TLDR 2022-05-13

Twitter's consumer product leader Kayvon Beykpour and general manager of revenue Bruce Falck have been asked to leave the company. Jay Sullivan will take over as both the head of product and interim head of revenue. Twitter had goals to deliver big growth in audience and revenue but it did not hit its milestones. The company is also pausing most hiring and backfills except for business-critical roles. It will pull back on non-labor costs to ensure it is being responsible and efficient.

The next Meta VR headset is a mixed reality-focused device that uses advanced cameras to pass color video through and blend VR into the feed. Currently called Project Cambria, the device is set to be released sometime this year. The headset will be marketed for professional, work, and fitness purposes. Meta is enabling the development of mixed reality apps through its Presence Platform. The Presence Platform will allow apps to be cross-developed for the Quest 2 and Project Cambria.

Researchers have developed an AI system that reads live camera footage and adopts traffic lights to keep traffic flowing and reduce congestion. The researchers used deep reinforcement learning to create the system, rewarding it when cars go through a junction and giving it negative feedback when cars have to wait or there is a jam. It was trained through simulations and significantly outperformed all other methods when tested. The program can be set up to view any traffic junction and can learn autonomously. The researchers hope to begin testing their system on real roads this year.

Scientists have grown plants in lunar soil using samples collected during the Apollo missions to the moon. The scientists grew thale cress, a small flowering plant that is attractive to researchers as it is well studied and its genetic code has been mapped. Almost all of the plants planted in the lunar soil sprouted. However, the plants showed signs of struggle and stress. Growing plants in the lunar soil could alter the moon's soil and make resources from the soil available in useful forms.

mitmproxy2swagger is a tool that can automatically reverse-engineer REST APIs just by running the apps and capturing the traffic. A short video showing how mitmproxy2swagger works is available.

Bubble Tea is a Go framework based on The Elm Architecture for building terminal apps. It is suitable for both simple and complex terminal apps, both inline or full-window. Examples are available.

Running a startup can be hard as many people don't know what they are doing wrong. This thread contains observations and lessons from founders and business owners that were not immediately obvious. The replies to the thread discuss the importance of sales, starting non-technical businesses and improving the tech, how to manage assets and expenses during tough times, and more.

There is a supermassive black hole more than four million times the mass of our Sun at the heart of our galaxy. Scientists have produced the first image of the black hole using the international Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). The EHT is a collection of telescopes scattered around the globe that records light in the microwave range of the electromagnetic spectrum from different locations. The images are combined and processed to create a high-resolution image picture. The image of the black hole is available in the article.