TLDR 2023-08-07

SpaceX performed a static fire of a new Super Heavy booster on Sunday. The rocket survived the test and appeared to be in good shape afterward. However, the test did not run its full duration, and four of the rocket's 33 engines shut down prematurely. SpaceX is working on an upgraded version of its Raptor engines to address reliability. While it is unclear how far away SpaceX is from a second Starship launch attempt, the fact that the latest test took place on a Sunday indicates that there is some sense of urgency as the company can only close the road leading to its launch site on a few weekend days per year.

Google is offering its full-time employees the chance to book a room at an on-campus hotel in Mountain View for $99 a night as a 'Summer Special'. The offer will run until September 30. Google is hoping that the offer will make it easier for workers to transition to the hybrid workplace and lure workers back to the office. Some workers aren't convinced it's a good deal.

Bypass surgery has significant limitations. For example, some patients lack appropriate donor vessels. Tissue engineered blood vessels, blood vessels manufactured using human cells and tissue, could provide a viable treatment option. A team of researchers has developed a fast, inexpensive, and scalable method for tissue engineering blood vessels that replicate the complex geometry of native blood vessels. The technology is not yet ready for bypass surgery, but the team believes they are on the right track. This article explains the difficulties around creating engineered blood vessels and looks at how the researchers managed to do so.

The process of making LK-99 is complex and there is some difficulty in sourcing some of the materials needed. The original papers were incredibly vague about the manufacturing process. They neglected to mention key details, so scientists trying to replicate their results had to guess. These factors have caused many failed attempts. The frenzy around LK-99 has dried up an unsuspecting worldwide supply chain. It is now relatively tough to secure red phosphorus, a controlled substance, and copper phosphate has climbed in price towards $20,000 per kilogram.

Jupyter AI brings generative AI to Jupyter. It provides a way to explore generative AI models in notebooks and improve productivity. Jupyter AI can turn the Jupyter notebook into a reproducible generative AI playground. It features a native AI chat and support for a wide range of generative model providers and models.

This article is a written version of a talk that summarizes the last few years of development in the space of LLMs. It aims to help people outside of the industry understand what LLMs are, what they can be used for, how they're trained, and the challenges in using them safely, effectively, and ethically. The article contains annotated slides from the talk along with extra notes and links. A video of the 40-minute-long talk is available.

Room-temperature conductors would have a transformative effect across a wide range of fields, including computing, aviation, healthcare, and the fight against climate change. If the claims about LK-99 turn out to be repeatable, reproducible, and reliable, it will change the world forever. Many devices will become more compact, cooler, and energy efficient. The material could enable levitating devices, faster quantum computing systems, and particle accelerators that don't require vast amounts of cooling. Much more research is needed to assess LK-99's properties - promising claims about room-temperature superconductors have been published before, but they have either been retracted or their results have been unverifiable.

The debate about remote work is still nowhere near settled. This post discusses why it's hard to discuss remote work rationally, the positives and negatives of remote work, a framework for reasoning about remote vs in-office work, and why remote work is a strategic advantage to some companies and poison for others. The discussion of the future of remote work is complex, especially as both sides are incentivized to normalize their own point-of-view.

NASA had lost contact with Voyager 2 two weeks ago due to an errant command sent to the probe that caused it to point its antenna slightly away from Earth.

When building a new product, like a library or framework, build something that uses that product to learn how to improve it.

Qualcomm, NXP, Nordic Semiconductor, Bosch, and Infineon are forming a new company aimed at advancing the adoption of RISC-V globally, starting with a focus on automotive uses and then eventually expanding to IoT and mobile.

This repository contains a Language Server designed to support Postgres, and only Postgres.

Rapid advancements in machine learning and the abundance of high-quality microphone-bearing devices have made sound-based side-channel attacks feasible and a lot more dangerous than previously expected.

Alibaba will be open-sourcing two versions of its Tongyi Qianwen model: Qwen-7B, which has seven billion parameters, and Qwen-7B-Chat, a version designed for conversational apps.