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TESLA REMOVES STOCK-BASED COMPENSATION THIS YEAR

Tesla has reportedly decided not to give stock-based compensation to employees as part of their annual performance reviews this year. Some employees who were reaching the end of their four-year vesting cycles were given stock refreshers to keep their total compensation competitive. Tesla is still doing modest cost-of-living increases and adjustments to its base salaries. It is unclear whether this will be a new policy going forward. Tesla regularly changes its employee compensations, and not always in a straightforward way.

APPLE PLANNING TO LAUNCH VISION PRO BY FEBRUARY

Apple has ramped up production of the Vision Pro to meet its goal of launching the device by February. Sales of the device will be limited to the US to begin with. Customers will need to purchase or pick up their devices in-store as Apple wants to ensure customers have the right headband size and Light Seal for an appropriate fit. Apple plans to do headset assembly for customers who need custom Zeiss prescription lenses in its retail locations. There probably won't be a launch event for the device.

THE BRAIN-IMPLANT COMPANY GOING FOR NEURALINK’S JUGULAR

Synchron has a brain-computer interface that promises to provide an invaluable communication method to people with severe paralysis without open brain surgery. The device is delivered like a stent, inserted into the jugular vein in the neck and then moved to a blood vessel near the brain's motor cortex. It allows people who suffer from brain-stem stroke or degenerative diseases to do basic computer tasks like sending messages and accessing digital health services without moving a muscle. The company is now in the middle of a US-based feasibility study, which, if successful, could lead to a larger study that will determine whether the device gets approved for clinical use.

WAYMO FINDS THAT ITS DRIVERLESS CARS ‘SIGNIFICANTLY OUTPERFORMED’ HUMANS

A safety study from Waymo found that its driverless cars led to a significant reduction in the rates of police-reported and injury-causing crashes compared to human drivers. There were 85% less injuries for crashes involving the Waymo Driver and 57% fewer police reports. The accidents covered in the study included all crashes, regardless of the vehicle's role in the crash. Waymo is pushing broadly for international standardization for valid analysis of autonomous vehicle crash data.

ADVICE FOR NEW SOFTWARE DEVS WHO'VE READ ALL THOSE OTHER ADVICE ESSAYS

This blog post contains 13 bits of advice for early-career programmers. It considers other similar essays and provides some of the things they missed. The advice includes scrutinizing what you read more carefully, not being worried about learning the 'wrong thing', taking walks, and learning different tools and types of programming to help find what you really like.

FOCUS IS KEY TO CREATING PRODUCT VALUE

This article looks at what happens when you don't focus using a Python project as an example. Focus is key to creating product value with software. Product value is best created by being conscious about goals while prioritizing ruthlessly and choosing boring technology by default.

PONDERING THE BIGGEST ORB

The Sphere is Las Vegas' biggest attraction at the moment. Costing upward of $2 billion to construct, the building is 366 feet tall and 516 feet wide and can host up to 20,000 spectators. The entire outside is a single display 580,000 square feet in size. This article contains a write-up about 'The Sphere Experience', which includes time inside the Sphere's lobby and a viewing of a 50-minute tech demo about the natural world.

MY JAW HIT THE FLOOR WHEN I WATCHED AN AI MASTER ONE OF THE WORLD'S TOUGHEST PHYSICAL GAMES IN JUST SIX HOURS

AI can master the game Labyrinth in just six hours. Labyrinth is an incredibly difficult physical board game that challenges players to navigate a metal ball through a hole-riddled maze by changing the orientation of the game platform using twistable knobs on the side of the game's box frame. It takes fine motor control, dexterity, and a lot of real-time problem-solving to complete the game. The AI was exponentially better than humans at completing the game, with a best time of 14.8 seconds - without cheating.

THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE HAVE REPORTEDLY OVERDOSED ON OZEMPIC

Semaglutide overdoses can resemble hypoglycemia.

ASTON MARTIN, PORSCHE PREVIEW BESPOKE APPLE CARPLAY INTERFACES

Apple is collaborating with automakers to bring brand-distinct design details to the CarPlay environment.

ELECTRIC SCOOTER COMPANY BIRD FILES FOR BANKRUPTCY

Bird was once valued at $2.5 billion by investors.

TOP PAY BY ENGINEERING LEVEL

The top-paying company for entry-level engineers is Jane Street with an L1 total compensation package of $350,000

META’S CTO ON HOW THE GENERATIVE AI CRAZE HAS SPURRED THE COMPANY TO ‘CHANGE IT UP’

An edited conversation with Meta's Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth on the AI craze and where the technology will take the company.

MATH TEAM

A recount of an experience of being in a school math team and the impact it had on their career.

