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THUMBNAILS THAT INCREASE VIEWS

12 ways you can create attention-grabbing thumbnails include using big numbers in the description, doing a before/after, and asking a question.

MOST UNPOPULAR PRODUCT MARKETING OPINION

An enlightening LinkedIn thread of the pain points of being a product marketer.

DATABASE MIGRATIONS

Database migrations are challenging, even with tools like Django’s migration engine. Migrating databases involves planning for scenarios like adding new fields, removing fields, and changing fields with attached business logic. There are advanced tactics, like dual-write strategies and phased deployments, that can help mitigate such challenges. This article dives into best practices for database migrations, like generating immutable migration scripts, ensuring the database version is contained within the database, focusing on backward compatibility, and leveraging modern tools to simplify migrations.

CLEAN LAYOUT ARCHITECTURE FOR VUE APPLICATIONS

Vue projects need clear rules and requirements for their layout architecture, such as declaring layouts and components for each page, ensuring changes to one page do not affect others, and handling common layout elements efficiently. This article provides examples, with code provided, of creating different layouts: three-column, two-column, and blank. It offers practical insights for managing layouts in Vue applications.

USING GIT HOOKS WITH MYSQL

Version control systems, and Git in particular, are essential tools for tracking code changes, collaborating with your team, and ensuring the stability of your codebase. While Git is primarily designed for source code, you can also use it in combination with MySQL databases for version control and schema change management. This article explores how to integrate Git with MySQL for version control using Git hooks, with specific examples in a guide format.

WANT

Working with your manager effectively is necessary to perform well at your job, get promoted faster, and take on more responsibility as a teammate. This article walks through building trust with your manager, getting your manager to want to promote you, and dealing with an unsupportive manager. It gives actionable tips for each step, such as building trust through feedback.

2023 DEVOPS IS TERRIBLE

DevOps has shifted to become more of a job title and a buzzword. DevOps and Cloud teams have become overbooked, leading to inefficiencies and frustration. One potential solution is platform engineering, which involves building an Internal Development Platform (IDP) that provides composable building blocks and tools for engineers.

HOW TO DEVELOP A 5 YEAR CAREER PLAN

Having a long-term plan for your career can help you reduce career-related stress, increase your perceived employability, and allow you to connect more deeply with your purpose. This article outlines 4 steps that will help you to move beyond yearly career goals and create a five-year plan.

BRUNO

Bruno is an open-source IDE for exploring and testing APIs. It stores your collections directly in a folder on your filesystem. Bruno uses a plain text markup language, Bru, to save information about API requests. You can use git or any version control of your choice to collaborate over your API collections.

PDF DEBUGGER

PDF Debugger allows you to inspect the tree structure of PDF files.

INSOMNIUM

Insomnium is a fast local API testing tool that is privacy-focused and works offline. It can be used for testing GraphQL, REST, WebSockets, and gRPC.

The P vs. NP problem is an important unsolved problem in computer science. Researchers used a Socratic Method to prompt GPT-4 and found that it provided arguments suggesting that P does not equal NP, although the validity of this conclusion is still under scrutiny. The study highlights the potential for large language models to assist in solving complex problems and the importance of prompt engineering to guide AI in productive discussions.

NEVER SAY “NO,” BUT RARELY SAY “YES.”

For startups, it’s important to balance staying focused on the main goal with leaving time to explore new opportunities. People working at startups should say “no” to distractions that diverge from their initial vision, but qualify their “yes” answers by setting conditions that make an opportunity worthwhile, such as the opportunity advancing the business significantly.

YOUR PROJECT MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE CAN’T SAVE YOU

Do-everything workplace managers like Asana and Trello promise organizational utopias, but they reveal limitations that date all the way back to the factory floors of the 1900s.

A RAYCASTING ENGINE IN 7 EASY STEPS

Raycasting is a rendering technique that creates a 3D perspective in a 2D map. This tutorial shows readers how to create a raycasting engine with code examples.

IS AI A PLATFORM SHIFT?

Personal computers, the Internet, mobile, and the cloud were platform shifts over the past few decades. Whether AI is a platform shift is yet to be seen.

WHICH BACKEND TECHNOLOGY TO CHOOSE IN 2023: NODE VS PYTHON?

This article aims to help you make an informed decision on which backend technology to choose by comparing Node.js and Python and discussing their key differences, advantages, and real-world use cases.

OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE’

OpenAI is looking to use Apple former chief design officer Jony Ive's design firm LoveFrom to develop OpenAI's first consumer device. The project is aided by over $1 billion in funding from Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son. Ive and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman discussed the product during brainstorming sessions at Ive's San Francisco studio. The device will aim to provide a more natural and intuitive user experience for interacting with artificial intelligence.

MICROSOFT CONSIDERED SELLING BING TO APPLE IN 2020

Microsoft considered selling Bing to Apple in 2020 in a deal that would have resulted in Bing replacing Google as the default search engine on Apple devices. Talks between the companies were only exploratory and did not progress. Apple did not move forward with the deal due to the money it earned from Google and because it thought that Bing would not be able to compete with Google in quality and capabilities. The Apple/Google deal is currently under scrutiny due to the antitrust trial between Google and the US Department of Justice.

NEXT WEEK

A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket may be launching a spacecraft to explore the metal-rich asteroid Psyche as soon as October 5. The asteroid is estimated to be composed of up to 60% iron-nickel metals. It could be more valuable than the entire world economy. NASA has no plans to mine the asteroid. It will use data from the mission to get a more accurate idea of its potential value and learn more about what Earth's core might be like.

SOLAR-POWERED AIRSHIP WILL CIRCLE THE WORLD NON-STOP WITHOUT FUEL

Solar Airship One is a 151-meter-long airship that has its entire upper surface covered in solar film. The airship is able to run on solar power during the day and store enough extra power to continue during the night. Solar Airship One will have an average speed of 83 kilometers per hour. While it will run on renewable energy, the airship still uses 50,000 cubic meters of helium, a completely non-replaceable element.

WIFI WITHOUT INTERNET ON A SOUTHWEST FLIGHT

Unable to access the internet during a flight because of payment portal issues, this author decided to see what data was still available on the Wi-Fi network. They found a repeating successful request that contained data for the plane's altitude, estimated time of arrival, and ground speed. This article breaks down how the author analyzed the request and used the data to find out more about their flight.

CSS SUBGRID

CSS subgrid allows track sizing and the sharing of templates and names with nested grids. It allows for variably sized content. This article explains how CSS subgrid works. A list of resources for further reading is provided at the end of the article.

AI, HARDWARE, AND VIRTUAL REALITY

This article looks at the most recent developments in technology and their implications. It covers ChatGPT's new voice and vision abilities, Meta AI, Emu, Meta Smart Glasses, the Quest 3, OpenAI's rumored device, and virtual reality.

WORKING AT A STARTUP VS IN BIG TECH

Being in a startup can be good because it's very educational and you can make a lot of impact, but there is a lot of financial risk and stress involved and failure is always a possibility. Working in Big Tech feels more organized and benefits include internal transfers, financial stability, perks, and networking. However, employees may feel a lack of purpose, there is a lot of overhead and bureaucracy, and misaligned incentives around performance reviews can create pretty twisted political situations.

SAYS STUDY

Chinchilla 70B, a large language model by DeepMind, can perform lossless compression on images to 43.4% of their original size and audio data to just 16.4% of their raw size.

INFLATION BITES U.S. ENGINEERING SALARIES

Inflation has outpaced growth in US engineering salaries for the second year in a row.

THE RASPBERRY PI 5 IS FINALLY HERE

The Raspberry Pi 5, starting at $60, is the first Raspberry Pi to come with in-house silicon.

OPEN SOURCE DOES NOT WIN BY BEING CHEAPER

Open source companies either have to surpass their competitors or need to have a concrete reason for why they are open source.

MARK ZUCKERBERG CAN’T QUIT THE METAVERSE

Mark Zuckerberg talked about how the technologies that combine the physical world and the physical world are still being built and how they will result in the concept called the metaverse at Meta Connect 2023.

The next iPhone SE, which will allegedly come out in 2025, will use the iPhone 14 as a basic template.

CHROMA X GOOGLE FOR BUILDING ON PALM

Chroma is a leading vector database for storing embeddings for AI applications. They've partnered with PaLM to build applications on top of the flagship Google model.

WITH A16Z GP KRISTINA SHEN

We all know SaaS is going to be impacted by AI but the question is what is the next wave going to look like? This in-depth discussion with Kristina Shen goes into why it’s more about insights than information and unlocking the real power of AI for SaaS.

NEW FORETHOUGHT TOOL LETS YOU BUILD WORKFLOWS WITH NATURAL LANGUAGE

Forethought unveils "Autoflows", a new AI-driven system for customer service tasks that goes beyond simple Q&A. Using natural language prompts, Autoflows determines steps and tasks across systems, differing from traditional no-code workflows. Powered by SupportGPT, which is based on OpenAI models, the system blends automation and human oversight.

