TLDR 2020-05-01

OpenAI Jukebox 🎵, Walmart 2hr groceries 🛍️, NASA picks SpaceX & Blue Origin 🚀

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Big Tech & Startups

Walmart is piloting a pricier 2-hour ‘Express’ grocery delivery service (4 minute read)

Walmart has introduced a new service that allows customers to receive grocery deliveries in two hours or less for an extra $10 on top of the usual delivery fee. The service has been tested across 100 stores since mid-April and will be expanded to up to 2,000 stores in the next few months. During the pilot, customers received deliveries within 55 minutes. To ensure stock levels for physical shoppers, Walmart will remove stock from the online grocery service when stock becomes limited.

OpenAI introduces Jukebox, a new AI model that generates genre-specific music with lyrics (2 minute read)

Jukebox is a new generative model by OpenAI that can create music. The model is able to generate lyrics, although the lyrics need to be modified. Jukebox can generate music in different artists’ styles and genres, but the music it generates misses some familiar larger musical structures, such as choruses that repeat. A link to Jukebox’s project page, which contains samples, is available in the article.
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Science & Futuristic Technology

Musk's SpaceX, Bezos' Blue Origin land contracts to build NASA's astronaut moon lander (3 minute read)

SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Dynetics were selected on Thursday by NASA to build lunar landing systems capable of carrying astronauts to the moon by 2024. The contract, worth $967 million, will be split between the three companies. Boeing proposed a concept for the project last year but was not selected. It lost another contract to SpaceX last month, with NASA noting that Boeing’s proposal was the most expensive and lowest-rated under the Mission Suitability factor.

The World’s Biggest Social Virtual Reality Gathering Is Happening Right Now (6 minute read)

Virtual Market 4 is a Japanese expo that features virtual apparel and avatars. It is currently being held in the VRChat ecosystem. The event has drawn the attention of big brands and has created an almost CES-like feel. VRChat is the most popular social VR application, comparable to a modern Second Life. Virtual Market 3 hosted more than 710,000 people, and organizers are expecting more than a million visitors this year.
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Programming, Design & Data Science

Calico (GitHub Repo)

Calico is a utility that is cat for colors. It accepts delimited hex colors or the GPL palette format as input, and the output is highly configurable. Calico can modify the hue, saturation, and luminosity values of all colors in the palette using a primitive command language.

Rules of thumb for a 1x developer (22 minute read)

A 10x developer is a developer who is thought to be as productive as 10 others in their field. Not all developers can produce that level of work consistently. This article discusses general rules of thumb for developers that help to build some structure and consistency in their work. These rules allow everything to run smoothly and with less effort. The 20 rules discussed cover productivity and learning, programming languages, technology choices, testing, DevOps, security, design, and project management.
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Miscellaneous

Neural net-generated memes are one of the best uses of AI on the internet (1 minute read)

A website from Imgflip automatically generates captions for memes using a neural network. Users can pick from 48 meme templates and they can generate as many captions as they want. The neural network was trained using images uploaded to Imgflip's meme maker. Memes containing profanity were not filtered out of the training data, so the generated memes may contain adult language. A link to the generator and examples of generated memes are available in the article.

This Tech Conference Is Being Held on an Animal Crossing Island (1 minute read)

A free tech conference called Deserted Island DevOps was held on April 30th. The event was held inside the game Animal Crossing and it was streamed live on Twitch.tv. Speakers held talks on an Animal Crossing island build specifically for the conference. More than 1,000 people registered for the event,
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