TLDR 2023-10-27

Google's ultra fast internet ⚡, OpenAI's AGI preparedness challenge 🤖, Next.js 14 👨‍💻

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Big Tech & Startups

Google Fiber is getting outrageously fast 20Gbps service (1 minute read)

Google Fiber plans to upgrade some of its users to a 20Gbps service by the end of the year. The new service is made possible via Nokia's 25G passive optical network technology. Google is one of the first Internet service providers to adopt the technology for consumers. The 20Gbps service will eventually roll out to most of Google Fiber's network.

OpenAI forms team to study ‘catastrophic’ AI risks, including nuclear threats (3 minute read)

OpenAI has created a new team called 'Preparedness' to assess, evaluate, and probe AI models to protect against catastrophic risks. Preparedness' chief responsibilities will be tracking, forecasting, and protecting against the dangers of future AI systems. Some of the listed risk categories include chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear threats. OpenAI is soliciting ideas for risk studies from the community and is offering $25,000 and a job at Preparedness for the top ten submissions. A link to the contest is available in the article.
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Science & Futuristic Technology

Slow-moving quasiparticles make the fastest semiconductor in the world (3 minute read)

Researchers at Columbia University in the US have developed the fastest and most efficient semiconductor that works at room temperature. The material was originally synthesized to test a high-resolution microscope and wasn't expected to conduct anything. It can be pulled into atom-thin sheets and combined with other materials. One of the elements in the material is extremely rare and expensive, so the semiconductor is unlikely to feature in any consumer devices in the future.

SpaceX’s Starship Can Fly In November Hint NASA, Coast Guard Notices (4 minute read)

The Coast Guard has warned mariners of a potential rocket launch in Boca Chica, Texas, during the first week of November. The notice coincided with a test of Starship's preflight systems by SpaceX and a visit by the Fish and Wildlife Service to the Starship launch pad. These events, along with a placeholder set by NASA, indicate that the next Starship test will be soon. SpaceX is still waiting for clearance from the FAA.
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Programming, Design & Data Science

Next.js 14 (16 minute read)

This article goes over the changes in Next.js 14. The update features partial prerendering, stable Server Actions, a free course, and more. There are several breaking changes and some features have been deprecated.

Hopping instead of hustling: Survey tells us how developers are taking care of business (8 minute read)

More developers are now looking for or are open to a new job compared to the last two years. Both new tech talent and late-career developers are likely to be looking. The tighter job market may be keeping comfortable developers where they are, while those who desire flexibility are more likely to look for it elsewhere. The migration of tech developers to other industries may be a reaction to the corporate culture of tech companies decreasing flexibility in order to justify higher pay.
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Miscellaneous

Sam Bankman-Fried testifies, says he “skimmed over” FTX terms of service (4 minute read)

Sam Bankman-Fried's testimony was a bit unusual as the judge sent the jury home for the day to assess which parts of the testimony would be admissible in the case. Bankman-Fried admitted that he only skimmed over FTX's terms of service during the juryless testimony. Part of his defense involves blaming FTX's lawyers - Bankman-Fried may argue that he received advice from company lawyers that his conduct was legal.

Ask HN: PG's 'Do Things That Don't Scale' manual examples? (Hacker News Thread)

Startups take off because the founders make them take off. Sometimes you have to push things before they get going. There are many unscalable things that founders need to do before their startups can scale, for example, nearly all startups have to recruit users manually the beginning. This Hacker News thread contains many examples of unscalable things that startups had to do to make things happen.
Quick Links

verto.sh (Website)

verto.sh curates accessible projects to make it easy for people to enter the open-source world.

Uber begins offering rides in self-driving Waymo cars (1 minute read)

Uber customers in Phoenix can now choose to take their rides in a fully autonomous vehicle.

Why cloud bandwidth is so obscenely expensive and what you can do about that (6 minute read)

A less known reason for high cloud bandwidth prices is that network is the hardest part to scale for cloud providers, so they need to incentivize their customers to optimize their network usage by themselves.

Despite usage declines, X remains ‘stickier’ than first thought (4 minute read)

While the number of daily active users has dropped on X, the time that users spend on the platform has grown, and power-user usage remains largely unchanged.

Introducing Pollen (Website)

Pollen is a highly configurable and responsive library of style-agnostic CSS variables that allows developers to write faster, more consistent, and more maintainable styles.

Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s chief scientist, on his hopes and fears for the future of AI (11 minute read)

ChatGPT has rewritten a lot of people's expectations and turned 'will never happen' into 'will happen faster than you think'.
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