Tesla is planning to unveil its next-generation self-driving robotaxi vehicle on August 8. The announcement appears to be an acceleration of the robotaxi program, which aims to design a vehicle optimized from the ground up for driverless ridesharing. Some Tesla owners are concerned with the project as it could result in Tesla focusing on achieving self-driving on new hardware rather than on its existing vehicle fleet as promised and sold to customers for years. A picture of an early design prototype is available in the article.
The fourth SpaceX Starship/Super Heavy launch may be in the next month or so. Its goal will be to get Starship's upper stage to get through the high heating regime of reentry and make a controlled splat into the ocean. SpaceX aims to bring the Super Heavy booster back intact, having it land on a virtual tower in the Gulf of Mexico. It could attempt to land a Starship booster on the real tower as soon as the vehicle's fifth flight. The company is working to accelerate production of Starship vehicles to support higher flight rates and increase payload capacity.
Coral reefs are degrading at an unprecedented rate due to pollution, overfishing, and destructive forestry and mining practices on land. Most corals could go extinct within a few generations. The Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute's Reef Recovery Initiative aims to help save coral reefs using cryopreservation, a novel approach that involves storing and cooling coral sperm and larvae at very low temperatures and holding them in government biorepositories. The frozen assets can be used to help reseed the oceans and restore living reefs even 100 years from now. Cryopreserved sperm has already been used to produce new coral across the Caribbean.
Hermeus, a company that is attempting to build hypersonic aircraft with jet engines that would allow them to take off from runways like traditional planes, has unveiled a flying prototype to demonstrate high-speed takeoff and landing. The Mk 1 is an uncrewed, remotely piloted plane that will allow Hermeus to conduct a comprehensive evaluation of the aircraft's performance and examine the effectiveness of the company's test procedures, safety culture, and interdisciplinary team collaboration. The company's next prototype is expected to demonstrate supersonic flight in 2025. A video featuring the Mk 1 is available in the article.
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pgmock is an in-memory mock PostgreSQL server for unit and E2E tests. It runs entirely within WebAssembly without external dependencies on both Node.js and the browser. A link to a web demo is available at the top of the repository.
This article tells the story of how and why Stack Overflow was created and discusses whether the site will have a place in engineering culture over the next decade. Before Stack Overflow, there was Experts Exchange, one of the first question-and-answer sites on the internet, coming into existence in 1996. Experts Exchange was free for over a decade, but it moved to a subscription-based model in 2004. This paywall created the perfect moment for a new site to counter-position itself, so the creators of Stack Overflow decided to create a more user-friendly version of Experts Exchange. Stack Overflow launched in 2008, the same year as GitHub, Apple's App Store, and Airbnb. The future existence of Stack Overflow will depend entirely on how well it can adapt to AI.
OpenAI solved its data supply problem in late 2021 by developing a speech recognition tool called Whisper to transcribe audio from YouTube videos, yielding new text to train its AI systems. Its team ultimately transcribed more than one million hours of video to train GPT-4. Google and Meta have also similarly cut corners in the race to lead AI, obtaining data in legally and ethically dubious ways. This article discusses the various methods companies have used to obtain data - or have considered using to obtain data - for AI training purposes.
Developers are sometimes assigned tasks that make no sense. This Hacker News thread contains many examples of this phenomenon. Some of these examples include implementing fixes for a deprecated tool, making an internal tool suck more so people would stop using it, projects that never launched for various reasons, and a company morale meter.
Opera's Opera One Developer browser can now run 150 different large language models from 50 different large language model families without requiring an internet connection except to download the models.
The entirety of modern computing infrastructure is built on top of thousands of projects that are built, maintained, and run entirely by one person or by extremely small teams that are more often than not unpaid volunteers.
Alphabet is in talks with advisors as it considers making an offer for marketing software company HubSpot. It has yet to determine how much it should offer. It is unclear whether antitrust officials will greenlight the deal. No official offer has yet been submitted.
Tesla is raising its compensation for artificial intelligence engineers to ward off poaching from other companies. Elon Musk says that the competition for AI engineers is the craziest talent war he has ever seen. Tech companies are offering million-dollar-a-year compensation packages and accelerated stock-vesting schedules. Layoffs are continuing in other areas of tech.
Smartwatches weren't even mainstream yet when Facebook bought Oculus 10 years ago. VR is still not massively adopted in 2024, but it has gone mainstream several times. This article contains an overview of where Meta is heading next with the Quest 3, AI, smart glasses, and AR glasses. Meta is bringing its own generative AI features to its Ray-Ban smart glasses later this month. The glasses will use their onboard cameras to recognize things in the real world.
Scientists were recently able to use a tabletop laser to bump an atomic nucleus into a higher energy state, a feat that paves the path towards creating the first nuclear clock. Nuclear clocks keep time based on the inner workings of atomic nuclei. They could be more simple and portable than atomic clocks. They could also be used to test fundamental physics theories in new ways. Nuclear clocks are based on different physics than atomic clocks, so comparing the two types of timepieces could allow for new studies of fundamental physics.
dotLottie-rs is a Rust implementation of the dotLottie player and its related tools. It utilizes uniffi-rs to generate FFI bindings for Kotlin, Swift, and WebAssembly (WASM) for use in native dotLottie players. dotLottie-rs builds on the Lottie format, adding new improvements and features like theming support, multi-animation support, built-in interactivity powered by state machines, reduced animation file sizes, and more. It brings consistency of playback and dotLottie features across all platforms.
