TLDR 2023-11-02

Google only shows ads on about 20% of queries. One of the company's most closely guarded secrets - which search terms make the most money - was revealed during the company’s antitrust trial this week. While the list only shows data for a week in September 2018, it's the first time anything like this has been revealed before. The top 20 queries from that list are available in the article. The top three queries by revenue were ‘iPhone 8’, ‘iPhone 8 Plus’, and ‘auto insurance’.

A new report shows how far Apple wants to go into healthcare and explains why it hasn't gotten there yet. The company’s ambitions have been slowed in parts by concerns that mistakes in the field of healthcare could tarnish its public perception. Another obstacle has been getting FDA approval for its technologies. This article details some of the health features that Apple has considered releasing over the years.

The Dream Chaser spaceplane is almost ready to fly. The plane's foldable wings and fuselage are covered in ceramic tiles to shield the spacecraft from the heat of atmospheric reentry. It will be the first commercial spaceplane capable of orbital flight. The ride back down to Earth will be at no more than 1.5 Gs. Each spaceplane is designed for a minimum of 15 flights. It will be able to haul up to 12,000 pounds into space and bring back about 4,000 pounds of cargo.

40% of people faint at least once in their lifetime. Researchers have discovered a neural pathway that connects the heart to the brain stem that, when activated in mice, causes them to become immobile almost immediately. This pathway may hold the key to understanding fainting. Further study of the pathway could inspire new treatment approaches for fainting due to cardiac causes.

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Amazon Web Services has launched Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Capacity Blocks for ML. The service allows customers to buy access to Nvidia GPUs for a defined amount of time. Customers will be able to reserve and schedule GPU instances for future dates for just the amount of time required. The price to access these resources will vary depending on supply and demand.

Bear Blog doesn't use client-side JavaScript. This post describes how it logs traffic without using JavaScript or server logs - only CSS. The site triggers a CSS rule whenever a user hovers their cursor over a page that makes a URL request to record data. The resulting system can track unique users without storing IP addresses un-hashed. The code for the system is available in the article.

Windows Mobile came too early - Android had the benefit of copying the iPhone, while Microsoft started development in 2000 with the Pocket PC 2000 operating system. Apple was able to invent the future by considering what the core functions of a cell phone would be years later. AI could be going down the same path as Window Mobile, especially with Biden's recent executive order, which is rooted in the past yet arrogant about an unknowable future, proscriptive instead of adaptive, and the most cynical attempt at regulatory capture the tech industry has ever seen.

The Biden-Harris administration has issued an executive order on artificial intelligence that is about 20,000 words long. The order tries to address the entire range of AI benefits and risks and will likely shape every aspect of the future of AI. This article takes a look at some of the policies in the executive order and how they may impact openness in AI.

Disney is buying up Comcast's stake in Hulu for an expected $8.61 billion.

This repository contains LangChain templates that serve as a set of reference architectures for a wide variety of popular LLM use cases.

Distil-Whisper is a distilled version of Whisper that is 6 times faster and 49% smaller.

Microsoft's Phi 1.5 model is now multimodal, meaning it can view and interpret images.

Netflix will make every fourth episode ad-free during binge-watching sessions.

Preliminary benchmark results indicate that the entry-level M3 chip with an 8-core CPU performs up to 35% faster than the M1 and 20% faster than the M2.