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Google has reorganized its Android, Chrome, and Google hardware divisions, merging them under a new 'Platforms and Devices' division. The new division will be led by Google Hardware SVP Rick Osterloh. It will include a group from Google Research that has been working on computational photography. The unified team will help Google deliver higher-quality products and experiences for its users and partners.
Scientists have witnessed a rare phenomenon called primary endosymbiosis, where one microbial organism engulfs another and starts using it like an internal organ. The process results in the host cell providing nutrients, energy, protection, and other benefits to the symbiote, which eventually becomes an organelle. It is being observed in a species of algae which have engulfed a cyanobacterium, allowing the algae to obtain nitrogen straight from the air. The relationship between the two organisms started to evolve around 100 million years ago. Studying the process may provide a new path to incorporate nitrogen-fixing into plants to grow better crops.
The US FAA has given Boom the first-ever Special Flight Authorization to Exceed Mach. The authorization will allow the company's XB-1 prototype to break the sound barrier during its test flights. The permission designated the Black Mountain Supersonic Corridor at Edwards Air Force Base in California and part of the High Altitude Supersonic Corridor within the R-2515 airspace as a permissible area for Boom to conduct supersonic test flights. Boom still has to complete up to 20 subsonic tests before starting supersonic tests.
Hatchet is a distributed fault-tolerant task queue. It replaces difficult-to-manage legacy queues and pub/sub systems so that developers can design durable workloads that recover from failure and solve for problems like concurrency, fairness, and rate limiting. Hatchet can be used to distribute functions between sets of workers with minimal configuration or infrastructure. Example use cases for Hatchet include fairness for generative AI, batch processing for document indexing, workflow orchestration for multi-modal systems, and correctness for event-based processing.
otel-profiling-agent is a whole-system cross-language profiler for Linux via eBPF. It implements the experiential OTel profiling signal with very low CPU and memory overhead. otel-profiling-agent features support for C/C++ executables, profiling of system libraries, mixed stack traces between runtimes, and more.
China has ordered Apple to remove some of the world's most popular messaging apps from the App Store in the country. WhatsApp, Threads, Signal, Telegram, and Line have now been removed from the store. Apple said it was told to remove the apps due to national security concerns. The messaging apps were only accessible in China through virtual private networks, but they were still commonly used. China's increasing censorship will likely result in more apps being removed from app stores over the coming months.
Drug development is an integrated team effort with crucial players from both the biology and chemistry disciplines. However, the design, synthesis, purification, and characterization of new drugs lies squarely within the domain of chemistry. Physicians administer drugs, but they don't usually invent them. The public needs to be more aware of chemists' involvement with the drug development process so that they can better help resolve the myriad of problems confronting humankind.
A 'WTF Notebook' can be a powerful tool for self-management and making changes in a team.
A review of Delta, a Nintendo console emulator on iOS - get a real controller for the best experience.
Big River Services International, an operation that sells around $1 million a year of goods through e-commerce marketplaces, is an arm of Amazon that surreptitiously gathers intelligence on the tech giant's competitors, using its sales across multiple countries to obtain pricing data, logistics information and other details about rival e-commerce marketplaces, logistics operations, and payments services.
The webpage devoted to AWS' Snow family of products now directs users to the company's other data transport services.
Stability AI has laid off 20 employees a day after announcing the expansion of access to its new flagship model.
This is a transcript of an interview with Mark Zuckerberg that covers Llama 3, open sourcing towards AGI, custom silicon, synthetic data, energy constraints on scaling, Caesar Augustus, intelligence explosion, bioweapons, $10b models, and much more.
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Fortune 50 companies like AWS and Google Cloud as well as fast growing startups like Vercel and Secureframe work with TLDR to reach our audience of over 4 million tech-savvy decision makers with highly customized campaigns (like this one!).
AltStore PAL, a third-party iOS app store, is now live in the EU. Access to the store costs €1.50 (plus tax) per year to cover Apple's Core Technology Fee for installing the marketplace. AltStore PAL will integrate its marketplace with Patreon for monetization. It will support developers who want to distribute beta apps as a reward for crowd-sourced funding. AltStore PAL is open to submissions from third-party developers.
