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IOS 18 MAY FEATURE ALL-NEW 'SAFARI BROWSING ASSISTANT'

iOS 18 will apparently feature a new Safari browsing assistant. While the code for the feature has been confirmed to exist, not many details about it are known. Apple is also apparently working on an 'Encrypted Visual Search' feature. iOS is set to be unveiled during Apple's WWDC keynote on June 10.

GOOGLE BRINGS AI-POWERED EDITING TOOLS, LIKE MAGIC EDITOR, TO ALL GOOGLE PHOTOS USERS FOR FREE

Google has made a handful of editing features previously exclusive to Pixel devices and paid subscribers free to all Google Photos users. The features include the AI-powered Magic Editor, Magic Eraser, Photo Unblur, and Portrait Light. They will only work on devices running Android 8.0 or iOS 15 or higher and on Chromebook Plus devices with at least 3GB RAM and ChromeOS version 118+. The tools will start rolling out on May 15 - it may take weeks for them to make it to all users.

ASTRANIS UNVEILS OMEGA ‘MICROGEO’ SATELLITES FOR BEAMING DEDICATED BROADBAND DOWN FROM HIGH ORBIT

Astranis, a company that builds and operates relatively small broadband satellites in high orbits, has unveiled a new generation of communications satellites that will serve broadband to Earth from geostationary orbit faster than any existing comsat. The new class of satellites, called Omega, can provide 50 gigabits per second of bandwidth each in both civilian and military bands. Astranis' relatively smaller satellites make them harder to target, making the infrastructure more resilient to attacks. The company plans to complete its first Omega satellite in 2025 and launch as many as 24 per year to orbit starting in 2026.

HOPES RISE FOR MRNA CANCER VACCINE AFTER MODERNA TRIAL SHOWS PROMISE

Moderna's mRNA cancer vaccine, developed to target melanoma, might also treat a form of head and neck cancer. Data from an early trial showed a greater survival rate for patients who took Moderna's cancer vaccine alongside immunotherapy treatments. The news sent Moderna's share price soaring.

SHELL HISTORY IS YOUR BEST PRODUCTIVITY TOOL

Shell history can be a personal knowledge vault, documentation, and command reference. This personal documentation can provide huge boosts to productivity. This article provides tips on how to optimize shell history configuration and usage to get the most out of it. The tips in the article focus on ZSH, but similar results can be achieved in Bash and other shells.

CLIENT LIBRARIES ARE BETTER WHEN THEY HAVE NO API

GEMINI 1.5 AND GOOGLE’S NATURE

Google claims to have the best infrastructure for AI. Its deep investments into AI have helped customers train and serve cutting-edge language models and put the company at the forefront of the AI platform shift. This article looks at how Google's infrastructure helps companies transform their operations and what that says about Google's ability to compete. Google may have to shift to a different business model, but its reliance on scale and overwhelming infrastructure advantage won't change - because it's the company's nature.

ALTERNATIVE BROWSERS REPORT UPLIFT AFTER EU’S DMA CHOICE SCREEN MANDATE

A month since the Digital Markets Act came into application, there are early signs that it is having an impact in stirring the competitive pot and helping smaller browser makers gain share. The new rules require internet gatekeepers to display browser choice screens that point users to alternatives. It is still early days, but several browser companies have shared positive stories of increased interest. Many regional mobile users have yet to see a choice screen appear on their devices as changes are still rolling out.

NVIDIA EMPLOYEES ARE GETTING RICHER WITH A 'SPECIAL JENSEN GRANT' THAT BOOSTS THEIR STOCK AWARDS BY 25%

The Jensen special grant will vest over four years, with the first portion coming in September.

AVI WIGDERSON, COMPLEXITY THEORY PIONEER, WINS TURING AWARD

Wigderson was named the winner of the A.M. Turing Award for his foundational contributions to the theory of computation, which has touched nearly every area of the field.

META’S NEW AI CHIPS RUN FASTER THAN BEFORE

The Meta Training and Inference Accelerator chip, which makes training more efficient and inference easier, was not expected to be released until 2025, but a second version of the chip is already in production.

THE $10,000 BYD SEAGULL EV IS SCARING THE U.S. AUTO INDUSTRY

While BYD isn't planning to enter the US, its entry into North America is considered an eventuality, and other Chinese automakers likely won't be far behind.

HOW DEEP DOES LIFE GO?

Microbial life could exist beneath Earth's surface in extreme environments long thought to be inhospitable.

THE RISE AND IMPENDING FALL OF THE DENTAL CAVITY

A new treatment for cavities will soon be available for home delivery in the US for the price of a single dental filling - it could eliminate the bacteria that causes dental cavities in humans completely.

