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DON'T DRY YOUR CODE PREMATURELY

Before applying DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself), consider whether the deduplication is truly redundant or if the functionality will need to evolve independently over time. Applying DRY principles too rigidly leads to premature abstractions that make future changes more complex than necessary. While two sections of code may look the same, they could serve different contexts and business requirements that evolve separately over time. Keep code separate until enough common patterns emerge over time to justify coupling the code together. Tolerate a little duplication in the early stages of development and wait to abstract.

CHASING UTOPIA, STARTUP STYLE

Silicon Valley's tech barons have several projects to develop new frontiers for human life. The projects are based on the desire to withdraw from existing societies and their high taxes and regulations. Stemming from a yearning for new forms of self-governance and citizenship, these political exit projects illuminate the real problems of society, like the failure of nation-states to respond adequately to modern crises, disintegrating social cohesion, and the epidemic of loneliness. While the idea of being a sovereign individual may sound appealing to Silicon Valley billionaires, the world's most poor and desperate often experience such lawless locales as antithetical to freedom as some of the worst abuses flourish in the absence of the state.

GOOGLE WILL ROLL OUT CHROME'S NEW EXTENSION SPEC NEXT WEEK

Google will begin phasing out Manifest V2 on the Chrome Beta, Dev, and Canary channels starting on June 3. Extensions will still work, but Google says it will disable them in browsers in the coming months before removing the ability to use them completely. A full rollout is scheduled for the beginning of 2025. Manifest V3 has faced pushback over concerns it could limit the effectiveness of ad blockers. Google has attempted to address developers' main concerns by adding support for user scripts and increasing the number of rule sets for an API used by ad blocking extensions.

TECH GIANTS FORM AI GROUP TO COUNTER NVIDIA WITH NEW INTERCONNECT STANDARD

The Ultra Accelerator Link Promoter Group will develop a new interconnect standard for AI accelerator chips in data centers as an alternative to Nvidia's proprietary NVLink interconnect technology.

THE DECLINE OF THE USER INTERFACE

While software looks cooler than ever, user interface design and the user experience have declined significantly.

HOW ANTHROPIC DESIGNED ITSELF TO AVOID OPENAI'S MISTAKES

As a public benefit corporation, Anthropic has a fiduciary obligation to increase profits for shareholders, but the board has legal room to prioritize safety over increasing profits and follow the company's mission to ensure that transformative AI helps people and society flourish.

SPACETOP, THE RADICAL NEW LAPTOP WITH NO SCREEN, IS READY FOR LAUNCH

The Spacetop G1, a laptop that swaps out a real display for a virtual one, will be available later this year for $1,900.

PAUL GRAHAM CLAIMS SAM ALTMAN WASN'T FIRED FROM Y COMBINATOR

Paul Graham, the co-founder of Y Combinator, has dismissed claims that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was pressured to resign from the startup accelerator in 2019 due to potential conflicts of interest.

WHITHER UTOPIA?

We should bring back the idea that life can be better and that we can work together to bring forth a utopian existence.

Start here → drinkLMNT.com/TLDR

FITBIT ACE LTE: HANDS ON WITH GOOGLE'S FIRST SMARTWATCH FOR KIDS

The Fitbit Ace LTE, designed for kids between the ages of 7 and 11, focuses on gaming and safety. At $229, the smartwatch can track a child's activity as they play throughout the day. With 16 hours of battery life, the Ace LTE is resistant to drops and can be submerged in up to 164 feet of water. It is available now for preorder and will be in stores on June 5.

APPLE'S AI PLANS INVOLVES 'BLACK BOX' FOR CLOUD DATA

Apple is expected to announce AI implementations into iOS 18 and its other operating systems at WWDC. The company intends to process data from AI applications inside a virtual black box that will use only Apple's hardware to perform AI processing in the cloud. The approach will prevent both Apple and potential hackers from being able to see app data. Using a cloud approach allows Apple to reduce the hardware requirements of its products.