TikTok Notes is now rolling out to select Android and iOS users for download and limited testing in Australia and Canada. Besides a couple of small tweaks, the app is similar to Instagram. The messaging around TikTok Notes suggests that the app may be populated with users' existing and future public TikTok photo posts unless they opt-out. It is uncertain when TikTok will roll out the app to the US and elsewhere.
Boston Dynamics' next-generation Atlas robot features all-electric 360-degree joints that enable it to move in inhuman ways. The company has retired the previous Atlas' hydraulic system to create a new robot a fraction of the size and weight that also looks like a product. It has some impressive capabilities, like being able to stand up from a lying face-down position. A short video of Atlas demonstrating the new way it moves is available in the article.
NASA's Dragonfly rotorcraft mission is heading to Titan, one of Saturn's moons. The mission has been approved for a 2028 launch with a scheduled arrival at Titan in 2034. The Dragonfly dual-quadcopter drone, powered by a Multi-Mission Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator, is expected to travel hundreds of kilometers during its planned two-year exploration of Titan. The total lifecycle cost of the mission is currently $3.35 billion, approximately double the proposed cost, with increases blamed on the COVID-19 pandemic, supply chain issues, and design changes.
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In just 4 months, QA Wolf automates hundreds (sometimes thousands) of tests, ready to run in the QA Wolf cloud on every deploy. They can test third-party integrations, APIs, extensions, email & SMS deliverability, audio & video accuracy — whatever you've got [9], really.
Stability AI has released its next-generation Stable Diffusion 3 generative AI model. The model is now available for use via an API on the Stability AI developer platform. Making the model production-ready was a key focus for the company as part of the API release. Stability AI has implemented a number of safeguards to prevent the model's misuse. It is planning to release an open model soon. Stability AI has also just released an early beta preview of Stable Assistant, a chatbot powered by Stability AI's text and image generation technology.
Portr is a tunnel solution that exposes local HTTP, TCP, or WebSocket connections to the public internet. It utilizes SSH remote port forwarding under the hood to securely tunnel connections. Portr is designed for small teams looking to expose development servers on public URLs and is not recommended for use alongside production servers. It features an admin dashboard for user/team management and an inspector for inspecting and replaying requests.
The jhanas is a growing meditation trend that has made its way into some corners of tech. Its practitioners claim that it can induce extremely blissful mental states that rival life's peak experiences. Jhanas could open the path to new inroads to understanding and improving how our brains work. This article takes a look at what jhanas are, what the experience is like, how the tech community is embracing the concept, and more.
Tesla is asking shareholders to approve a move to Texas and to re-approve a $55.8 billion pay package for CEO Elon Musk that was recently voided by a Delaware judge. The vote will be held at Tesla's 2024 annual meeting on June 13. Renegotiating a replacement compensation plan that Musk would agree to would likely take substantial time and incur new accounting charges of billions of dollars. Musk has not been paid for any of his work over the last six years at Tesla, where he helped generate significant growth and stockholder value, with the company's stock up more than 630% since March 2018.
TikTok divestiture legislation already passed by the House will be included in a fast-moving aid package for Ukraine and Israel that the chamber is set to clear on Saturday.
Several new architectures have recently emerged that are designed to outperform full attention Transformers in long-context learning/generation and inference speed/cost.
Desbordante is a high-performance data profiler capable of discovering many different patterns in data and running data cleaning scenarios using various algorithms.
The expansion is a natural move for Mercury, who serves more than 100,000 businesses, many of which are startups and have expressed interest in a personal banking product.
Compute thresholds are a poor tool for policymakers because compute is a cost for AI developers and thus they are heavily incentivized to lower it.
Focus on what makes you enjoy your leisure activities and stop optimizing for a non-existent audience.
YouTube is strengthening its enforcement on third-party apps that violate its Terms of Service, specifically ad-blocking apps. It recently made a post on the official YouTube Community Help Forum putting third-party ad-blocking apps on notice. People using these apps may start experiencing buffering issues or errors when trying to watch videos.
