Search the archive

[5], resource allocation visibility [5], and workflow automation

to set and meet improvement goals that are backed by data.

Get the free guide from LinearB

WHATSAPP IS WORKING ON SECURE CROSS-APP MESSAGING TO CONNECT USERS ACROSS PLATFORMS

WhatsApp has been working on an initiative for two years that will allow its users to send messages across different messaging applications using end-to-end encrypted methods. The initial phase of the interoperability rollout will enable basic functionalities such as text, image, voice message, video, and file sharing between individuals. Advanced features such as calls and group chats are expected to be introduced later. The feature will be opt-in. Third-party apps will have to encrypt their messages using Signal's encryption protocol and meet specific technical standards.

ADAM NEUMANN IS TRYING TO BUY BACK WEWORK

WeWork co-founder Adam Neumann, who stepped down in 2019, is attempting to buy the company out of bankruptcy. WeWork was once valued at $47 billion. It filed for bankruptcy last November, listing debts of over $18.6 billion at the time of filing. Neumann's current venture, Flow, is a residential real estate outfit focused on rentals. Flow received a $350 million investment from a16z in August 2022.

BLUESKY IS READY TO OPEN UP

Bluesky is removing its invite system and opening its doors to anyone who wants to sign up. It will start letting outside developers host their own servers on its underlying AT Protocol later this month. Bluesky users will be able to opt into experiences that aren't run by Bluesky and bring their profiles with them to rival apps on the network. The company plans to make money by charging users for additional features in its app, taking a cut of purchases for things like custom feeds (which developers will be able to charge for), and through a service that will help others manage servers on the AT Protocol.

IT'S CONFIRMED! LASER FUSION EXPERIMENT HIT A CRITICAL MILESTONE IN POWER GENERATION

A series of papers detailing the US National Ignition Facility's 2022 achievement of a break-even fusion reaction have passed peer review. In the breakthrough experiment of December 2022, lasers fired 2.05 megajoules of energy into a fuel source, which resulted in 3.15 MJ being released. Researchers have fired more energetic lasers and produced even more energy in several experiments since. Links to the five peer-reviewed papers are available at the end of the article.

MOJO CSS

Mojo CSS is a framework for crafting UIs without shipping any CSS. It features multiple color themes, a small package size, compatibility with a wide range of technologies, and more. Developers can use Mojo CSS to build custom design systems. A short introduction video is available.

THE FASTEST-GROWING COUNTRIES FOR SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT, ACCORDING TO GITHUB

GitHub releases data on developer contributions quarterly as part of its Innovation Graph project. The most recent batch of data, released on January 18, shows a jump in the number of developers from Bangladesh, Nigeria, and Pakistan. The data only measures registered accounts rather than code commits, so it's heavily skewed to less active contributors.

THE APPLE VISION PRO

visionOS suffers from several UI shortcomings. It is difficult to manage multiple windows on the screen and its eye tracking is not nearly as precise as it needs to be for productive window management. The Vision Pro's field of view is very narrow, making it difficult to have more than two or so apps open without encountering z-axis issues. These problems result in the device not being a great productivity tool - better hardware may not change this reality.

GFIBER LOOKING FOR EXTERNAL INVESTMENT TO EXPAND TO MORE CITIES

GFiber (formerly Google Fiber) is planning to raise external capital to expand. The company is currently entirely funded by Alphabet and customer revenue. GFiber is aiming to be independent from Alphabet, similarly to how Waymo and Verily have done over the years. External capital will enable GFiber to scale its technical leadership, expand its reach, and provide better internet access to more communities. The internet service provider is operating or has announced availability in 18 US states.

BUILDKIT IN DEPTH: DOCKER'S BUILD ENGINE EXPLAINED

BuildKit takes configuration files and converts them into built artifacts using parallelizing build steps whenever possible.

MIDJOURNEY HIRES EX-APPLE VISION PRO ENGINEER FOR HARDWARE PUSH

Ahmad Abbas, who was previously a hardware engineer manager on Apple’s Vision Pro team, is now Midjourney's head of hardware.

TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING: THE TRADE-OFF WE MAKE WITH TESTS

The cost of writing tests should be lower than the cost of bugs.

AMAZON CUTS HUNDREDS OF JOBS IN PHARMACY, ONE MEDICAL UNITS: READ THE MEMO

Amazon bought PillPack in 2018 as an entry point into the online pharmacy market and acquired One Medical in 2022 for roughly $3.9 billion.

ON SPATIAL COMPUTING, METAVERSE, THE TERMS LEFT BEHIND AND IDEAS RENEWED

While the Metaverse is usually referred to as something we may one day reach, spatial computing has been here since Snow Crash was published.

