Princess Elisabeth Island, the world's first artificial energy island, has secured its environmental permit in Belgium. The island is an at-sea electricity grid that will connect offshore wind farms to the Belgian mainland. It will serve as a hub for future interconnectors with the UK and Denmark. Construction is planned to be completed in August 2026. The island is expected to be fully connected to all wind farms and the mainland by 2030. A 3-minute video about the project is available.
Database schema migrations are essential for keeping systems up to date and in sync with evolving application requirements, but they come with many challenges. Many developers choose to avoid complex migrations due to this and only make additive changes, resulting in an accumulation of technical debt in the database schema. pgroll is a command-line tool for performing schema migrations against Postgres databases. It allows users to define schema migrations using a high-level JSON format and then takes care of executing them.
zany is an easy-to-use, configurable favicon server. Developers can simply point their icon tag at zany and configure styling without generating, downloading, or serving favicons. It supports text, emojis, background color, text color, and font-family. zany favicons can be easily tested in the browser bar.
Elon Musk questions life's default settings and goes all-in into his work. If one has enough awareness when faced with a new problem, it's easier to come up with novel ways to solve it. This article contains a compilation of anecdotes from Walter Isaacson's biography on Elon Musk of times when Musk made unusual strategic or tactical decisions and what the outcome was. Musk's willingness to have difficult conversations is something many can learn from.
Applying to jobs online is like navigating a maze. Resume parsing software, application tracking systems, and other factors make the process pretty frustrating. This article explores factors that make job applications more or less frustrating. The author applied to 250 jobs manually to see how long it took to get from start to finish. They applied for engineering/product-focused roles in a mix of companies across different industries.
While the proceedings may leave Sam Bankman-Fried feeling very bleak about his future, they will hopefully help make customers whole, hold bad actors accountable, and restore the public's trust in markets.
Microsoft's Satya Nadella says that a deal to be the exclusive search provider on Apple devices would be a game-changer for Bing. The company was prepared to give Apple all of the economic upside of a deal if Apple were to switch to Bing. It was willing to hide the Bing brand and respect any of the company's privacy wishes. Microsoft was willing to make the deal at any cost due to the data it would gain access to if it became the default search engine for Apple devices.
Chromebook Plus is a new certification to help shoppers identify high-quality Chromebooks. It will be awarded to laptops that have an Intel Core i3 or higher or AMD Ryzen 7000 CPU, an iPS panel with at least 1080p resolution, a 1080p webcam, 8GB of RAM, and 128GB of storage. Chromebook Plus-certified devices will have access to several AI-powered features such as a magic eraser tool in Google Photos, improvements to lighting and noise cancellation in video conferencing, and Offline File Sync.
Scientists have been working to standardize image formats for biological microscopy data for two decades. There are now around 160 standard file formats. A new project aims to shrink that number of formats down to a small handful. Having a common format would make it much easier for scientists to do their work - many are currently dealing with formatting issues by relabeling data by hand. There are several cultural and technical barriers to overcome before the project can become successful.
The BlueWalker 3 communications satellite can turn ordinary smartphones into satellite phones. It is the brightest satellite in low Earth orbit yet, and there are concerns that it may usher in a new generation of satellites that create way more light pollution than their predecessors. The satellite is bright due to its large size. It is about as bright as the eight-brightest star visible from Earth.
Unicode is a standard that aims to unify all human languages and make them work with computers. In practice, it is a table that assigns unique numbers, called code points, to different characters. This article explains what Unicode is and how it works. It covers all the basics as well as some advanced concepts and why some 'bugs' occur with certain characters.
Nue is a library for building user interfaces. It is a user-friendly alternative to frameworks like Next.js, Vite, and Sveltekit. Nue uses an HTML-based template syntax perfect for UX developers focusing on interaction design, accessibility, and user experience. Examples of Nue components are available in the article.
Mixed messages from Flexport founder Ryan Petersen during an on-stage interview a week after Petersen forced Clark out as CEO underscored the dysfunction surrounding the sudden firing of Dave Clark, who was previously one of Jeff Bezos' top deputies. Petersen had publicly criticized Clark for his decisions just days earlier, yet he praised Clark's work and expressed admiration for his achievements during the interview. This article tells an account of Clark's last few days at the company based on conversations with people close to Clark and Petersen.
U2 played the first-ever show at the Las Vegas Sphere on September 29. The band will play in a series of performances at the venue through the end of December, with the cheapest tickets going for around $400. Videos posted to social media show how breathtaking shows in The Sphere can be. Videos taken by concertgoers from inside The Sphere are available in the article.
Generative interfaces, which need to be designed individually for every task, could be compiled just in time with generative AI, enabling a much more customized experience.
Details about Samsung's Galaxy S24 devices, expected to be out in early 2024, have been leaked. The CAD-derived renders for the S24 Ultra, S24, and S24 Plus show the important parts of the device down to the millimeter. The Plus and base models will share a design that features a flat metal band that wraps around the perimeter. The Ultra version has the same Ultra design used since the S22. It is rumored to have a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC, a 5000 mAh battery, and 2TB of max storage.
