TLDR 2023-03-15

GPT-4 launches 🤖, Pixel 8 leaks 📱, in-person engineers outperform 👨‍💻

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Big Tech & Startups

Google Pixel 8 Pro adds a mysterious new sensor, flat display in first leaked renders (2 minute read)

Leaked Google Pixel 8 Pro CAD-based renders reveal a number of new design elements. The phone appears to have slimmed-down bezels all around and has mostly done away with a curved display. A new sensor has been added to the camera bar. The new sensor's function is unknown. The Google Pixel 8 Pro's dimensions measure 162.6×76.5×8.7mm. It will feature a 6.52-inch display. The phone is expected to launch later this year with a Tensor G3 processor.

OpenAI’s GPT-4 exhibits “human-level performance” on professional benchmarks (7 minute read)

OpenAI has announced GPT-4. Microsoft revealed that its Bing Chat was already running on the new model. OpenAI plans to release GPT-4's text capability through ChatGPT and its commercial API with a waitlist at first. GPT-4's image input is being tested with a single partner, Be My Eyes. GPT-4 supports generating and processing up to 32,768 tokens. It could potentially open up a new era in AI.
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Science & Futuristic Technology

Amazon says its satellite home-Internet terminals cost under $400 to produce (3 minute read)

Amazon has revealed three types of satellite broadband user terminals set to roll out service in 2024. The standard model has been crafted for residential and small business customers and will cost Amazon just under $400 to manufacture. It is less than 11 inches square, weighs less than five pounds, and is less than an inch thick. The device is capable of delivering speeds up to 400 Mbps. There will be a smaller 'ultra-compact' option, providing speeds of up to 100Mbps, and a larger 19x30-inch version that will enable users to access 1Gbps speeds. Pricing plans for the devices and services have yet to be announced.

Mini Robot Enters Blood Vessels, Completes Surgery (3 minute read)

Researchers in South Korea have developed an untethered, magnetically guided robot that can navigate blood vessels autonomously to reach blockages and lesions with greater accuracy than human surgeons guided by X-rays. The process involves the creation of a 3D map of the patient’s blood vessels, which is used to guide the robot in treatments. The robot is only millimeters in size and has so far demonstrated its effectiveness in pigs. The research paves the way for robots to perform medical procedures with greater ease, precision, and safety compared to human surgeons.
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Programming, Design & Data Science

Job Iteration API (GitHub Repo)

Software that requires high availability must be able to withstand infrastructure interruptions. Iteration is an extension for ActiveJob that saves all the progress made on a job, allowing jobs to be interruptible and resumable. It prevents records from being processed more than once, even with frequent deploys and worker restarts. Iteration prevents jobs from being lost or restarted from the beginning.

Modern Font Stacks (Website)

Modern Font Stacks features a system font stack for every modern OS organized by typeface classification. The fonts are fast and do not require downloading, layout shifts, or flashes. They can be easily previewed with customizations.
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Miscellaneous

Mark Zuckerberg says engineers who joined Meta in-person perform better than those who joined remotely (3 minute read)

Mark Zuckerberg recently presented in a staff memo an internal data analysis indicating that engineers who began working in an in-person setting performed better than those who began remotely. Engineers who began in-person and later transitioned to remote work and those who remained entirely in-person performed better than those who started remotely. Younger engineers were found to perform better when working in-person for at least three days each week. Meta says it intends to continue embracing remote work, but the study suggests that it also wants to encourage more in-person work.

Why Spotify wants to look like TikTok, with co-president Gustav Söderström (42 minute read)

Spotify's most recent redesign features a TikTok-style homepage feed for discovering new content. This was the biggest change Spotify has made since its mobile app launch. Gustav Söderström was responsible not only for Spotify's visual and functional design, but also for its AI-powered recommendations. This article features an interview with Söderström where he discusses Spotify's recent company restructuring, the pressures inherent in redesigning a widely used app, and the industry-wide trend towards cutting costs and operational efficiency.
Quick Links

Apple Expands Hiring Freeze, Delays Bonuses for Some Employees (1 minute read)

Apple is leaving positions open and plans to shift to a once-per-year bonus schedule for some of its corporate workforce.

Turbowatch (GitHub Repo)

Turbowatch is an extremely fast file change detector and task orchestrator for Node.js.

Google opens up its AI language model PaLM to challenge OpenAI and GPT-3 (2 minute read)

Google will launch an app called MakerSuite alongside the PaLM API that will make it easier for users to iterate on prompts, augment datasets with synthetic data, and tune custom models.

Evals (GitHub Repo)

Evals is a framework for evaluating OpenAI models and an open-source registry of benchmarks.

Anthropic launches Claude, a chatbot to rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT (4 minute read)

Claude can search across documents, summarize, write, code, and answer questions about particular topics and Anthropic claims that it is less likely to produce harmful outputs.

Meta to lay off another 10,000 as Zuckerberg celebrates “year of efficiency” (8 minute read)

Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta will lay off 10,000 employees and stop trying to fill 5,000 open roles in a staff memo titled 'Update on Meta's Year of Efficiency'.
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Jobs

TLDR - TLDR Web Dev Newsletter Curator (Fully Remote, $31,200+)

TLDR is hiring a TLDR Web Dev Newsletter Curator to curate the most interesting stories in web development 3 nights a week for a web dev newsletter that already has 200,000 pre-launch sign-ups.

NexGen Cloud - Infrastructure Support Engineer (Fully Remote, $80,000+)

NexGen Cloud is hiring an Infrastructure Support Engineer to help design, build, and implement infrastructure support tools for an innovative IaaS company focused on bridging the gap between Web 2.0 and Web 3.0.

Multiverse - Product Designer (United Kingdom)

Multiverse is hiring a Product Designer to contribute to the future direction of an alternative to college and corporate training via professional apprenticeships.
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