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FLY

WILL APPLE TAKE A BIG BITE OUT OF THE BANKS?

Apple has launched two big products with Goldman Sachs’ help over the past three weeks. Apple Pay Later allows consumers to borrow funds and Savings is a high-yield savings account that offers a 4.15% interest rate. Apple's scale makes many banks and other providers of financial services look small. The company has been vocal in its ambitions to replace the wallet. Apple typically expands into new sectors through incremental steps that give it a sustainable advantage over time.

FOR SOME DEVS

SCIENTISTS MAY HAVE FIGURED OUT HOW TO REGENERATE LOST HEARING

WATCH A ROCKET-POWERED SPACEPLANE FLY FOR THE FIRST TIME

KUASAR

Kuasar is a container run time that supports multiple sandbox techniques. It provides cloud-native, all-scenario container solutions and an optimized framework to accelerate container start up and reduce unnecessary overheads. Kuasar features unified sandbox abstraction, multi-sandbox colocation, and an open and neutral attitude towards sandbox technologies.

PROMPT ENGINEERING VS. BLIND PROMPTING

CAREER ADVICE NO ONE GAVE ME: GIVE A LOT OF NOTICE WHEN YOU QUIT

LAYOFF RUNBOOK

This runbook was designed to help those who have been laid off get on track. It covers what to do before and after losing access to work systems and how to go about searching for jobs. The guide contains links to job marketplaces and other places to look for work. It is mainly geared towards software engineers, but most of the information can be applied to any profession.

DENSITY

GAMES ARE PROBLEMS PEOPLE PAY TO SOLVE

HEIST

FOR GOOGLE SHEETS

CHIP DESIGNER ARM MAKES ITS OWN ADVANCED PROTOTYPE SEMICONDUCTOR

Arm is developing its own chips as it seeks to attract new customers and fuel growth.

MY HIGH-FLYING LIFE AS A CORPORATE SPY WHO LIED HIS WAY TO THE TOP

BARD CAN HELP YOU CODE

Google’s language model Bard, when launched, refused to answer coding questions. That has changed now. It can help you code in a huge variety of languages and does a pretty good job! There hasn’t been any official validation released, so we don’t know how it compares to other program synthesis models, but it’s always nice to have options.

MIND AND BRAIN

INTRODUCING W&B PROMPTS

THEORY OF ADAM INSTABILITY

The Meta folks have been training some big models recently. Part of the pain of that is loss spikes. This is where training diverges and usually requires manual intervention to get things back on track. This paper outlines a hypothesis for these spikes. They claim that Adam is the culprit. Maybe some of the new optimizers like Lion or Shampoo can help?

REAL-TIME VIEW SYNTHESIS

This paper presents a novel method that distills and bakes Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) into efficient mesh-based neural representations, enabling real-time rendering and compatibility with parallel graphics pipelines. The approach uses a two-layer duplex mesh, screen-space convolutions, and a multiview distillation optimization strategy, resulting in superior performance and effectiveness demonstrated through experiments on standard datasets.

MULTI-MODAL FACE GENERATION AND EDITING

VOICE CLONING

Transformers continue their march into all modalities, this time taking on audio with a cool voice cloning tool. There are some limitations, but with just a few seconds of audio, you can get a pretty great representation of your voice.

LLAMA ACADEMY

It seems like everywhere you look people are building retrieval augmentation into language models. Here is another tool to do that, using the almost-open sourced Llama models. This one has a nice recipe you can follow to teach the model about novel APIs and SDKs.

IS AI-GENERATED MUSIC LEGAL?

PROMPT ENGINEERING VS BLIND PROMPTING

CHATGPT IS VERY EXPENSIVE TO MAINTAIN

ROBOTS AND AI INCREASES PACE OF RESEARCH 100X

AN AI DEVICE THAT PROJECTS PHONE CALLS ONTO YOUR HAND

SPEECHGPT

SpeechGPT is a web application that enables you to converse with ChatGPT.

ELECTIONS

US presidential hopefuls, including Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy, have expressed their opposition to a central bank-backed digital US dollar (CBDC). While CBDCs are still a ways away in the US, the issue has become a point of contention among politicians. Critics, such as Wall Street banks and digital-asset companies, argue that a digital dollar could destabilize the banking sector and compromise privacy. Proponents contend that CBDCs could improve payments, maintain the dollar's global dominance, and protect consumer privacy if implemented correctly.

DECENTRALIZED ECONOMY

GEMINI FOUNDATION — A NON-US CRYPTO DERIVATIVES PLATFORM

TELEGRAM WALLET USERS CAN NOW BUY, WITHDRAW AND EXCHANGE BITCOIN

7 SANITY CHECKS BEFORE DESIGNING A TOKEN

ADDRESS

ON COLLECTING A PIECE OF ART

DATA SHOWS

ON COLLECTIBLES FROM A HISTORICAL POV

THE CRYPTO DETECTIVES ARE CLEANING UP

Cryptocurrency detective firm Chainalysis helps governments crack down on crypto fraud. Firms like this have honed their techniques as regulatory scrutiny has ramped up in the space, and they have been able to successfully identify individuals at the center of numerous frauds.

MOST DEFI PROTOCOLS FADE AFTER THEY’RE HACKED, ANALYSIS SHOWS

SOCIAL MEDIA IS DEAD. HERE'S WHY.

GOOGLE BARD NOW HELPS YOU CODE

Google’s Bard now has the ability to help people with programming and software development tasks, including code generation, code debugging, and explanation.

HIGHLIGHT

ALRIGHT REACT APP

Alright React App is a professional React app generator. It comes with an exposed, unopinionated, high performance configuration, supporting Jest, SWC, Storybook, Typescript 5, Webpack 5.

CAREER ADVICE NO ONE GAVE ME: GIVE A LOT OF NOTICE WHEN YOU QUIT

This blog post suggests giving a lot of notice when you quit, given you are a crucial part of the team and have performed well in your role. The author presents various upsides and positives to giving more than the two week notice when you quit.

UBER’S ENGINEERING LEVEL CHANGES

This article recaps the changes made in Uber's engineering levels, which initially happened in March 2022. Titles and expectations were updated. The author also goes over how these level changes affect Uber alumni.

TYPESCRIPT DECORATORS: A COMPLETE GUIDE