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OpenAI has launched a new AI model called GPT-4o mini. It is available to free users. The 'o' in the name stands for 'omni', hinting at the model's audio, video, and text capabilities. The model will be made available to ChatGPT Enterprise users next week.
Online spending during this year's 48-hour Amazon Prime Day event was up 11% year-over-year, with customers spending $14.2 billion. The strong showing was driven by back-to-school shopping and an apparent product refresh cycle. Consumer behaviors during the sale indicate a shift to more conscious shopping and a preference for saving over splurging.
A new fusion experiment has set a record for the strongest steady magnetic field confining a plasma. Strong magnets are essential for certain types of fusion power - for every doubling of the strength of a magnetic field, the power output of one reactor design increases 16-fold. The team was able to produce a 17 tesla magnetic field, more than twice as powerful as the high-resolution MRI scanners used to image human brains. They are now working on more advanced magnet designs.
A study on psilocybin suggests that psychedelic drugs work by disrupting certain brain networks, especially one that helps people form a sense of space, time, and self. The study, which involved scanning participants' brains with an MRI while under the influence of the drug, showed that the drug caused populations of neurons usually in synchrony to fall out of synchrony. The brain appears to respond to this by entering a state of enhanced plasticity that can last for weeks. The study hints at how psychedelic drugs could be used to treat people with addiction, depression, or post-traumatic stress.
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SQLite provides lower operational complexity. It is the best choice for getting applications running on a single machine. However, SQLite becomes less appealing if a project requires multiple machines, has a write-heavy workload, or has long-running transactions. In these cases, developers are better off using a more traditional database like MySQL or Postgres.
Apple's macOS App Store is automatically rejecting apps that contain the string 'itms-services' - the URL scheme for apps to ask Apple's iTunes Store to install another app. The string exists in the urllib parser in Python's standard library. The discovery of this issue led to a discussion among Python developers about whether 'acceptable to app stores' should be a design goal for CPython. The developers decided to implement a `--with-app-store-compliance` configuration option to remove the problematic code.
Meta has told its AR/VR teams to cut spending by around 20%. The division has lost $55 billion since 2019. The company is still aiming to release a new Meta Quest 4 headset, a Quest Pro sequel, and new AR glasses in the next three years. Meta has been shifting its focus over to AI. It is gearing up to release its Llama 400B AI model by the end of the month.
Apple is in talks with major studios to bring more movies to Apple TV+, expanding and extending the service's appeal. The company's previous experiments with licensing movies and making them available for limited runs seem to have gone well. While Apple has found some success in terms of series, it has struggled to make as much of an impact with its movies. Apple TV+ accounted for $23.9 billion, more than half the revenue generated by iPhone hardware sales, in the second quarter of this year.
Broadcom is reportedly in discussions with OpenAI about creating an artificial intelligence chip, an effort that will involve OpenAI hiring former Google employees who worked on the Tensor processor.
Google stopped generating new goo.gl URLs in March 2019.
Netflix is starting to phase out its ad-free Basic plan in the US and France, making the cheapest commercial-free Netflix plan $15.49 per month in the US.
Childhood is a precious, fleeting stage of life - screens obstruct imagination and play opportunities, so some parents choose to not rely on them at all.
Being uncritical of your work can lead to mediocrity, but being obsessively self-critical can lead to disastrous consequences.
A software flaw in Ariane 5's guidance system caused the rocket to deviate off track, causing one of history's most expensive software failures.
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Microsoft's AI-powered Designer app is now available to anyone with a personal Microsoft account on Windows, iOS, and Android. The app allows users to create custom images, stickers, greeting cards, and more using templates. It uses AI to create and edit images on the go. Designer can edit and remove backgrounds, remove people or objects from images, and add text and branding to images. The app gives users 15 free daily 'boosts' that can be used to create or edit AI-powered images and designs. Upgrading to a Copilot Pro subscription gives users 100 boosts per day.
Meta will withhold its next multimodal AI model from customers in the EU because of a lack of clarity from regulators. Apple has also said it won't release its Apple Intelligence features in Europe because of similar concerns. Meta plans to incorporate its new multimodal models in a wide range of products, including smartphones and its Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses. The upcoming larger text-only version of Meta's Llama 3 model will be available in the EU.
A recent study into the mechanism of human language comprehension aimed to figure out if there was any structure to the neuronal response to language. It involved playing recorded sets of words to patients who had implants that monitored the activity of neurons located in their left prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain largely responsible for processing language. The study found that the neurons' responses changed based on context - neurons in certain areas would light up if the patient heard specific words. Words presented with context elicited a stronger response compared to when the context was not available.
Researchers have discovered a drug that increases the life spans of laboratory animals by nearly 25%. It works by lowering levels of a protein called interleukin-11, which is associated with higher levels of inflammation and other factors that control the pace of aging. Mice with decreased interleukin-11 had lower levels of cancer, improved muscle function, were leaner, had healthier fur, and scored better on many measures of frailty. The drug is already being tested in people, but it is unknown whether it will have the same anti-aging effect.