Apple is rumored to be eyeing Formula 1 as its next big sports investment. The company is reportedly considering an offer worth about $2 billion per year that would make it the exclusive streaming rights holder of Formula 1 racing. Apple will not be able to secure global rights for a while due to existing contracts. The company is also rumored to be considering deals with various other sports leagues, including the NBA, English Premier League, and NFL Sunday Ticket.
Space scientists study the physiology and psychology of people living in the Antarctic and other remote outposts due to their similarities with other worlds. There are around 20 analog space facilities around the world that host volunteers for isolation studies over weeks or months in polar stations, desert outposts, and even sealed habitats inside NASA centers. The research helps scientists test medical and software tools, enhance indoor agriculture, and address the difficulties analog astronauts face.
Ethylene, the world's most widely produced and used petrochemical, is used to make products lightweight, durable, or waterproof. Conventional ethylene production releases enormous amounts of greenhouse gasses. CERT Systems Inc. has developed a technology that removes fossil fuels from the process of producing ethylene. The technology works at ambient temperatures, uses renewable energy, and produces no harmful emissions. CERT's process could be used to make other carbon-based building block chemicals.
Database migrations can be one of the most annoying problems to deal with for a software engineer. There are a ton of things to consider when doing database migrations. This article discusses the complexities that arise during database migrations. It covers why they can be hard, why nobody wants to work with them, different scenarios, downtime, and more. The article concludes with a list of best practices.
CSS has implemented auto-expanding textareas. It is already available in the Chrome Canary with the web experiments flag enabled. It is unknown whether the feature will be usable across all browsers or if it will ship in the same format.
Sam Bankman-Fried apparently wanted to pay Donald Trump not to run for president. He played a video game during his first TV interview. Bankman-Fried was friends with Tom Brady, who reportedly adored him. He was invited to sponsor the Met Gala as a social experiment. Bankman-Fried faces more than 100 years in prison if convicted. His biggest fear is potentially losing access to the internet.
Meta's Codec Avatars is a research project that aims to revolutionize remote communication using headsets with face-tracking sensors and eventually glasses. A video was recently released showing Mark Zuckerberg being interviewed in VR using the technology. The interview was conducted through a set of Quest Pro headsets, with the interviewer frequently expressing feelings of disbelief at what they were experiencing. The video is available in the article.
AI turns the marginal cost of content to zero and drastically changes workflows, making it likely to be the next dominant layer on which applications are built.
OpenAI is looking to use Apple former chief design officer Jony Ive's design firm LoveFrom to develop OpenAI's first consumer device. The project is aided by over $1 billion in funding from Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son. Ive and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman discussed the product during brainstorming sessions at Ive's San Francisco studio. The device will aim to provide a more natural and intuitive user experience for interacting with artificial intelligence.
Microsoft considered selling Bing to Apple in 2020 in a deal that would have resulted in Bing replacing Google as the default search engine on Apple devices. Talks between the companies were only exploratory and did not progress. Apple did not move forward with the deal due to the money it earned from Google and because it thought that Bing would not be able to compete with Google in quality and capabilities. The Apple/Google deal is currently under scrutiny due to the antitrust trial between Google and the US Department of Justice.
A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket may be launching a spacecraft to explore the metal-rich asteroid Psyche as soon as October 5. The asteroid is estimated to be composed of up to 60% iron-nickel metals. It could be more valuable than the entire world economy. NASA has no plans to mine the asteroid. It will use data from the mission to get a more accurate idea of its potential value and learn more about what Earth's core might be like.
Solar Airship One is a 151-meter-long airship that has its entire upper surface covered in solar film. The airship is able to run on solar power during the day and store enough extra power to continue during the night. Solar Airship One will have an average speed of 83 kilometers per hour. While it will run on renewable energy, the airship still uses 50,000 cubic meters of helium, a completely non-replaceable element.
Unable to access the internet during a flight because of payment portal issues, this author decided to see what data was still available on the Wi-Fi network. They found a repeating successful request that contained data for the plane's altitude, estimated time of arrival, and ground speed. This article breaks down how the author analyzed the request and used the data to find out more about their flight.
CSS subgrid allows track sizing and the sharing of templates and names with nested grids. It allows for variably sized content. This article explains how CSS subgrid works. A list of resources for further reading is provided at the end of the article.
This article looks at the most recent developments in technology and their implications. It covers ChatGPT's new voice and vision abilities, Meta AI, Emu, Meta Smart Glasses, the Quest 3, OpenAI's rumored device, and virtual reality.
Being in a startup can be good because it's very educational and you can make a lot of impact, but there is a lot of financial risk and stress involved and failure is always a possibility. Working in Big Tech feels more organized and benefits include internal transfers, financial stability, perks, and networking. However, employees may feel a lack of purpose, there is a lot of overhead and bureaucracy, and misaligned incentives around performance reviews can create pretty twisted political situations.
Chinchilla 70B, a large language model by DeepMind, can perform lossless compression on images to 43.4% of their original size and audio data to just 16.4% of their raw size.