TLDR Daily Update 2019-01-23

Apple Pay is coming to Target, Taco Bell, Jack in the Box, Speedway, and HyVee. Now they are in 74 of the top 100 merchants in the US and 65% of all retail locations. Apple Pay is now rolling out overseas, launching in Germany last December.

Uber's rewards program is now available in most major cities across the US. It will roll out internationally once it's nailed the user experience. Perks include Uber credits, priority support, no surge pricing, and high rollers can even get a dedicated 24/7 phone support line.

The European Space Agency has signed a one-year contract to study and prepare for a mission to go to the moon to mine regolith. Regolith is an ore that you can extract water and oxygen from, so mining it would be a key component of building a permanent moon colony.

NASA is attempting to knock a small asteroid off course in October 2022, in order to test whether we will be able to protect Earth from a future asteroid impact if we need to. The asteroid, Didymoon, is about 150 meters wide. NASA will launch a 500kg spacecraft at the asteroid and attempt to hit it to alter its course.

This is a tool that gives you a real browser preview inside your VSCode editor so you can debug in real time. It uses a headless Chrome instance under the hood.

This is a library open soured by Facebook that represents sentences in a language agnostic way, so you can easily translate sentences into many languages including ones where training data is extremely limited. It's built on top of PyTorch.

Google has proposed a change to Chromium (the engine that runs the Chrome web browser) that would kill ad-blocking extensions like uBlock Origin and uMatrix. This change would have performance benefits, but would also greatly limit what adblockers are able to block. This is just a proposal at the moment, so it's still possible Google could change their mind.