TLDR 2018-10-12

Privacy-focused search engine Duck Duck Go just hit 30 million searches a day, after having just hit 20 million searches a day last year. The company has been profitable since 2014, and estimates that it has 25 million users. Increased awareness for online privacy may help Duck Duck Go compete against Google, and the company recently raised $10 million in external investment.

Facebook is rolling out a new feature called 3D photos, which uses AI to make it so you can add make-believe depth to photos. The effect basically allows you to rotate photos and peek behind objects (there's an example gif inside), it's pretty cool kind of like looking through a window and being able to see a picture from different angles. Currently the feature only works on iPhone 7 and above, but will eventually be rolled out ot other phones.

Google has a new feature that lets you screen out spam calls and answer calls with Google Assistant. Here's a video of someone demoing this new functionality!

This thread is about the career paths of engineers who left Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, or Google. A lot of interesting stories, perspectives on what's importance in ones career, and advice for finding a job that fits you.

This is a handy weekly roundup of apps, scripts, plugins, and other tools that front end designers will be interested in. It's curated by Louis Lazaris of Impressive Webs.

The UK Parliament will be questioning Pepper, a robot capable of recognizing human emotions and mood, as part of its inquiry into robots and artificial intelligence. Pepper was originally designed to care for the elderly, and while the particular lines of questioning are unknown, the chair of the committee doing the questioning expressed concern about robot and AI driven job losses, saying "The fourth industrial revolution is possibly the most important challenge facing our nation over the next 10, 20 to 30 years. This is not about someone bringing an electronic toy robot and doing a demonstration, it's about showing the potential of robotics and artificial intelligence and the impact it has on skills."

Waymo just announced that it hit 10 million miles in real world testing of its self-driving cars. However, the company also uses a simulator to drive 10 million test miles per day, for situations where it would be too dangerous to do real world testing (for example, in the simulator they can test their software in scenarios where pedestrians suddenly jump out at the car). To explore more corner cases, Waymo uses "fuzzing" a technique where they rerun scenarios but add random variations each time, to see if these variations cause things to break or cars to crash. The company also has 400 people in Phoenix, Arizona using completely driverless taxis for their daily drives.

Robotics company Boston Dynamics has now made a humanoid robot that can run and jump smoothly through a parkour course. The robot moves in a very human like way.