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ORACLE JAVA POLICE START KNOCKING ON FORTUNE 200'S DOORS FOR FIRST TIME

Oracle has dispatched Java audit letters to Fortune 200 companies for the first time. The company announced a new licensing regime in January 2023 that was two to five times more expensive for businesses with limited Java use. Companies should be wary, evaluate their positions, and only pay for Java where necessary. Signing up for a long-term agreement may hold customers hostage to fortune when it comes to renewal.

THE VOTE ON ELON MUSK'S $46 BILLION PAY PACKAGE IS COMING DOWN TO THE WIRE

The vote on Elon Musk's $46 billion Tesla pay package is still too close to call. Shareholders are expected to finish voting on Thursday. Musk has been personally campaigning for the vote, even attending meetings with some large investors that he usually skips. To incentivize voting, Tesla has been offering a raffle for a chance of a tour of its Texas production plant with Musk. It launched a video with voting instructions last week that featured its Optimus humanoid robot.

ASK HN: WHAT ARE YOUR PERSONAL RED FLAGS WHEN YOU'RE INTERVIEWING AT A COMPANY? (HACKER NEWS THREAD)

This Hacker News discusses situations where interviewees decided that the place they were interviewing for wasn't right for them. Some common red flags include people having dinner at the office, complicated interviewing processes, take-home assignments, using misleading language, and open office plans.

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AS NASA WATCHES STARSHIP CLOSELY, HERE'S WHAT THE AGENCY WANTS TO SEE NEXT

NASA and SpaceX are planning for the possibility of modifying the Artemis III mission - while NASA still maintains it will fly a crewed lunar landing in September 2026, almost everyone in the space community thinks it will be delayed.

CAN APPLE RESCUE THE VISION PRO?

While Apple hasn't released sales figures, analysts' estimates suggest that the Vision Pro was a flop, selling fewer units than expected.

IT'S TIME TO BEACQUIRED FOR €500 MILLION

French app developer Voodoo is purchasing BeReal for €500 million.

ELEPHANTS MAY REFER TO EACH OTHER BY NAME

Elephants seem to respond more actively to calls that include their 'name'.

GENERAL INTELLIGENCE (2024)

AGI will likely be developed within three to five years.

BACK TO ATOMS

AI might be the last big wave before the tide goes out in the software development industry.

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APPLE WWDC 2024: THE 13 BIGGEST ANNOUNCEMENTS

Apple announced AI features and major updates across its operating systems at its Worldwide Developers Conference keynote. Apple's AI system, Apple Intelligence, will put powerful generative models at the core of the iPhone, iPad, and Mac. It will enable new capabilities across Apple's native apps, such as the ability to generate images or summarize text. Apple Intelligence will be available for free on the iPhone 15 Pro and on iPads and Macs with an M1 or later chip. Other announcements at the event include more customization in iOS 18, RCS support for the iPhone, a Passwords app to keep track of logins, and a Calculator app for iPadOS 18.

APPLE IS BRINGING RCS TO THE IPHONE IN IOS 18

Apple's Messages app will support RCS in iOS 18. It will replace SMS as the default communication protocol between Android and iOS devices. RCS offers typing indicators, read receipts, longer messages, and higher-quality images and videos. Apple likely integrated the protocol to appease EU regulators.

WE JUST BROKE GROUND ON AMERICA'S FIRST NEXT-GEN NUCLEAR FACILITY

Kemmerer, Wyoming, will soon be home to the most advanced nuclear facility in the world. It will hopefully come online in 2030. There is still a review process to be completed - TerraPower will build out the non-nuclear parts of the facility in the meantime. Started by Bill Gates in 2008, TerraPower is leading the country and the world in developing safe, next-generation nuclear technology.

