Today's big tech job options offer great compensation, incredible platforms for scale and impact, and slow but consistent growth over time. However, the kind of growth most companies experienced over the last few decades simply cannot happen again, rocket-ride careers are largely over, and there is increasing bureaucracy in the industry. Most of big tech is still laying off or not hiring and there is increasing return to office pressure. Working with big tech would suit people looking for stability, new graduates, and those looking for a path to retirement. Those who can afford higher risk, people who have already received credentials from a big tech job, and anyone who cannot stand being part of a large, slow system should look elsewhere.
2024.07.11·threadreaderapp.com·2 min read·TLDR Sponsored
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2024.07.11·brilliant.org·Sponsor·TLDR AMD is buying Finnish AI startup Silo AI for $665 million in an all-cash acquisition expected to close in the second half of this year.
2024.07.11·arstechnica.com·4 min read·TLDR While humans have an amazing ability to make meaning from the world, create stories to construct understanding, and search for patterns that may reveal larger truths, these mental efforts are often flawed, arbitrary, and incomplete.
2024.07.11·nautil.us·14 min read·TLDR Apple expects that iPhone 16 shipments will be about 10% higher than its 2023 figures.
2024.07.11·appleinsider.com·2 min read·TLDR Spotify's recent launch of comments on podcasts is another step towards making the app a social network centered around audio.
2024.07.11·techcrunch.com·5 min read·TLDR The first experiment involves using AI to help someone unskilled in molecular biology perform basic biomedical tasks.
2024.07.11·links.tldrnewsletter.com·2 min read·TLDR Wikipedia administrator David Gerard goes out of his way to provide interviews to journalists who write on topics he's passionate about - then he adds just the right quotes from those sources to Wikipedia articles about those topics and protects those additions from any who might question them.
2024.07.11·tracingwoodgrains.com·82 min read·TLDR The Hugging Face team has released an extremely powerful and strong math model.
Anthropic's new features in Claude allow developers to automate prompt engineering, improving AI application development by generating, testing, and refining prompts with quick feedback.
2024.07.11·techcrunch.com·2 min read·TLDR AI Microsoft and Apple have opted not to join OpenAI's board due to regulatory scrutiny, with Microsoft stepping down from its observer role and Apple reversing plans to become an observer.
2024.07.11·siliconangle.com·2 min read·TLDR AI Anole is an open autoregressive multimodal model built on Meta's Chameleon model. This work adds image generation capabilities back into the model with targeted fine-tuning.
2024.07.11·arxiv.org·21 min read·TLDR AI Researchers introduce a new reinforcement learning framework to improve personalized text-to-image generation.
2024.07.11·arxiv.org·19 min read·TLDR AI PerlDiff is a method that improves the precision of street view image generation by integrating 3D geometric information.
2024.07.11·arxiv.org·18 min read·TLDR AI From the creator of ControlNet, IC-Light, and many other image generation systems, Paints UNDO is a system where a model creates strokes that are used to recreate an image. Interestingly, unlike previous stroke systems, this model can undo strokes and often rethinks its approach entirely part way through - very similarly to a human artist.
2024.07.11·github.com·GitHub repository·TLDR AI Scalable Rectified Flow Transformers are used, in part, for Stable Diffusion 3. This repository is a minimal implementation of this that also includes muP hyperparameter sweeps.
2024.07.11·github.com·GitHub repository·TLDR AI A framework for serving and evaluating LLM routers.
2024.07.11·github.com·GitHub repository·TLDR AI SuperFlow is a new framework that enhances 3D perception in autonomous driving by using consecutive LiDAR-camera pairs for spatiotemporal pretraining.
2024.07.11·arxiv.org·38 min read·TLDR AI One popular area of VC investing is building the “picks and shovels” for AI (e.g. model fine-tuning, observability, and inference). VCs are betting that companies will not want to build things in-house as they add AI to their products. The TAM for AI inference is quite constrained. VCs need to believe in massive TAM expansion for their investments to pay off. While AI inference platforms are a boon for startups in the short term, they are detrimental to startups over longer periods.
2024.07.11·links.tldrnewsletter.com·8 min read·TLDR AI Cyclists in San Francisco have reported close encounters and safety concerns with Waymo's and Cruise's autonomous vehicles. Nearly 200 complaints have been made to the California DMV highlighting erratic driving and near-misses involving these self-driving cars. While the companies claim their vehicles have enhanced safety features, the incidents raise questions about their readiness for broader deployment amidst increased regulatory scrutiny.
2024.07.11·yahoo.com·8 min read·TLDR AI Sponsored
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2024.07.11·events.oup.com·Sponsor·TLDR AI OpenAI and Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) are collaborating to explore safe applications for AI in bioscientific research, with a focus on using models like GPT-4o to assist in laboratory tasks through multimodal capabilities such as vision and voice.
2024.07.11·links.tldrnewsletter.com·3 min read·TLDR AI You can speed up model initialization dramatically without much loss in tokens per second by moving some lazy loading to the model on the first pass.
Remember anything with a real-time, on-device AI assistant.
The German state of Saxony's government's offloading of Bitcoin seized from a movie piracy website continues, with an additional 1,127 BTC transferred to exchanges on Wednesday. This brings the total sell volume to over $340 million. The state still holds over $1 billion in confiscated BTC. It is expected to continue selling, despite some criticism from government officials.
Electric Capital's Crypto Market Map tracks over 1,500 significant crypto projects organized into six tech layers and 137 categories. The map, which shows the rapid growth and specialization of the industry since 2019, highlights core infrastructure, scaling, interoperability, developer tools, protocols, and applications. Despite its comprehensive scope, the map remains in beta. Electric Capital is inviting community contributions for further improvement.
