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The Year on TikTok 2023 honors some of the standout moments that have happened on the platform this year. It peeks at the stories that have inspired, entertained, and educated over 1 billion people around the world. This page contains links to this year's biggest TikTok videos, trends, songs, stars, and more. It shows trends from around the world, but it has a section for US-specific trends for every topic.
Reliable Robotics Corp. has flown a small cargo plane without a human on board. The 12-minute flight, made with a plane on loan from FedEx, was Reliable Robotics' second automated flight. The startup is working to gain full approval from the FAA. Its system will restrict remote pilots to only supervising one aircraft at a time rather than managing multiple autonomous flights. Remote piloting will boost efficiency and allow planes to be repositioned more easily to match where demand is strongest.
The coldness of space is a largely untapped thermodynamic resource. Advances in technology could soon result in solar panels that work at night as well as day. Scientists have already demonstrated that it is possible to chill water to cool buildings by as much as 5 degrees Celsius during the day directly using power generated by the cold universe. This article looks at some current ideas and prototypes in the field.
Spotlight is a highly customizable debug tool for web apps. It notifies developers of errors and other signals as they happen. Spotlight works everywhere and it is compatible with Sentry's universal SDKs.
Google has announced Cloud TPU v5p, its most powerful, scalable, and flexible AI accelerator yet. TPUs are used for training and serving AI-powered products. Google has also announced AI Hypercomputer from Google Cloud, a supercomputer architecture that uses an integrated system of performance-optimized hardware, open software, leading ML frameworks, and flexible consumption models. AI Hypercomputer employs systems-level co-design to boost efficiency and productivity across AI training, tuning, and serving.
Google's release of its next-generation AI model Gemini reflects years of efforts from inside Google overseen and driven by its CEO Sundar Pichai. Pichai is famously product-obsessed and has infused AI deeply into all of Google's products. This article contains an interview with Pichai where he discusses Gemini and what it will mean for Google, its products, AI, and society at large. Gemini is different from other models as it is natively multimodal from the ground up.
This article contains thoughts from over 40 of a12z's partners on what they believe will drive innovation in 2024. The ideas cover technologies like smart energy grids, voice-first companion apps, programmable medicines, and AI tools for kids.
Liquid neural networks are much smaller than traditional AI models and require far less compute power to run.
Unidentified governments, including democracies allied to the United States, are surveilling smartphone users through app push notifications.
JSONB is a rewrite of the SQLite JSON functions - it can be several times faster than the original JSON functions.
The new iPad Air, iPad Pro, and MacBook Air models will all be released during the first several months of next year.
Sam Altman is TIME's 2023 CEO of the year.
This post proposes a hierarchy of needs for workers to refer to when picking a startup to join.
X.AI has filed with the SEC to raise up to $1 billion in an equity offering. It has already raised nearly $135 million from four investors and has a binding and enforceable agreement for the purchase of the remaining shares. The startup released an AI chatbot with real-time knowledge of the internet called Grok last month. It aims to directly compete with companies like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.
SpaceX and NASA may be demonstrating orbital refueling technology on the next Starship test flight. NASA has yet to make a decision on when to start testing the capability. Cryogenic propellants must be kept at super-low temperatures or they turn into a gas and boil off. Rockets using these types of propellants typically need to complete their missions within hours - NASA wants to extend this lifetime to months and enable the transfer of the propellants from one vehicle to another.
Animate Anyone uses a generative video technique to create videos from pictures of people. While its results are far from perfect, the model is a huge leap over the previous state of the art, which produced way more artifacts or completely lost important details. The team behind the model hasn't released the code for it yet. Videos showing deepfakes made with Animate Anyone are available in the article.
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StyleX is an expressive, deterministic, reliable, and scalable styling system. It was carefully designed to meet the requirements of large application, reusable component libraries and statically typed codebases. StyleX is fully typed and supports an expressive subset of CSS. It takes the developer experience of CSS-in-JS libraries and uses compile-time tooling to bridge it with the performance and scalability of static CSS.
This blog post presents a cursory overview of the internals of iMessage. It glosses over specific technical details, but links to resources to see how things are specifically implemented are provided. The post covers how Apple's Push Notification Service works, how the Identity Services keyserver makes registration requests, and message encryption.
This article covers what happened behind the scenes during OpenAI's recent five-day crisis. It also looks at Microsoft's relationship with OpenAI and the company's history with AI. Microsoft's CTO Kevin Scott, the person most responsible for forging the OpenAI partnership, believes that AI is one of the most powerful things humans have ever invented. It will take a lot of time to develop the technology, but it could improve the quality of life for everyone.
The Internet can not be portrayed as a district development from a world increasingly in turmoil. Removing the constraint of physical distribution may have accelerated the development of many technologies, but it also created many problems. An increasingly AI-generated world where all content is customized for every individual may help more people realize the only way to survive online is to pay it increasingly little heed.
Amazon's investment in Nvidia hardware is huge - there is clearly room to bend the price/performance curve.
Klarna isn't planning any layoffs, but it will refrain from active recruitment as it expects AI will be able to handle many tasks that were previously performed by humans.
This post contains a list of things to know to help put together tech meetup events.
Loco is a Rust API and web framework for full stack product builders that is strongly inspired by Rails.
Unless something dramatically reverses Firefox's trends, the USWDS will soon tell government web devs that they don't have to support Firefox anymore.
