Search the archive

GOOGLE CEO TELLS EMPLOYEES GEMINI AI BLUNDER ‘UNACCEPTABLE’

Google has taken Gemini's image-generation feature offline for further testing due to problematic issues related to bias.

YOUR REFERRAL LINK - https://tldr.tech/tech?ref=2613930

AFTER A DECADE OF STOPS AND STARTS, APPLE KILLS ITS ELECTRIC CAR PROJECT

Apple has reportedly ended work on its electric car project. It will shift some of the staff to work on generative AI projects while laying off others. Project Titan, which had been in development for 10 years, was originally going to be a car with a luxurious limo-like interior and robust self-driving capabilities. Its ambitions were scaled back after multiple changes in direction and leadership. The project faced high startup costs and a difficult regulatory environment, making it hard for the company to find the profit margins it hoped for.

META MIGHT DEMO A PAIR OF ‘TRUE’ AR SMART GLASSES LATER IN 2024

Meta may reveal a pair of augmented reality smart glasses at its Meta Connect event later this year. Orion will be a 'true' AR device. There is a lot of internal pressure at the company to produce a high-quality demo. Company insiders are now experimenting with advanced prototypes. The glasses likely won't be available to the public until 2027.

IT TURNS OUT THAT ODYSSEUS LANDED ON THE MOON WITHOUT ANY ALTIMETRY DATA

Intuitive Machines believes that its mission to land on the Moon was a complete success, despite Odysseus toppling over after touching down. The moon lander's range finders were discovered to be inoperable a couple of hours before it was due to attempt to land on the Moon, so the company rewrote its software to take advantage of three telescopes on a NASA payload for altimetry purposes. While the patch mostly worked, Odysseus' onboard flight computer was unable to process the data in real time - its last accurate altitude reading was more than 12 minutes before touchdown. This forced the lander to rely on optical data, resulting in it coming down much faster than planned.

VARDA’S DRUG-COOKING WINNEBAGO WILL BE REMEMBERED AS A SPACE PIONEER

Varda's Winnebago series is designed to bring pharmaceutical research specimens back to Earth for laboratory analysis and eventual commercial exploitation. The company's business plan involves producing pharmaceuticals and other goods in low-Earth orbit inside an automated laboratory for a fraction of the cost of a human space flight mission. Some goods benefit from being produced in a microgravity environment. The success of the mission may mean that the FAA will see the same increase in demand for reentry licenses that it has seen for launch licenses.

INGESTR

ingestr is a command-line tool that can copy data between databases with a single command. It can copy data from any source to any destination without any code. ingestr supports incremental loading with append, merge, or delete+insert.

THE UNWRITTEN RULES (TILL NOW) OF NEGOTIATING WITH META

Meta is hiring more engineers than any of the other FAANGs. Its centralized hiring process is completely divorced from the teams candidates might end up on. Interviews are conducted with people whom candidates might never work with again. After initial interviews, candidates will go through a team-matching phase, during which recruiters will likely down-level them. Candidates will then be made lowball offers with just a few days to make a decision. Meta will refuse to negotiate unless candidates can show other offers from comparable companies. This post shares tips on how to navigate the process and negotiate the best deal.

WENDY’S WILL EXPERIMENT WITH DYNAMIC SURGE PRICING FOR FOOD IN 2025

Wendy's will start testing dynamic pricing and AI menu features in 2025. Dynamic pricing means that prices for food items will automatically change throughout the day depending on demand. The company will invest approximately $20 million to install digital menus capable of displaying real-time variable prices across all of its company-operated locations in the US. Dynamic pricing is a common business practice for several industries, but its application in the fast-food sector is largely untested.

WONDER, MARC LORE'S $3.5 BILLION STARTUP, HAS LAUNCHED A FOOD HALL IN WALMART

Wonder has opened its 11th location inside a Walmart in Quakertown, Pennsylvania. The company plans to open two more locations inside Walmart stores in Ledgewood and Teterboro, New Jersey. Wonder is a 'fast-fine' food startup that until last year operated high-tech food trucks. The company achieved a $3.5 billion valuation after a $350 million capital raise in 2022. Its pivot away from its curbside delivery model netted a $100 million loss.

fewer, more effective meetings today. Try Fellow for free

KLARNA SAYS ITS AI ASSISTANT DOES THE WORK OF 700 PEOPLE AFTER IT LAID OFF 700 PEOPLE

Klarna has released data that demonstrates AI's ability to handle customer communications, make shoppers happier, and drive better financial results.

WHY TIME SEEMS TO PASS FASTER AS WE AGE

The brain is a prediction device that likes to pay attention to what's new and surprising - new surprises come less often as we age, so the brain notices and memorizes less as well.

HOW AND WHY WE RIPPED OUR OS PRODUCT APART FOR A FULL REBUILD

This article tells the story of Browserless' battle with tech debt and how the company completely rebuilt its product.

