SpaceX has launched its first batch of six Starlink satellites designed to enable direct-to-cell internet service from space. The satellites will provide global access to texting, calling, and browsing anywhere in the world without special hardware or firmware. They have a modem that acts as a cellphone tower in space, eliminating dead zones with network integration. Partner providers will include T-Mobile in the US, Rogers in Canada, and Optus in Australia.
2024.01.03·themessenger.com·1 min read·TLDR Foldables emerged as a differentiator in the premium smartphone market in 2023. Apple ended the year with a 71% share of the premium smartphone market due to competition from Huawei and Samsung. While global smartphone sales have been down, the premium segment is set to grow 6% year-on-year. Consumers are willing to spend more to get a higher quality device that will last longer and promotions, sales, and financing options make the devices accessible to a larger market.
2024.01.03·pcmag.com·1 min read·TLDR NASA's Juno spacecraft flew within 930 miles of the surface of Io, the fourth largest moon in the Solar System, on Saturday. Io is a dense and dry moon that is extremely geologically active, making it an object of great interest to astronomers and planetary scientists. The data collected from the flyby will help scientists determine how Io's volcanoes erupt and how its activity is connected to Jupiter's magnetosphere. A link to a gallery of images from the flyby is available in the article.
2024.01.03·arstechnica.com·2 min read·TLDR A handful of companies will be deploying their humanoid robots in commercial pilot projects this year. This article looks at the current state of humanoid robots and whether they're ready for work. Humanoid robots are able to replace human workers doing robotic jobs, freeing them to be able to work in other more valuable positions. The pilot tests this year will determine whether their potential will translate into a fundamental shift in how repetitive labor is done.
2024.01.03·spectrum.ieee.org·7 min read·TLDR Sponsored
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Large language models (LLMs) are great for programming work, but using them requires practice. Communicating poorly is a great limitation. Many programmers communicate poorly despite being very capable in their field. Asking LLMs the right questions is a fundamental skill that can be improved with practice.
2024.01.03·antirez.com·26 min read·TLDR This blog post extracts some of the insights from 'The Purely Functional Software Deployment Model' by Eelco Dolstra into short-form content to inspire others to read the full text. The book is an often recommended resource for learning about Nix, a powerful and flexible package manager for Linux and other Unix-like systems. It is still remarkably relevant given its age. A significant portion of the book is philosophical rather than technical.
2024.01.03·jonathanlorimer.dev·35 min read·TLDR Fees, delays, and existential risks of crypto exchanges have led most of the investing public to remain on the sidelines with Bitcoin. However, the widely expected approval of numerous bitcoin Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) in the coming days could change all that. ETFs are one of the world's most popular ways to invest. An ETF would make investing in bitcoin easy and relatively more safe. A bitcoin ETF could, in theory, push the price of bitcoin even higher over the coming weeks, months, and years.
2024.01.03·nymag.com·8 min read·TLDR Apple is facing a series of regulatory decisions by US and EU authorities that will determine its future. If Google loses its antitrust trial, it could be forced to stop making regular payments to Apple worth an estimated quarter of the annual revenues earned by Apple's services arm. Apple and other tech giants are being forced to change their app store policies to allow sideloading of apps. Both of these changes will have large impacts on Apple's revenue.
2024.01.03·arstechnica.com·6 min read·TLDR A look at the features and improvements coming to PostgreSQL in 2024 and reflections on where the project is headed.
2024.01.03·jkatz05.com·18 min read·TLDR The ideal messaging frequency varies from individual to individual - try to push helpful messages and minimize harm.
2024.01.03·eugeneyan.com·18 min read·TLDR Reflections and advice from someone who has worked in both a zombie startup, where nothing was happening, and a startup that had to deal with a rapid 20x growth in paying users.
2024.01.03·swizec.com·8 min read·TLDR Exploring the similarities and differences between AI visual systems and human perception will help scientists build safer AI systems.
2024.01.03·deepmind.google·7 min read·TLDR ParadeDB is an ElasticSearch alternative built on Postgres currently in public beta.
2024.01.03·github.com·GitHub repository·TLDR The next decade might see disruption and market cap destruction within the tech industry.
2024.01.03·michaeldempsey.me·14 min read·TLDR Many teams at Amazon have been in a hiring freeze for over a year and the employees that were left after the layoffs in 2023 are now leaving. The changes in the organization will likely result in a major AWS outage in 2024. There has already been an increase in large-scale events throughout Amazon. While Amazon is operationally strong, these operational practices depend on people, and when people are eliminated to increase stock prices, operational practices suffer.
