TLDR 2023-09-19

iOS 17 and iPadOS17 bring new features such as Contact Posters, Live Voicemail, and upgraded autocorrect. iOS 17 will have a feature called StandBy that turns iPhones into a display while charging. iPadOS 17 allows users to personalize their lock screens and add interactive widgets. Apple has also released tvOS 17.

Charter and Disney have agreed on a package that will provide subscribers with Disney Plus Basic when they pay for Spectrum's TV Select package. Subscribers who choose Spectrum TV Select Plus will also get ESPN Plus. Spectrum cable customers will soon be able to bundle multiple streaming services on their bills.

Stoke Space has successfully completed a key test of its second stage prototype. The space startup is now one step closer to flying a fully reusable launch vehicle. It plans to conduct its first orbital flight test in 2025. A video of the second stage prototype test is available in the article.

Agility Robotics is building a factory in Oregon that will be able to manufacture more than 10,000 of its Digit humanoid robots per year. The 70,000-square-foot RoboFab facility is set to open later this year. Digit robots will be used in the factory to produce more Digits. A video announcement from Agility Robotics about the factory is available in the article.

HyperDX is an open source observability platform that helps to quickly resolve production issues. It centralizes and correlates logs, metrics, traces, exceptions, and session replays in one place. HyperDX allows users to dashboard high cardinality events without a complex query language and set up alerts in just a few clicks. Screenshots are available.

MongoDB is releasing a new query engine in version 7.0. The change completely overhauls the way the engine executes the strategy picked by the query optimizer. While the classic engine was mature and it served customers' needs, its data model and approach resulted in suboptimal performance and a serious maintenance burden. This article shares some technical details about the new engine.

A Reddit user recently posted an AI-generated image of a spiral-shaped medieval village that gained rapid attention on social media for its remarkable geometric qualities. The image was created using Stable Diffusion and a guidance technique called ControlNet. A similar technique for producing QR codes went viral earlier this year. This article explains how the artwork was generated. Examples of other similar artworks are available.

Unity announced a Runtime Fee on September 12 that will charge developers for each game installation past a certain threshold. This was not received well by the developer community, who were quick to point out all the problems that the fee might cause. Unity posted an apology on X on September 17 saying that it would make changes to the policy and share an update in a couple of days. It is rumored that Unity plans to limit fees to 4% of a game's revenue for customers making over $1 million. The new approach will reportedly also not retroactively count installations.

An efficient 800-square-foot garden could sustain a family of four.

The Augmented Reality Microscope, while not yet ready for clinical use, has shown initial promise as a useful tool for pathologists without easy access to a second opinion.

npm gradually implemented all of the features that made Yarn special over the years - the same thing will likely happen with Bun.

AWS currently owns 127,972,688 IPv4 addresses and it has plans to charge $43.80 per year per IPv4 address starting in February next year.

Coronal mass ejections are immense eruptions of plasma and energy from the Sun's corona - a video of the fly-through is available in the article.

This post shares some of the discussions going on inside Microsoft among the senior leadership team and the board during the early days of the pandemic and after the company decided to lay off thousands of employees.