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ZOO DEV LAUNCHED TEXT-TO-CAD

Zoo Dev (previously Kitty Cad) has rebranded and released a new text-to-cad feature. It is a powerful platform that generates 3d assets that are usable for printing or parts.

WAYMO FINDS THAT ITS DRIVERLESS CARS ‘SIGNIFICANTLY OUTPERFORMED’ HUMANS

Waymo's researchers say that its driverless cars have significantly reduced rates of police-reported and injury-causing crashes compared to human drivers. It is pushing broadly for international standardization for valid analysis of autonomous vehicle crash data.

GEMINI PAPER

This 850+ author paper outlines much of the Gemini language modeling effort from Google. It's understandably short on key architectural and dataset details, but gives attribution and evaluation details.

ALIBABA’S FONTDIFFUSER: ONE-SHOT FONT GENERATION

FontDiffuser is a diffusion-based method for automatic font generation, particularly excelling with complex characters and large style variations. It features a Multi-scale Content Aggregation block for better stroke preservation and a Style Contrastive Refinement module for style transfer.

3D STRUCTURE RECONSTRUCTION FROM 2D LANDMARKS

The new 3D-LFM model uses transformers to reconstruct 3D structures from 2D landmarks without needing 'in-correspondence' 3D data. This approach, the first of its kind, efficiently handles varying point numbers, occlusions, and can generalize to unseen categories.

WHISPERPLUS

Advanced speech-to-text processing.

TINYZERO

Easily train AlphaZero-like agents on any environment you want.

SPEECH SEPARATION MODEL

The MossFormer2 model, an advancement of the original MossFormer, offers improved monaural speech separation capabilities.

MULTILINGUAL SCENE TEXT GENERATION

Diff-Text is a new training-free framework for creating photo-realistic images with text in any language. It enhances the Stable Diffusion model's multilingual capabilities by using sketched images as priors.

MY JAW HIT THE FLOOR WHEN I WATCHED AN AI MASTER ONE OF THE WORLD'S TOUGHEST PHYSICAL GAMES IN JUST SIX HOURS

AI can play the game Labyrinth exponentially better than humans, with a best time of just 14.8 seconds. It can learn how to do so in just six hours. Labyrinth is an incredibly difficult physical board game that takes fine motor control, dexterity, and a lot of real-time problem-solving to win.

LARGEST AI IMAGE DATASET REMOVED AFTER DISCOVERY OF CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE MATERIAL

The LAION-5B dataset used by Stable Diffusion and other major AI products have been removed after a Stanford study found that it contained 3,226 suspected instances of child sexual abuse material, 1,008 of which were externally validated.

META’S CTO ON HOW THE GENERATIVE AI CRAZE HAS SPURRED THE COMPANY TO ‘CHANGE IT UP’

Meta's Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth on the AI craze and where the technology will take the company.

TOP PAY BY ENGINEERING LEVEL

The top-paying company for entry-level engineers is Jane Street with an L1 total compensation package of $350,000

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CELESTIA RIVAL AVAIL PARTNERS WITH STARKWARE FOR BLOCKCHAIN DATA

Blockchain data firm Avail, a rival of Celestia, announced a partnership with Starknet to enhance data access for the L2 network. By leveraging Starknet sequencer Madara, Avail seeks to offer data solutions for developers' app chains, potentially cutting costs and enabling more innovation in the ecosystem. The integration is expected to lower data publishing prices by 90% and help achieve quicker transaction finality. Although Avail's testnet will only go live in Q3 2024, developers have immediate access for experimentation.

CHINA VOWS TO CLARIFY WEB3, NFT DEVELOPMENT PATH

China is planning to release a web3 strategy intended to clarify industry objectives. The strategy document will cover innovation, security, and government responsibilities related to crypto. It will also aim to foster new business models and use cases in areas involving NFTs and other decentralized applications.

YOUR STASH: CRYPTOPUNKS721

Yuga has introduced a new platform called 'Your Stash' to address some of the unique features of trading CryptoPunks. Its first function allows for simplified trading of CryptoPunks, a pre-ERC721 standard collection, via a new wrapper dubbed 'CryptoPunks721'. The update offers a streamlined interface for wrapping coupled with batch capabilities for efficient transactions. Your Stash also unveiled a tool for easy migration of Wrapped Punks, with more developments hinted at for the near future.

ONDO BRINGS TREASURY-BACKED TOKENS TO SOLANA

Ondo Finance, a top real-world asset protocol, has expanded its product offerings to Solana. The firm is providing two treasury-backed tokens, OUSG and USDY, diversifying from its prior Ethereum-driven approach. Solana has turned heads recently as its one-week DEX trading volume surpassed Ethereum’s this week, creating a real potential growth opportunity for Ondo's tokenized treasury offerings.

