TLDR 2021-01-04

Samsung will announce its latest lineup of Galaxy flagship phones on January 14th. It is expected to announce three new smartphones at the event: the Galaxy S21, S21 Plus, and S21 Ultra. Samsung may also announce a new Tile competitor and a new set of Galaxy Buds Pro wireless earbuds. The event teaser video is available in the article.

The Federal Aviation Administration has announced new rules for unmanned aircraft that weigh more than 0.55 pounds and operate around people. The new rules address safety and security concerns around the aircraft and they are the latest in a series of steps to solidify regulations around drone deliveries and flights around the US. It will be two years before the new rules go into effect.

The Holotron is a lower-body robot exosuit that can be worn to simulate some of the forces needed to make virtual reality more realistic and interactive. It features force-feedback that can constrain an avatar depending on the physical constraints of the virtual environment. The Holotron suspends its user in the air while providing the necessary movement to make them feel like they are moving. This allows the user to fully concentrate on controlling the body of their avatar. The Holotron could be used for many applications, including gaming, job training, and controlling telepresence robots. A one-minute video showing the Holotron in action is available in the article.

Soft robots could one day be used for a wide variety of applications, for example, space exploration, surgery, rescue operations, and much more. They are made of squishy materials that enable them to approximate biological functions. It is expected that the market for soft robots will reach $2.16 billion in 2024. Soft robots have flaws, such as being slow to power up, but researchers are developing workarounds to these issues.

The Pile is an 825 GiB language modeling data set consisting of 22 smaller combined datasets. Diversity in data sources improves general cross-domain knowledge and downstream generalization capability, especially for large models. Models trained on Pile have shown moderate improvements in traditional language modeling benchmarks.

TabFS is a browser extension that mounts browser tabs as a filesystem on macOS and Linux systems. It has full support for Chrome, with lesser support for Firefox. TabFS allows you to apply all the existing tools on your computer that deal with files and use them to control and communicate with your browser.

By the second half of 2021, we will see people returning to normal life. However, this will likely not change the behaviors people have adopted during the pandemic and people will continue to do many things from home. Many sectors of the economy will never be the same. The pandemic and the climate crisis will drive people to move to areas less affected by climate change. This will be a huge investible trend for years to come. Cryptocurrency and decentralized organizations will be more common, with the approach expanding into areas beyond the financial sector.

Older employees in tech have had a harder time getting hired or keeping their jobs in recent years, and older startup founders have had difficulty securing funding due to their age. A market research firm decided to investigate the median age of employees at the top tech companies in the US and found that most employees in the tech world are in their late 20s. The resulting chart of the median employee ages at top tech companies is available in the article.