Search the archive

AMAZON CONFIRMS EMPLOYEE CONTACT INFO STOLEN THROUGH HACK

Details of up to 2.8 million Amazon workers were posted on a well-known hacking forum.

XAI'S GROK-2 MIGHT BE AVAILABLE FOR FREE ON X SOON

While Grok has remained exclusively available to X premium users, Grok-2 will likely be available to free users, with some stipulations.

OPENAI AND OTHERS SEEK NEW PATH TO SMARTER AI AS CURRENT METHODS HIT LIMITATIONS

AI companies are seeking to develop training techniques that use more human-like ways for algorithms to 'think'.

JAWSM

Jawsm is a JavaScript to WebAssembly compiler that can create standalone WASM binaries that can be executed without an interpreter.

INTUITIVE MACHINES CEO: ‘WE NOW HAVE THE PLATFORM FOR A LUNAR ECONOMY'

Intuitive Machines is uniquely positioned to support lunar missions and eventually a lunar economy as a full-fledged commercial space services company.

YOUTUBE TESTS ADDING TIKTOK'S SWIPE-UP GESTURE TO FULL-LENGTH VIDEOS

YouTube is testing a fullscreen video player behavior where a swipe up results in a new video being played.

Invest in RYSE alongside the Dragons.

OPENAI REPORTEDLY DEVELOPING NEW STRATEGIES TO DEAL WITH AI IMPROVEMENT SLOWDOWN

OpenAI's new model's performance exceeds its existing models, but the improvement is less than the jump from GPT-3 to GPT-4. The rate of improvement seems to be slowing down. OpenAI created a foundations team to figure out how the company can continue to improve its models. One of the proposed strategies is to train models on synthetic data produced by AI models.

CHATGPT MONTHLY USAGE MAY NOW RIVAL GOOGLE CHROME

SPACEX PITCHES NASA ON 'MARSLINK,' A VERSION OF STARLINK FOR THE RED PLANET

SpaceX is working on a concept version of Starlink for Mars. It has ideas about developing next-generation relay services capable of beaming 4 Mbps or more in data across 1.5 astronomical units. The Marslink concept involves placing multiple space satellites in Mars orbit to provide full visibility and interoperability for ground and orbital assets. Other companies have also submitted proposals - slides from the recent meeting of the Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group showing each company's proposal are available in the article.

HPV VACCINATION: HOW THE WORLD CAN ELIMINATE CERVICAL CANCER

Cervical cancer is caused by a virus (HPV), making it preventable. The virus is also responsible for a large share of other cancers. HPV integrates itself into cells' DNA and damages key proteins that protect the cell from uncontrolled growth, eventually leading to cancer. HPV vaccines are highly effective in preventing infections - and cervical cancer. Countries like the UK and Australia are showing that the elimination of cervical cancer is possible, but much of the world is missing out.

constantly. Deploy continuously. Start here

EVERYTHING I'VE LEARNED SO FAR ABOUT RUNNING LOCAL LLMS

It is now possible to run a large language model (LLM) smarter than the original ChatGPT on a Raspberry PI. Running models locally allows for private, unlimited, and registration-free access. This article talks about how to run local text-based LLMs on your own hardware. It covers the software needed, the different models available, user interfaces, and more. While LLMs are fun, there are still many tasks they can't reliably do.

IRONCALC

IronCalc is a modern spreadsheet engine and set of tools for working with spreadsheets in diverse settings. It can be used with a variety of programming languages including Python, JavaScript, Node.js, and possibly R, Julia, and Go. IronCalc is still a work in progress but an early browser preview is available.

MOVING PAST SKEUOMORPHIC AI

AI is being limited by our mental models for what to use the technology for. The current available technology can already be transformative given the right application mindset. Moving to the next level will require giving models more autonomy and self-learning capabilities. We should be building applications around things that AI is uniquely suited to do. Thinking this way will result in the creation of new services and products.

