TLDR 2019-10-24

Swipe Night is a new four-part video series that was released by Tinder this month. An episode aired every Sunday during October in the US and was only available for 6 hours. During each episode, users were able to make choices by swiping left or right. These choices affected the rest of the story. Users were matched with other users depending on the choices they made. Matches on Tinder jumped 26 percent as a result, and messages increased by 12 percent. Tinder is planning an international rollout of the series in February 2020. The plot of the story centers around an apocalyptic scenario where a comet is set to destroy Earth in three hours.

SpaceX plans to offer Starlink's broadband services to customers in mid-2020. It will require six to eight launches of 60 satellites per launch to get the service up and running. SpaceX has applied for the ability to launch up to 42,000 satellites into orbit. 60 satellites were launched in May. Three of those satellites failed, and two satellites were taken out of orbit to prove that SpaceX had the ability to remove them if necessary. The remaining satellites appear to be working. Elon Musk recently sent a tweet using a connection provided by the Starlink system. SpaceX still needs to finish developing its user terminal and sort out pricing and distribution before it will be available to customers.

A new Quantum Stealth material developed by Canada's Hyperstealth Biotechnology is able to make anything behind it seem invisible. Hyperstealth Biotechnology manufactures camouflage uniforms for militaries across the globe. The material is paper-thin, doesn't require a power source, and is inexpensive. It bends light around the target, making it seem to disappear. This includes ultraviolet, infrared, or shortwave infrared light. Hyperstealth has released more than 100-minutes of footage describing and demonstrating the material. The video shows the material hiding a scaled-down tank and a small jet. A one-minute video is available in the article demonstrating the use of the material.

Google has officially announced that it has achieved quantum supremacy. The paper was accidentally published exactly a month ago, but now that it is official, the full details of the research are available to the public. Google's 54-qubit Sycamore processor was able to perform a calculation in 200 seconds that would have taken the world's most powerful supercomputer 10,000 years to compute. IBM is disputing Google's claims, saying that the same calculation can actually be completed in 2.5 days on a classical system, rather than 10,000 years. According to IBM, Google failed to fully account for plentiful disk storage.

Zipline is a Pythonic algorithmic trading library. It is currently used in Quantopian, a free platform for building and executing trading strategies. Zipline allows users to focus on algorithm development by providing easy access to analysis tools through the use of standard libraries.

Zero is a graphics pipeline implemented in JavaScript and rendered to the terminal. It uses JavaScript to replicate the functionality of a GPU, so no GPU is required. Zero is available for Windows, OSX, and Linux terminals.

Edward Snowden was a Central Intelligence Agency employee and subcontractor. In 2013, he copied and leaked highly classified information from the National Security Agency. In this interview with Joe Rogan, Snowden calls out former President Barack Obama for growing the surveillance state and enabling illegal activity from intelligence agencies. Obama had campaigned against the wiretapping of the Bush administration, yet after taking office, he expanded the programs. Snowden currently lives a relatively normal life in Russia and has stated that he would return to the US if he was able to be guaranteed a fair trial.