SOLAR-POWERED PLANES TAKE FLIGHT

Solar-powered planes could lead to new alternatives for aerial surveillance and telecommunications. Aviation giants, telecommunication companies, venture investors, and the military are already spending millions of dollars developing the technology. These planes never need refueling and can stay in the air as long as the sun is shining. Advances in battery technology have finally made it feasible to power a solar plane through the night.

THE FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING HIRING PROBLEM

When hiring for functional programming languages, you primarily pick from either resume spammers, bright undergraduates, or senior engineers who only want to work with that particular language. Resume spammers can be safely ignored. Bright undergraduates can be a source of great potential. Senior engineers who only want to work with a particular language may look like the best candidates, but they may be too focused on the tool to see the goals of the business.

PAYMENTS 101 FOR A DEVELOPER

This page contains a list of terms and core concepts for developers in the payments team of an online business or payments service provider. It can be frustrating to work in an environment without understanding the terminologies used in every conversation. The page attempts to simplify the concepts to bring developers up to speed with payments.

APPLE'S AI PROMISE: “YOUR DATA IS NEVER STORED OR MADE ACCESSIBLE TO APPLE”

Apple's new Apple Intelligence system will use Private Cloud Compute to ensure any data processed on its cloud servers is protected in a transparent and verifiable way. Many of Apple's generative AI models can run entirely on a device powered by an A17+ or M-series chip. When a bigger model is required to fulfill a generative AI request, Apple Intelligence only sends relevant data to complete the task to special Apple silicon servers. Customer data will not be saved for future server access or used to further train models. The server code used for Private Cloud Compute will be publicly accessible.

STUDY FINDS A QUARTER OF BOSSES HOPED RTO WOULD MAKE EMPLOYEES QUIT

A study of more than 1,500 employees found that a quarter of executives and a fifth of HR professionals hoped that return-to-office (RTO) mandates would result in staff leaving. While people did quit when RTO mandates were enforced at many of the largest companies, it wasn't enough - many of the layoffs in the past 12 months were believed to be a result of too few people leaving in protest of RTO mandates. Many employees feel that management wants them back in the office to monitor them more closely. This has resulted in the growth of an office culture that is even more performative, suspicious, and divisive than before the COVID-19 pandemic.

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NOKIA JUST MADE THE FIRST PHONE CALL USING 3D SPATIAL AUDIO

Nokia placed a call over a cellular network using the 3GPP Immersive Video and Audio Services codec, which lets people hear spatial audio in real time.

XBOX BOSS: ‘I THINK WE SHOULD HAVE A HANDHELD, TOO'

Microsoft is reportedly working on a true handheld gaming device.

WHY TRIPLEBYTE FAILED

Triplebyte was a technical recruiting company for software engineers with an excellent brand delivering a well-liked product.

THE AI ARMS RACE TO COMBAT FAKE IMAGES IS EVEN — FOR NOW

Current methods for detecting fake images are fairly effective, but generators are getting better.

CREATING PERFECT FONT FALLBACKS IN CSS

Modern CSS allows developers to override font metrics with @font-face properties like size-adjust, ascent-override, and descent-override.

HOW TO BUILD AN AI DATA CENTER

Digital infrastructure ultimately requires physical infrastructure - the more computing needed, the more physical infrastructure is required.

SPACEX SCALES UP STARFACTORY, AIMING TO BUILD A STARSHIP A DAY

SpaceX's Starfactory started construction back in February. The upgrade gives Starbase an extra 100,000 square feet of factory floor to help SpaceX reach its ambitious goal of producing one Starship a day. SpaceX intends to start building Starship Version 2 at the new Starfactory. Starship Version 2 is said to hold more propellant, have improved reliability and a lower dry weight, and feature aerodynamic changes. There are currently over 1,800 full-time employees at Starbase.