NEURALINK WANTS 3 MORE QUADRIPLEGIC PATIENTS FOR ITS BRAIN CONTROL INTERFACE TRIAL

Neuralink is recruiting another three subjects for its brain implant study. It is seeking subjects aged 22 to 75 with severe quadriplegia due to spinal cord injury or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis for at least one year without improvement. Healthy people, people with morbid obesity, or people with an active device already implanted are disqualified from the study. Participants will be monitored for adverse events for 72 months following the implantation procedure.

NEW BYD HYBRID CAN DRIVE NON-STOP FOR MORE THAN 2,000 KILOMETERS

BYD has unveiled a new hybrid powertrain that can travel for more than 2,000 kilometers without recharging or refueling. Vehicles with the technology can travel from New York to Miami on a single charge and a full tank of gas. The upgraded tech will be launched in the Qin L and the Seal 06. Both mid-sized sedans, which were unveiled at the Beijing Auto Show in April, cost under $13,800.

THREE LAWS OF SOFTWARE COMPLEXITY (OR: WHY SOFTWARE ENGINEERS ARE ALWAYS GRUMPY)

Software engineers are destined to wallow in unnecessary complexity due to three fundamental laws: a well-designed system will degrade into a badly designed system over time, complexity is a moat filled by leaky abstractions, and there is no fundamental upper limit on software complexity. Building a new system from scratch without succumbing to these laws is a lot harder than it sounds. Engineers who work on badly designed systems suffer more as badly designed systems have unbound complexity.

WHAT WE LEARNED FROM A YEAR OF BUILDING WITH LLMS (PART I)

While the barrier to entry for building AI products has lowered, creating something effective beyond a demo remains a deceptively difficult endeavor. This series of articles identifies crucial lessons and methodologies for developing products based on large language models gathered by people who have been building real-world applications on top of ML systems over the past year. It is organized into three sections: tactical, operational, and strategic. This first part dives into the tactical nuts and bolts of working with large language models and shares best practices and common pitfalls around prompting, setting up retrieval-augmented generation, applying flow engineering, and evaluation and monitoring.

HOW A.I. MADE MARK ZUCKERBERG POPULAR AGAIN IN SILICON VALLEY

When Meta released its AI, it made the technology freely available, largely the opposite of what Google, OpenAI, and Microsoft have done. Mark Zuckerberg has become the highest-profile technology executive to support and promote the open-source model for AI. While other companies are using a closed strategy to guard their technology, Zuckerberg believes that the technology is so important and the opportunities are so great that it should be made widely available so that everyone can benefit. The decision to open source Meta's AI tech was well-received and made Zuckerberg a lot more popular in tech circles.

A MYOPIA EPIDEMIC IS SWEEPING THE GLOBE. HERE'S HOW TO STOP IT

Studies from around the world are finding an increased rate of incidences of pathologically stretched eyeballs among children compared with pre-pandemic levels. The pandemic saw real-life classrooms and playgrounds give way to virtual meetings and digital devices, increasing the time that children spend focusing on screens and other nearby objects significantly. This shift has caused their eyeballs to lengthen to accommodate short-vision tasks. An hour of extra outdoor break time every day can markedly reduce the incidence of short-sightedness.

STARLINK'S DISRUPTION OF THE SPACE INDUSTRY

Starlink launched its first 60 satellites into orbit five years ago on May 23 - it has since launched more than 6,500 satellites, making it the largest satellite constellation in service.

ARM SAYS ITS NEXT-GEN MOBILE GPU WILL BE ITS MOST ‘PERFORMANT AND EFFICIENT'

Arm's next-generation Cortex-X925 CPU and Immortalis G925 GPU designs will offer optimized layouts to make it easier for device makers to implement their own system-on-a-chip layouts.

GH-DASH

gh-dash is a command-line extension that displays a dashboard with pull requests and issues by filters.

GOOGLE CONFIRMS THE LEAKED SEARCH DOCUMENTS ARE REAL

A collection of 2,500 leaked internal documents that details the data that Google is keeping track of has been confirmed to be real.

