TLDR 2023-08-22

Arm filed for its initial public offering (IPO) yesterday. Its sale will be a major test for the IPO market, which has been heavily affected by rising interest rates. Arm is one of the most important companies in tech. Its chip designs are found in nearly every smartphone in the world. SoftBank, which owns Arm, is aiming to bounce back from a grim tech market and pivot its focus to artificial intelligence.

SpaceX is expanding its Rideshare program to meet the demand for launches to mid-inclination orbits. The new program was quietly announced at a space industry conference earlier this month. Mid-inclination orbits are appealing to a growing number of customers. SpaceX currently has four mid-inclination orbit missions booked between 2024 and 2025. The new Rideshare program could be a major threat to small launch providers.

China's leading tech companies have placed orders for $5 billion worth of chips from Nvidia, despite the fact that the chips have been deliberately hobbled to limit their capabilities for the Chinese market. Worries that the US might tighten its export controls further have prompted more orders. Training requirements for the most advanced AI systems doubles every six to 12 months, so the gap between chips sold in China and those available elsewhere will grow quickly.

The Pyxis Ocean, chartered by shipping firm Cargill, has set out on its maiden voyage. The ship has wind-powered sails that are designed to cut fuel consumption. It will travel from China to Brazil to test the technology and provide an opportunity to assess whether traditional methods of propelling ships could be the way forward for moving cargo at sea. The sails could help save 20 tonnes of CO2 per day per ship.

Lightning CSS is an extremely fast CSS parser, transformer, and minifier. It can be used with Parcel, as a standalone library, as a command-line tool, or via a plugin with any other tool. Lightning CSS has typed property values, a browser-grade parser, vendor prefixing, and more.

Walk is a terminal navigator that is simple and minimalistic that allows for quick navigation with fuzzy searching. It is a replacement for cd and ls. Users can open vim right from the walk. GIF examples are available.

There have been many Create Economy startups over the past few years. The rise of social media platforms has empowered creators to become a focal point for consumer engagement. These startups promised to help creators better monetize their audiences. There have been some big successes, with some companies hitting billions in earnings paid to creators. This article looks at lessons learned about the dynamics in this sector and why some startups worked while others lagged behind.

This two-part essay discusses how Stable Diffusion works and predicts how this technology will be used and by whom. Stable Diffusion was basically trained to make noisy images clearer. The demand for real physical art is likely not going to vanish. Physical media will continue to be used in training generative AIs. Generative AI will replace a slice of illustration and writing, in particular, the kind where the content doesn't matter.

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There is going to be a new generation of designers who sit alongside and work with engineers to help drive the product or company.

This article looks at Microsoft's work on AI over the last few decades.

Web developers have no control over what conditions their websites will be visited on, so it's best to create flexible rules and allow browsers to calculate the best outcomes based on the conditions they find themselves in.

The best time to talk to a recruiter is when you're not looking for a job.

This blog post details high-level thoughts on Infrastructure as Code (IaC) concepts and principles and discusses lessons learned from using a myriad of IaC tools.

VisionScript is an abstract programming language built in Python for doing common computer vision tasks that offers a simple syntax for running object detection, classification, and segmentation models.