TLDR 2023-08-14

Apple Watch X โŒš, Amazon boxless delivery ๐Ÿšš, $0 to $100M to $0 startup journey ๐Ÿ“‰

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Big Tech & Startups

Apple Planning Major 'Apple Watch X' Redesign to Introduce New Band System and More (2 minute read)

Apple is reportedly planning a complete revamp of the Apple Watch for the device's tenth anniversary. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman says that the 'Apple Watch X', which will be released either in 2024 or 2025, will have a thinner casing and different ways for bands to attach to the device. The Apple Watch Series 9 will likely only be a minor refresh. Apple is considering switching the Apple Watch away from annual updates to offer more substantial upgrades on a less frequent cycle.

Millions of Amazon Packages Will Now Arrive Without Any Packaging At All (3 minute read)

Around 11% of packages from Amazon in the US will now arrive without extra packaging. Amazon is aiming to streamline its delivery process, boost sustainability, and appeal to customers who are turned off by brown boxes. Customers can choose whether they want extra packaging or not at checkout on items qualified to ship in their own containers.
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Science & Futuristic Technology

How Amazon is racing to catch Microsoft and Google in generative A.I. with custom AWS chips (8 minute read)

Amazon quietly started production of custom silicon in 2013. It has launched its own Arm-based server chip as a rival to x86 CPUs from AMD and Intel. Amazon launched AI-focused chips in 2018, two years before Google announced its first Tensor Processing Unit. This article takes a look at Amazon's strategy to provide the infrastructure for businesses to create generative AI applications.

New force of nature discovered by scientists at Fermilab (4 minute read)

Scientists at Fermilab have found evidence of muons not behaving as expected by the current physics theory. There is still some uncertainty over the results. It could be a sign of a new force of nature. Muons are fundamental particles similar to electrons but about 200 times as massive. The standard model of physics is unable to account for many phenomena observed in the universe.
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Programming, Design & Data Science

Metatype (GitHub Repo)

Metatype is a declarative API development platform. It uses Typegraphs, programmable virtual graphs describing all of the components in a stack, to enable API, storage, and business logic composition in a type-safe manner. Metatype supports plugins and reusable components. It is still in beta, but most of the core engine is close to production readiness.

The Source of Readability (14 minute read)

Code that is read together should be written together. There is a lot of actionable advice that can be derived from this rule, for example, maintain high cohesion and low coupling, write less code, keep modules deep, and avoid repetition. This article takes a look at the rule and how it results in more readable code.
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Miscellaneous

There is no hard takeoff (5 minute read)

The information revolution will do for intelligence what the industrial revolution did for energy. Most work used to be done by muscles, now it is not - soon, most thinking won't be done with brains. The change won't happen overnight, but it has already begun. More intelligence will lead to new tricks, but the tricks will get harder and harder to find.

My $0->$100m->$0 in 5 years story (3 minute read)

This Reddit post tells the story of someone who quit their executive job at a FAANG and started a SaaS as a first time founder. It talks about how they scaled, raised money from VCs, and how the advice of VCs caused the business to collapse. The story aims to show another side of the VC startup scene to provide a different perspective in a field that often shows too much survivor bias.
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Quick Links

How the FBI goes after DDoS cyberattackers (19 minute read)

In this interview, Elliott Peterson, one of the FBI agents who led the investigations around the DDOS attacks that knocked out some of the biggest websites in 2016, discusses his work going after the people behind DDoS services and identifying which services to take down.

Amazon warns employees who donโ€™t go to the office enough (3 minute read)

Amazon sent an email to employees who rarely used their workplace ID badges to enter an Amazon office building saying that workers are expected to start coming into the office three or more days a week now.

Prepare your Firefox desktop extension for the upcoming Android release (2 minute read)

Mozilla is launching support for an open ecosystem of extensions on Firefox for Android in the coming months - developers can start optimizing their desktop extensions for mobile use right away.

How a startup loses its spark (5 minute read)

A look at the differences between working at startups vs large companies for engineers.

Carrot Problems (3 minute read)

Anytime someone achieves success in a way they don't want to admit publicly, they have to come up with an excuse, which can mean misleading others into potentially wasting their time or worse.

Sam Bankman-Fried is going to jail (2 minute read)

Prosecutors convinced a judge that Bankman-Fried had fed documents to the media to intimidate a witness.
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