TLDR 2022-01-25

Tesla Cybertruck leaks 🛻, Meta's AI supercomputer 💻, future of psychedelics 🍄

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Big Tech & Startups

Tesla Cybertruck prototype shown in detail in new leaked walkaround video (2 minute read)

A video of a Tesla Cybertruck prototype has been released. The video, available in the article, gives viewers a close look at the truck from all sides. The prototype has features that won't be in the production version, such as a giant wiper. There are people in the video standing next to the truck, giving viewers a sense of scale. An official update on the Cybertruck program is expected on Wednesday.

Meta has built an AI supercomputer it says will be world’s fastest by end of 2022 (5 minute read)

Meta's new AI Research SuperCluster will be one of the world's fastest AI supercomputers. Development on the supercomputer is expected to complete later this year. It will be used to train a range of systems across Meta's businesses and design experiences for the metaverse. AI supercomputers require much less accuracy than traditional supercomputers, so they can not be directly compared. While theoretical performance numbers can be impressive, it is common for supercomputers to run at less than 25% of their peak performance during real-world applications.
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Science & Futuristic Technology

AI2 shows off an open, Q&A-focused rival to GPT3 (4 minute read)

The Allen Institute for AI has revealed a language model a tenth the size of OpenAI's GPT-3 with on par or better performance. Macaw is good at tracking who did what, but it still has some quirks. The model was not designed to replace GPT-3 but to add to the research advancing language generation and understanding. A smaller model would be more practical for general use. The team is still working on explaining how the Macaw model generates its answers.

The Future of Psychedelic Medicine Will Be Drugs You’ve Never Heard Of (15 minute read)

Research on psychedelic compounds has boomed in the last few years. Many companies are now springing up in the psychedelic sector with the aim of creating new analogs of drugs similar to the psychedelics known today. Companies that create new psychedelics can patent them. These companies are creating compounds that alter the psychedelic experience to cater to different uses. There will likely be a range of psychedelics with niche uses in the future, similar to how there are a range of drugs for many conditions now.
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Programming, Design & Data Science

How I Got Pwned by My Cloud Costs (7 minute read)

Cloud computing can be expensive if not set up correctly. This article follows the story of how a developer received an $8,000 bill after running a service on a cloud unmonitored. It discusses how the developer diagnosed and found the issue as well as mitigation strategies to prevent surprise bills like this from happening. Costs can gradually creep up without developers noticing, so it is important to set up cost alerts and act on them.

GitHub Actions by Example (Website)

This site contains examples of how to use GitHub Actions, a CI/CD service provided by GitHub. Each example contains code and comments explaining the code. Topics include event triggers, actions, environment variables, parallel jobs, context expressions, and more.
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Miscellaneous

Ask HN: What technology is “cutting edge” in 2022? (Hacker News thread)

This thread discusses cutting-edge technology in 2022. The top replies talk about dependent types for programming languages, spatial finance, retro game GAN upscaling, and zero-knowledge proofs.

Hactivists say they hacked Belarus rail system to stop Russian military buildup (3 minute read)

A group of hacktivists called the Cyber Partisans have infected the network of Belarus' state-run railroad system with ransomware. The group will return Belarus Railway's systems to normal if the government releases 50 political prisoners and promises to prevent Russian troops from entering Belarus to use its ground for the attacks on Ukraine. Russia has been sending military equipment and personnel into Belarus using rail. The hack has disrupted ticketing, scheduling, and freight trains. Screenshots from Belarus Railway's private network are available in the article.
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