WITH VIDS, GOOGLE THINKS IT HAS THE NEXT BIG PRODUCTIVITY TOOL FOR WORK

Google's new Vids app can create collaborative shareable videos for things people do at work. The app makes making videos as easy as making slides - no video production is required. Users line up assets inside the app and edit it all into a finished video. They can choose to do all of this themselves or ask Google's Gemini AI to build storyboards, write scripts, read the scripts aloud using text-to-speech, and create images to use in the video. People with access to the video can add comments, leave notes, and make edits. Vids will launch in public beta this summer.

INTEL’S GAUDI 3 GOES AFTER NVIDIA

Intel gave the first architectural details of its Gaudi 3 third-generation AI processor at Vision 2024 this week in Phoenix, Arizona. Gaudi 3 is made up of two identical silicon dies, each with a central region of 48 megabytes of cache memory, joined by a high-bandwidth connection, surrounded by four engines for matrix multiplication and 32 programmable units called tensor processor cores. It produces double the AI compute of Gaudi 2 using 8-bit floating-point infrastructure. It also provides a fourfold boost for computations using the BFloat 16 number format.

META CONFIRMS THAT ITS LLAMA 3 OPEN SOURCE LLM IS COMING IN THE NEXT MONTH

Meta plans to release an initial version of its next-generation Llama 3 large language model within the next month. The company will release a number of different models with different capabilities and versatilities during the course of the year. Llama 3 will be able to answer a wider range of questions compared to its predecessor, including questions regarding more controversial topics. Meta has not released any details about the model's size, but it is expected to have about 140 billion parameters - the biggest Llama 2 model has 70 billion.

GABE NEWELL'S NEURAL INTERFACE COMPANY UPDATED ITS WEBSITE

Starfish, a neural interface company co-founded by Gabe Newell, recently updated its website, indicating that its team is working hard on its brain-computer solutions. The company is developing minimally invasive one-dimensional implants for neuromodulation and neural recording. Newell's interest in the field goes back to at least 2021, when he brought up the idea of using brain-computer interfaces for gaming. Valve has previously worked to create open source software to allow developers to understand signals coming from people's brains.

GOOGLE LAUNCHES CODE ASSIST, ITS LATEST CHALLENGER TO GITHUB’S COPILOT

Google's Gemini Code Assist is an enterprise-focused AI code completion and assistance tool. It was previously offered under the now-defunct Duet AI branding which became generally available in late 2023. Code Assist is both a rebrand and a major update. It uses Gemini 1.5 Pro, which has a million-token context window. Code Assist will be available through plug-ins for popular editors like VS Code.

CHRONON

Chronon is a platform that allows organizations to power AI/ML projects without needing to worry about orchestration by abstracting away the complexity of data computation and serving for AI/ML applications. It can perform batch and streaming computation, scalable backfills, low-latency serving, and more. Chronon can utilize all of the data within an organization.

BEEPER WAS JUST ACQUIRED BY AUTOMATTIC, WHICH HAS BIG PLANS FOR THE FUTURE OF MESSAGING

Beeper, the company that attempted to launch an app that let Android users use iMessage a few months ago, has been acquired by Automattic, the giant that owns WordPress. As part of the deal, Beeper is opening up its messaging app, which attempts to corral all messaging services into one inbox, to everyone across platforms, and shutting down its waitlist for good. Automattic's CEO says that messaging will be the next big pillar of the company. Its team intends to replace a lot of messaging methods with an open-source system.

APPLE PLANNING TO OPEN LARGE OFFICE IN MIAMI

Apple is leasing an office building in the Miami area. The 45,000 square feet of space, located at The Plaza Coral Gables, is still under construction. Apple is also planning to open a new retail store at the Miami Worldcenter in the heart of the city. Multiple tech companies have expanded to South Florida, including Amazon and Microsoft.

GOOGLE’S NEW ARM-BASED CPU WILL CHALLENGE MICROSOFT AND AMAZON IN THE AI RACE

Google's new Arm-based CPU, Axion, will be used to support Google's AI workloads before it rolls out to Google Cloud business customers later this year.

BUILDING RELIABLE SYSTEMS OUT OF UNRELIABLE AGENTS

It's possible to build reliable systems out of AI models by writing simple prompts, building an eval system to do prompt engineering and improve performance in a principled way, deploying AI systems with good observability, investing in Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), and fine-tuning models using data gathered from the process.

OPENAI MAKES GPT-4 TURBO WITH VISION AVAILABLE TO DEVELOPERS TO UNLOCK NEW AI APPS

GPT-4 Turbo with Vision allows developers to call on a single model for both text and image processing.

LIFEHACKS

This post contains a list of 130 tips and mindsets for living a better life.

THE THREAT TO OPEN SOURCE COMES FROM WITHIN

The fragile balance of open source will be disrupted if the community comes to believe that maintaining that balance is more trouble than it's worth.

