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OpenAI is using GPT-4 to build a scalable, consistent, and customizable content moderation system that can aid in developing policies and swiftly iterating on policy changes.

THINKING FAST AND SLOPES

Prospect theory, an explanation for how people make decisions, may not be entirely applicable to the current economic landscape - embracing both caution and boldness allows people to navigate this new era of uncertainty and capitalize on the opportunities it presents.

HOW CAR THEFT WENT HIGH-TECH

An overview of the vulnerabilities present in modern-day cars.

NETFLIX FINALLY STREAMS VIDEO GAMES, TOO

Netflix has started the first public tests of its cloud-streamed games. Subscribers in Canada and the UK will soon be able to stream Netflix games to select TVs, connected TV devices, and browsers. The two games currently available are Oxenfree and a new title called Molehew's Mining Adventure, a gem-mining arcade game. Players control games on their TVs using their smartphones. A list of compatible devices is available in the article.

APPARENT IMAGES & SPECS OF SAMSUNG HEADSET PROTOTYPE LEAK

Images and specs of a prototype Samsung headset have been leaked. The XR headset uses a new variant of Android. It will reportedly feature four tracking cameras, pancake lenses, dual RGB cameras for color passthrough, a depth sensor, OLED microdisplays, and Samsung's own Exynos 2200 chip. It doesn't have tracked controllers, using hand tracking and eye interaction instead. The headset will likely be in the $1,000-$2,000 range. The leaked images are available in the article.

TOWARDS A METAL-RICH ASTEROID IN OCTOBER

NASA's Psych mission is gearing up for an early October launch. The $985 million mission involves sending an orbiter to rendezvous with the 16 Psych asteroid, which is believed to hold approximately $10,000 quadrillion dollars worth of nickel and iron. It was discovered in 1852 and has a diameter of about 140 miles. If everything runs on schedule, the Psych spacecraft will arrive at the asteroid in around six years.

ALL

A New Zealand-based startup, Kimer Med, is trying to develop a broad-spectrum antiviral. Its current strategy involves targeting a factor in human cells to attack a wide variety of viruses. Kimer's technology triggers a process that kills targeted cells upon detection. While it has shown promise in the lab, the company still has to prove that it works in animals and humans. A broad-spectrum antiviral would save tens of millions of lives and trillions of dollars over the coming decades.

AI TOWN

AI Town is a virtual town where AI characters live and interact with each other. This repository contains a deployable starter kit for easily building and customizing a version of AI Town. The project was inspired by a research paper. It aims to provide a platform with a strong foundation that is meant to be extended.

OUTLINES

Outlines is a library for neural text generation. It helps developers guide text generation to build robust interfaces with external systems. Outlines is compatible with all models. It can be used as a more flexible replacement for the generate method in the transformers library.

INSIDE THE DECLINE OF STACK EXCHANGE

Stack Exchange's library of knowledge is under a Creative Commons license, which means that anyone can use it in any way, even for commercial purposes. A large chunk of its programming-specific data was ingested by AI models. This article looks at Stack Exchange usage and how the introduction of generative AI to the public has affected trends.

MY EVERYDAY LLM USES

This article looks at everyday uses for large language models outside of coding or professional work. The list includes using the models for sorting grocery lists, summarizing book notes, dictionary lookup, turning tasks into subtasks, and as an editor. The article also looks at some of the things that large language models aren't as useful for - generating names, brainstorming, and writing fiction novels.

PROVIDER

Rapottoni, a company that supplies multiple listing services to regional real estate groups nationwide in the US, was likely hit by a ransomware attack.

HERE'S WHAT THEY HAD TO SAY

This Reddit post contains a summary of important points from a conversation with a VP on the Microsoft team responsible for the development of the company's AI tools on AI technologies currently under development, the future of the job market, public policy surrounding AI, predictions for the future, and more.

NON-THOUGHTS ON THE OPEN SOURCE INITIATIVE

While the Open Source Initiative is uniquely positioned to guide discussions on open source and free software, the organization has ties to many companies and its behavior is centered around ease of use for multinational companies rather than developers.

Writing exposes gaps in knowledge that only become clear when explaining things to others.

WHAT EXACTLY ARE THE ECONOMICS OF AI?

This article takes a look at whether AI companies can be profitable and whether the astronomical valuations for generative AI companies are justified.

AS OCTOBER’S ECLIPSE

More details about Humane's mysterious Ai Pin, a device that can apparently replace a smartphone, will be announced on October 14.

SYSTEM AND MORE

Apple is reportedly planning a complete revamp of the Apple Watch for the device's tenth anniversary. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman says that the 'Apple Watch X', which will be released either in 2024 or 2025, will have a thinner casing and different ways for bands to attach to the device. The Apple Watch Series 9 will likely only be a minor refresh. Apple is considering switching the Apple Watch away from annual updates to offer more substantial upgrades on a less frequent cycle.

ALL

Around 11% of packages from Amazon in the US will now arrive without extra packaging. Amazon is aiming to streamline its delivery process, boost sustainability, and appeal to customers who are turned off by brown boxes. Customers can choose whether they want extra packaging or not at checkout on items qualified to ship in their own containers.