OPENAI IS HELPING APPLE FIX SIRI, AND THAT HAS MICROSOFT WORRIED

OpenAI's technology plays a big role in powering Apple's new AI-based features for its operating systems.

THE FUTURE OF FOUNDATION MODELS IS CLOSED-SOURCE

Open-source AI will become a financial drain for model builders, an inferior option for developers and consumers, and a risk to national security - closed-source models will create far more economic and consumer value over the next decade.

million round

* $5M grant from the U.S. Department of Energy * Strategic agreements in place with top lithium producers * Nearly 100 patents across 19 patent families

OPENAI TRAINING ITS NEXT MAJOR AI MODEL, FORMS NEW SAFETY COMMITTEE

OpenAI has announced the formation of a new Safety and Security Committee to oversee risk management for its projects and operations. The company recently began training its next frontier model. The new Safety and Security Committee will be responsible for making recommendations about AI safety to the full company board of directors. It will be responsible for processes and safeguards related to alignment research, protecting children, upholding election integrity, assessing societal impacts, and implementing security measures.

AN ANONYMOUS SOURCE SHARED THOUSANDS OF LEAKED GOOGLE SEARCH API DOCUMENTS WITH ME; EVERYONE IN SEO SHOULD SEE THEM

API documentation from Google Search was recently leaked. The 2,500-page document contained 14,014 attributes that appear to come from Google's internal Content API Warehouse. While it doesn't show things like the weight of particular elements in the search ranking algorithm or prove which elements are used in the ranking systems, it shows incredible details about the data Google collects. This article looks at the leak and extracts some of the most interesting details, for example, how Google utilized cookie history, logged-in Chrome data, and pattern detection to fight manual and automated click spam.

NEURALINK RIVAL SETS BRAIN-CHIP RECORD WITH 4,096 ELECTRODES ON HUMAN BRAIN

Precision Neuroscience claims to have set a new record for the number of neuron-tapping electrodes placed on a living human's brain at 4,096. The high density of electrodes allowed neuroscientists to map the activity of neurons at an unprecedented resolution during a surgery to remove a benign brain tumor. Precision's device sits on top of the brain and does not penetrate the brain at all. It consists of a film that contains 1,024 electrodes embedded in a lattice pattern. The device is modular, allowing for multiple films to be used at once - four devices were used during the surgery.

WILL SCALING SOLVE ROBOTICS?

Over 900 people attended last year's Conference on Robot Learning, which featured 11 workshops and almost 200 accepted papers. One of the largest debates at the event was whether training a large neural network on a very large data set was a feasible way to solve robotics. This post presents the different sides of the argument to deepen people's understanding of the debate. Scaling has worked for other similar fields. However, it is impractical as there isn't much robotics data available and there's no clear way to get it. Even if scaling works as well as in other fields, it likely still won't solve robotics.

can trust. Good data, better results

DOING IS NORMALLY DISTRIBUTED, LEARNING IS LOG-NORMAL

A process taking two, three, or five times as long as estimated is much more common when learning is involved. It is almost never the case in software development that you know all or even most of the technical hurdles that you will face in the process of development. This throws everything we know about traditional project management into disarray. Knowing your tooling and having enough experience can help you provide better estimates.

YOUR API SHOULDN'T REDIRECT HTTP TO HTTPS

The common practice of redirecting API calls from HTTP to HTTPS should be reconsidered. Many programmatic API clients don't keep browser-like state of things like HSTS headers they have seen. The usability-security tradeoff argument doesn't apply as APIs are mostly consumed by other software. HTTP interfaces should be disabled entirely or return clear error responses for unencrypted requests. API credentials sent over unencrypted connections should be considered compromised and revoked.