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This playbook [10] outlines the specific steps you should take to establish a repeatable observability framework [10], including:
In-app browsers have limited functionality, privacy and security concerns, inconsistent UI/UX, and worse performance than normal browsers. Businesses use in-app browsers to perform man-in-the-middle attacks by injecting arbitrary JavaScript code and intercepting network traffic. This allows them to watch what users are doing within their in-app browsers. Websites can detect when in-app browsers are being used and offer links to users to open them in the default browser instead.
While there are a lot of techniques that could be used to apply to certain types of optimization, sometimes compilers will opt to look for a more-or-less hardcoded pattern. Compilers must consider many tradeoffs when choosing what optimizations to perform and how to perform them. Extremely sophisticated algorithms may be avoided because they can be expensive, too complex, or not broadly applicable. Hardcoded optimizations are fairly cheap and the maintenance burden is very low.
Learning math early guards you against numerous academic risks and opens doors to all kinds of career opportunities. It can make one appear to be a genius in others' eyes and help them get a ticket to those opportunities usually reserved for top students. Faster learning leads to an earlier career start, which results in greater productivity and accomplishments over the course of a career. It is a myth that learning math early is inappropriate for students' social/emotional and cognitive/academic development. A student is ready for advanced mathematics once they have mastered the prerequisites.
Factors that matter most for starting a company are market, team, growth, cycle time, ideas, new technology, and competition. Startups should build minimal viable experiments and make a list of unknowns. The exact idea is unimportant as long as founders are talking to the right customers, so pick markets over a specific idea. Fund only what is needed to run your experiment. Start small - you will get good at whatever you spend time on.
Too much tech speculation tied to speculative funding caused the funding and customers to go away, and now the jobs are gone.
GitLab currently has a market value of about $8 billion, more than the $7.5 billion Microsoft paid for GitHub in 2018.
There are two ways to ensure that your data cannot be accessed by anyone: using end-to-end encryption or self-hosting your own server.
The current dating app concept doesn't work well because of market dynamics and business incentives.
This article looks at how Notion improved its performance in the browser by using the WebAssembly implementation of sqlite3.
Conferences allow you to make connections that will propel your career for years to come.
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Andrej Karpathy, former head of AI at Tesla and researcher at OpenAI, has launched an 'AI native' education platform called Eureka Labs. The company aims to create AI teaching assistants to guide students through course materials. These AI assistants will work with human teachers to allow anyone to learn anything. The venture's first product will be an undergraduate-level class that will help students train their very own AI. Eureka Labs will run both digital and physical classes.
The Taiwanese version of the FCC has leaked photos and details of the entire Pixel 9 series. The photos confirm that Google is moving the Pixel Fold's inner selfie camera to the corner of the screen and adding a new square camera arrangement. The Pixel 9 series will feature faster charging speeds and Thread support. It is expected to launch at the Made by Google event on August 13. The leaked pictures are available in the article.
The Airshield is a device that allows runners to train without experiencing any air resistance. Currently a prototype, the Airshield allows athletes to run faster than they are able to unaided, allowing their bodies to learn the neuromuscular sequences required to run at that speed. The wedge-shaped open-backed cart is towed behind an electric go-kart, which is steered along a running track by a human driver. Pictures and a video of the Airshield being used are available in the article.
France-based Zephalto, Florida-based Space Perspective, and Arizona-based World View are just three of the startups currently building balloons to hoist tourists to the stratosphere. Most of these balloons will reach heights of 15 to 19 miles above the Earth's surface. At that height, the outside of the capsules will be essentially a vacuum and the sky will be a deep black. Passengers will not experience weightlessness. There will be no physical requirements for passengers to board the balloons. Seats on the balloons range from $50,000 to around $184,000.
This article looks at how Hugging Face approaches developer relations. Hugging Face is well known for being a startup whose large online community also translates to massive multi-thousand-people meetups all over the world. The community-centric company prioritizes giving the spotlight to community members and collaborators as much as possible and provides compute and no-strings-attached cash grants to community members and communities. It also helps maintain open-source libraries and closely collaborates with other tools. The company aims to always take a collaborative approach to working with other groups, open-source platforms, and libraries.
This blog post contains a list of lessons learned by a developer from 35 years of making software. The advice covers topics such as relationships, chasing interests, how people see the world, different mindsets to develop, and more. A lot of career progression in white-collar work is gained through developing relationships.
The current regulatory system isn't set up to consider regulations in a long-term fashion in our technology-driven world. The FTC wants to create opportunities for non-Big Tech companies, but the reality of the technology ecosystem is very different. Many companies with the potential to grow bigger are staying private to avoid public market scrutiny. Regulators need to rethink what constitutes a monopoly in the digital age.
This article contains an interview with Tim Sweeney, Founder and CEO of Epic Games, and Neal Stephenson, the author who coined the term 'Metaverse'. The interview discusses the Metaverse, thoughts on its technological and economic growth, Apple's Vision Pro, blockchains, the ethics of generative AI, and much more.
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Amazon is keeping tabs on the number of hours corporate employees spend in the office to prevent them from leaving immediately after badging in.
Google offered a $500 million alternative deal to a group of cloud providers to maintain its EU antitrust complaint against Microsoft.
iOS 18 gives users tools to easily customize the app icons on their homescreen and put app icons wherever they want.
Winning in open source means embracing the fact that you will share the commercial market for the software with other entities.