TLDR 2023-03-09

Companies have become obsessed with measuring developer work. But what actually improves it? Swarmia uses a combination of research-backed metrics and tooling to:

• Measure proven productivity metrics tied to business impact, flow, code quality, and team health

• Adopt Working Agreements to encourage proven good habits like "avoid working alone" and set numeric targets for code reviews, open PRs, and more.

• Use real-time alerts and nudges to improve collaboration and cut down waiting times.

Learn more about the healthy way to improve developer productivity with Swarmia

Spotify is introducing a new design to make it easier for users to find new content to listen to and watch. The redesign incorporates heavy use of imagery and vertical scrolling to increase discoverability across the Spotify ecosystem. Spotify's new design separates podcasts and music while giving each more space. Opening the app presents a set of album and playlist covers, but also includes autoplaying video podcasts and Instagram-style photos that provide more information about relevant playlists. Examples of the new design are available in the article.

Google and the Technical University of Berlin's AI researchers have developed a multimodal embodied visual-language model (VLM) called PaLM-E. PaLM-E has 562 billion parameters, making it the largest-ever VLM. PaLM-E combines language and vision for robotic control and can perform a range of tasks without requiring retraining by analyzing data from its camera. It is adaptable and can react to changes in its surroundings. PaLM-E exhibits emergent abilities such as multi-image inference, even though it was trained on single-image prompts.

Fervo Energy claims it can create flexible geothermal power plants that can increase or decrease their electricity output as needed. The power plants would serve as a power source in periods of low production and act as a battery. While there are still outstanding questions about whether the system is scalable, affordable, and entirely safe, the technology offers a way to make it cheaper and easier to eliminate greenhouse-gas emissions from electricity systems.

Researchers from the Indiana University School of Medicine have developed a validated blood test to objectively determine an individual's level of anxiety, the severity of their current anxiety, and which therapies are suitable. Physicians at MindX Sciences are currently developing the test for wider use. The test could also determine a person's risk of developing future anxiety and evaluate how hormonal changes might impact their anxiety. The new test, when used in conjunction with other tests, provides a more comprehensive view of a patient's mental health and could be used to develop new, more individualized anxiety treatments based on a patient's biomarkers.

Trance Stack is a Remix stack built for AWS Lambda, providing various features such as authentication, security, internationalization, feature flags, and analytics. It is intended to serve as a starting point for Remix projects. The stack offers production-ready Remix applications and allows for customization and modification in accordance with users' preferences.

UpTrain is a tool that aids machine learning (ML) practitioners in observing and improving ML models for optimal performance. It is a data-secure tool that easily integrates with existing production pipelines. UpTrain's features include data drift checks, data integrity checks, customizable metrics, real-time dashboards to monitor the model's health, edge case signals, AI explainability, and special dashboards to understand model-inferred embeddings. Users can get alerts on Slack when using UpTrain.

When you click on the "Login with Google" button on a website form, that is OAuth in action. It's the standard that lets users grant websites access to their information on other sites. But how does it work? We put together an expert guide based on hundreds of conversations and implementations of an OAuth server that has been downloaded millions of times. No fluff, just a real-world perspective covering the modern use cases of OAuth.

AI seems to be the new bubble, with multiple reports of companies raising large valuations despite having no revenue. Bubbles are when people buy too much unnecessary stuff due to the belief that they can sell it to someone even more ignorant. An example of this is the crypto bubble of 2017 where blockchain companies saw huge gains in stock price as a result of Bitcoin skyrocketing. While emerging technology can lead to new opportunities, returns from these opportunities are not likely to be distributed equally.

Tech companies have turned to mass layoffs in order to make cuts. Many employees are at risk of losing their jobs due to the failure of long-term projects. Unlike previous years, employees can no longer slip into another position at their company if a project fails. Employees are now much more vulnerable to layoffs. Technology projects that were previously championed by former CEOs, but may be years from profitability, are the most affected by layoffs in recent months.

Retro Biosciences came out of stealth mode in mid-2022 with the mission to add 10 years to the average human lifespan.

Rabois says that Google and Meta brought on too many staff to fulfill the vanity metric of hiring.

Sidekick is a productivity browser with features geared towards ADHD sufferers.

Statisticians observed a surprising increase in the number of babies born last year.

Scientists hope that the vaccine will pave the way for other vaccines.

This repository contains a fork of Facebook's LLaMa model that runs on the CPU.

TEKsystems is a third-party recruiter hiring for a Senior Full Stack C# Developer to play a central role in executing a client’s Microsoft Azure platform cloud strategy.

Qatalog Ltd is hiring a Senior Backend Software Engineer to be responsible for establishing best practices for technical architecture, quality control, scalable design, and modularity of the codebase for a company that creates bespoke software that centralizes people, processes, and knowledge.

NexGen Cloud is hiring a Senior Backend Developer to take charge of various Python development projects to assist in building out billing, monitoring and alerting, automation, and business logic systems for an Infrastructure as a Service provider.