TLDR 2023-12-05

Spotify is laying off 17% of its workforce to reduce costs and adjust for a slowdown in growth. News of the layoffs sent Spotify shares up more than 7%. Spotify says it took on too many employees over 2020 and 2021. The company reported a 65 million euro profit for the third quarter. The layoffs could supply a nearly 2% reduction in operating expenses in 2024.

Tesla has confirmed that it will lose half of the $7,500 tax credit on the Model 3 Rear-Wheel-Drive and Model 3 Long Range from next year. The eligibility criteria for the $7,500 federal tax credit have changed to include things like price and source of components. The battery material criteria are becoming more strict to include more batteries and materials built in North America. This will likely be helpful for Tesla in Q4 as they are trying to sell a record number of vehicles to deliver on its annual guidance.

Despite claims that autonomous vehicles reduce accidents and assurances that they won't displace truckers, autonomous trucks still scare the public and alarm labor groups. Some major companies claim they have achieved Level 4 automation, which means their vehicles can be operated without human presence. Several companies have plans to launch their vehicles within the next few years. This article looks at the upcoming wave of autonomous trucks and the issues that will need to be overcome before they become a common sight on the road.

Startup Biomemory has released DNA cards that can store one kilobyte of data for at least 150 years. The company encodes the data by chemically synthesizing strands of DNA base by base in a process that takes about 8 hours. Customers will have to send their DNA cards to Biomemory's partner Eurofins Genomics to decode the data. They will not get their cards back after the data has been decoded. A pack of two identical cards costs $1,000.

Google's internal code review tool Critique is highly rated among software engineers. This article looks at what makes Critique so good and explains how it pairs with Google's process of code review. It covers Google's guidelines for efficient code review, internal statistics on Google code reviews, and more. While Critique will never be open-sourced, Google maintains a similar open-source code review tool called Gerrit.

This site contains a database of 300 case studies from over 80 companies that share practical machine learning use cases and learnings from designing ML systems. The database can be filtered by industry or ML use case. Tags based on recurring themes are available.

OpenAI's achievements over the past year were recently eclipsed by a rollercoaster couple of weeks that involved Sam Altman being ousted and reinstated as well as a new board. This post contains an edited interview with OpenAI's COO Brad Lightcap where he discusses ChatGPT, OpenAI's Dev Day, and Altman.

Many people use social media out of a fear of missing out rather than genuine interest, making them worse off than if the platforms didn't exist in the first place. This study looks at this phenomenon to paint a more accurate picture of how social media impacts consumers. It challenges the argument that the mere existence of a product implies positive welfare for its users. The results suggest a heightened need for regulators to assess whether different products create traps for consumers and whether they generate positive welfare.

This site looks at how the nano-gpt model, which has 85,000 parameters, sorts a sequence of six letters into alphabetical order.

Examples of side projects that have helped developers land jobs include a Dropbox-like sync and share application, a high availability project for MySQL, and answering questions about a specific subject on StackOverflow until a publisher made them a book offer.

Verizon recently released a Netflix and Max bundle and may release an Apple TV+ and Paramount+ bundle, following a trend that is seeing streaming apps partnering with other apps and other types of companies to offer TV streaming at a lower monthly price.

Transition from passwords to Passkeys might not be a good idea because they are not accessible to everyone and their use will push data ownership more towards Big Tech.

The ultrasound vaccine delivery technique doesn't damage the skin, and while it delivers less molecules of vaccine than conventional jabs, test animals produced more antibodies.

Colonizing Mars is a biology problem - space survival requires miniaturized, modular, failure-proof biotechnologies that will also ensure sustainable abundance for billions of humans on Earth.