for individuals who are lonely or isolated. However, there are unanswered questions about how AI will affect society in terms of personalization, engagement, and loneliness.
In the midst of industry discussions about productivity and automation, it’s all too easy to forget to fully come to terms with complexity. However, it’s important that we don’t ignore complexity or see it as something that can be fixed: we need to embrace it and use it to our advantage.
This article explores how to manage vector data in a PostgreSQL database using Supabase. It also delves deeper into the creation of embeddings using OpenAI, which offers an efficient way to transform complex data into meaningful numerical representations.
Details about Samsung's Galaxy S24 devices, expected to be out in early 2024, have been leaked. The CAD-derived renders for the S24 Ultra, S24, and S24 Plus show the important parts of the device down to the millimeter. The Plus and base models will share a design that features a flat metal band that wraps around the perimeter. The Ultra version has the same Ultra design used since the S22. It is rumored to have a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC, a 5000 mAh battery, and 2TB of max storage.
Apple is rumored to be eyeing Formula 1 as its next big sports investment. The company is reportedly considering an offer worth about $2 billion per year that would make it the exclusive streaming rights holder of Formula 1 racing. Apple will not be able to secure global rights for a while due to existing contracts. The company is also rumored to be considering deals with various other sports leagues, including the NBA, English Premier League, and NFL Sunday Ticket.
Space scientists study the physiology and psychology of people living in the Antarctic and other remote outposts due to their similarities with other worlds. There are around 20 analog space facilities around the world that host volunteers for isolation studies over weeks or months in polar stations, desert outposts, and even sealed habitats inside NASA centers. The research helps scientists test medical and software tools, enhance indoor agriculture, and address the difficulties analog astronauts face.
Ethylene, the world's most widely produced and used petrochemical, is used to make products lightweight, durable, or waterproof. Conventional ethylene production releases enormous amounts of greenhouse gasses. CERT Systems Inc. has developed a technology that removes fossil fuels from the process of producing ethylene. The technology works at ambient temperatures, uses renewable energy, and produces no harmful emissions. CERT's process could be used to make other carbon-based building block chemicals.
Database migrations can be one of the most annoying problems to deal with for a software engineer. There are a ton of things to consider when doing database migrations. This article discusses the complexities that arise during database migrations. It covers why they can be hard, why nobody wants to work with them, different scenarios, downtime, and more. The article concludes with a list of best practices.
CSS has implemented auto-expanding textareas. It is already available in the Chrome Canary with the web experiments flag enabled. It is unknown whether the feature will be usable across all browsers or if it will ship in the same format.
Sam Bankman-Fried apparently wanted to pay Donald Trump not to run for president. He played a video game during his first TV interview. Bankman-Fried was friends with Tom Brady, who reportedly adored him. He was invited to sponsor the Met Gala as a social experiment. Bankman-Fried faces more than 100 years in prison if convicted. His biggest fear is potentially losing access to the internet.
Meta's Codec Avatars is a research project that aims to revolutionize remote communication using headsets with face-tracking sensors and eventually glasses. A video was recently released showing Mark Zuckerberg being interviewed in VR using the technology. The interview was conducted through a set of Quest Pro headsets, with the interviewer frequently expressing feelings of disbelief at what they were experiencing. The video is available in the article.
AI turns the marginal cost of content to zero and drastically changes workflows, making it likely to be the next dominant layer on which applications are built.
One of the coolest and simplest vision papers in recent weeks. Vision Transformers use "useless" pixel values as places to store global information. This makes attention maps uninterpretable. However, if you add a simple [reg] token to the vocabulary, the model will use it and won't store information in pixel values.
With all the new models coming out, it can be somewhat challenging to find a way to pull and run them. It's also hard to remix and remake them easily. This neat little tool, Ollama, makes it easy to test the latest models.
SapientML is an AutoML technology that can learn from a corpus of existing datasets and their human-written pipelines and efficiently generate a high-quality pipeline for a predictive task on a new dataset.
VanEck is planning to launch an Ethereum Strategy ETF (EFUT) and has committed to donating 10% of its profits to Protocol Guild for at least a decade. Protocol Guild is a funding mechanism that supports the maintenance and development of Ethereum's core protocol. The company says this donation is both a recognition of Ethereum builders' contribution and an investment in its future adoption.
The SEC has delayed decisions on proposed spot Bitcoin ETFs from WisdomTree, VanEck, and Fidelity, requesting further input. At this point, there is a 21-day public comment period with an additional 35-day rebuttal period, indicating that the approval process may extend for several more months. The SEC is also seeking fresh perspectives on a proposed surveillance-sharing agreement with crypto exchange Coinbase. This follows similar delays for proposals from BlackRock, Invesco, Valkyrie, and Bitwise.
Circle Research has released Perimeter Protocol, an open-source tool for building credit applications. The Solidity-based contracts powering this protocol enable loan management and delegation. Perimeter offers integration with open identity standards, as well as a variety of credit tools without a need for protocol tokens.
Rome Protocol plans to utilize Solana as a shared sequencer network for Ethereum rollups, offering improved speed, interoperability, and efficiency for cross-rollup transactions. Leveraging Solana's strengths will assist with atomic composability, enabling smooth bridging and arbitrage operations while maintaining identical rollup states. Using Solana should also improve MEV searching and handle the fragmented liquidity issue in the rollup ecosystem.
This post from Vitalik Buterin talks about the tradeoffs of ‘enshrining’ more features into Ethereum. While enshrining features can help avoid centralization risks, complicating the base layer can result in systemic risks. Buterin argues that developers need to consider whether the trust and governance load of a particular new feature will weaken Ethereum's credible neutrality and increase complexity.
This thread explains how some innovative solutions for gas market challenges are being developed to address challenges in the space. Finite blockspace limits smart contract and transaction execution on blockchains, and gas fees - which reflect computational resource usage - are being addressed with solutions such as gas fees/blockspace trading, new futures and swap markets, fixed-price transaction subscriptions, and gas price derivatives.
This blog post from Casey Rodarmor, the creator of the Ordinals Protocol, attempts to explain how he sees his role in the space. Rodarmor details how he thinks his responsibilities are to keep laying out new ideas, extend Ordinals, and propose new ways to work with bitcoin. He also explains that he does not see himself having the final say in new development as that is up to the Ordinals community.
This blog addresses blockchain scalability issues, walking through challenges like transaction replication, execution, and consensus protocols which traditionally increase with the number of validators, hampering scalability. The author suggests these issues can be mitigated through the use of batching and modern cryptography. However, there's no blockchain currently using an all-batching model. Furthermore, batching adds latency, posing potential benefits for latency-sensitive transactions.
2023.10.02·
decentralizedthoughts.github.io·3 min read·TLDR Crypto
Su Zhu was arrested in Singapore for not complying with liquidation processes. Orders were also issued for Kyle Davies, Zhu’s co-founder, to be arrested as well, though he is still at large.
In this blog, Variant discusses the potential of real-world assets on-chain, emphasizing benefits like broadening access, enhancing off-chain asset utility, and improving traditional capital market efficiency.