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WAVE OF APPLE GENERATIVE AI TOOLS ON TRACK FOR WWDC DEBUT

Apple reportedly plans to announce a series of new tools based on generative AI and WWDC as part of iOS 18. The new tools will include a revamped version of Siri, a new version of Xcode, and a tool in Apple Music for automatic playlist creation. The technology will also be used for troubleshooting problems with AppleCare. Apple's generative AI vision will likely take until 2025 to fully scale.

ALPHABET’S ISOMORPHIC STACKS TWO NEW DEALS WITH LILLY, NOVARTIS WORTH NEARLY $3B AHEAD OF JPM

Alphabet's Isomorphic's latest deal will add significant weight to Google DeepMind's AlphaFold AI tech, which predicts protein structures to enable potentially faster target discovery and compound construction. The deals involve identifying small molecule therapies for use against undisclosed targets. The announcements are the first to emerge from the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference. The conference will go on until January 11.

FIGURE 01 HAS LEARNED TO MAKE COFFEE ☕️

Figure 01 is a commercially viable autonomous humanoid robot. At 5'6" and 60kg, it can carry a payload of 20kg and move at a speed of 1.2m/s for around 5 hours of runtime. Its human form factor allows it to perform dexterous tasks and lend support across manufacturing, logistics, warehousing, and retail. This thread contains a video showing Figure 01 making a coffee - it learned the task just by watching humans make coffee.

FIRST US MOON LANDER SINCE APOLLO PREPARES TO BLAST OFF ON MONDAY

Peregrine mission one aims to put a US lander on the moon on February 23. It is the first mission to fly under NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPs) initiative. The mission will carry five NASA payloads and 15 others. It is bound for an ancient lava flow called Sinus Viscositatis, or the Bay of Stickiness. The next mission under the CLPs scheme is due to launch in mid-February and may touch down before Peregrine.

WEIRD THINGS ENGINEERS BELIEVE ABOUT WEB DEVELOPMENT

Many web developers have ideas about browsers and the Web that can be a bit dubious. For example, they assume that web browser engineers, web developers, and the people who make Web specifications know the Web really well. Other dubious ideas include the myth that browsers aren't meant to run SPAs, that MPAs will replace SPAs, that all sites should work without JavaScript, that web development shouldn't need a build step, and that what they know is representative of web development at large. It's easy to assume what you know is representative of web development in general, but the field is much broader and deeper than most people know.

HOW I'M WRITING CSS IN 2024

CSS in 2024 has cross-browser support for nesting, :has(), container queries, and more. There are now many frameworks and compilers that help optimize CSS loading performance and powerful and fast new CSS tools. This post is a collection of notes and thoughts about the CSS ecosystem. It covers the many changes and provides recommendations for helpful tools.

WHAT TO EXPECT AT CES 2024

CES 2024 is a show for just about any kind of tech. The event will deliver more tech news than any other event this year. It starts tomorrow and runs through until Friday. Companies have been trickling out announcements as excitement about the show ramps up. This article contains some of the biggest announcements expected this year. Some of the tech expected this year includes smart TVs centered around AI processing, new electric vehicles, bigger laptops, and new OLED monitors for PC gaming.

WHY I’M EXCITED ABOUT PROFIT-SHARING STARTUPS

Most successful outcomes in tech often take many years to mature. The future is unpredictable and the macro environment can not be controlled. Several big shifts will drive founders and investors to pursue profit-sharing models in 2024 and beyond. Profit-sharing startups will become more popular as people look to diversify their net worth and capture liquidity sooner. This will not preclude founders from raising traditional venture capital - some businesses will still need VC to scale and win a market.

THE TWO REACTS

A discussion of what components should be run on a client and what should be run on the server.

NITRO

Nitro is a TypeScript framework for building ultra-fast web servers.

M3 CPU CORES HAVE BECOME MORE VERSATILE

This article compares the performance of Apple's new M3 series P and E cores to assess what has changed between the M1 and M3.

CSVLENS

csvlens is a command-line CSV file viewer.

FDA INVESTIGATING LINK BETWEEN SEMAGLUTIDE AND HAIR LOSS, SUICIDAL THOUGHTS

The FDA has received reports of patients using drugs like semaglutide suffering from a form of hair loss known as alopecia, suicidal ideation, and instances of aspiration in which food and liquids accidentally enter the lungs.

EMERGENCY POST: WTF IS GOING ON AT CARTA?

One of Carta's customers revealed last week that the FinTech platform is doing cold outreach to the customer's angel investors about selling its shares to their buyers.

