Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and TomTom have formed a group that will release data that could enable companies to build their own maps. The Overture Maps Foundation has captured 59 million points of interest, including restaurants, landmarks, streets, and regional borders. The data can be used for free as the base layer for a new map application. The data was collected and donated to the foundation by Meta and Microsoft.
Facebook has more than 3 billion monthly active users, despite its declining popularity among younger people. There are 3.88 billion monthly active users across Meta's entire family of apps, almost half of the world's population. The growth was driven in part by Reels, which gets 200 billion plays per day across Meta’s family of apps. Threads is doing quite well according to Mark Zuckerberg, with 10s of millions of daily active users.
EchoStar's 9.2-metric-ton communications satellite launched on top of a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket on Wednesday night from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The satellite will provide Internet services across the Americas. It can provide up to 500 gigabits per second of total capacity. This was the seventh Falcon Heavy launch and the third of five planned this year. A link to the live-streamed webcast is available.
Scientists from Korea claim to have synthesized a superconductor that works at room temperature and ambient pressure. Such a discovery would represent one of the biggest physics breakthroughs of recent decades. While superconductors are widely useful, they're often impractical since they require low temperatures and high pressure. While the Korean scientists say they can make the material relatively easily, their study is still going through the peer review process and the results have not yet been replicated.
Continue is a VS Code extension that brings the power of ChatGPT to the IDE. It can answer coding questions, edit in natural language, and generate files from scratch. A GIF showing what the extension looks like is available.
WordPress Playground is a sandboxed environment that lets developers try new things. It runs a WordPress instance directly in the browser without having to mess around with a server. WordPress Playground creates a brand-new WordPress site with a full admin panel and the ability to create posts and pages in just a few seconds. Developers can mess around with the site as much as they want as the changes are gone when the page is refreshed. There are options to store and save data.
This article tells the story of how startup Neeva attempted to create a search engine powered by AI. Google dominates the search market, but this means that it is unlikely to ever explore huge changes to its results page or business model. This leaves room for others to create something that Google simply can't or won't make. After 15 years at Google, Sridhar Ramaswamy left the company to co-found Neeva to build the search engine of the future. Despite its hard work, Neeva ultimately closed down its search engine as it couldn't create a sustainable business in consumer search.
Remote work is now a bigger competitive hiring advantage than before the pandemic as more and more companies are demanding that remote workers return to the office. Working remotely has become a defining characteristic of a job for many people. Some people won't even consider positions that involve an office. Remote work is lowering the cost of new company formation, granting more entrepreneurs more opportunities without the need for other people's money.
Google's proposed Web Environment Integrity, which was created primarily to extract value from people, allows websites to refuse service to specific browsers.
A group of automakers, including General Motors, Stellantis, Hyundai Motor, Honda, BMW, and Mercedes Benz, are creating a new joint-venture company with the target of rolling out 30,000 electric vehicle chargers in North America, starting along major highways and in cities.
Treemaps are capable of generically summarizing data of many shapes and sizes and can be used as a flexible tool for exploring and navigating messy data blobs.
Meta expects its operating losses for Reality Labs to increase meaningfully year-over-year due to its ongoing product development efforts and investments to further scale its ecosystem.
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