TLDR 2022-08-15

The software industry has a long history of using harmful metrics to measure developer productivity (ahem, lines of code written). But there’s an alternative: Swarmia rallies software teams around meaningful metrics that help ship better code faster. Instead of spying on developers, Swarmia helps find bottlenecks - which are almost always processes, not people.

Over 1,000 teams use Swarmia to gain visibility into well-researched metrics around focus, delivery, collaboration, and quality. “The perfect overview of engineering productivity” - Roland Fiala, SVP of Engineering, Productsup.

Swarmia is free for small teams and offers a 14-day free trial

Apple and Meta were in talks to share Facebook's ad revenue, with most of the discussions taking place between 2016 and 2018. Apple claimed that boosted posts were in-app purchases, but Facebook argued that they were ads and won. The companies also discussed the idea of a Facebook subscription that would remove ads from the platform. They weren't able to reach an agreement and now the two companies are ideologically opposed when it comes to ads.

YouTube is developing a channel store where customers can purchase subscriptions for various streaming services. It is currently in talks with potential partner companies. Partner companies will likely have to share their earnings for purchases made on YouTube. The store could launch as soon as fall this year.

China has launched an 800-meter experimental maglev line with permanent magnets that can keep a maglev train afloat forever without a power supply. It uses powerful magnets rich in rare earth elements. The magnets can lift a train with 88 passengers in the air. The new technology generates little electromagnetic radiation and costs about a tenth of what it costs to build a subway. China controls more than 80% of the world's permanent magnet producing capacity.

A nuclear yield of more than 1.3 megajoules was achieved in August 2021. The results of the experiment were published in three peer-reviewed papers exactly one year later. The experiment establishes that fusion ignition in the lab is possible. The researchers have not been able to recreate the same level of fusion yield since.

Directus, the leading open-source data platform, has released Flows, an event-driven automation system for creating custom data workflows. This new feature of Directus Studio enables developers to quickly automate alerting, data transformation and synchronization, service integration, and more. Did we mention there’s a free forever Community Cloud? Go check Directus out

Zellij is a workspace for anyone who loves the terminal. It features a layout system and a plugin system that can create plugins in any language that compiles to WebAssembly. A GIF preview is available.

Puppertino is a CSS framework based on Human Guidelines from Apple. It is designed to mimic the look of macOS. Puppertino was created to be lightweight, modular, and cool looking.

An exploit in the macOS version of Zoom allows attackers to gain access to the entire operating system. The exploit was reported to Zoom in December 2021. While the company issued a patch to fix the problem, the patch contained a bug that meant the vulnerability was still exploitable. Zoom's security and privacy PR lead says that the company is working diligently to address the issue.

Stability AI is releasing Stable Diffusion, a DALL-E 2-like image generation system, to the public in the coming weeks. It recently released the system to just over a thousand researchers ahead of the launch. Stable Diffusion will let users generate fake images of public figures, unlike DALL-E 2. There is minimal filtering aside for illegal content. Examples of images generated by Stable Diffusion are available in the article.

Erg is a Python-compatible statically typed language that is simple, robust, functional, and object-oriented.

AWS Private 5G allows companies to set up their own private 4G LTE mobile networks on-site.

Future language models will have superhuman coding abilities as it is possible to generate unlimited data to train them.

ProtGPT2 is a language model based on OpenAI's GPT-2 that can generate novel protein sequences.

Histoire is a tool that provides interactive component playgrounds.

oasis is a small statically-linked Linux system.