TLDR 2021-12-15

Google recently hired a lead for its Operating System team for Augmented Reality and posted job listings that indicate that the company is getting serious about AR. Most of the new roles are in the US, but some are located at the offices of Canadian smart glasses maker North, which Google acquired last year. Google has dabbled in AR before, but its interest appeared to cool down even as Facebook and Apple invested heavily in it. Apple and Facebook's CEOs have both described AR as the next big computing platform after smartphones.

Story Studio is a new video editing app from Snap that is designed to give creators more precise editing control over vertical videos and allow them to add elements like text, audio, and AR lenses. Videos can be downloaded and shared without watermarks on any platform. Snap has paid out more than $250 million to 12,000 creators on its Spotlight platform since its launch. Story Studio is only available to iOS users in the US, UK, and Canada.

Researchers with the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) recently captured footage of the super-rare barreleye fish. These fish live thousands of feet beneath the surface and not much is known about them. Their large set of eyes are thought to be used to spot shadows of their prey above them, with the green pigment in their eyes filtering out sunlight reflecting from the ocean surface. The species has only been spotted by the team at MBARI nine times out of more than 5,600 dives. A minute-long video of the fish captured by the researchers is available in the article.

NASA's Parker Solar Probe recently flew through the sun's upper atmosphere and took measurements of the particles and magnetic fields it encountered. The probe is scheduled to take 21 trips through the sun's corona over the course of seven years. It was subjected to temperatures of nearly 2,500 Fahrenheit during the flyby. The Parker Solar Probe uses Venus' gravity to steer. Future flybys will probably last longer as the corona is growing as part of a normal 11-year cycle.

Doodle CSS is a simple hand-drawn HTML/CSS theme. This page shows off all the elements and features in the theme with interactive demos and examples.

drgn is a programmable debugger that exposes the types and variables in a program for easy, expressive scripting in Python. drgn aims to make scripting as natural as possible to make debugging feel like coding. It was developed for debugging in the Linux kernel but it can also debug userspace programs written in C.

The 21st century will see technology change the nature of companies and states, with the rise of decentralized protocols allowing for the safeguarding of property and execution of contracts beyond the boundaries of traditional nation-states. This article discusses 20 ways in which humanity is transitioning from an age of geopolitics to one of techno-politics. It covers the impact of global internet access, cryptocurrencies, the remote economy, encryption, and other technologies that will change how the world works.

OpenAI is now allowing developers to create custom versions of GPT-3. Developers can now train GPT-3 to recognize specific patterns for workloads like content generation, classification, and text summarization. The new fine-tuning capabilities are expected to lead to cost savings due to a higher frequency of higher-quality outputs from fine-tuned models. OpenAI has focused on making its API accessible to developers who might not have machine learning backgrounds.