TLDR 2023-10-31

Ad-free Facebook/Insta 📱, X's $19B valuation 🐦, state of dev job market 👨‍💻

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Big Tech & Startups

X is officially worth less than half of what Elon Musk paid for it (1 minute read)

X employees were awarded equity in the company at a valuation of $19 billion on Monday. At $45 per share, X's self-assessed value is at a 55% discount to Musk's original purchase price. The equity is in the form of restricted stock units, so employees will have to wait for a liquidity event to sell them. Employees will have to pay tax on any sales as income.

Facebook and Instagram launch a paid ad-free subscription (2 minute read)

Meta is launching a paid subscription for people aged 18 and older in the EU that will remove ads from Facebook and Instagram on the web for €9.99 per month and on iOS and Android for €12.99 per month. The subscription aims to address concerns by the EU about Meta's ad targeting and data collection practices. Free access with ads will remain available and the experience for nonpaying users will not change. The ad-free subscription will initially apply across all linked Meta accounts, but the company will start charging extra for linked accounts starting in March 2024.
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Science & Futuristic Technology

World's smallest particle accelerator is 54 million times smaller than the Large Hadron Collider — and it works (3 minute read)

A new particle accelerator known as a nanophotonic electron accelerator is around the size of a small coin. The device consists of a small microchip that houses an even smaller vacuum tube made up of thousands of individual pillars. Researchers can accelerate electrons by firing mini laser beams at these pillars. The main goal of creating these devices is to use the energy given off by the accelerated electrons in targeted medical treatments that can replace damaging forms of radiotherapy.

New laser enabled 3D-printing method makes steel more affordable (3 minute read)

A new method for 3D printing metal developed by a team led by the University of Cambridge allows structural alterations to be written into metal alloys during 3D printing. It allows for the creation of complex forms and the engineering of the structure and characteristics in the material. The method gave the researchers complete control over both the strength and toughness of its structures. It uses typical laser-based 3D printing technology with some modifications.
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Programming, Design & Data Science

The architecture of today’s LLM applications (2 minute read)

This blog post aims to give readers everything they need to know to build their first LLM app. It also introduces some problem spaces that readers can start exploring today. The blog covers the emerging architecture of LLM apps and the real-world impacts of LLMs. Resources for further reading are available.

Hopping instead of hustling: Survey tells us how developers are taking care of business (7 minute read)

This article summarizes the results from Stack Overflow's Job Report, which looks at job insights from the tech community. New developers switched jobs more frequently than early- and mid-career developers in the last three years. The decreasing amount of entry-level openings and the lack of perceived stability within the tech industry could be why developers are migrating out of the tech industry and exploring career changes.
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Miscellaneous

Meta’s AI research head wants open source licensing to change (5 minute read)

While Meta's Llama 2 is free for many, it was released under a limited license that doesn't meet all of the requirements of the Open Source Initiative. Releasing AI models as completely open source may have potential risks and accountability issues for the companies that release them. Acknowledging these risks while providing an avenue for feedback isn't currently a standard part of the open source discussion, but it should be a norm for anyone creating AI models.

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai defends Google’s search deals in antitrust trial (5 minute read)

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai defended Google's default search engine agreements during his testimony at Google's antitrust trial. He also addressed the government's allegations that Google destroyed chat messages and described the company's relationship with Apple. This article provides a detailed look at Pichai's testimony and the arguments in the case.
Quick Links

I Accidentally Saved Half A Million Dollars (6 minute read)

A story of how one employee saved their company half a million dollars in five minutes by clicking about five buttons.

Edge and beyond: How to meet the increasing demand for memory (9 minute read)

Edge computing provides huge opportunities, but there are equally large memory requirements - this post discusses how to improve memory use using software-defined memory.

ChatGPT Plus members can upload and analyze files in the latest beta (2 minute read)

The latest beta features the ability to upload and work with files as well as multimodal support - the AI will now guess what mode to select based on context.

The product manager role is a mistake (10 minute read)

Many problems can arise when you put someone without vision, charisma, passion, technical skills, or willpower in charge.

CSS is fun again (6 minute read)

There have been many big changes lately in CSS that make features previously only available through external tools a native part of the language.

10 lessons from successful one-person startups (9 minute read)

Successful indie hackers ship fast and often, make small bets, work through their failures, and have their marketing on lock.
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