Signals for Tailwind CSS is a plugin that utilizes style queries via container queries to reactively enable custom states that can be consumed by descendants in the DOM. It reduces development effort and the need to compose a chain of variants. Signals for Tailwind CSS is useful for simplifying the application of styles based on ancestor states, improving developer experience with a more declarative API, and reducing the need for complex selector chaining and arbitrary targeting. Browser support for style queries is still limited, so Signals for Tailwind CSS may not be suitable for projects that require broad compatibility.
Credit cards earn money in multiple different ways. One important method is interchange, a fee paid by card-accepting businesses. The fee is split between various parties in the credit card ecosystem for marketing. Credit card issuers offer rewards cards so customers use their rails and then compete with each other for 'share of wallet' by bidding with interchange. Not every card is a reward card due to different card applications and features, regulations, collusion, and other reasons. This article explains how credit card rewards programs work and the systems that work together that make them profitable.
Most of the best and cleverest 404-error pages have been lost to time. This Hacker News thread looks at the current best 404 pages and classic error pages that still survive today. Some examples of sites that have noteworthy 404-error pages include the Financial Times, The Sisters of Mercy, Adult Swim, and Reddit.
Apple is reportedly exploring various personal robotics projects in an effort to create its next big thing. These include a mobile robot that follows people around their homes and a tabletop device that uses robotics to move a display around. The projects are said to be in the very early stages of research and it is unclear if any of them will ever be released. Apple apparently considered developing robots that can handle chores but decided against it for now due to extraordinarily difficult engineering challenges.
OpenAI's DALL-E now offers image editing tools both on the web and on mobile. There are preset style suggestions to help inspire image creation. The image generation platform has been integrated with ChatGPT - users can now edit DALL-E images in ChatGPT across web, iOS, and Android. Videos from OpenAI showing off the new features are available in the article.
The European Space Agency (ESA) plans to use two separate spacecraft to create its own solar eclipse to study the Sun's corona. The spacecraft will fly 150 meters apart, aligned so that one satellite blocks out all but of corona from the other satellite. They will have to fly in precise formation down to millimeter accuracy. Studying the Sun's corona will reveal details about its role in our solar system's weather. The ESA hopes to launch the mission in September.
A new experimental treatment developed by biotechnology firm LyGenesis may lead to patients growing an additional miniature liver. The approach involves injecting healthy liver cells into a lymph node in the upper abdomen of a patient with liver failure. The cells multiply and take over the lymph node to form a structure that can perform a liver's blood-filtering duties. The first person who received the treatment (on March 25) is recovering well, but they will need to be closely monitored for a while to see if the treatment is both safe and effective. The treatment has worked so far in mice, dogs, and pigs.
Googling 'File System API' will bring up a lot of similarly named APIs. This can get confusing as there are multiple standards and names, but there are actually fewer than it seems at first and many build on each other, adding layers of functionality. This article gives a tour of the different file system APIs. Interacting with file systems is complex - the different APIs handle different actions and security concerns.
Observability costs are on top of mind for many organizations. This post covers a brief history of modern observability, how the industry arrived at its current observability cost crisis, and a new way of thinking about observability costs and pricing models. Over the past few decades, infrastructure-as-a-service providers and open source have made it easy to produce voluminous amounts of telemetry, while little regard has been given to the cost or storage of the telemetry output, causing a cost crisis in observability tooling. One solution may be to not send any observability data by default.
There is currently only one third-party iOS app store live in Europe. Other app stores have been announced and some are in the review process. One reason for the lack of alternative app stores is due to Apple's Core Technology Fee, which requires developers to pay Apple 50 euro cents for every annual app install over one million, with third-party app store developers paying the fee for every first annual install of their app marketplace. Apple has also made installing third-party marketplaces a hassle, requiring around a dozen screen interactions to install each store.
One topic in the startup world is extremely opaque: founders' salaries. This causes founders to make all kinds of mistakes, like paying themselves too early, too late, too little, or too much. Founders don't get rich with their salaries: most of the money comes from IPOs, secondaries, and acquisitions. Being a founder means having to learn to deal with financial uncertainty.
Jpegli is an advanced JPEG coding library that maintains high backward compatibility, enhanced capabilities, and a 35% compression ratio improvement at high quality compression settings.
The generative AI industry looks like it is facing many issues, but there is still a lot of hype, many people have found a use case for the technology and are using it, and research continues to push the field further at a fast pace.
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The Apple Vision Pro's new Spatial Personas feature creates floating animated portraits in users' session spaces, using AI to sync the avatar to match users' head, mouth, and hand movements. It uses real-time movement tracking to create a more personal sensation of the other user being in the room. 2D tiles are still the default. The feature works with up to five users on a FaceTime call. Spatial Personas is still in beta.