This mechanism of selling block building and execution rights in advance is the latest development in enshrined proposer builder separation for Ethereum. In this model, builders purchase a proposal slot, with the final price dynamically determined by the amount of outstanding purchases. The payment is burned, similar to EIP-1559.
Defi Llama has added support for narrative tracking, giving analysts the average performance per category weighted by market capitalization.
Ethereum maintained its dominance among Layer 1 blockchains in the first half of 2024, while Solana saw a resurgence. Bitcoin enjoyed renewed interest due to Ordinals and Layer 2 solutions. Startups are increasingly focused on infrastructure, DeFi, payment, and AI x crypto products. There has been a noticeable geographic shift toward Asia and Africa due to regulatory challenges in the US.
Uniswap's Permit2 is a novel way to improve UX for ERC-20 token transfers. Instead of approving a transfer to an individual smart contract, users grant a central Permit2 contract transfer authority and then perform a signature-based approval to transfer to specific contracts.
The slot-to-ping (s2p) ratio is the ratio of the block production time to the time it takes for the block to reach other validators. A smaller s2p promotes centralization, as delays in block production times lead to higher returns by allowing producers to include more blocks. block-bits-per-slot-time against propagation/execution bandwidth must also be considered as it considers block data transfers instead of assuming it is always a tiny fraction of the slot time.
Vitalik Buterin is urging the Ethereum network to implement automated responses to potential 51% attacks to reduce the reliance on social consensus and improve the network's resilience. He also highlighted the importance of adopting light clients, ensuring quantum resistance, and simplifying protocols for enhanced security and usability.
A new proposal for the Arbitrum DAO that aims to enhance the predictability of its voting processes by establishing a regular schedule for posting proposals and incorporating a holiday break.
2024.07.11·forum.arbitrum.foundation·7 min read·TLDR Crypto The biggest issue facing NFTs today is not a lack of use cases but the need for better infrastructure, or "rails," to support them.
Bitcoin's security model is broken due to the diminishing effects of the halving on mining rewards and the network's present overpayment for security.
Blockchains provide objective, strict consensus, whereas AGI has more complex, subjective consensus and is therefore better than blockchain.
Serif has introduced a six-month free trial for its Affinity creative suite, an alternative to Adobe's Mac, Windows, and iPad design apps. Despite concerns about pricing changes post-Canva acquisition, Affinity retains a one-time purchase pricing model starting at $69.99 per app. Affinity is committed to creating flexible, professional design solutions.
Netflix is set to open Netflix House, an immersive retail and entertainment venue based on its hit series, at King of Prussia Mall in Pennsylvania and Galleria Dallas in Texas. The venue will offer experiences that feature sets, games, restaurants, and shops inspired by shows like Bridgerton and Squid Game. The location will span over 100,000 square feet and the experiences will rotate year-round. Opening in 2025, the concept aims to bring Netflix's beloved stories to life in new and ever-changing ways.
The upcoming iOS 18 introduces an integrated call recording feature within the Phone app, eliminating the need for third-party solutions and allowing users to create transcripts directly on their devices. Apple Intelligence on newer models like the iPhone 15 Pro will offer AI-powered summaries of these transcripts that can be stored in Apple Notes. The call recording and transcript feature will support multiple languages and territories.
Figma's annual design conference, Config 2024, attracted over 10,000 attendees with its vibrant branding, which included breakdancing and Figma-branded merchandise. The ten-month visual identity project extended Figma's shape-based language with transforming glyphs. It was designed mainly in-house, with the Danish team Relay assisting with motion design. The project featured an open film to captivate attendees through abstract shapes and transformations.
Figma's new AI features, particularly its 'make' tooling and layer renaming, sparked mixed reactions in the design community. While some functionalities are practical, there needs to be more concern over the impact on creativity and job security. The core issue is the commoditization of design, as AI-generated content risks diluting originality. Exploring how to maintain human uniqueness in design is crucial amidst these changes.
Trust is crucial for high-performing teams, fostering collaboration, open communication, and risk-taking. It can be cultivated by making work enjoyable, promoting learning, and encouraging connections. Practical tools for building trust include quarterly planning sessions, defining areas of ownership, regular check-ins, collaborative work, and open communication.
2024.07.11·links.tldrnewsletter.com·7 min read·TLDR Design A collection of product design exercises for junior designers to improve their design skills. Each exercise comes with detailed instructions and an explanation of the exercise's objective.
Repper lets you create seamless patterns from any image. It supports bitmap and vector styles and offers live previews.
Studio.ai is a web design tool with AI capabilities. It allows users to create and edit sites effortlessly using voice or text commands, resulting in a seamless experience.
Modular design breaks systems down into smaller, self-contained units, enhancing flexibility and adaptability in website design. Despite challenges like handling edge cases, it offers efficiency, scalability, and a strong focus on user experience, enabling the creation of adaptable websites that meet diverse client needs.
2024.07.11·links.tldrnewsletter.com·4 min read·TLDR Design Cognitive load is the mental effort required to process and interact with an interface. Intrinsic cognitive load involves necessary information processing, while extraneous load includes unnecessary elements that distract users. Reducing cognitive load through effective design enhances user experience and learning.
In 2015, a passionate critique on icon fonts went viral, sparking heated debates and mixed feedback. In this post, the author reflects on the backlash and the lessons learned about effective communication and critique. He emphasizes a more positive and persuasive approach to technical discussions by sharing personal experiences and promoting the benefits of alternatives like SVGs.