SIRI IS REBORN IN IOS 18 — EVERYTHING APPLE'S VOICE ASSISTANT WILL BE ABLE TO DO

Details about Siri's new functionalities as well as prompts that Apple used to test the software have been leaked. Many of the prompts used contain natural language, often detailing descriptions of what the user is trying to do along with arguably superfluous details. Several core apps, including Notes, Photos, Safari, and Mail, will be getting enhanced Siri features in iOS 18. This article looks at all of the enhanced Siri features coming in iOS 18 and other updates that can be expected in iOS 18 and macOS 15.

A REVOLUTION IN BIOLOGY

This article discusses different ways in which biology can be hacked without gene editing. For example, scientists have used drug combinations to create planarians with two heads or two tails. The two-headed worms produce two-headed offspring indefinitely, meaning that the scientists achieved a permanent change in the structure of the worm - without changing its genes. Studies like this open up the possibility of a perspective shift in how the body works.

ARS CHATS WITH PRECISION, THE BRAIN-CHIP MAKER TAKING THE ROAD LESS INVASIVE

Competition is amping up in the brain-computer interface (BCI) space as recent advances have the field buzzing with anticipation. Precision Neuroscience is one of the startups at the forefront of the field. It has placed its device on the brains of 14 human patients so far and is hoping to at least double that number by the end of this year. The company expected to have its first BCI on the market next year. This article takes a look at the BCI space, Precision's device, how it works, future designs, and more.

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SPREADSHEET IS ALL YOU NEED

This project, a nanoGPT pipeline packed in a spreadsheet, was created to help further understanding of how GPT works. All of the mechanisms, calculations, and matrices included are fully interactive and configurable, designed to help readers visualize the entire structure and data flow. Resources for further learning are available.

SO YOU WANT TO BUILD A BROWSER ENGINE

This blog post contains advice on building a browser engine that's competitive with Chromium. Focusing on the right set of imparted and hard use cases will help a lot in the beginning. Some of these constraining use causes include site isolation, content main thread sanctity, fast JS-DOM calls, page load performance, and typing latency. The post also contains ideas on how browsers can be improved in general. For example, they could restore state after a browser reset.

BUILDING AI PRODUCTS

Just because AI gets things wrong sometimes doesn't mean it's useless. AI models are extremely good at telling you what a good answer to a question would probably look like. Generative AI is a general-purpose technology, but developers are boxing it into single-purpose tools and experiences. One of the reasons people are so excited about large language models is that they could move through all of the levels of software and hardware abstraction to the top.

NVIDIA'S NEW SALES BOOSTER: THE GLOBAL PUSH FOR NATIONAL AI CHAMPIONS

Governments around the world are boosting their budgets to encourage companies and multinationals to build new data centers and refit old ones to develop AI locally and train large language models in their native languages based on their own citizens' data. Nvidia says that these sovereign AI efforts are expected to bring in almost $10 billion this year. Many governments are concerned about how generative AI will impact their economies. They want sovereign clouds for their AI infrastructure and sensitive data, and US tech companies are eager to build those for them.

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WITH MARRIAGES DECLINING IN JAPAN, TOKYO'S GOVERNMENT IS BUILDING ITS OWN DATING APP

The Japanese government has started several initiatives in an attempt to create more couples and aid the country's falling birthrate, which is at an all-time low.

HOW TO BUILD ANYTHING EXTREMELY QUICKLY

Recursively create outlines, speedrun filling them in, and then once everything is almost done, go through and perfect it.

HOW A SINGLE CHATGPT MISTAKE COST US $10,000+

ChatGPT hard-coded an ID string instead of using a function or lambda to generate UUIDs, resulting in an issue that prevented new users from subscribing.

ELON AND AI AT TESLA

This post details several examples of when Elon Musk demonstrated his key role in driving AI and autonomy at Tesla.

THE SKEW PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE

Skew is a fairly conventional object-oriented program language but with wrapped types, real integer types, customizable syntax, name-based member access, open declarations, and compiler optimizations.

DECADE OF THE BATTERY

Batteries may be the defining technology of the 2020s - in just a few years, they have changed human energy supply, war, transportation, and geopolitical dominance.