TLDR Daily Update 2021-09-27

Day is a new standalone calendar app from Yahoo. It will be designed by the same developer as the popular Sunrise calendaring app that was sold to Microsoft for over $100 million. Day will be built independently with no Yahoo branding or integrations. It will be able to integrate with email and other tools. The service is currently invite-only.

Tesla has begun rolling out a Full Self Driving beta button for drivers to test out the technology before its wider release. The company will assess driver behavior for a week before allowing them to use the software. Critics are accusing Tesla of irresponsible marketing as FSD technology could be dangerous if misused. Tesla has been unresponsive to official recommendations for improvements by the National Transportation Safety Board.

Scientists have managed to 3D print living, functioning mouse brain cells using a new laser technique. Most of the neurons survived for over two days, making them viable tools for preclinical research. The team hopes that the technique can help improve medical research once it is able to print human neurons. Using 3D-printed human neurons would reduce the number of animals killed while also making research more accurate, as treatments that work on one species don't always perform as well in others.

OpenAI has developed an AI model that can summarize books of arbitrary length. It works by summarizing small sections of each book and then repeating the process to create higher-level summaries. The model was trained with a combination of reinforcement learning and recursive task decomposition. While the model successfully generated summaries containing much of the important information in each book, some statements were inaccurate due to a lack of context, and the summaries often read more like a list of events rather than a coherent summary. OpenAI has not released the source code or training dataset for the model.

Partytown is a library that helps relocate resource-intensive scripts into a web worker. It helps speed up sites by offloading third-party scripts off the main thread. Partytown can also sandbox third-party scripts, allowing developers to control what the scripts can execute.

This repository contains a complete study plan to become a Machine Learning Engineer. It is designed to equip students with enough theoretical and practical experience to get started in the industry. The course only links to free resources.

Over four years ago, the US Department of Justice took down AlphaBay in the biggest dark web market bust in history. The market's number-two administrator has relaunched AlphaBay with revamped technical protections. Users can now only use Monero, a cryptocurrency designed to be difficult to trace. The site can be accessed using I2P as well as Tor. It features a new system called AlphaGuard that will allow users to retrieve their funds even if the site has been taken offline. Many more details about the marketplace are available in the article.

Amazon's first hair salon in London opened to the public at the end of May. The salon uses an augmented reality app that lets customers experiment with different hairstyles and colors. Customers can select products in the salon to be delivered to their homes. Haircuts cost $US72. This article details the experience of getting a haircut at the Amazon Salon. It includes pictures of the salon and shows how the AR app's virtual hair color system works.