TLDR 2020-07-13

A leaked video of the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 5G handset suggests that the device might be revealed at Samsung's upcoming August 5th Galaxy Unpacked event. The device appears visually similar to the Galaxy Z Flip clamshell but with a faster processor and 5G. A new 'mystic bronze' color will be available. The video, which shows the phone from practically every angle, is available in the article.

Signal has been a favorite of privacy advocates ever since Edward Snowden endorsed the app. One of the reasons the app was highly recommended was because it did not collect much information from users. Signal developers have implemented a new requirement for users to create a PIN to activate an account data recovery feature. The new feature stores users' contacts, profile information, settings, and blocked users list on Signal's servers. Security experts are concerned as it demonstrates that the developers have changed their stance on storing user information.

Voyage is a startup that plans to offer a taxi service in The Villages, a large retirement community in Florida. Its vehicles have a speed of up to 25 miles per hour and they are remotely operated using a special Telessist Pod. The Telessist pod was created to mirror the experience of driving a real car as closely as possible for the remote operators. Voyage's cars feature multiple cellular connections and a system called Remote Drive Assist in case the cars lose their wireless connections. They also feature a high-tech emergency braking system called Shield that is powered by lidar.

Elastagen is an Australian company that has perfected a technique for producing elastin, a protein that can stretch to eight times its length. Elastin occurs anywhere in the body that requires stretching and recoil and accounts for the elastic properties of many of the body's tissues. Elastagen produces tropoelastin, a precursor of elastin, by putting the genetic instructions for human tropoelastin into a bacterium. The resulting protein can be developed into topical gels, surgical glue, and could also potentially be used for other applications in stem cell and regenerative medicine research.

Being a software engineer doesn't just mean a lifetime of working in software development. Many other jobs require software development skills, for example, technical writing, developer marketing, and project management. This article has a list of 23 alternative career paths for software developers with each section describing the role and how to start getting into the field.

As a company grows, so does its costs, especially when they involve several GPU-intensive ML models. One strategy to reduce costs by up to 90% is by using spot instances. Companies do not always need to use GPU instances and it is worth experimenting with other systems. Optimizing the model itself can also bring significant cost reductions, even if each change is only slightly more efficient. Alternatively, investing in owning the server equipment itself can lead to huge savings over time.

The Survival Condo is a former Atlas Missile silo turned luxury condominium complex. It is an apocalypse bunker that features a swimming pool, rock climbing wall, hydroponics and aquaculture setup, and more. At a secret location around three hours drive from Kansas City airport, the heavily guarded facility is 200 feet underground. A unit in this complex is $1 million, plus an extra $2,500 a month to cover living expenses. It is built to withstand 12-kiloton nuclear warheads dropping half a mile away. The owner of the Survival Condo plans to build another facility around three times larger and they already have a waiting list of people interested in buying the new units.

While GPT was only trained using samples of what humans think, it was able to learn the underlying principle behind some concepts and extrapolate to tasks that it had never seen before. This suggested that GPT exhibited primitive intelligence of the same type as human intelligence. It was able to imitate the underlying type of thinking of what it was trained on rather than just copying observed behavior. GPT-4 has the potential to imitate superintelligence, potentially creating hypotheses and ideas for potential scientific breakthroughs.