WHY WE CAN'T HAVE NICE SOFTWARE

Software offers humans a chance to create something magical, but this opportunity is squandered in a doomed quest for endless growth.

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

GOOGLE WILL NO LONGER BACK UP THE INTERNET: CACHED WEBPAGES ARE DEAD

Google is killing off its cached links feature. The company says that the feature was designed as an alternative way to load websites when people couldn't depend on a page loading, but technology has improved to the point Google feels it can retire it. While users can currently still create cache links manually, all of Google's support pages about cached sites have been taken down. Deleting cache data will free up an uncountable number of petabytes of data for Google, which is currently in an era of cost savings.

THE FIRST REDDIT REVIEWS OF THE VISION PRO ARE IN

OBESITY DRUGS HAVE ANOTHER SUPERPOWER: TAMING INFLAMMATION

The drugs classified as GLP-1 receptor agonists have been shown to reduce inflammation in the liver, kidneys, heart, and brain. These drugs include semaglutide and tirzepatide, which are marketed as treatments for diabetes and obesity. This effect is leading scientists to hope that they could be used to treat Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases, which both involve brain inflammation. More than 20 clinical trials are now exploring the drugs as therapies for the two conditions.

ANTI-AGING PILL FOR SENIOR DOGS IS NOW IN CLINICAL TRIALS

Biotech company Loyal has launched a study that will test a daily anti-aging pill in senior dogs. The pill is designed to help dogs live and stay healthy longer. Dogs must weigh at least 14 pounds, be at least 10 years old, and live near one of 55 participating vet clinics to enroll in the study. Loyal plans to enroll 1,000 senior dogs in the study, which has already begun. A link for dog owners to sign their pets up for the study is available in the article.

Download the cheatsheet from Datadog

INTRODUCING PKL, A PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE FOR CONFIGURATION

Pkl is a programming language for producing configurations that are declarative and simple to read and write. It features capabilities borrowed from general-purpose languages like classes, functions, conditionals, and loops. Pkl can build abstraction layers to meet many different types of configuration needs. It can produce static configuration files in any format or be embedded as a library into another application runtime. Pkl code can be shared by creating packages and publishing them.

THE PAIN POINTS OF BUILDING A COPILOT

Companies everywhere are launching copilots, AI assistants that leverage large language models to assist with tasks. This article looks at the process of building these products, the pain points, and the opportunities for AI tools. The information was gathered from semi-structured interviews with developers from a variety of companies that are working on copilots. It is still very early in the field of product copilots and it will be interesting to see how software engineering will evolve over the next several years.

REMAKING THE APP STORE

The iPhone proposed a new kind of tradeoff for the software industry - it put security, privacy, and reliability over the freedom to change anything and do anything. While this tradeoff is right for almost everyone, Apple uses its control for selfish reasons that are not about security, privacy, or reliability at all. The DMA appears to be trying to stop gatekeepers from abusing their control over competitors while also requiring them to control all sorts of other policy objectives. Apple's response to the DMA suggests that nothing much will change.

WHEN SHOULD YOU GIVE UP ON A PROJECT THAT DOESN'T WORK?

If you have an idea, you should test your hypothesis as soon as possible. Being afraid that your hypothesis may be wrong can lead you to spend time working on something that won't pay off. Early testing can validate an idea - you will know straight away if something is worth building. Procrastination can sometimes be a sign that you subconsciously know a project isn't going to work out the way you thought it would.

3-day money-back guarantee* Join 1 million travelers

GENERATING CODE WAS NEVER THE HARD PART

The truly hard parts of being a software engineer largely happen before code generation - things like requirements clarification, negotiation, technical design, and tradeoff analysis.

DEP TREE

Dep Tree is a tool that helps developers keep code bases clean and decoupled by creating a 3D force-directed graph that visualizes the entropy of a code base.

DECIDING WHETHER AN INVESTMENT IS WORTHWHILE

Most investments won't work out - you don't want to spend the next five years doing the wrong thing.

AMAZON’S NEW AWS CHARGE FOR USING IPV4 IS EXPECTED TO RAKE IN UP TO $1B PER YEAR — CHANGE SHOULD SPEED IPV6 ADOPTION

Amazon now charges $0.005 per IPv4 address per hour for all public IPv4 addresses.

DAUNTING PAPERS/BOOKS AND HOW TO FINALLY READ THEM

This mathoverflow thread discusses how people successfully overcame whatever was stopping them from extracting the information they were interested in and how long it took.

THE UNDERCOVER GENERALIST

This post discusses an independent contractor's struggles with being a generalist software engineer yet having to market themselves as a specialist.