META'S TEXT TO IMAGE MODEL

Pre-trained on 1.1B image pairs and fine-tuned on just a few thousand highly curated images, Emu image generation outperforms SDXL in user preference surveys. It acts as the backbone to much of Meta’s new AI assistant play.

SIMPLIFYING VQ-VAE

VectorQuantized-VAEs are typically the state of the art when trying to learn a specific discrete representation (e.g., tokens or codes). However, they are usually complex and fragile. This new paper proposes a simple quantization scheme that eliminates codebook collapse and complicated machinery such as commitment losses, codebook reseeding, code splitting, entropy penalties, etc.

JOINTLY TRAINING LARGE MULTIMODAL MODELS

Models are usually trained separately on specific tasks (e.g., language vs image generation). The newly proposed joint autoregressive mixture (JAM) algorithm combines disparate models with a clever interleaved cross attention and gentle fine-tuning achieves dominant performance in many multimodal tasks.

SIGLIP CHECKPOINTS RELEASED BY GOOGLE

Joint embedding models combine two data types into a single space. CLIP is a popular one for images and text. Recently, Google researchers proposed a Sigmoid CLIP model which performed very well and was Vision Transformer based. They've now released more information about the models and updated their code and paper.

THE FUTURE OF IMAGE-TEXT UNDERSTANDING AND CREATION

InternLM-XComposer is a cutting-edge tool that can create articles with both text and images that fit perfectly together.

A LEADER'S GUIDE TO GENERATIVE AI IN THE WORKPLACE

For technical leaders, embracing generative AI in the workplace brings a wealth of opportunity to drive productivity and transformation. It also means leaders need to consider how to design meaningful career pathways for team members. Workera’s guide shows leaders how they can do it.

WHITE HOUSE COULD FORCE CLOUD COMPANIES TO DISCLOSE AI CUSTOMERS

The White House may mandate cloud companies to report large-scale computing purchases, targeting potential foreign AI threats. Critics cite surveillance concerns and changing compute costs. Entities like Microsoft and OpenAI support similar oversight measures.

ANTHROPIC PARTNERS WITH BCG

Anthropic has partnered with Boston Consulting Group (BCG) to offer their AI assistant, Claude, to BCG customers globally. This collaboration focuses on responsible AI deployment, with use cases including market research, fraud detection, and business analysis. Both entities aim to establish a new standard for ethically deployed enterprise AI.

DATA

Google introduced a tool, Google-Extended, which enables website publishers to prevent their data from being used in Google's AI training while still appearing in Google Search results.

CRYPTO COMPANY RIPPLE BACKS OUT OF FORTRESS TRUST PURCHASE

Ripple has decided not to proceed with its previously announced acquisition of custodian Fortress Trust following a security breach at a third-party service used by six of Fortress's customers that resulted in a reported loss of $12-$15 million in cryptocurrency. Despite the terminated deal, Ripple will remain an investor in Fortress's parent company, Fortress Financial Technologies.

AND BITWISE

The SEC has announced additional proceedings to assess whether to approve or deny proposed Bitcoin ETFs from BlackRock, Valkyrie, Invesco, and Bitwise. The process includes public comment and rebuttal periods, indicating that a final decision may not be reached for several months. The delay does not necessarily signify any conclusion has been made on any issues raised by the proposals.

OUTSIDE US

Coinbase has received approval from the Bermuda Monetary Authority to provide non-US retail customers with perpetual futures trading services. The announcement comes after the cryptocurrency exchange ramped up its institutional trading services and handled over $5.5 billion in futures trading volume in Q2 this year. The move is part of Coinbase's international strategy called “Go Broad, Go Deep”, which targets regulators in 24 countries where it plans to create a global regulatory framework.

RECORDS

IYK has been driving greater fan engagement over the last two years by bridging the gap between the digital and physical worlds with its fan experience platform. It embeds NFC chips in physical merch to “supercharge” these collector items. IYK has successfully partnered with the likes of Adidas and 9dcc to prove the concept. The company has now raised $16.8 million in funding from heavy hitters like a16z Crypto, Collab Currency, 1kx, and Lattice Capital to expand its platform.

AN INCOMPLETE PRIMER ON INTENTS

This article dives into the concept of "intents," which have been gaining traction in the crypto space with protocols like Anoma and Essential. Intents help users specify transaction conditions without exact message calls, simplifying the transaction flow. They focus on outcomes rather than processes, meaning that users specify goals and "solvers" determine how best to achieve them.