TOUCH SCREENS ARE OVER. EVEN APPLE IS BRINGING BACK BUTTONS

Screen interfaces require people to look at them, making the 'touch screen' a misnomer. Buttons, knobs, sliders, and other physical controls are making a comeback in vehicles, appliances, and personal electronics. Engineers and designers are tapping into people's sense of touch and spatial awareness to make using gadgets easier, more fun, and in some cases, safer. Physical interfaces allow people to use devices without looking and makes interactions with machines more intuitive.

to handle your customers' messiest spreadsheets. See OneSchema

SYSTEM TESTS HAVE FAILED

System tests in theory offer great confidence that machines are working as they should, but in practice, they are slow, brittle, and full of false negatives.

THIS SCIENTIST TREATED HER OWN CANCER WITH VIRUSES SHE GREW IN THE LAB

Beata Halassy, a virologist at the University of Zagreb, treated her own breast cancer by injecting the tumor with lab-grown viruses, sparking discussions around the ethics of self-experimentation.

INTERNAL SOFTWARE BUILDERS

AI could give the No Code/Low Code sector a new lease on life.

CHONKIE

Chonkie is a lightweight RAG chunking library that can be installed, imported, and run without users having to worry about dependencies, bloat, speed, or other factors.

ALGORITHMS WE DEVELOP SOFTWARE BY

A look at different programming techniques and tricks and how they help improve code quality.

AMD MAKES BIGGEST LEAP IN RECENT HISTORY

AMD gained a substantial 5.7 percentage points of share of the desktop x86 CPU market and raked in a strong increase in revenue share in the third quarter.

Report 2024

APPLE IS FINALLY LETTING GREEN BUBBLES SEND MESSAGE REACTIONS

iOS 18.1 can display emoji reactions from Android users correctly. iOS was unable to display message reactions correctly when RCS first launched on the platform in September. Apple has been ignoring Google's campaign to adopt RCS for years, only complying after pressure from both China and the EU. The company will likely keep as many exclusive features as possible for its iMessage service as long as it isn't forced to change.

META IS OPENING A POP-UP RETAIL STORE FOR THE RAY-BAN META GLASSES

Meta Lab, a pop-up experiential retail space for Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses, will open on November 8 in Los Angeles. The temporary store will allow customers to try out the glasses and customize glasses cases. There will be events with various creators, live podcasts, and cooking classes. The store will close on December 31. Another Meta Lab experience is planned for Phoenix at the end of January.

PHYSICISTS STIR A SUPERSOLID FOR FIRST TIME, PROVING ITS BIZARRE DUAL NATURE

Scientists have successfully stirred a supersolid, a strange type of matter that is both rigid and fluid, for the first time. Supersolids have the properties of both solids and superfluids - a fraction of atoms flow friction-free through a lattice of a rigid crystal structure. Stirring the supersolid resulted in tiny whirlpools called quantized vortices, an indication of superfluidity. The breakthrough will make it possible to simulate phenomena in the lab that normally occur under truly extreme conditions, like in the hearts of neutron stars.

AIRBORNE MICROPLASTICS AID IN CLOUD FORMATION

New research suggests that microplastics in the air could affect weather and climate by producing clouds in conditions where they would not form otherwise. Clouds form when water vapor sticks to tiny floating particles in the atmosphere. Water droplets with microplastic particles can produce ice crystals at temperatures 5 to 10 degrees Celsius warmer than droplets without microplastics. Precipitation typically starts as ice particles. More information about microplastic concentrations at the altitudes where clouds form is needed before scientists can make theories on how exactly microplastics affect weather and climate.

RAILS 8.0: NO PAAS REQUIRED

Deploying modern web apps has become so hard that many developers have become reliant on Platform-as-a-Service. Rails 8 includes tools to make the process more simple. These include Kamal 2, a tool that turns fresh Linux boxes into application or accessory servers with just a single command, and Thruster, a proxy that provides X-Sendfile acceleration, asset caching, and asset compression. This blog post covers the highlights of the new Rails release.

BEMIDB

BemiDB is a simple and cost-effective cloud analytics platform. It connects and automatically synchronizes data from existing PostgreSQL databases and other data sources, storing data in a columnar format that's ready for querying. BemiDB makes data accessible for analysis in near real-time without additional pipelines or transformations.

