TLDR 2023-12-14

Tesla's next-gen robot 🤖, Netflix's most watched shows 📺, running an open source company 👨‍💻

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Big Tech & Startups

Tesla unveils its latest humanoid robot, Optimus Gen 2, in demo video (2 minute read)

Tesla has released a demo video showing the latest version of its Optimus Gen 2 humanoid robot. The video, available in the article, shows a vastly improved robot moving in real time without any CGI performing various tasks like walking, crouching, manipulating eggs without breaking them, and waving its arms. Tesla aims to eventually develop a robot to replace human labor in a seamless way.

Netflix finally reveals viewing data across its entire catalog (2 minute read)

Netflix will start publishing comprehensive deep dives into what its subscribers are watching twice a year. Its first report provides viewer data on more than 18,000 titles representing a total of nearly 100 billion hours viewed. Netflix's lack of transparency created an environment of mistrust in the industry. The company says that the data released is the same data that it uses to run its business.
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Science & Futuristic Technology

Human brain-like supercomputer with 228 trillion links coming in 2024 (2 minute read)

DeepSouth is a supercomputer designed to operate in a manner similar to a network of neurons. It uses interconnected artificial neurons and synapses to emulate the brain's ability to learn, adapt, and process information in a highly parallel and distributed manner. The neuromorphic supercomputer will be capable of 228 trillion synaptic operations per second, on par with the estimated number of operations in the human brain, when it becomes operational in April 2024.

Cosmic nuclear fission seen for 1st time in 'incredibly profound' discovery (8 minute read)

Scientists have discovered the first indication of nuclear fission occurring amongst the stars. The discovery supports the idea that neutron stars create superheavy elements that break down via nuclear fission to birth elements like gold. It brings scientists a step closer to solving the mystery of where the universe's heavy elements come from. The research also indicated that elements with atomic masses greater than 260 may briefly exist around neutron star smashes.
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Programming, Design & Data Science

Modern iOS Navigation Patterns (9 minute read)

This page contains a collection of familiar navigation patterns for structuring iOS apps. The collection covers structural, overlay, and embedded navigation patterns. Each section contains an example and a detailed breakdown of the pattern.

Bash One-Liners for LLMs (17 minute read)

This blog post describes five solid examples for making llamafile more productive on the command line. It shows various ways to use one-liners to produce specific results. Each example contains code and demo files.
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Miscellaneous

Balancing Growth and Sustainability - Avalonia's Financial Evolution (9 minute read)

Monetizing open source software is notoriously difficult. This post describes Avalonia's approach to creating a sustainable business around a popular open source project. Avalonia's 30% month-over-month growth during 2023 came with many challenges, which meant that its team needed to expand to handle its community's growing needs. The project gains income through development services, support agreements, in-person training, donations, and by making a paid product.

Why the AI Act was so hard to pass (9 minute read)

European lawmakers have reached a provisional deal on artificial intelligence rules. The EU AI Act uses a tier system that ranks AI applications based on risk. High risk AI systems, systems that could impact safety or fundamental rights, and General Purpose AI Systems, have the most onerous regulatory restrictions. Many parts of the legislation were heavily contested even until the final hours before the deal was approved. The full approved AI Act text won't be available for several weeks.
Quick Links

llmware (GitHub Repo)

llmware is a framework that provides tools for rapidly building industrial-grade enterprise LLM-based applications.

First Impressions with Google’s Gemini (6 minute read)

This guide discusses what Gemini is, analyzes its performance across a range of computer vision tasks, and shares resources for building with Gemini.

Threads is officially starting to test ActivityPub integration (2 minute read)

Meta is beginning to test making Threads posts available on ActivityPub-supporting services.

OpenAI inks deal with Axel Springer on licensing news for model training (2 minute read)

OpenAI will train its generative AI models on Axel Springer's content and add recent articles from the publisher to ChatGPT.

Elon Musk Is Reportedly Launching a New University in Texas (2 minute read)

Elon Musk is intent on setting up a primary and secondary school in Austin, Texas, that will focus primarily on STEM - the school will eventually expand and develop into a university.

It’s weird how design systems are so rote, yet so difficult (7 minute read)

It's easy to choose a design system, but getting teams to align with and understand the resulting decision-making around design systems is difficult.
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