WITH CUSTOM AWS CHIPS

Amazon quietly started production of custom silicon in 2013. It has launched its own Arm-based server chip as a rival to x86 CPUs from AMD and Intel. Amazon launched AI-focused chips in 2018, two years before Google announced its first Tensor Processing Unit. This article takes a look at Amazon's strategy to provide the infrastructure for businesses to create generative AI applications.

NEW FORCE OF NATURE DISCOVERED BY SCIENTISTS AT FERMILAB

Scientists at Fermilab have found evidence of muons not behaving as expected by the current physics theory. There is still some uncertainty over the results. It could be a sign of a new force of nature. Muons are fundamental particles similar to electrons but about 200 times as massive. The standard model of physics is unable to account for many phenomena observed in the universe.

METATYPE

Metatype is a declarative API development platform. It uses Typegraphs, programmable virtual graphs describing all of the components in a stack, to enable API, storage, and business logic composition in a type-safe manner. Metatype supports plugins and reusable components. It is still in beta, but most of the core engine is close to production readiness.

THE SOURCE OF READABILITY

Code that is read together should be written together. There is a lot of actionable advice that can be derived from this rule, for example, maintain high cohesion and low coupling, write less code, keep modules deep, and avoid repetition. This article takes a look at the rule and how it results in more readable code.

THERE IS NO HARD TAKEOFF

The information revolution will do for intelligence what the industrial revolution did for energy. Most work used to be done by muscles, now it is not - soon, most thinking won't be done with brains. The change won't happen overnight, but it has already begun. More intelligence will lead to new tricks, but the tricks will get harder and harder to find.

MY $0->$100M->$0 IN 5 YEARS STORY

This Reddit post tells the story of someone who quit their executive job at a FAANG and started a SaaS as a first time founder. It talks about how they scaled, raised money from VCs, and how the advice of VCs caused the business to collapse. The story aims to show another side of the VC startup scene to provide a different perspective in a field that often shows too much survivor bias.

AMAZON WARNS EMPLOYEES WHO DON’T GO TO THE OFFICE ENOUGH

Amazon sent an email to employees who rarely used their workplace ID badges to enter an Amazon office building saying that workers are expected to start coming into the office three or more days a week now.

RELEASE

Mozilla is launching support for an open ecosystem of extensions on Firefox for Android in the coming months - developers can start optimizing their desktop extensions for mobile use right away.

HOW A STARTUP LOSES ITS SPARK

A look at the differences between working at startups vs large companies for engineers.

HOW THE FBI GOES AFTER DDOS CYBERATTACKERS

In this interview, Elliott Peterson, one of the FBI agents who led the investigations around the DDOS attacks that knocked out some of the biggest websites in 2016, discusses his work going after the people behind DDoS services and identifying which services to take down.

SAM BANKMAN-FRIED IS GOING TO JAIL

Prosecutors convinced a judge that Bankman-Fried had fed documents to the media to intimidate a witness.

CARROT PROBLEMS

Anytime someone achieves success in a way they don't want to admit publicly, they have to come up with an excuse, which can mean misleading others into potentially wasting their time or worse.

A MOTHER-DAUGHTER DUO

CEO CLAIMS X, FORMERLY TWITTER, IS CLOSE TO ‘BREAK EVEN’

EXPERIMENTAL INSULIN IMPLANT USES ELECTRICITY TO CONTROL GENES

LUNAR LANDING SINCE 1976

RETAKE

Retake is a hybrid search for Postgres. It accelerates the development of AI applications that require searching, matching, or analyzing database documents by connecting directly to Postgres. Retake can manage separate vector stores and text search engines, upload and embed documents, and reindex data. It ensures that indexed data is always kept in sync and it updates the embedding/vector representation of data behind the scenes whenever data is changed.

THINGS YOU FORGOT (OR NEVER KNEW) BECAUSE OF REACT

MORE REAL

ARE REPORTS OF STACKOVERFLOW’S FALL GREATLY EXAGGERATED?

COMPUTING

THE FUTURE OF TECHNOLOGY LOOKS A LOT LIKE...PIXAR?

A SENIOR ENGINEER/EM JOB SEARCH STORY

CRACKDOWN COMING

RESEARCHERS WATCHED 100 HOURS OF HACKERS HACKING HONEYPOT COMPUTERS

PGAUDIT

This PostgreSQL extension provides detailed session and/or object audit logging via the standard PostgreSQL logging facility.

CODE: FLASHLIGHT, SHORTCUTS, VOICE MEMOS, AND MORE

Apple has released the fourth beta of iOS 17 to developers. There are new code snippets contained within the beta that hint at functionality for the rumored Action button on the upcoming iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max. The iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max's Action button will reportedly replace the Ring/Silent switch and allow users to quickly access various functions and settings without unlocking the device or navigating to an app. There will likely be nine options for features that users can customer and assign to different actions - these are listed in the article.

AN EPILOGUE TO MY TIME WORKING AT TWITTER

This article from Esther Crawford talks about her time working at Twitter. Crawford sold her startup to Twitter in 2020. She describes the experience as both amazing and terrible. The company often felt siloed and bureaucratic and engineers had to act as politicians instead of just building. The article covers topics such as what it is like to work/interact with Elon Musk and the dangers of living in an echo chamber.