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MICROSOFT’S NEW COPILOT KEY IS THE FIRST BIG CHANGE TO WINDOWS KEYBOARDS IN 30 YEARS

Microsoft partners will start shipping a new Copilot key on a variety of new PCs and laptops. The button will provide quick access to Microsoft's AI-powered Windows Copilot experience. It is the first big change to the Windows PC keyboard layout in nearly three decades. The new Copilot key will replace the menu (or application) key. If Windows Copilot isn't available in the user's country, the button will launch Windows Search instead. It is unclear whether Microsoft plans to allow users to use the key in combination with other keys.

GOOGLE APPEARS TO BE WORKING ON AN ‘ADVANCED’ VERSION OF BARD THAT YOU HAVE TO PAY FOR

Bard Advanced is an upgraded version of Bard that may soon be available through a paid subscription to Google One. It appears to be powered by Gemini Ultra, an upgrade over the current version of Bard which runs the mid-tier Gemini Pro. There may be a feature that allows users to create custom bots, but it is unclear whether users will be able to share these bots. It is unknown when or if the feature will become official.

GOOGLE WROTE A ‘ROBOT CONSTITUTION’ TO MAKE SURE ITS NEW AI DROIDS WON’T KILL US

The DeepMind robotics team has revealed three new advances that will help robots make faster, better, and safer decisions in the wild. One involves a system for gathering training data with a set of safety-focused prompts instructing the model to avoid choosing tasks that involve humans, animals, sharp objects, and electrical appliances. The others are a neural network architecture designed to make the existing Robotic Transformer RT-2 more accurate and faster and RT-Trajectory, which adds 2D outlines to help robots better perform specific physical tasks.

ELON MUSK: SPACEX NEEDS TO BUILD STARSHIPS AS OFTEN AS BOEING BUILDS 737S

Elon Musk recently made a post on X saying that SpaceX might need to make up to 300 spaceships a year to achieve Mars colonization. Establishing a settlement on Mars will require rocket travel to be nearly as routine as air travel. While SpaceX will be able to reuse Starship and its Super Heavy boosters, the parts that travel into orbit won't be able to be reused as often. Ships often have to orbit the planet several times before they line up with pickup sites, so they might only be able to be used once a day.

TERMINAL SMOOTH SCROLLING

Terminal usually draws lines of text at fixed intervals. When scrolling, the sudden jumps are incompatible with how eyes track motion, making it a blurry mess that's hard to read. This blog post discusses how to implement smooth scrolling in Terminal. While smooth scrolling uses a lot more resources, it makes it possible to easily skim text as it scrolls by. A video demonstrating the difference between normal scrolling and smooth scrolling in Terminal is available in the post.

MISE-EN-PLACE

mise-en-place manages dev tools like Node, Python, CMake, Terraform, and more. It manages environment variables for different project directories and tasks used to build and test projects. It can also work as a task runner that can replace make or npm scripts.

AMAZON CAPTURED 29% OF ONLINE ORDERS BEFORE CHRISTMAS

Amazon's global order volume in the final two weeks before Christmas was up 21% from the week of Thanksgiving and Black Friday. The company's speedy delivery is a key competitive advantage. 70% of Prime orders in the US arrive within two days, with almost a quarter being delivered within a day. Amazon plans to double its number of same-day delivery facilities in the coming years.

OPENAI’S APP STORE FOR GPTS WILL LAUNCH NEXT WEEK

OpenAI's GPT Store will feature custom apps based on its text-generating AI models. Developers will have to review OpenAI's updated usage policies and GPT brand guidelines as well as verify their user profiles before they will be eligible for listing in the store. Making a bot doesn't require any coding experience - developers can just type the capabilities they want their bots to offer in plain language and a GPT-building tool will attempt to make it. Bots can be as simple or complex as a developer wishes. It is unclear whether the GPT Store will launch with a revenue-sharing scheme.

OPENAI’S NEWS PUBLISHER DEALS REPORTEDLY TOP OUT AT $5 MILLION A YEAR

OpenAI offers between $1 million and $5 million a year to license copyrighted news articles to train its AI models.

THE RANDOM TRANSFORMER

This blog post provides an end-to-end example of the math within a transformer model with lots of simplification and reduced dimensions.

NVIDIA SUPER REFRESH CONFIRMED FOR CES 2024 — GIGABYTE TEASES GEFORCE RTX 40-SERIES SUPER GPUS

It is likely that Gigabyte's Aorus Turkey graphics board will essentially confirm Nvidia's RTX 40 Super launch.

TESLA ADDS POWERWALL, SOLAR, AND CHARGER TO ITS API FOR DEVS

The release is aimed at increasing the value of Tesla's distributed energy assets and growing the deployment of its energy storage products.

WHEN "EVERYTHING" BECOMES TOO MUCH: THE NPM PACKAGE CHAOS OF 2024

An npm package called 'everything' released in the new year that depended on every other public npm package, creating millions of transitive dependencies, caused storage space to run out and system resource exhaustion for anyone that installed it.