MICROSOFT IS CONFIDENT WINDOWS ON ARM COULD FINALLY BEAT APPLE

Microsoft will unveil its vision for AI PCs at an event in Seattle on May 20. The company is confident that its new Arm-powered Windows laptops will beat Apple's M3-powered MacBook Air in both CPU performance and AI-accelerated tasks. The laptops will feature Snapdragon X Elite processors from Qualcomm. Microsoft is planning to ship consumer models of its Surface Pro 10 and Surface Laptop 6 with Snapdragon X Elite processors instead of the Intel Core Ultra processors that the business-focused versions have.

GOOGLE LAUNCHES ANDROID FIND MY DEVICE NETWORK

Google has launched the Find My Device network for Android-based products. The Android Find My Device network can use the millions of existing Android devices to track down lost, stolen, and missing Android products. The network uses Bluetooth and works even when Android devices are offline and do not have a cellular or Wi-Fi connection. The network will also work with third-party Bluetooth trackers starting in May.

ELON MUSK JUST GAVE ANOTHER MARS SPEECH — THIS TIME THE VISION SEEMS TANGIBLE

Elon Musk gave a 45-minute speech at SpaceX's Starbase facility in South Texas last weekend about making life multiplanetary, the booster for Starship, the upper stage, and SpaceX's plans to ultimately deliver millions of tons of cargo to Mars for a self-sustaining civilization. SpaceX has now completed 327 successful launches, with 80% of those involving used boosters. This performance has given Musk confidence that reusability can be achieved with the Super Heavy booster that powers Starship. While SpaceX's goals seem audacious, the company has proven that rocket reusability is a very viable thing, so its other goals appear a lot more achievable.

A SECRET CLIMATE EXPERIMENT IN ALAMEDA

A group of scientists launched a stream of microscopic salt particles off the deck of a decommissioned aircraft carrier last Tuesday in Alameda, California, as part of an experiment to limit global warming by increasing cloud cover to reflect sunlight away from Earth. Very few people knew about the project beforehand as geoengineering projects are controversial and the team was concerned that critics would try to stop them. The experiment will run through the end of May, and visitors are able to view the experiment.

META’S X COMPETITOR THREADS INVITES DEVELOPERS TO SIGN UP FOR API ACCESS, PUBLISHES DOCS

Meta's Threads has introduced developer documentation and a sign-up sheet for interested parties ahead of its API's public launch planned for June. The documentation details the API's current limitations and endpoints. Developers can use the API to track analytics and publish posts and media, among other things. Threads accounts are limited to 250 API-published posts and 1,000 replies every 24 hours, with a text post limit of 500 characters.

OPEN PARSE

Open Parse lets users easily chunk complex documents the same way a human would. It provides a flexible library capable of visually discerning document layouts and chunking them effectively. Open Parse supports Markdown and tables. It is extensible, intuitive, and easy to use and learn. Sample notebooks are available.

HOW CAN I ACCELERATE MY PERSONAL GROWTH?

Growing quickly requires a job that surrounds you with people who are smarter than you and gives you opportunities to fail, with a company that has a history of giving massive responsibility to people similar to you. Choose companies that are selective with hiring and target positions where success is not guaranteed. Look for people in the company who have similar profiles as you and see if they have been given outsized responsibility in the company to see if you have a chance to get promoted quickly. These selection criteria are heavily weighted towards startups.

NOTES ON HOW TO USE LLMS IN YOUR PRODUCT

It's easy to make an argument that large language models can improve internal efficiency in companies somehow. It's much harder to describe a believable way for them to make products more useful to customers. This article discusses ways to meaningfully integrate large language models into existing products. It covers how to think about the technology, revamping workflows, different ways to implement models, and more. The article also covers potential issues such as copyright law, data processing agreements, and provider availability.

TIKTOK’S INSTAGRAM COMPETITOR LIKELY TO BE NAMED TIKTOK NOTES

TikTok has been working to launch a photo-sharing app.

LLM.C

llm.c trains large language models in C/CUDA.

INTERVIEWING MY MOTHER, A MAINFRAME COBOL PROGRAMMER

Some banks would go under in a matter of weeks if their COBOL programmers were to quit.

XBOX PRESIDENT SARAH BOND HAS SET UP A NEW TEAM DEDICATED TO GAME PRESERVATION AND FORWARD COMPATIBILITY

The new team will ensure that Microsoft's games remain accessible long into the future.

WHAT IT’S LIKE TO RUN HTMX IN PRODUCTION - STORIES FROM EXPERIENCED SOFTWARE ENGINEERS

HTMX provides most of the capabilities of a Single-Page Application with the simplicity of a Multi-Page Application.

BIG TECH PASSKEY IMPLEMENTATIONS ARE A TRAP

Big Tech is using passkey technology to lock people into walled gardens rather than to provide a secure solution to everyone.

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