TLDR 2022-05-17

Uber announced a big new update during its Go/Get virtual event on Monday. The update includes new features such as an option for booking buses or passenger vans, a trip itinerary feature for booking rides through an extended trip, voice ordering through Google Assistant, UberEats at stadiums, an electric vehicle hub and charging map, and more. Uber will add trains, buses, planes, and car rentals to its UK app this summer. Details about the new features are available in the article.

Microsoft is raising compensation as the labor market tightens and employees contend with increasing inflation. Inflation jumped 8.3% in April and is close to a 40-year high. Some tech companies have responded with salary bumps while others have implemented layoffs. Microsoft is nearly doubling its global merit budget. It has increased research and development costs and bolstered spending in cloud engineering.

A study by a team of European researchers has found that playing video games may boost a child's intelligence. The study followed a cohort of children over two years and looked at their self-reported screen time. Children who played video games gained about 2.5 IQ points more than the average child over the two years. While the study had many limitations, it suggested that not all screen time is detrimental.

Researchers have successfully used bacteriophages to treat an antibiotic-resistant mycobacterial lung infection. The patient had cystic fibrosis and had suffered a mycobacterial lung infection over a six-year period. They were denied a life-saving lung transplant multiple times due to the infection. The bacteriophage treatment ran for 200 days and was so successful that the patient was able to undergo the lung transplant.

wp-sqlite is a WordPress implementation with an SQLite database. SQLite is self-contained, serverless, zero-configuration, and transactional. It allows a single database connection to access multiple database files simultaneously. WordPress is much faster and more secure with an SQLite implementation.

This repository contains resources for building a better GitHub profile. The resources include badges, widgets, icons, and more. Each link to a resource comes with an example or screenshot of what the component looks like.

iPhones run in a low-power mode for 24 hours after shutting down. This makes it possible for them to act as tracking devices in case of theft or loss. A team of researchers has discovered an exploit that allows them to run malware that remains active even when the iPhone has powered down. It is a hardware flaw so it can't be removed with a system update. The attack requires a jailbroken iPhone, so it has limited real-world value.

Twitter's CEO Parag Agrawal has pushed back against Elon Musk's concerns around spam and bots on the platform. He claims that the internal estimates for bots or spam accounts over the last four quarters were all well under 5%. The deal to buy Twitter is temporarily on hold pending details to support Twitter's estimate. Musk claims that he is still committed to the acquisition, but says that the estimate is fundamental to the financial health of the platform. Twitter recently admitted that it has been overcounting active users for years.