AMAZON CEO ANDY JASSY DENIES THAT 5-DAY OFFICE MANDATE IS A 'BACKDOOR LAYOFF'

Amazon's five-day in-office mandate was not made to reduce headcount or appease city officials, according to CEO Andy Jassy. The topic was brought up during an all-hands meeting on Tuesday. Jassy says that the decision to get workers back into the office was about the company's culture and strengthening that culture. Returning workers to the office will allow employees to be better set up to invent, collaborate, and be connected. Amazon employees will have to return to the office five days a week starting from January 2.

A NEW CITY SPRINGS FROM THE RAINFOREST TO BECOME INDONESIA'S TECH HUB

Indonesia is building a new capital to replace Jakarta as the current capital is sinking - in some areas, at a rate of 25 cm per year. This was caused by the over-extraction of groundwater and the sheer weight of buildings. Nusantara, the new city, aims to be a model of livability and sustainability. It will be powered predominantly by renewable energy with the aim of being carbon neutral by 2045. This article looks at the project and its aims and challenges. Local opinions of the project are mixed - many locals have taken to referring to the city as 'Wakanda' as a way to criticize government decisions and officials without the risk of imprisonment.

TYPED VARIABLES FOR VALID DEV & PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENTS

The Owl Store is a concrete implementation of a Type System for Environment Variables that specifies, resolves, and verifies an environment's correctness.

PKL: APPLE'S NEW CONFIGURATION LANGUAGE THAT COULD REPLACE JSON AND YAML

Pkl, Apple's take on configuration-as-code, is aimed at making configuration more reliable and maintainable.

ANTHROPIC TEAMS UP WITH PALANTIR AND AWS TO SELL AI TO DEFENSE CUSTOMERS

Claude is now available within Palantir's Impact Level 6 environment, which is reserved for systems containing data deemed critical to national security.

FFMPEG DEVS BOAST OF UP TO 94X PERFORMANCE BOOST AFTER IMPLEMENTING HANDWRITTEN AVX-512 ASSEMBLY CODE

AVX-512 has optimizations that make it ideal for compute-heavy tasks.

TORONTO CRYPTO COMPANY CEO KIDNAPPED, HELD FOR $1M RANSOM BEFORE BEING RELEASED

Dean Skurka, the president and CEO of Toronto-based financial firm WonderFi, was found uninjured after paying the $1 million ransom.

MOZILLA FOUNDATION CRUMBLES AS THIRD OF STAFF CAST OFF

The Mozilla Foundation is laying off about a third of its staff and reorganizing teams to increase agility and impact.

➡️ REQUEST A PREVIEW OF YOUR DOCS BUILT WITH FERN

GOOGLE'S JARVIS AI EXTENSION EXISTENCE LEAKED ON THE CHROME STORE

Google's Jarvis AI extension was leaked for a brief time on the Chrome Web Store. The store page described Jarvis as a helpful companion that surfs the web. It supposedly works by taking and analyzing screenshots, similar to Apple's 'onscreen awareness' and Microsoft Recall. The extension will likely go live after Gemini 2.0's official release, which should be sometime next month.

OPENAI ACQUIRED CHAT.COM

Chat.com now redirects to OpenAI's ChatGPT. The domain was registered in September 1996. It was sold to HubSpot co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah last year for $15.5 million. Shah sold the domain to OpenAI in March. It is unknown how much the deal was worth. Shah implied that he had been paid in OpenAI shares.

SPACEX TO LAUNCH STARSHIP FOR THE SIXTH TIME THIS MONTH

The sixth flight test of SpaceX's Starship may be as soon as November 18. It will have many of the same objectives as the previous test, which is part of the reason for the fast approval. SpaceX will also attempt to relight one of the Starship's six Raptor engines in orbit, test new secondary thermal protection materials, and stress the limits of flap control to gain data on future landing profiles. Its engineers have introduced a number of upgrades to the system, including more redundancy in the booster propulsion system and updated software controls.

A NEW STRONGER OZEMPIC IS COMING. HERE'S WHAT TO KNOW

Novo Nordisk's CagriSema combines semaglutide, the active ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy, with an amylin and calcitonin receptor agonist. Amylin helps regulate blood sugar levels while calcitonin controls calcium levels in the blood. An early-stage clinical trial of CagriSema found it helped patients lose more weight faster compared to the highest dose of Wegovy. Late-stage trials of the drug are expected later this year and in the first half of 2025.

Download the solution brief