TLDR 2023-04-13

The team behind Pieces for Developers is on a mission to reimagine the basics of personal productivity.

What they’ve built is probably the most advanced code snippet manager/workflow helper to date 😅

Their simple yet creative features didn’t go unnoticed and the Developer Advocates at GitHub had Tsavo Knott (CEO) on for an awesome live-stream & demo out to the world.

Audience Favorites from Event:

• Paste a snippet/screenshot and watch it auto-magically extract/enrich with metadata+context

• One-click snippet transforms: convert to boilerplate, improve readability/performance, translate between languages/frameworks

• Global Search…Google for your Code Snippets. Offline. On-Device.

Checkout Highlight Clips - They Won’t Disappoint 🤝

OpenAI's consistency models can do simple tasks an order of magnitude faster than image generation models like DALL-E. While diffusion models learn how to gradually subtract noise from a starting image made entirely of noise, consistency models are trained to take an image at any level of obscuration and generate a complete source image in just one step. They don't make very good images yet, but the technique demonstrates how it is possible to efficiently generate images for next-generation use cases. Examples of pictures generated with consistency models are available in the article.

Google has launched the first of four planned public beta releases of Android 14. The beta is the first release that can be installed over-the-air. It can only be installed on Pixel devices 4a 5G and newer. The beta features a new back arrow and a smarter sharesheet. It has per-app language settings and Google's previously announced new privacy settings.

The European Space Agency is launching a large probe to Jupiter to study its moons. The Jupiter Ice Moons Explorer (JUICE) is the largest deep space mission launched by the ESA. It cost the agency 1.5 billion euros. JUICE will fly by the Earth and Venus several times to build up the energy required to reach Jupiter. It aims to enter Jupiter's orbit in 2031. JUICE will orbit around Jupiter until 2034, when it is planned to enter orbit around Ganymede. A link to the livestream of the launch, which is scheduled for 8:15 am EDT, is available in the article.

A study has found that aging seems to affect cellular processes in the same way across humans, fruit flies, rats, mice, and worms. A variety of molecular processes become less reliable as organisms age. Gene mutations become more frequent, chromosomes get shorter, and transcription becomes more error-prone. The study's findings open up the possibility of developing drugs that target these factors to slow down the aging process.

GitHub Accelerator is an exploration into what sustainable open source could look like. It is a 10-week program where open source maintainers receive a sponsorship of $20,000 to work on their projects. The program pairs members with guidance and workshops from open source leaders to build reliable streams of funding for their work. GitHub Accelerator aims to help maintainers and projects that want to make open source a full-time career. The program has just announced its first cohort of 20 projects and 32 participants.

Arroyo is a distributed stream processing engine designed to efficiently perform stateful computations on streams of data. It can operate on both bounded and unbounded sources and emit results as soon as they are available. Arroyo lets users ask complex questions of high-volume real-time data with subsecond results. It can be used for real-time product and business analytics, to detect fraud and security incidents, for real-time ML feature generation, and more.

Learn how to use monitoring to build better digital experiences! Discover how to monitor your applications proactively with Synthetic Monitoring and Real User Monitoring (RUM); resolve issues faster with end-to-end distributed tracing; and easily analyze uptime, SLO, Core Web Vitals, and conversion rate metrics. Join the live session and Q&A on April 27 (multiple time zones).

Meta's 'year of efficiency' has so far translated into mass layoffs. There have been two rounds of cuts over the past six months, with two more to come that will eliminate over 21,000 positions. Some of Meta's top executives have moved away and are managing large parts of the company from London and Tel Aviv. There is increased scrutiny in workplace reviews and workers are being asked to justify why their jobs are crucial to Meta's goals. Workers are creating memes about how much time they have left in the company.

Tech companies are offering lucrative salaries and funding offers to students at top colleges to lure in technical talent. Undergrads and Ph.D.s are being offered large salaries and endless research funding. The recruiting is so aggressive that some universities are seeing a slowdown in enrollments for AI Ph.D.s. Some companies are allowing students to work part-time while they continue their studies. The hiring is fueled by companies' fear of falling behind in the AI race.

Fusion energy will likely be more costly than wind or solar power.

Elon Musk talked about a range of topics related to Twitter during a recent interview, including the site's open sourcing of its recommendation algorithm, the company's financial situation, Twitter's growth, and advertisers returning to the site.

Scaffolded LLM systems wrap a programmatic scaffold around an LLM core and chain together individual LLM calls to achieve larger and more complex tasks.

Companies in Austin, Miami, New York, and other cities are receiving relatively large increases in investments and deals, leading to many tech workers leaving Silicon Valley.

LinkedIn is partnering with CLEAR, a secure identity platform, to provide identity and employment verification for users within the US for free.

Dolly 2.0 is a large language model that is open-sourced to use for commercial purposes.