TLDR 2023-11-30

Sam Altman interview 👨🏻, Spotify Wrapped 🎵, online LLMs 🤖

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Big Tech & Startups

Interview: Sam Altman on being fired and rehired by OpenAI (7 minute read)

Sam Altman felt defiant, hurt, and angry when OpenAI's board asked him to return a day after they fired him. This article contains an interview with Altman and OpenAI CTO Mira Murati on the attempted boardroom coup. Altman repeatedly declined to say exactly why he was fired during the interview. OpenAI's new board will conduct an independent investigation into what went down.

Firefox for Android is getting over 400 more extensions in December (1 minute read)

Firefox extensions compatible with Android will be openly available to users on December 14. There will be over 400 extensions available at launch. The update involves giving developers a route to port desktop extensions to Android. Mozilla will be redesigning the add-on library to better show the new options.
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Science & Futuristic Technology

Perplexity AI unveils ‘online’ LLMs that could dethrone Google Search (6 minute read)

Perplexity AI's combination of a web index and up-to-date information with a conversational AI chatbot-style interface has the potential to dethrone Google. The company recently released fine-tuned and augmented versions of open source models from Mistral and Meta. The models aim to offer helpful, factual, and up-to-date information. They are the first-ever live LLM APIs that are grounded with web search data and have no knowledge cutoff.

Google’s DeepMind finds 2.2M crystal structures in materials science win (2 minute read)

Google DeepMind researchers have discovered 2.2 million crystal structures using an AI tool known as GNoME. The researchers plan to make 381,000 of the most promising structures available to fellow scientists to make and test their viability. The discovery of inorganic crystals has always been bottlenecked by expensive trial-and-error approaches. The venture shows how AI can be used to shortcut years of experiments and potentially deliver improved products and processes.
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Programming, Design & Data Science

jaq (GitHub Repo)

jaq is a clone of the JSON data processing tool jq that focuses on correctness, performance, and simplicity. It aims to support a large subset of jq's syntax and operations. Examples of how to use jq and benchmark results are available.

pgxman (Website)

pgxman is a command for implementing extensions and updates in PostgreSQL. It allows developers to install and upgrade Postgres extensions with confidence. pgxman automatically detects and streamlines extension operations based on the local development environment. It integrates with the system package manager to ensure correct versions are installed without extra packages from any shared dependencies between extensions.
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Miscellaneous

Y Combinator's Future in the Software Slowdown (32 minute read)

Y Combinator invests in, educates, and promotes early-stage companies, especially in software. It has helped birth companies like Airbnb, Reddit, Twitch, and Instacart. YC exerts a wide cultural and intellectual influence on Silicon Valley, the core driver of US economic growth and technological dynamism in the present day. This article looks at YC and its impact on the industry and how the company will be affected as the contemporary political economy of the US changes and software successes become less impactful.

Your Complete Guide to Spotify Wrapped, 2023 (4 minute read)

Spotify Wrapped is a yearly summary of the songs and artists that users have listened to throughout the year. It has become one of the most successful and shareable marketing ploys on social media since its inception in 2016. 2023's Spotify Wrapped has launched. This article shows readers how to access the feature, how it works, the most popular artists of the year, and more.
Quick Links

Reddit Sans (GitHub Repo)

This repository contains both TrueType and WOFF/WOFF 2 files for Reddit Sans, Reddit Mono, and Reddit Condensed.

llamafile (GitHub Repo)

llamafile allows anyone to distribute and run LLMs that work with multiple CPU microarchitectures with a single file.

Writing Documentation for Your House (6 minute read)

This article presents a guide to creating documentation for a house for homeowners to refer to for a whole slew of scenarios.

Stability AI Positioning Itself for Acquisition (2 minute read)

Stability AI has engaged in preliminary discussions with multiple companies for an acquisition due to mounting pressure from investors over its financial position.

The Indie Era of Startups (7 minute read)

This post steps through the various eras of a venture investing career to create a context for the current startup funding environment.

My $500M Mars Rover Mistake: A Failure Story (20 minute read)

A mistake resulted in the connector interface sending a surge of electricity straight into the Spirit spacecraft instead of its RAT-Revolve motor.
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