TLDR 2022-04-12

Meta monetizes Metaverse 💰, Gen Z's favorite app 📱, Etsy sellers revolt 🧶

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Big Tech & Startups

Etsy sellers are officially on strike (2 minute read)

More than 14,000 Etsy workers are striking from 11 to 18 April to protest the company's increase in transaction fees. The workers are asking the company to cancel its fee increase, take down resellers who offer mass-produced goods, introduce a faster seller support system, allow sellers to opt-out of off-platform advertising, and end the Star Seller program. Etsy says its new fee increase will allow it to invest in marketing, customer support, and moderation. The company's revenue gains grew more than 106% in 2020 to $10 billion, and by another 31% in 2021.

Meta Begins Monetizing Its Metaverse (3 minute read)

Meta has started monetizing Horizon Worlds, its open-world VR app. Users are now able to buy items in individual worlds. They won't be able to bring the purchased items into other worlds. Meta will take a 25% cut of items that are sold. Creators will receive a monthly performance bonus aimed at incentivizing engagement with VR. These early monetization efforts are still in testing and are subject to change.
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Science & Futuristic Technology

Nissan and NASA team up on 15-minute EV charging (2 minute read)

Nissan, NASA, and other big-name automakers have teamed up to outline a vision around next-generation battery technology. The plans include a dedicated production facility and possible 15-minute charging times for electric vehicles. Nissan sees cheaper solid-state batteries as a key pillar in the strategy due to their superior energy density, lower costs, and potentially shorter charging times. The company plans to have a production line up and running by 2024 and launch an EV with a solid-state battery by 2028.

MIT Scientists Develop New Regenerative Drug That Reverses Hearing Loss (6 minute read)

Frequency Therapeutics is seeking to reverse hearing loss by regrowing hair cells in the inner ear. It has developed a drug candidate that can be injected into the ear to regrow hair within the cochlea. The treatment has improved people's speech perception in clinical trials. Some participants saw significant improvements after a single injection, with the effect lasting up to two years. Frequency is now recruiting for a new trial from which the results should be available early next year.
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Programming, Design & Data Science

bore (GitHub Repo)

bore is a command-line tool for making tunnels to localhost. It exposes local ports to remote servers, bypassing standard NAT connection firewalls. bore is designed to be a simple, highly-efficient, and unopinionated tool for forwarding TCP traffic.

The struggle of using native emoji on the web (10 minute read)

Emoji are released by the Unicode Consortium every year, but operating systems don't always update them in a timely manner. This results in browsers sometimes rendering emojis using an outdated system. This article looks at the problem with displaying emojis on web pages, some possible solutions, and ideas for improving the standard so that developers can reliably use emojis on their sites.
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Miscellaneous

Gen Z’s new favorite app (3 minute read)

BeReal is a new social media app that has become popular with Gen Z. The app encourages users to post once every day to show their friends what they are doing in real time. Users have to post within two minutes of receiving a randomly-timed notification. Those who don't post will not be able to view their friend's pictures. BeReal is currently ranked 4th in downloads in the US, UK, and France.

Elon Musk won’t join Twitter board, can thus exceed 14.9% ownership cap (3 minute read)

Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal has announced that Elon Musk won't be joining Twitter's board of directors. If Musk had joined the board, he would have been barred from owning more than 14.9% of the company during his time on the board and for 90 days after. There is a high likelihood that Musk will take a more hostile stance toward Twitter and increase his active stake in the company. Musk recently tweeted a series of criticisms, suggestions, and jokes about the social media platform. He has since deleted most of the tweets except for one that asks whether Twitter is dying.
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