Google is bringing emoji reactions to its Gmail service. It will roll out gradually starting with Android users and to other platforms over the next few months. Users with access will see a smiling emoji at the bottom of messages. Some emojis will enable full-page animations. Emoji reactions will only show up in the Gmail app - people using third-party email clients will receive emojis as separate emails. The feature is not available to users on school or work accounts or for large group messages.
Amazon deployed a secret algorithm called Project Nessie to gauge how high it could raise prices before competitors stopped increasing their prices as well. The algorithm would inflate prices and monitor whether other retailers would follow suit. If retailers maintained the lower price, the algorithm would revert back to the normal price. Amazon reportedly stopped using it in 2019. Project Nessie is just one of the many ways the FTC has accused Amazon of illegally maintaining its market dominance in the e-commerce industry.
Princess Elisabeth Island, the world's first artificial energy island, has secured its environmental permit in Belgium. The island is an at-sea electricity grid that will connect offshore wind farms to the Belgian mainland. It will serve as a hub for future interconnectors with the UK and Denmark. Construction is planned to be completed in August 2026. The island is expected to be fully connected to all wind farms and the mainland by 2030. A 3-minute video about the project is available.
Starlink has launched new versions of its satellites that can communicate via lasers. The service has an estimated one million subscribers and is looking to improve its offering as competition warms up in the sector. While Amazon's Kuiper project has so far failed to take off, another rival, OneWeb, is expected to begin offering services soon. Starlink's new satellites will be able to transfer data through laser links at speeds of 100 Gbps over thousands of miles.
Database schema migrations are essential for keeping systems up to date and in sync with evolving application requirements, but they come with many challenges. Many developers choose to avoid complex migrations due to this and only make additive changes, resulting in an accumulation of technical debt in the database schema. pgroll is a command-line tool for performing schema migrations against Postgres databases. It allows users to define schema migrations using a high-level JSON format and then takes care of executing them.
zany is an easy-to-use, configurable favicon server. Developers can simply point their icon tag at zany and configure styling without generating, downloading, or serving favicons. It supports text, emojis, background color, text color, and font-family. zany favicons can be easily tested in the browser bar.
Elon Musk questions life's default settings and goes all-in into his work. If one has enough awareness when faced with a new problem, it's easier to come up with novel ways to solve it. This article contains a compilation of anecdotes from Walter Isaacson's biography on Elon Musk of times when Musk made unusual strategic or tactical decisions and what the outcome was. Musk's willingness to have difficult conversations is something many can learn from.
Applying to jobs online is like navigating a maze. Resume parsing software, application tracking systems, and other factors make the process pretty frustrating. This article explores factors that make job applications more or less frustrating. The author applied to 250 jobs manually to see how long it took to get from start to finish. They applied for engineering/product-focused roles in a mix of companies across different industries.
While the proceedings may leave Sam Bankman-Fried feeling very bleak about his future, they will hopefully help make customers whole, hold bad actors accountable, and restore the public's trust in markets.
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