Baidu's ChatGPT-style chatbot Ernie Bot has doubled its number of users since December. The chatbot now has over 200 million users and more than 85,000 enterprise clients. Its API is being used 200 million times each day. Ernie Bot was launched in March 2023 and released publicly last August. It is competing with other Chinese generative AI models including Alibaba Group's Tongyi Qianwen, Tencent's Hunyuan, and Alibaba-backed Moonshot AI's Kimi.
ALOHA Unleashed by Google DeepMind is a new generation of AI-powered robots with impressive dexterity. DeepMind recently released a series of videos showing the robots hanging shirts, inserting precise gears, and even tying shoelaces. The robots can generalize to untrained objects. The videos are available in the link.
A team of researchers from Berlin has developed a charging solution that makes lithium-ion batteries last much longer than they do now. It uses a pulsed current (PC) protocol that results in reduced mechanical stress and cracking in graphite particles within batteries and suppressed structural degradation in cathodes. Using PC charging can double the service life of commercial lithium-ion batteries with an 80% capacity retention. High-frequency pulsing with square-wave current produced the best results.
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Effect 3.0 is the first stable release of the core Effect Ecosystem. Effect is a TypeScript library that works in every runtime and project. It aims to solve some issues in TypeScript in areas such as dependency injection, error management, data modeling, and logging. Effect was designed from day one with production-grade software in mind.
A recent paper authored by Yilei Chen called 'Quantum Algorithms for Lattice Problems' has roiled the cryptography research community. The preprint, whose results are still being evaluated, claims a new quantum algorithm that efficiently solves the 'shortest independent vector problem' in lattices with specific parameters. If true, the result could allow future quantum computers to break schemes that depend on the hardness of specific instances of these problems. If the result can be improved upon, it could render an entire generation of 'post-quantum' lattice-based schemes obsolete, forcing cryptographers and the industry back to the drawing board.
Neopets announced a rebrand in 2023 and has been consciously courting former fans with promises of reuniting them with old digital companions that have remained largely unchanged. The site's resurgence is led in large part by millennials, for whom the site brings feelings of nostalgia. This article looks at Neopets' strong start, long decline, and recent revival. Neopets' new owners seem to be actively engaging with the community, with several projects aimed at working with fans to improve the site and user experience.
A small number of ships maintain the subsea cables that carry 99% of the world's data. Positioned in strategic locations around the planet, these ships stand ready to sail out and fix faults as soon as they are detected. This article tells the story of how these ships operate and the problems they face. Cable industry professionals perform a function vital to the world, which if done right, will continue to be unaware of their service.
The initial batch of AI features on iOS 18 will function without the need for an internet connection.
The attempt to plant a backdoor into Linux's xz data compression library is likely not an isolated incident.
Cloudflare's `foundations` library is a modular set of tools and utilities for building networked services/microservices.
Basically every error handling model in program languages conflates two or more separate concepts into a single system.
MKBHD's review of the Humane Ai Pin has some people up in arms due to its title and thumbnail, sparking debate about influencers and their responsibilities to the companies they talk about.
Prism is a parser for the Ruby language exposed as both a C library and a Ruby library.
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Automation is high on the agenda for most organizations, but often fails to materialize — especially when processes are only automated in a single software system, team, or device. Even simple-sounding processes often follow a complex logic. That's where process orchestration [3] comes in: coordinating the various endpoints of a business process (people / systems / devices), or tying multiple processes together.
Elon Musk sent a memo to Tesla employees saying that the company will lay off more than 10% of its global workforce. Tesla had 140,473 employees as of December 2023. Its shares have fallen 31% year to date. Electric vehicle sales are gaining popularity worldwide, but the company is facing more competition now than ever. It is also dealing with other challenges, such as logistical problems caused by Yemeni Houthi maritime attacks in the Red Sea and production suspension at its gigafactory near Berlin due to suspected arson at a nearby electricity substation. A copy of the memo from Musk is available at the end of the article.