TLDR 2022-05-31

An early prototype of the Pixel 7 recently showed up on eBay and was quickly taken down. The device featured a glossy glass back and a new metal camera bar. Google already revealed the design at its I/O event, but the leak confirms that the device will lose the matte black frame that the Pixel 6 had. It also confirms that the Pixel 7 will have 128GB of storage. The leaked pictures are available in the article.

The AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer is the first officially recognized exascale supercomputer in the world. It ranks first on the Top500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers and is faster than the next seven supercomputers on the list combined. Frontier also ranks as the fastest AI system on the planet. It runs on the most power-efficient supercomputing architecture in the world. More details, including benchmark results and pictures of the supercomputer, are available in the article.

A group of startups is using end-to-end learning to teach self-driving cars how to drive. Despite investors sinking more than $100 billion into self-driving car technology, driverless tech is still stuck in the pilot phase. The current approach to driverless car technology uses a robotics mindset, which is hard to build and maintain. The startups are building neural networks that can figure out how to drive themselves using new AI techniques. More details about the new approach and the startups trying to build the next generation of self-driving cars are available in the article.

Researchers from the University of Oxford and robotics company Devanthro engineered a robotic shoulder to function as a stretching mechanism to produce lifelike human tendon tissue. The team grew cells on the robotic joint using a strategically placed bioreactor over two weeks, bending and twisting the joint in human-like ways for 30 minutes each day. More work still needs to be done to determine if the new method was an improvement over traditional methods. The approach has been attempted before with living muscle tissue grown from rat cells.

Dragonfly is a modern, scalable in-memory data store. It is fully compatible with Redis and Memcached. Dragonfly scales vertically to handle millions of QPS and hundreds of GBs of memory on a single instance. Benchmark results are available.

Websites need to be optimal and performant as people have very short attention spans. This article presents two lines of CSS code that boost rendering performance by approximately 7x. It explains how the code works and provides alternatives. The code is most useful when a website needs to render a huge list/grid of data at the mount of the application.

It can be handy to have access to multiple phone numbers. Verizon's My Numbers service allows users to have extra numbers, but the UI is bad and the interface is slow. This article follows a developer's process of figuring out how to access the My Numbers service programmatically in order to automate the search for a number with four consecutive digits. It involves learning how to find out which API endpoints are used and then calling the APIs using Python.

Nuclear authorities in China have discovered rich uranium deposits at depths of almost 10,000 feet. The discovery could increase the country's total reserves of uranium 10-fold to more than two million tonnes. Uranium was thought to concentrate mainly in shallow, geophysically stable areas, but recent finds by China have been more than 4,920 feet below the surface in regions that have experienced large tectonic movements. A new method for detecting uranium developed by China could help other countries find hidden uranium deposits.