THE PULSE: WILL US COMPANIES HIRE FEWER ENGINEERS DUE TO SECTION 174?

Section 176 of the US tax law made it so all costs related to R&D cannot be expensed, making bootstrapped software businesses completely unsustainable.

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LEAKED VIDEO SHOWS BROWSING SAFARI IN APPLE VISION PRO IS SUPER SMOOTH

The latest rumors suggest that the Apple Vision Pro is launching by the end of February. Recently leaked videos show how much multitasking users can expect to accomplish with Apple's Safari web browser inside of visionOS. Safari on the Apple Vision Pro lets users place multiple windows and tabs in 3D space inside of the headset, creating a fully customizable work experience. The leaked videos are available in the article.

META'S CTO CALLS ITS AR GLASSES PROTOTYPE "THE MOST ADVANCED THING WE'VE EVER PRODUCED AS A SPECIES"

Meta plans to possibly unveil an AR glasses prototype in 2024 that it claims is the most advanced piece of technology on the planet in its domain. The device is still prohibitively expensive to manufacture and there is still a lot of work to be done to reduce the price and form factor. Meta may be working on a version of the Ray-Ban Meta smartglasses with a small viewfinder display. AI breakthroughs and the integration of AI into the current Ray-Ban Meta smartglasses have significantly affected Meta's product roadmap.

THE TWO CHINESE LABS WORKING ON REPLICATING LK-99 APPEAR TO HAVE FOUND A ROOM-TEMPERATURE SUPERCONDUCTOR

Chinese labs working on replicating LK-99 findings have discovered a superconductor that works at -23 C. While it is not exactly a room-temperature conductor, it is still a significant discovery. Similar materials have been discovered previously, but they require high pressure to exhibit their superconducting properties. The labs' results have already been replicated.

MOBILE ALOHA

Mobile ALOHA is a system for imitating mobile manipulation tasks that are bimanual and require whole-body control. It is able to autonomously complete complex mobile manipulation tasks such as cooking, opening doors, and much more. This thread contains a video showing a robot with Mobile ALOHA cooking a Cantonese recipe. Mobile ALOHA is low-cost and open-source.

THE AHA STACK

The AHA stack combines Astro, htmx, and Alpine.js to create modern web applications with a simple set of mental models and workflows. It features a thin client, a simple yet awesome backend, a lightweight frontend, and a declarative approach. The AHA stack is minimalist and uses as few dependencies as possible.

SIEVE IS SIMPLER THAN LRU

Caching involves storing temporary data for quick access. Eviction algorithms determine what data to keep and what to discard. SIEVE is a simple and effective cache eviction algorithm with just one queue. It can also serve as a cache primitive for designing more advanced eviction policies. SIEVE is not scan-resistant, so it can sometimes show a higher miss ratio than other tools.

THE PROTOCOL FORCE

The protocol force encourages the layer between consumers of value and producers of value to be as thin as possible. IP, HTTP, and HTML are great examples of this effect. The protocol force minimizes the cost of reaching as many consumers or producers as possible. This force is present in any layered stack that has producers and consumers as outer layers. One of the key challenges of designing versatile tools is that this middle layer is constantly tested and often broken.

WHAT WILL HAPPEN IN 2024

A lot of innovation will be happening in 2024. AI and web3 are creating a more intelligent, resilient, and decentralized internet and new energy technologies will power our lives in new and sustainable ways. This article looks at the technologies that will be developed this year and opportunities for the teams building these new technologies. 2024 will be a terrific year for tech.

FULL RETURN TO OFFICE ISN'T THE ONLY WORK MODEL DYING. SO IS FULLY REMOTE

Most business leaders are confident with a hybrid work strategy.

SAMSUNG SETS GALAXY S24 LAUNCH FOR JAN. 17; HERE’S WHAT TO EXPECT

The Samsung Galaxy S24 will have a new design with flat metal sides and some models will feature a titanium body.

RESEARCHERS DEVELOP FIRST-EVER FUNCTIONAL GRAPHENE SEMICONDUCTOR

The tech could be used to advance quantum computing and is a potential replacement for silicon.

WHY ARE TECH REPORTERS SLEEPING ON THE BIGGEST APP STORE STORY?

App stores opening up to competing browsers will enable competitors to replace app stores with directories of Progressive Web Apps.

QUANTUMSCAPE’S SOLID-STATE BATTERIES PASS LATEST TEST

The endurance test determined that the batteries will be able to power electric vehicles that can drive 500,000 kilometers with virtually no loss of range.

13-YEAR-OLD BECOMES FIRST PERSON TO BEAT TETRIS ON NES

Blue Skuti is the first human to ever force Tetris into a kill screen on the NES classic.

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