TLDR 2023-06-08

Apple's new Game Porting Toolkit will make it easier and quicker for developers to port Windows games to Mac. It uses a Proton-like environment that translates and runs the latest DirectX Windows games on macOS. Developers can use the tool to launch an unmodified version of a Windows game on a Mac to see how well it runs before fully porting the game. Most unoptimized games will likely run into performance issues and bugs.

AlphaDev, an AI system based on DeepMind's AlphaZero AI, can create algorithms that sort data up to three times as fast as human-generated algorithms. The system has created algorithms that are already part of two standard C++ coding libraries. AlphaDev was trained to compare values, move values between locations, and jump to different parts of the program. It was rewarded based on correctness and speed. The DeepMind team plans to apply AlphaZero-style algorithms to more kinds of problems, including hardware design.

A team of scientists diverted lightning by using lasers on a mountain in northeastern Switzerland. The technology could be used one day to protect infrastructure from lightning strikes. The scientists were only able to show 50 meters of guiding length. Most lighting channels are kilometers long, so the technology will need to be able to guide lightning for longer distances before it can be practically used. The laser is very expensive and won't be commercialized for at least a decade.

NASA is granting funds to hundreds of small aerospace businesses as part of a wider government program to seed cutting-edge American enterprises. 249 small businesses and 39 research institutions received $150,000 for a total investment of $45 million. While the reward is a signal that NASA may be interested in purchasing technology from these companies in the future, there is no guarantee of a contract. Companies that are successful during the first phase of the program may apply for larger grants in subsequent phases.

This article looks at how several companies are using AI for software development. Large language models can improve their output through self-reflection. A growing body of research is showing that a more guided auto-regressive approach to using LLMs can lead to better outcomes. The ability of LLMs to quickly produce large amounts of code will mean that there will be a need for better quality control procedures. Some companies are already using AIs to check code for accuracy, security, and speed.

PyStack is a tool that lets users inspect the stack frames of a running Python process or a Python core dump. It helps users quickly and easily see what is going on without having to interpret CPython internals. PyStack is super fast and it works with aggressively optimized Python interpreter binaries and Python interpreter libraries that don't have symbols or debug information. It can usually reconstruct stacks for processes that crash due to memory corruption.

Sequoia Capital's plan to split itself into three separate regional firms is a major shift for one of the world's leading venture capital firms. It highlights the impact of rising political tensions between the US and China. Sequoia has been criticized for its Chinese investments. US law could soon curtail US investments in foreign entities. Sequoia's split will be functionally complete by the end of the year, with names and branding updated by the end of next March.

This article describes what it is like to wear Apple's new Vision Pro headset. While Apple's Personas are slightly disappointing, the rest of the experience out-classed every other VR headset the author has tried. Its passthrough mode makes the wearer feel like they are looking through the headset. The eye tracking and pinching method of input works well and could be the new standard for AR and VR input.

TLDR is hiring a part-time curator to join our TLDR Cybersecurity newsletter curation team. The newsletter already has over 200,000 subscribers pre-launch, it's a fun way to earn some side income and build a personal brand within the security community.The ideal candidate would work in cybersecurity and enjoy keeping up with news, tools, and trends in the security ecosystem, and spend time reading Reddit, Twitter, Hacker News, and other news sources for security professionals.Time commitment is roughly 6 hours/week (Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday), to apply please send your LinkedIn or resume to jobs@tldr.tech along with a couple sentences on why you'd be a good fit!

Daft is a Pythonic and scalable dataframe library built for machine learning workloads that features columns that can contain any Python object.

Hurtigruten's Sea Zero electric-powered cruise ship will feature retractable sails with solar panels that harness energy from the wind and sun and store it in batteries.

Arroyo is a distributed stream processing engine designed to efficiently perform stateful computations on streams of data.

qnm is a simple command-line utility for querying the node_modules directory to provide fast and focused information about installed modules.

People's evaluation of their contemporaries' morality has remained largely unchanged for the past 70 years.

Amazon has been in early-stage discussions with services for several weeks to bring an ad-supported tier to Prime Video.