TLDR 2024-06-19

Nvidia is now the most valuable public company in the world. Its market cap surpassed Microsoft's $3.32 trillion on Tuesday, reaching a high of $3.34 trillion. Nvidia's shares are up more than 170% so far this year. Its market cap hit $3 trillion for the first time earlier this month. Nvidia's rise has been so rapid the company has yet to be added to the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the stock benchmark of the 30 most valuable US companies.

Apple will repeatedly release a cheaper, cut-down version of the Apple Vision Pro at the end of 2025. Development work on a second generation of the high-end model of the Vision Pro has been shelved. Reports suggest that the cheaper Vision Pro will cost around $1,500. Apple is apparently struggling to find ways to cut the price and weight of the device without sacrificing too much of the experience.

A recent study, which analyzed over 37,000 accidents involving autonomous and human-driven vehicles, found that while autonomous vehicles (AVs) were generally less prone to accidents than human-driven vehicles, they significantly underperformed against humans in some situations. The study found that level 4 AVs were over five times more likely to be involved in an accident at dawn and dusk and that the odds of an accident during a turn were almost double in AVs compared to human-driven vehicles. It highlights the need for better data and stronger intelligence for decision-making.

Scientists in the UK are developing very precise new sensors using quantum mechanics to create a quantum compass - an instrument that exploits the behavior of subatomic matter to accurately pinpoint their locations no matter where they're placed. This could result in a new generation of underground and underwater sensors that can provide location information without interference from weather and other obstructions. Their device could be ready for widespread use in just a few years. It works well in a stable laboratory environment but needs to be tested in more extreme conditions to be turned into a transportable, standalone device that can be used in remote or complex locations.

Confusion, which costs time and money, is caused by high cognitive load. Cognitive load is how much a developer needs to think in order to complete a task. Developers should constantly ask themselves whether they are embedding excessive cognitive load into their code as far more time is spent reading and understanding code than writing it. They should make things easy to understand to avoid creating unnecessary cognitive load for themselves and their colleagues.

Meta's Threads API is now available to all developers. The API will enable creators, developers, and brands to build their own unique integrations, manage their Threads presence at scale, and easily share content with their communities. It allows people to publish posts, fetch content, set reply and quote controls, retrieve and respond to replies, hide and unhide specific replies, and retrieve key metrics. Links to developer documentation and a sample app are available.

This article looks at the global digital architecture required to make the internet a public interest technology. It looks at what should be considered as digital infrastructure and the consequences of its capture, the problems with current approaches to internet standards, limits to the main approach to digital regulation that states are deploying, how to approach the governance of transnational public infrastructure, how to pay for this, and more. While creating a public interest internet would be difficult, the alternative, keeping our digital infrastructure entirely in the hands of a few megacorporations, could be more costly.

Butterfly is a social network made up of AI characters. Its app allows users to create AI characters, or Butterflies, which generate photos and interact with other accounts on their own. There's no limit to the number of Butterflies users can create. These AI profiles coexist with human accounts, which can also post and comment. The app provides a peek into a somewhat dystopian future where AIs start invading social media feeds - Mark Zuckerberg shared in September that Meta is building an AI Studio that would let users build AIs that can post and interact with people on their behalf.

Whee is an app for sharing photos with close friends.

GitHub Copilot Workspace failed a super simple task for this review - in every way it could at every step.

Extensions in Visual Studio Code can do pretty much whatever they want, they automatically update, publisher accounts are too easy to verify, the code shipped in an update can differ from what's on GitHub, and there's no way to verify the data being used in the extension store indicating popularity or trust-worthiness.

Elon Musk is pushing to launch X payment services, arguably one of the reasons he paid so much to acquire Twitter in 2022, by the end of 2024.

Apple has rejected the UTM emulator app from its App Store and all third-party app stores in the EU by refusing to notarize it.

Meta's Reality Labs is undergoing its biggest restructuring in years - it will separate into two organizations: Wearables and Metaverse.