THE MARKET ALWAYS WINS

Either you have something people want or you don't - you can't beat the market.

CHINA BREAKTHROUGH PROMISES OPTICAL DISCS THAT STORE HUNDREDS OF TERABYTES

Researchers in China have developed an optical disc that can store up to 200 terabytes of data.

LITESTAR

Litestar is a lightweight and flexible ASGI framework for building performant APIs.

YOUR REFERRAL LINK - https://tldr.tech/tech?ref=2613930

ups that have already chosen WorkOS. Start free here.

APPLE VISION PRO’S COMPONENTS COST $1,542 — BUT THAT’S NOT THE FULL STORY

The materials for the Apple Vision Pro are estimated to cost around $1,542. Its dual displays are the most expensive component, costing $456. The external display used for EyeSight costs around $70. The M2 system-on-a-chip and the R1 processor together cost around $240. A full table of materials and their estimated costs is available in the article. The cost estimate doesn't take into account manufacturing, shipping, marketing, or research and development.

MISTRAL AI RELEASES NEW MODEL TO RIVAL GPT-4 AND ITS OWN CHAT ASSISTANT

Mistral AI has launched a new language large model called Mistral Large to rival other top-tier models like GPT-4 and Claude 2. The company is also launching a new service called Le Chat to compete with ChatGPT. Access to Mistral Large costs $8 per million input tokens and $24 per million output tokens through the company's API. The model supports a context window of 32k tokens and English, French, Spanish, German, and Italian. Le Chat is free, but it can't access the web.

PEERING THROUGH LENOVO’S TRANSPARENT LAPTOP INTO A SCI-FI FUTURE

Lenovo's ThinkBook Transparent Display Laptop is a 17.3-inch notebook with a see-through screen. Its bezel-less MicroLED display offers up to 55% transparency when its pixels are set to black or turned off. The display becomes less and less see-through as its pixels light up. Due to technical challenges, the laptop's display resolution is only 720p and it is not currently possible to manually set the whole laptop screen to be opaque. The laptop has a flat touch keyboard as its base that is also designed to work as a drawing tablet. Pictures of the device are available in the article.

THE ODYSSEUS LUNAR LANDER IS ON ITS SIDE AND WILL LIKELY RUN OUT OF ENERGY SOON

The Odysseus lander will likely stop operating today as its panels and antennas aren't oriented exactly as planned, making it difficult to generate power and communicate. The lander almost failed its landing due to issues with its range finder lasers, but a last-minute software patch allowed engineers to use one of NASA's experimental LIDAR systems to retrieve the required data to ensure its safe landing. Despite this, Odysseus landed on its side. The only cargo on the side facing down is a piece of art sent by a commercial customer.

JUSTPATH

justpath is a utility for exploring the PATH environment variable in both Windows and Linux. It can only view the PATH variable - neither justpath nor any of its child processes can modify the shell PATH directly. justpath provides a modified version of PATH that can later be used in a shell startup script or with an environment manager. It can be used to filter directory names, purge incorrect paths, create new content strings for PATH, dump PATH as JSON, and more.

R2R

R2R is a semi-opinionated framework for the rapid deployment of production-ready RAG systems. It aims to bridge the gap between experimental RAG models and production-ready systems. R2R offers a straightforward path to deploying, adapting, and maintaining RAG pipelines in production. A short demo video is available.

DECODING APPLE'S PLOY TO SCUTTLE PROGRESSIVE WEB APPS

Apple plans to stop supporting Progressive Web Apps on March 6. The EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA) mandates that Apple must allow competing browsers on its App Store. Apple's response to this is to geofence browser choice and kneecap web apps. This choice will break many apps across the EU, affecting schools, governments, startups, gamers, and more. None of this is required by the DMA, despite Apple blaming its decision on the law. By doing this, Apple is cementing a future where the mobile web will never be permitted to grow beyond marketing pages for native apps.

IN DEFENSE OF THIN WRAPPERS

Many apps find that their variable costs start skyrocketing once they get some form of traction and grow. Having to deal with these issues when growing is really hard as developers have to effectively rebuild their engines while it's running. Founders can get in front of this issue by planning ahead, having multiple choices for infrastructure, finding good advisors, developing better negotiation skills, and raising more money than needed as a buffer. This article discusses how to handle rising costs as a startup, with a particular focus on AI-based projects.

INSTAGRAM IS WORKING ON A ‘FRIEND MAP’ FEATURE THAT WOULD LET YOU TRACK FRIENDS’ LOCATIONS

The feature is currently an internal prototype that is not being tested externally.

🦑 THE 14 PAINS OF BUILDING YOUR OWN BILLING SYSTEM

Billing systems are complicated, involving finance, product, experience, customer support, customers, legal, compliance, sales, and sometimes more.