2024.01.02·justingarrison.com·6 min read·TLDR 2024.01.02·theverge.com·1 min read·TLDR Scientists have discovered a way to combat cancer cells using vibrating molecules. The molecules vibrate synchronously to rupture the membranes of cancer cells. They are activated with near-infrared light, which allows for deeper penetration into the body than visible light. The technique demonstrated 99% efficacy in destroying cultured cancer cells in laboratory tests. When tested on mice models, half of the animals became cancer-free.
2024.01.02·interestingengineering.com·2 min read·TLDR The first CRISPR-based gene therapies were approved in the UK and the US late last year. While gene therapies promise to tackle both rare and common diseases, they will come with side effects like exorbitant prices, barriers to access, and ethical concerns. This article looks at how the field promises to bring better editing with more targets and equitable therapies for all in 2024 and beyond.
2024.01.02·inverse.com·11 min read·TLDR GitHub is launching Copilot Chat in general availability for all users. It is free for verified teachers, students, and maintainers of certain open source projects and $10 per month for other users. Copilot Chat allows developers to ask for real time guidance with natural language. Powered by GPT-4, it is the most widely adopted AI developer tool in history. A list of Copilot competitors is available at the end of the article.
2024.01.02·techcrunch.com·3 min read·TLDR This course on large language models covers fundamental knowledge about mathematics, Python, and neural networks. It focuses on teaching students how to build and deploy the best possible LLMs using the latest techniques. The repository contains a list of notebooks and articles related to LLMs and resources for further learning.
2024.01.02·github.com·GitHub repository·TLDR This article attempts to round up the highlights in AI development over 2023. It covers how to run LLMs on personal devices, fine-tuning models, the problem of gullibility, LLM applications, and more. LLMs can provide people who use them effectively with a significant boost to their quality of life. They're actually quite easy to build, but there's still a lot unknown about them and they're still unreliable for many applications. There are still many legal and ethical problems to overcome in the space.
2024.01.02·simonwillison.net·7 min read·TLDR This thread provides a recap of AI products and trends that hit the mainstream in 2023. It goes through product launches month by month, providing user numbers and other relevant metrics. Highlights include ChatGPT reaching 100 million monthly active users in January, Balenciaga Pope going viral with 28 million views in March, AI covers taking off in June, users getting roasted by TikTok's AI memes in August, and X's Grok launching in December.
2024.01.02·twitter.com·6 min read·TLDR Every large smartphone manufacturer except Apple is betting on foldable phones reviving a lackluster mobile market despite a lack of interest from mainstream consumers.
2024.01.02·arstechnica.com·2 min read·TLDR This blog post discusses several approaches to making files smaller.
2024.01.02·jamesg.blog·6 min read·TLDR Companies are hiring virtual influencers and reporting significant results and decreases in costs.
2024.01.02·arstechnica.com·3 min read·TLDR The Guinness World Record for the largest snowflake, for which there is no photographic evidence, may be a bit misleading - the largest photographed snow crystals are much smaller than the supposed record.
Beeper has been playing and losing the cat and mouse game with Apple - its current solution requires users to have access to an old jailbroken iPhone.
2024.01.02·daringfireball.net·14 min read·TLDR It's usually useful to merge pull requests into the main branch and make small and frequent changes.
2024.01.02·matklad.github.io·4 min read·TLDR Apple's hardware can finally go toe to toe with some of the best PCs. The company is now aiming to make another attempt at becoming a gaming powerhouse. Its previous attempt in 1999 did not go so well. Now, Apple has larger and more capable teams with plenty of resources, and the company is used to playing the long game. This article looks at Apple's history with gaming, its hardware developments in recent years, and the company's push to make its systems more game-friendly.
2023.12.29·inverse.com·20 min read·TLDR Amazon plans to produce hydrogen fuel at its fulfillment centers. It has partnered with hydrogen company Plug Power to install an electrolyzer at a fulfillment center in Aurora, Colorado. The electrolyzer, which uses electricity to split water molecules to produce hydrogen, has the capacity to fuel up to 400 hydrogen fuel cell-powered forklifts. Amazon says that hydrogen is an important tool in its efforts to decarbonize its operations by 2040.
2023.12.29·theverge.com·3 min read·TLDR JAC Motors is launching an electric vehicle with a sodium-ion battery through its Yiwei brand. Sodium-ion batteries have lower density than lithium-ion batteries, but their lower cost, more abundant supplies, and superior cold-weather performance make them viable for mass EV adoption. The Yiwei EV will have a 252 km range with a 25 kWh capacity. Deliveries of the vehicle will begin in January.
