Apple is reportedly investigating 'electrically induced adhesive debonding' technology to make iPhone batteries more replaceable. The technology would allow a battery to be dislodged from its chassis with a small jolt of electricity to the battery. It could debut with at least one of the iPhone 16 models this year.
SpaceX will sell insider shares at $112 each in a tender offer that values the company at close to $210 billion. The company was valued at $180 billion in December. The new valuation is a record for an American private company. It puts SpaceX on par with some of the world's largest publicly traded companies by market capitalization. Terms on the tender offer haven't been finalized - the size of the offer could change depending on interest from both insider sellers and buyers.
DAWN is a project from Synhelion that aims to remove the dependency on fossil fuels from the transport sector, particularly in aviation. It uses a 65-foot-high solar tower surrounded by a mirror field that concentrates solar rays to produce synthetic fuels using solar heat. The tower has an energy storage system that allows it to generate solar fuel even when there's no sunlight. DAWN is scheduled to begin production in the latter half of the year. Synhelion says DAWN will produce several thousand liters of fuel per year.
Astronomers have found a galaxy that was already shining with intense starlight when the universe was only 290 million years old. The earliest, most distant galaxy yet found, JADES-GS-z14-0 is one of a string of discoveries enabled by the James Webb Space Telescope that challenge conventional models of how the first stars and galaxies formed. The discovery proves that luminous galaxies were already in place 300 million years after the Big Bang and are more common than what was expected. Galaxy formation models will need to address the existence of such large and luminous galaxies so early in cosmic history.
Dorkly is a free feature flag system for LaunchDarkly's open source SDKs. It allows developers to implement feature flagging consistently across dozens of languages. Dorkly was designed to fit into existing workflows. It aims to be a simple feature flagging system without the cognitive load of yet another tool.
Corcel is a collection of PHP classes that provides a fluent interface for connecting and getting data directly from a WordPress database. It allows WordPress to be used as a backend. Corcel can be used with any PHP project that uses Composer.
Some popup villages have seen hundreds of people from the internet gather for multiple months at a time. These gatherings are long enough to build relationships but short enough to not require permanent relocation. People can join these communities for however long they want, creating an opportunity for a demand-first approach to prototyping permanent places. This essay looks at successful popup villages, why they work, and where they could go next.
CriticGPT is a new AI model from OpenAI designed to identify mistakes in code generated by ChatGPT. Based on the GPT-4 family of large language models, it analyzes code and points out potential errors, making it easier for humans to spot mistakes that might otherwise go unnoticed. CriticGPT was trained on a large number of inputs containing deliberately inserted mistakes. Its capabilities extend beyond just code review - it is able to identify errors made by ChatGPT in some other tasks as well. OpenAI plans to integrate CriticGPT-like models into its RLHF labeling pipeline to provide its trainers with AI assistance.
The Meta Large Language Model Compiler is a suite of models designed to emulate the compiler, predict optimal passes for code size, and disassemble code.
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