MICROSOFT INVESTS IN EUROPE’S MISTRAL AI TO EXPAND BEYOND OPENAI

Microsoft is investing in Mistral AI to unlock new commercial opportunities and expand to global markets.

SAMSUNG HAS BIG AMBITIONS FOR THE GALAXY RING

Samsung's Galaxy Ring is part of the company's vision for a future of ambient sensing, which involves data gathering from multiple sources to provide connected care around the home.

JENSEN HUANG SAYS KIDS SHOULDN'T LEARN TO CODE — THEY SHOULD LEAVE IT UP TO AI

Huang says that AI will allow programming languages to be replaced with human language prompts, thus enabling everyone to be a programmer.

GOOGLE'S NEW AI CAN GENERATE ENTIRE 2D PLATFORMER GAMES

Genie is a foundation world model trained exclusively on videos from the Internet that can create playable 2D environments from a single image prompt.

YOUR REFERRAL LINK - https://tldr.tech/tech?ref=2613930

TESLA SHARES MORE FOOTAGE OF OPTIMUS WALKING IMPROVEMENTS

Tesla's latest clip of its Optimus humanoid robot shows it smoothly walking around one of its testing facilities. The robot can currently walk at around 0.6 meters per second, a 30% speed boost compared to the robot's last appearance. Tesla is aiming for the robot to be eventually able to walk up to five miles per hour. A link to the video is available in the article.

GOOGLE SAYS MICROSOFT OFFERED TO SELL BING TO APPLE IN 2018, BUT SEARCH-QUALITY ISSUES GOT IN THE WAY

A document from Google's antitrust case against the US Justice Department revealed that Microsoft offered to sell its Bing search engine to Apple several times over the past few decades, with Apple declining the offer over quality issues every time. Microsoft's almost $100 billion investment into Bing over 20 years was not enough to create a product comparable to Google's. Google's case centers over whether the company has a monopoly in web search. Microsoft's CEO previously testified that he has focused every year of his tenure as CEO to see if Apple would be open to a default search arrangement for Bing.

FIRST PRIVATE MOON LANDER TOUCHES DOWN ON LUNAR SURFACE TO MAKE HISTORY

Odysseus landed successfully on the Moon on 22 February. Built by Intuitive Machines, Odysseus is the first private lunar lander and the first US lunar lander since 1972. It is currently around 300 kilometers from the lunar south pole, an area that may contain ice. The lander experienced a malfunction that required a software patch hours before landing. It will collect data for up to seven days until night falls at the landing site.

HOW DOES BLUESKY WORK?

BlueSky (the company) is using BlueSky (the microblogging application) to prove the viability of the Authenticated Transfer Protocol (atproto), a federated protocol for large-scale distributed social applications. atproto can't be controlled by any one organization due to its federated nature - various parts of the system that communicate with each other can have multiple people running them. This article takes a close look at how atproto works, explaining its structure, how the system is supposed to work, potential issues, and more.

Download Snyk's Buyer's Guide

FUNCTIONAL UI KIT

Functional UI Kit is a design system that focuses on accessibility, development experience, and unified designer-developer experience. It uses Figma variables and CSS variables that share the same names, usage, and inheritance structure. Each Figma variable has a direct counterpart in CSS so there's no confusion. Functional UI Kit is packed with best practices, unified prop names, and consistent design and code.

REACT STRICT DOM

React Strict DOM aims to improve and standardize the development of styled React components for web and native. It integrates React DOM and StyleX to improve the speed and efficiency of React development without compromising performance, reliability, or quality. The tool is used at Meta to ship features faster to more platforms with fewer engineers.

LESSONS FROM MY THIRD YEAR RUNNING A SAAS

This post summarizes a developer's learnings from three years of running a SaaS app. In three years, their product had grown from a toy to something people were paying for. The developer learned to stop being afraid of success and calmed down on their software releases and content marketing. They experimented with onboarding, which massively paid off, and started to understand their own product philosophy. The developer learned that, once their product became sustainable, they only had to focus on quality.

APPLE EXPLORED THESE NOTCH AND DYNAMIC ISLAND DESIGNS FOR IPHONES

Apple introduced the Dynamic Island with its iPhone 14 Pro models in 2022. The feature makes the space surrounding the front camera and Face ID sensors more useful compared to the notch in previous models. Apple explored a variety of ideas for the feature before arriving at its current design. This article looks at some of the ideas Apple considered and presents mock-ups of what they might have looked like.

PGLITE

PGlite enables developers to run Postgres in the browser, Node.js, and Bun without any other dependencies.

REDDIT WARNS THAT R/WALLSTREETBETS COULD WREAK HAVOC ON ITS STOCK PRICE

Reddit has clearly listed one of its subreddits on its S-1 form as a possible risk to investing in the company.

CAN A PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE IMPLEMENT TIME TRAVEL?

Mariposa is a toy programming language that claims to implement time travel as part of its feature set.