TLDR 2020-08-20

Palantir Technologies is relocating its headquarters to Denver, Colorado from Palo Alto, California. It is unclear how many of Palantir's employees will be affected by the move. Reasons for the move include the increasing intolerance and monoculture of Silicon Valley and the high housing prices in the area. Palantir announced in early July that it had filed confidentially for a public stock offering.

Apple hit a market cap of $2 trillion on Wednesday and is the first publicly traded US company to reach the milestone. It broke the barrier just before 11 am with a price of $467.77. Apple first reached a $1 trillion market cap in August 2018. It posted a strong third quarter in late July, reporting $59.7 billion in revenue and double-digit growth in its products and services. While Apple closed many of its retail stores during the quarter, work-from-home trends and strong online sales boosted overall operations.

DARPA's AlphaDogfight Trials is a simulated aerial dual that will pit AI F-16 pilots against each other and then against a human pilot to determine the viability of relying on machines in aerial combat. The three-day virtual games will feature eight teams, each using a different methodology to build their algorithms. Using divergent methods will help researchers identify the performance of different algorithms, further understand how different areas of AI work, and identify future areas of research. The guest list is full, with around 5,000 people on the waiting list to view the event.

A California-based company called NoTraffic is rolling out smart traffic lights in Phoenix at a few key intersections to improve traffic flow and reduce vehicle and pedestrian delays. NoTraffic claims up to a 40% reduction in vehicle delay time once its system has been deployed. One feature of the traffic grid management system is that it can give first-responders a clear path through busy commuter corridors. NoTraffic's system tracks road assets and calculates the most optimal configuration for an intersection, taking into account safety considerations like vehicles' blind spots.

This website contains tips, tricks, and in-depth guides on Puppeteer and Playwright. Puppeteer is a Headless Chrome Node.js API and Playwright is a Node.js library to automate Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit. Recent guides cover topics such as clicking and typing, navigating and waiting, and working with selectors.

Conductor is a Workflow Orchestration engine that can orchestrate microservices-based process flows from the cloud. It features a distributed server ecosystem, a JSON DSL based blueprint, a simple interface to connect workers, the ability to scale to millions of concurrent running process flows, and more.

Fortnite was removed from Apple's App Store last week due to terms-of-service violations. While users can't install the game on their devices anymore, Apple has no way of removing existing installations. Some iPhone owners who already had the app installed listed their devices on eBay with listing prices as high as $10,000. Apple is working with Epic to resolve the issue, so it is unlikely that Fortnite will stay banned forever.

A botnet that focuses on infecting SSH servers has been discovered targeting millions of servers around the world. The botnet distributes its administration among many infected nodes rather than relying on a central server, making it harder to spot and more difficult to shut down. There have been at least 20 versions of the software binary since January. Researchers have developed a program to analyze the botnet. Servers that don't have both a strong password and a cryptographic certificate may already be infected with the malware. A detailed report is linked. The report includes a script that can spot infected machines.