MLX is an array framework for machine learning on Apple silicon with familiar APIs, composable function transformations, lazy computation, dynamic graph construction, and more.
Spotify is laying off 17% of its workforce to reduce costs and adjust for a slowdown in growth. News of the layoffs sent Spotify shares up more than 7%. Spotify says it took on too many employees over 2020 and 2021. The company reported a 65 million euro profit for the third quarter. The layoffs could supply a nearly 2% reduction in operating expenses in 2024.
Tesla has confirmed that it will lose half of the $7,500 tax credit on the Model 3 Rear-Wheel-Drive and Model 3 Long Range from next year. The eligibility criteria for the $7,500 federal tax credit have changed to include things like price and source of components. The battery material criteria are becoming more strict to include more batteries and materials built in North America. This will likely be helpful for Tesla in Q4 as they are trying to sell a record number of vehicles to deliver on its annual guidance.
Despite claims that autonomous vehicles reduce accidents and assurances that they won't displace truckers, autonomous trucks still scare the public and alarm labor groups. Some major companies claim they have achieved Level 4 automation, which means their vehicles can be operated without human presence. Several companies have plans to launch their vehicles within the next few years. This article looks at the upcoming wave of autonomous trucks and the issues that will need to be overcome before they become a common sight on the road.
Startup Biomemory has released DNA cards that can store one kilobyte of data for at least 150 years. The company encodes the data by chemically synthesizing strands of DNA base by base in a process that takes about 8 hours. Customers will have to send their DNA cards to Biomemory's partner Eurofins Genomics to decode the data. They will not get their cards back after the data has been decoded. A pack of two identical cards costs $1,000.
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This Datadog report [9] looks at >2.4 billion containers run by tens of thousands of Datadog customers. As organizations have scaled container environments, some have adopted innovative technologies such as serverless containers and GPU-based computing [9]. Many are also exploring solutions like Arm-based computing and autoscaling to
Google's internal code review tool Critique is highly rated among software engineers. This article looks at what makes Critique so good and explains how it pairs with Google's process of code review. It covers Google's guidelines for efficient code review, internal statistics on Google code reviews, and more. While Critique will never be open-sourced, Google maintains a similar open-source code review tool called Gerrit.
This site contains a database of 300 case studies from over 80 companies that share practical machine learning use cases and learnings from designing ML systems. The database can be filtered by industry or ML use case. Tags based on recurring themes are available.
OpenAI's achievements over the past year were recently eclipsed by a rollercoaster couple of weeks that involved Sam Altman being ousted and reinstated as well as a new board. This post contains an edited interview with OpenAI's COO Brad Lightcap where he discusses ChatGPT, OpenAI's Dev Day, and Altman.
Many people use social media out of a fear of missing out rather than genuine interest, making them worse off than if the platforms didn't exist in the first place. This study looks at this phenomenon to paint a more accurate picture of how social media impacts consumers. It challenges the argument that the mere existence of a product implies positive welfare for its users. The results suggest a heightened need for regulators to assess whether different products create traps for consumers and whether they generate positive welfare.
Verizon recently released a Netflix and Max bundle and may release an Apple TV+ and Paramount+ bundle, following a trend that is seeing streaming apps partnering with other apps and other types of companies to offer TV streaming at a lower monthly price.
Examples of side projects that have helped developers land jobs include a Dropbox-like sync and share application, a high availability project for MySQL, and answering questions about a specific subject on StackOverflow until a publisher made them a book offer.
Transition from passwords to Passkeys might not be a good idea because they are not accessible to everyone and their use will push data ownership more towards Big Tech.
The ultrasound vaccine delivery technique doesn't damage the skin, and while it delivers less molecules of vaccine than conventional jabs, test animals produced more antibodies.
This site looks at how the nano-gpt model, which has 85,000 parameters, sorts a sequence of six letters into alphabetical order.
Colonizing Mars is a biology problem - space survival requires miniaturized, modular, failure-proof biotechnologies that will also ensure sustainable abundance for billions of humans on Earth.
Manifest V3 will delay extension developers' abilities to react quickly to changes by putting up roadblocks before extension updates on Chrome's extension platform. Ad blocking is a cat-and-mouse game of updates and counter-updates, and Google is forcing one side to slow down. With Manifest V3, all updates to extensions, including filtering lists, will need to happen through a full extension update on the Chrome Web Store, which means they will be subject to the Chrome Web Store reviews process. Once it becomes mandatory in June 2024, daily updates will no longer be an option.
Samsung's S24 devices will use AI to translate messaging apps in real-time in over a dozen languages. They may also use Samsung's AI-powered Zoom Anyplace camera framing feature. The devices will use Qualcomm modems with Smart Transit functionality. The Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra will have a new flattened screen design, a titanium frame, an upgraded 50 MP 5x telephoto camera, better vapor chamber cooling, and Wi-Fi 7. More details about the devices and official images from Samsung are available in the article.
The world's biggest operational experimental nuclear fusion reactor has been inaugurated in Japan. The JT-60SA reactor aims to investigate the feasibility of fusion as a safe, large-scale, and carbon-free source of net energy. The six-story-high machine is a joint project between the European Union and Japan. It is the result of a collaboration between more than 500 scientists and engineers and more than 70 companies throughout Europe and Japan.