EX-OPENAI BOARD MEMBER REVEALS WHAT LED TO SAM ALTMAN'S BRIEF OUSTING

Former OpenAI board member Helen Toner revealed new details about what led to CEO Sam Altman's ousting in November in a recent interview. The board had apparently learned about ChatGPT's release on Twitter. Toner says that Altman had lied to the board multiple times. Altman was reportedly withholding information and misrepresenting things that were happening in the company for years. His lies made it difficult for the board to make decisions, leading them to think that he wasn't the right person to lead the company to AGI.

ASK HN: WHAT WOULD YOU SPEND YOUR TIME WORKING ON IF YOU DIDN'T NEED MONEY? (HACKER NEWS THREAD)

This Hacker News thread discusses what developers would choose to do for their ideal job. The answers range from large, world-benefiting schemes to personal projects and just doing nothing. Some of the answers are from people who have retired or are about to retire.

YOUTUBE ROLLS OUT ITS NEW PLAYABLES GAMES TO ALL USERS

YouTube has rolled out over 75 games playable directly on the platform previously only available to Premium members.

NVIDIA SAID TO BE PREPPING AI PC CHIP WITH ARM AND BLACKWELL CORES

Nvidia is reportedly preparing a system-on-chip that pairs Arm's Cortex-X5 core design with GPUs based on Nvidia's Blackwell architecture.

PAYPAL IS BUILDING AN AD NETWORK BASED ON YOUR VENMO DATA

PayPal's new advertising platform will be built on purchase information and customer spending habits from PayPal and its sister app Venmo.

USING A DEV DIARY SEEMS TO BE WORTHWHILE

Keeping a diary is a good way to think out problems and you can also feed the diary to a large language model and ask it questions.

SO MANY FEED READERS, SO MANY BIZARRE BEHAVIORS

Serving 429 responses to RSS clients that hit a feed too often resulted in the uncovering of several bugs and helped some developers improve their software.

YOUTUBE HAS NOW BEGUN SKIPPING VIDEOS ALTOGETHER FOR USERS WITH AD BLOCKERS

YouTube is testing tactics like slowing down video load times, skipping videos, muting videos, and pausing videos to push users towards Premium.

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APPLE SIGNS DEAL WITH OPENAI FOR IOS, STILL WANTS GOOGLE AS AN 'OPTION'

Apple and OpenAI have signed a deal to provide chatbot functionality in iOS 18. The deal will be a component of Apple's WWDC event in June. It will allow Apple to continue working on its own chatbot, like how it previously offered Google Maps before launching Apple Maps. Apple is still working on a deal with Google to offer Gemini as an option.

ELON MUSK'S XAI RAISES $6 BILLION TO FUND ITS RACE AGAINST CHATGPT AND ALL THE REST

xAI has announced raising $6 billion in funding to help bring the startup's first products to market, build advanced infrastructure, and accelerate the research and development of future technologies. The funding comes from several sources, including Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, and Saudi Arabian Prince Al Waleed bin Talal. Elon Musk plans to launch xAI's new data center by the fall of 2025. Musk has said he would prefer to build products outside of Tesla when it comes to AI and robotics unless he gets more control.

SCIENTISTS FOUND A PARADOX IN EVOLUTION — AND IT MAY BECOME THE NEXT RULE OF BIOLOGY

Scientists from the University of Southern California have proposed a new rule for biology called Selectively Advantageous Instability (SAI). SAI explores how instability can actually benefit a cell or organism. Instability allows for greater genetic diversity, which can make organisms more adaptable. A shorter cell component lifespan can actually help promote cell health. Understanding the process could aid in the exploration of the biological processes behind disease and aging.

LOOKING GLASS DEBUTS 16-INCH OLED AND 32-INCH ‘HOLOGRAPHIC' SPATIAL DISPLAYS

Looking Glass has introduced a 32-inch spatial display and a 16-inch OLED variant designed to enable group 3D visualization without the need for headsets. The displays can assist in the development and presentation of interactive 3D digital images, videos, and applications in real time. They support a range of software through plugins for Unity, Unreal, Blender, and WebXR. Looking Glass provides a 3D model importer and an SDK for developing custom 3D/holographic content. The new displays are thin and designed to be easily installed anywhere.