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

ELON MUSK SAYS TESLA WILL HOLD A SHAREHOLDER VOTE TO INCORPORATE IN TEXAS AFTER DELAWARE PAY SNUB

Tesla is holding a shareholder vote on whether the company should transfer its state of incorporation to Texas. The company is currently incorporated in Delaware. The vote comes after a Delaware judge voided Elon Musk's $56 billion pay package granted in 2018. A decision to reincorporate could be challenged by shareholders as a breach of fiduciary duty according to Delaware law as it could be seen as a choice made for selfish reasons.

THE ARC BROWSER IS GETTING BETTER BOOKMARKS AND SEARCH RESULTS, ALL THANKS TO AI

The Browser Company has made some big AI-powered changes to its Arc desktop browser. The new features turn search queries into bookmarks and keep users up to date on things they care about. The Browser Company aims to make some of the many-step processes of using the internet simpler, faster, more intuitive, and more useful. A video explaining Arc's new features is available in the article.

FOR THE FIRST TIME NASA HAS ASKED INDUSTRY ABOUT PRIVATE MISSIONS TO MARS

NASA is taking its first steps towards opening a commercial pathway to Mars. Jet Propulsion Laboratory has issued a new solicitation titled 'Exploring Mars Together: Commercial Services Studies'. The request asks for proposals from the US space industry on how they would complete one of four private missions to Mars. The missions include delivering small satellites to orbit and providing imaging services around the red planet. NASA plans to award multiple contracts of $200,000 for one study or up to $300,000 for a maximum of two studies. Details about the studies are available in the article.

NEW TYPE OF CHERRY TOMATO SELF-DRIES WHILE STILL ON THE VINE

Supree, a food tech company, has created tomatoes with microscopic cracks in their skin that allow moisture to naturally evaporate from within them, resulting in tomatoes that have lost 80% of their original weight by the time they're packed. The tomatoes can be dried further after harvest to tweak their content, but that process doesn't involve the use of any additives. The dried tomatoes can be reportedly kept for a year after being frozen for shipping and storage without any negative effect on their taste, texture, or nutritional value. Supree will sell its product directly to corporate clients for now.

ACCESSKIT

AccessKit provides UI accessibility infrastructure across platforms and programming languages. It features a data schema that defines all of the data required to make a UI accessible to screen readers and other assistive technologies. The schema, largely based on Chromium's cross-platform accessibility abstraction, also defines actions that can be requested by assistive technologies.

STANCHION

Stanchion is an SQLite 3 extension that enables column-oriented storage in SQLite. It brings all of the benefits of column-oriented storage and data warehousing to anywhere SQLite is already deployed. Column-oriented storage outperforms row-oriented storage for storing and processing metric, log, and event data, time series data storage and analysis, change tracking, and anchor modeling. Stanchion uses compression techniques that significantly reduce the size of stored data, greatly reducing the cost of large data sets.

WHY TIM COOK IS GOING ALL IN ON THE APPLE VISION PRO

When Tim Cook first experienced the Apple Vision Pro maybe eight years ago, it needed a supercomputer in the other room to run. Over the years, Apple engineers shrunk the device to a pair of goggles that weigh a little more than a box of spaghetti. This article talks about what using the Vision Pro is like. The device's high-resolution displays can overlay digital objects that look real.

GOOGLE IS PREPARING TO FULLY RENAME BARD TO GEMINI

Google appears to be ditching the 'Bard' branding altogether and switching entirely to 'Gemini'. All of Bard's phone experience was renamed 'Gemini' earlier this week. The app now says 'Bard is now Gemini' across mobile devices and the web. Bard is powered by Gemini Pro, the middle option in Google's newest family of AI models.

MAKING A PDF THAT’S LARGER THAN GERMANY

The claim that the maximum size of a PDF is 381 km x 381 km is completely false - there's no set limit to the size of a file.

THE WEB JUST GETS BETTER WITH INTEROP 2024

The Interop project aims to improve interoperability by encouraging browser engine teams to look deeper into various web technologies and their compatibility between browsers.

HOW TO LEARN UNFAMILIAR SOFTWARE TOOLS WITH CHATGPT

A guide on how to use AI to turbocharge your ability to dive into unfamiliar software tools and quickly learn how to use them.

MARK ZUCKERBERG CALLS APPLE’S DMA RULES ‘SO ONEROUS’ HE DOUBTS ANY DEVELOPER WILL OPT IN

Apple's compliance with the DMA involves reduced commissions, but the company added new fees that make going to alternate app stores too expensive.

VERSIONFOX

VersionFox is a cross-platform tool for managing SDK versions that allows users to quickly install and switch between different versions of SDKs using the command line.