HOW YOU WIN IN A BULL MARKET

This thread outlines tips for navigating the bull market successfully. It recommends self-reflection on past actions, removing the noise from your timeline, understanding the context of market cycles, strategizing, and monitoring emotions. It also advises to follow up-trends, abandon outdated narratives, manage risk intelligently, and recognize when to take profits.

17 INSIGHTS FROM MESSARI’S 2024 CRYPTO THESES

Messari Crypto's much-anticipated annual Crypto Theses report details trends to look for in the year ahead - 2024’s report is finally out. This thread breaks down some of the major takeaways from the report, including continued positive price action for Bitcoin and potential milestones from Ethereum, trends to watch in AI and crypto, and a push towards web3 monetization in gaming. The report also highlights several funds, physical infrastructure networks, and projects to keep an eye on.

TCG CRYPTO YEAR IN REVIEW 2023

TCG Crypto posted a reflective review of the past year, discussing both prior investments in the space and future focus areas. The company looks for opportunities around net new consumer behaviors and platforms driven by blockchain technology, rather than focusing on the technology itself. Its current investments align with existing businesses in its broader portfolio, enhancing them with blockchain tech and blockchain-native companies that could potentially disrupt traditional business models.

BOS: THE UNIVERSAL ACCESS LAYER TO THE BLOCKCHAIN

This article discusses problems caused by the fragmentation of various blockchains - developer tooling, smart contract language, and access to liquidity - and the new Blockchain Operating System (BOS), which addresses these issues. This feature-rich platform aims to tackle these problems by offering greater security, enhancing developer experience, and fostering fast, modular development, positioning it as a universal access layer for different blockchain applications.

PHANTOM ADDS SUPPORT FOR BITCOIN, ORDINALS, AND BRC-20 TOKENS

Phantom, the leading wallet on Solana, announced that it will be supporting Bitcoin, Ordinals, and BRC-20 tokens, aiming for cross-chain interoperability.

LEDGER PROMISES TO MAKE VICTIMS WHOLE AFTER ATTACK

Ledger announced that it is aiming to eliminate the blind-signing feature that contributed to the widespread exploit last week. It also said it would be reimbursing users the $600k in funds lost due to the exploit.

SAGA BLOCKCHAIN LAUNCHES ‘PLAY-TO-AIRDROP’ GAME TOURNAMENTS—HERE'S HOW TO EARN

Saga is offering a 'play-to-airdrop' campaign, rewarding players with SAGA tokens for participating in crypto game competitions ahead of its mainnet launch.

IT’S SOL SEASON

In light of Solana’s recent outperformance and burgeoning ecosystem, this post gives a good overview of important tokens in the ecosystem.

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SKETCH IN 2023: WHAT HAVE WE BEEN UP TO?

Sketch made significant strides in 2023, with updates like enhanced Smart Layout, Figma file imports, and user-friendly feedback tools. It improved workspace organization and introduced new design templates, culminating in its return to the Mac App Store.

INSIDE THE DESIGN OF ALPHAFLY 3, NIKE’S RECORD-SMASHING MARATHON SHOE

Alphafly 3 shoes are Nike's latest running shoes for marathon runners. With their unconventional design, material mix, and knitting, they were crafted with a simple goal in mind: to help runners run faster marathons.

VOLKSWAGEN BOWS TO TOUCHSCREEN CRITICISM, WILL BRING BACK PHYSICAL BUTTONS

After eschewing physical controls in recent releases, Volkswagen will bring physical controls back to future models. Thomas Schäfer, the company's CEO, said the touchscreen design of the Volkswagen ID.3 and Volkswagen Golf damaged the brand, with drivers unsatisfied with having to swipe on menus to turn on lights and complete other simple tasks.

UX/UI DESIGN TRENDS GOING INTO 2024

Every year, we have a lineup of new design trends that look good and stick around and influence other designers to “steal” the trend. The most prominent trends from 2023 that will continue in 2024 are Bento boxes, spatial design with AR/VR, more animations, the end of flat design, the flood of AI design tools, and a more significant focus on accessibility.

MAKING NOISY SVGS

There has been an emergence of texture instead of clean, flat shapes, usually as part of a design’s lighting or shading, and usually a “noisy” or grainy texture. The cool thing about this style of illustrations is that they can be done entirely with SVG.

THE UNSEEN POTENTIAL OF AUGMENTED REALITY

Over the past decade, augmented reality (AR) has evolved from an immature technology to one extending into practical realms like navigation, shopping, and education. Interactive AR could also be used for object identification and explanation, translation, guidance, navigation, reviewing and comparison, and workspace expansion.