TLDR 2023-09-08

Google Chrome's redesign 🎨, Elon's AI ambitions 🤖, ChatGPT traffic decreasing 📉

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Big Tech & Startups

Chrome turns 15 and is getting a big redesign (5 minute read)

Chrome is getting a big redesign to celebrate its 15th birthday. The redesign will bring Google's 'Material You' design language to Chrome. Other updates from the latest version of Chrome include a more comprehensive menu, an upgraded Safe Browsing blocklist, and AI in the sidebar. Screenshots of the redesign are available in the article.

Cruise ‘just days away’ from approval to mass-produce Origin robotaxis without steering wheels (3 minute read)

Cruise, a company backed by GM, is set to soon begin mass production of its fully autonomous vehicle, pending regulatory approval. The vehicle will not have a steering wheel or pedals. Its lack of traditional human controls means that Cruise requires an exemption from the federal government's motor vehicle safety standards. The government body responsible for processing the exemption is expected to make a decision on the matter soon, maybe even before the end of the month.
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Science & Futuristic Technology

Scientists grow whole model of human embryo, without sperm or egg (5 minute read)

Scientists from the Weizmann Institute have grown embryo models that resemble real early human embryos without using sperm, eggs, or a womb. The embryo models look like a textbook example of a real 14-day-old embryo. They release hormones that turn pregnancy tests positive in the lab. Realistic embryo models could provide an ethical way for scientists to study the earliest moments of life. The scientists claim that it would be impossible to achieve a real pregnancy using their embryo models.

Humanised kidneys grown inside pigs for the first time (4 minute read)

Researchers have created human-pig chimeric embryos that, when transferred to surrogate pig mothers, were shown to have kidneys that contained mostly human cells. This is the first time that scientists have grown a solid humanised organ inside another animal. The kidneys are not able to be used for transplantation in their current form as they are not entirely human. There are still plenty of legal and ethical challenges to overcome before this work will see any clinical applications.
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Programming, Design & Data Science

μDSV (GitHub Repo)

μDSV is a JavaScript library for parsing well-formed CSV strings. It is mostly RFC 4180 compliant. μDSV supports quoted values containing commas, escaped quotes, and line breaks. It will eventually be able to handle 99.5% of use cases without adding complexity or performance trade-offs to support the remaining 0.5%.

LotusDB (GitHub Repo)

LotusDB is an extremely fast advanced key-value store. It combines the advantages of log-structured merge (LSM) trees and B+ trees. LotusDB has much lower read and space amplification than typical LSMs.
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Miscellaneous

Inside Elon Musk's Struggle for the Future of AI (23 minute read)

This article covers Elon Musk's history with AI. It includes anecdotes about his discussions with Larry Page before Google purchased DeepMind, his role in co-founding OpenAI, why he split with OpenAI, and many other stories. Musk's xAI is currently aiming to create an AI bot that can write computer code, reason, think, and pursue truth to compete with OpenAI's GPT series.

ChatGPT traffic slips again for third month in a row (3 minute read)

ChatGPT's traffic has declined for the third month. There are signs that the decline is coming to an end. School coming back into session in September may have boosted ChatGPT's traffic and usage. ChatGPT is still one of the top 30 websites in the world.
Quick Links

Google gets its way, bakes a user-tracking ad platform directly into Chrome (6 minute read)

Google Chrome's new Privacy Sandbox ad platform, which is rolling out with the new Chrome today, allows web pages to generate a list of advertising topics to share with other websites.

Every Software Project is a Startup That Will Probably Fail (3 minute read)

Most software will never produce more value than it cost to develop.

‘I hope I’m wrong’: the co-founder of DeepMind on how AI threatens to reshape life as we know it (9 minute read)

An article about Mustafa Suleyman, one of the co-founders of DeepMind, and his views on how AI will affect our lives in the future.

The Secret to Nvidia’s AI Success (4 minute read)

The biggest gain for Nvidia has been in boosting number representation in its GPUs.

Alaz (GitHub Repo)

Alaz is a Ddosify BPF agent that can inspect and collect Kubernetes service traffic without code instrumentation, sidecars, or service restarts.

Elements of Exceptional Startups (8 minute read)

Exceptional startups have an exceptional CEO, executive team, investors, talent, and product.
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