2023.12.29·engadget.com·2 min read·TLDR Researchers have been able to lower low-density lipoprotein (LDL) levels using a vaccine based on a non-infectious virus particle that targets a protein known to have an important relationship to LDLs. LDLs can cause dangerous blockages in the arteries, reducing oxygen flow to the heart or causing blood clots that can lead to a stroke. The vaccine was able to reduce the bad cholesterol by up to 30% in animal models. It will still be a while before the technology can be used in humans, but it promises a solution that would be more affordable than current options and last around a year per dose.
2023.12.29·sciencealert.com·2 min read·TLDR Apache Hudi manages the storage of large analytical data sets on distributed file systems. It allows users to atomically publish data with rollback support, snapshot isolation between writer and queries, manage file sizes and layouts using statistics, and more. Hudi supports snapshot, incremental, and read-optimized queries.
2023.12.29·github.com·GitHub repository·TLDR This collection showcases the most impactful prompts of the year across various domains. It covers domains such as job hunting, essay and research, language learning, code generation, mental health, music, marketing, and much more. The complete collection can be accessed through a CSV file. Each prompt includes a backlink to its original author.
2023.12.29·github.com·GitHub repository·TLDR This post by Vitalik Buterin takes a look at the core values of the crypto movement and how they have changed. Crypto isn't just about creating isolated tools and games - it's about building holistically toward a more free and open society and economy where the technological, social, and economic parts fit into each other. web3 had a similar vision to build a set of technology that could together form the base layer of a more open internet stack. Unfortunately, these visions have faded somewhat into the background.
2023.12.29·vitalik.eth.limo·21 min read·TLDR Apple and medical device maker Masimo have been entrenched in a legal battle over a single feature on the Apple Watch for over three years. Masimo had sued a startup on similar grounds in 2018 and won. Both cases involved employees who helped the companies develop similar technologies. The International Trade Commission's US import on Apple's watches was quickly paused on appeal. The US Customs and Border Protection will make a decision on January 12 on whether the changes Apple made to the watches are significant enough to avoid a patent dispute.
2023.12.29·theverge.com·3 min read·TLDR Developers shouldn't 'support' features by telling the user 'no' - they should either support the feature, guide the user toward a better solution, or do nothing.
2023.12.29·bvisness.me·5 min read·TLDR Xiaomi’s SU7 sedan, slated to roll out in China next year, runs Xiaomi’s HyperOS, a new architecture from Xiaomi that's supposed to be dynamic enough to power phones, smart home systems, and cars.
2023.12.29·techcrunch.com·3 min read·TLDR The next generation of Surface devices will come with Intel and Arm-based neural processing unit options.
2023.12.29·theverge.com·2 min read·TLDR Google's Hypercomputer is the company's take on a modular supercomputer with a healthy dose of its homegrown TPU v5p AI accelerators.
2023.12.29·hpcwire.com·11 min read·TLDR Netflix's top rivals lost more than $5 billion in 2024 from the streaming services they built to compete with it.
2023.12.29·arstechnica.com·3 min read·TLDR The specialist programmer will continue to dominate over the journalist who's just telling the computer to write the code.
2023.12.29·twitter.com·3 min read·TLDR Tesla is already preparing to produce the 2024 refresh Model Y at Gigafactory Shanghai, with mass production expected to start by mid-2024. The refresh will have significant changes compared to the updated units released in October 2023. The new Model Y will have more noticeable changes to the exterior and interior to compete with new electric car units to be released in China next year. It is expected to feature a new wheel design with ambient lighting.
2023.12.28·teslarati.com·2 min read·TLDR Researchers have discovered an attack that backdoored possibly thousands of iPhones over four years. Many of the affected phones belonged to Moscow-based security firm Kaspersky. The attackers were able to achieve an unprecedented level of access by exploiting a vulnerability in an undocumented hardware feature that few people know of. It is still unknown how they became aware of the feature. The exploit was delivered through iMessage texts which installed malware without requiring the receiver to take any action. Apple has patched the exploit, which also affected Macs, iPods, iPads, Apple TVs, and Apple Watches.
2023.12.28·arstechnica.com·8 min read·TLDR Scientists have discovered a new class of antibiotics for drug-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) bacteria using AI. The discovery could be a turning point in the fight against antibiotic resistance. Deep learning is increasingly being applied in drug discovery to accelerate the process. The model was able to predict the activity and toxicity of the new compound.
2023.12.28·euronews.com·3 min read·TLDR Glucose-responsive insulin, or 'smart' insulin, is a form of insulin that provides control of blood glucose levels over a longer period of time than normal insulin. A recent study reported that a single injection of a smart insulin system was able to regulate blood glucose levels in diabetic mice and minipigs for a week. The system mimics the body's natural process, releasing insulin in response to glucose. Research into smart insulin is still in its early stages, but the study demonstrated that it could be a viable research subject heading forward.
2023.12.28·arstechnica.com·3 min read·TLDR