TLDR 2024-01-05

Microsoft partners will start shipping a new Copilot key on a variety of new PCs and laptops. The button will provide quick access to Microsoft's AI-powered Windows Copilot experience. It is the first big change to the Windows PC keyboard layout in nearly three decades. The new Copilot key will replace the menu (or application) key. If Windows Copilot isn't available in the user's country, the button will launch Windows Search instead. It is unclear whether Microsoft plans to allow users to use the key in combination with other keys.

Bard Advanced is an upgraded version of Bard that may soon be available through a paid subscription to Google One. It appears to be powered by Gemini Ultra, an upgrade over the current version of Bard which runs the mid-tier Gemini Pro. There may be a feature that allows users to create custom bots, but it is unclear whether users will be able to share these bots. It is unknown when or if the feature will become official.

The DeepMind robotics team has revealed three new advances that will help robots make faster, better, and safer decisions in the wild. One involves a system for gathering training data with a set of safety-focused prompts instructing the model to avoid choosing tasks that involve humans, animals, sharp objects, and electrical appliances. The others are a neural network architecture designed to make the existing Robotic Transformer RT-2 more accurate and faster and RT-Trajectory, which adds 2D outlines to help robots better perform specific physical tasks.

Elon Musk recently made a post on X saying that SpaceX might need to make up to 300 spaceships a year to achieve Mars colonization. Establishing a settlement on Mars will require rocket travel to be nearly as routine as air travel. While SpaceX will be able to reuse Starship and its Super Heavy boosters, the parts that travel into orbit won't be able to be reused as often. Ships often have to orbit the planet several times before they line up with pickup sites, so they might only be able to be used once a day.

Terminal usually draws lines of text at fixed intervals. When scrolling, the sudden jumps are incompatible with how eyes track motion, making it a blurry mess that's hard to read. This blog post discusses how to implement smooth scrolling in Terminal. While smooth scrolling uses a lot more resources, it makes it possible to easily skim text as it scrolls by. A video demonstrating the difference between normal scrolling and smooth scrolling in Terminal is available in the post.

mise-en-place manages dev tools like Node, Python, CMake, Terraform, and more. It manages environment variables for different project directories and tasks used to build and test projects. It can also work as a task runner that can replace make or npm scripts.

Amazon's global order volume in the final two weeks before Christmas was up 21% from the week of Thanksgiving and Black Friday. The company's speedy delivery is a key competitive advantage. 70% of Prime orders in the US arrive within two days, with almost a quarter being delivered within a day. Amazon plans to double its number of same-day delivery facilities in the coming years.

OpenAI's GPT Store will feature custom apps based on its text-generating AI models. Developers will have to review OpenAI's updated usage policies and GPT brand guidelines as well as verify their user profiles before they will be eligible for listing in the store. Making a bot doesn't require any coding experience - developers can just type the capabilities they want their bots to offer in plain language and a GPT-building tool will attempt to make it. Bots can be as simple or complex as a developer wishes. It is unclear whether the GPT Store will launch with a revenue-sharing scheme.

OpenAI offers between $1 million and $5 million a year to license copyrighted news articles to train its AI models.

This blog post provides an end-to-end example of the math within a transformer model with lots of simplification and reduced dimensions.

It is likely that Gigabyte's Aorus Turkey graphics board will essentially confirm Nvidia's RTX 40 Super launch.

The release is aimed at increasing the value of Tesla's distributed energy assets and growing the deployment of its energy storage products.

An npm package called 'everything' released in the new year that depended on every other public npm package, creating millions of transitive dependencies, caused storage space to run out and system resource exhaustion for anyone that installed it.

Section 176 of the US tax law made it so all costs related to R&D cannot be expensed, making bootstrapped software businesses completely unsustainable.