TLDR 2022-10-14

Netflix will roll out its ad-supported tier on November 3. The Basic with Ads tier will cost $6.99 per month. It will be available in the US, Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Spain, and the UK. Viewers will see an average of four to five 15-30 second ads per hour. The tier will not include Netflix's full catalog and subscribers will not be able to download content onto their devices. Video quality will be capped at 720p/HD.

Apple is planning to offer a high-yield Savings account to Apple Card users. The company has not specified what the interest rate will be or when the accounts will be available. Cardholders will be able to deposit cash into the account with no fees, no minimum deposits, and no minimum balance requirements. Funds can be deposited through a linked bank account or from an existing Apple Cash balance.

A recent study showed that neurons grown from human stem cells can interface with nerve cells in live rodents. The human cells were able to send signals and respond to environmental cues picked up by the rats' whiskers. While it is currently too expensive and complex to be used as a standard research tool, the technology could one day be used for testing therapies for human brain disorders.

A team from Stanford's Biomechatronics Laboratory has created a robotic boot that can improve walking speed and energy economy. The exoskeleton can learn from its wearer's movements and adjust itself to provide optimum assistance. It allows people to walk 9% faster with 17% less energy. The team is working to commercialize the project within the next few years. A video showing the boot in action is available in the article.

PostgreSQL 15 has been released. The update adds the popular MERGE command, more capabilities for observing the state of the database, and improvements for managing workloads in both local and distributed deployments. This article details all of the notable changes that were made in PostgreSQL 15.

Planby is a React-based component for implementing timelines. It can be used to create timelines, schedules, and more. The theme and items are customizable and the component has an API for integrating with other third-party UI libraries. Planby uses a custom virtual view that allows developers to operate on a large amount of data.

This Twitter thread tells the story of a ghostwriter who writes tweets for venture capital funds. The ghostwriter made $200,000 last year and it only required five hours of work a week. Many VCs employ several writers and some writers are making almost seven figures in their roles. VCs are willing to pay for the tweets as they get the attention of young founders and help establish the credibility of the fund. The tweets also help VCs raise millions of dollars.

Project Starline is Google's next-generation 3D video chat booth. It projects 3D video to other chat booths in real time to create the illusion that users are sitting with somebody else across a table. Users report the experience as being remarkably realistic. Project Starline will soon be deployed to select enterprise partners as part of an early access program. This article details a first-hand experience of what it is like to use Project Starline.

This article looks at how web architecture is evolving.

The Synthetic Party, which follows policies derived from AI, is a new Danish political party led by a chatbot named Leader Lars.

Former Oculus CTO John Carmack talked about his frustrations with Meta's VR project during an hour-long unscripted talk in VR that was broadcast as a 2D video on Facebook.

Many managers are calling their employees back to the office while continuing to work remotely.

Amazon will launch two test satellites for its Project Kuiper satellite internet constellation on a Vulcan Centaur rocket from the United Launch Alliance in early 2023.

Metlo is an open-source API security platform.