TLDR 2022-06-20

Meta is launching an online store where Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger users can purchase digital clothes for their avatars. The store will feature brands such as Prada, Balenciaga, and Thom Browne. There is no information on how much the items in the store will cost. The store is set to launch 'soon'. Pictures of Mark Zuckerberg's avatar wearing different digital outfits are available in the article.

Brex is a Silicon Valley lender to startups. It recently informed tens of thousands of its small business customers that they have until August 15 to withdraw funds from their accounts and find new providers. The lender was unable to service all of its customers well due to a shift in market conditions so it decided to focus on its core customers instead. It will keep clients with secured institutional backing and traditional companies that are midmarket in size.

A transatlantic team of researchers has created a simple and fully functional plastic processor that can be manufactured at sub-penny prices. A high percentage of the time, the flexible 4-bit and 8-bit processors continue to work even when bent. The needs of flexible applications tend to be computationally simple. The study shows that flexible electronics may finally be ready for the mainstream.

Atoms can be thought of as waves, so it is possible to build atom lasers containing waves of matter. These atom lasers don’t usually last long. A team of physicists from Amsterdam have built an atom laser that can create a continuous beam for a theoretically indefinite period of time. It works by cooling atoms in several steps through space so that there is a continuous supply of ultracold atoms to replenish the atom laser. If the scientists are able to create a stable output beam of matter, the applications will be limitless.

Bolt is an algorithm for compressing vectors of real-valued data and running mathematical operations directly on the compressed representations. It can help save significantly on compute time for large collections of mostly-dense vectors. Bolt currently only supports x86 machines from fall 2013 or later. Benchmarks are available.

The Elastic UI Framework is a collection of React UI components for building user interfaces. It provides reusable UI components that can be used throughout Elastic's web products. Elastic is accessible to everyone, flexible and composable, and well documented and tested. Examples of components are available on the full documentation site.

The next big breakthrough in AI will happen through hardware advances. While general architectures allow many types of computations, they are not optimized for specific computation types. Some manufacturers are working on in-memory processing systems to more closely simulate neuronal processing models, but these computations are less general, so there needs to be a large established use case for them to make these chips profitably. Many architectures are still evolving quickly so manufacturers may be reluctant to mass manufacture designs. It will still take some time for the industry to mature.

This Twitter thread contains a list of eight things that are likely to happen within the next 18 months in the tech startup world. The market is likely to continue to drop and layoffs are just beginning. Companies will start focusing more on customers, business building, and their core missions, and a number of great companies will be built during this period.