TLDR 2024-01-16

Tesla bot folds shirt 🤖, YouTube slows ad blockers 📺, hacking AWS bandwidth fees 👨‍💻

📱
Big Tech & Startups

Tesla Optimus robot can’t build cars yet, but it is folding clothes (3 minute read)

Elon Musk has shared a video of Tesla's Optimus humanoid robot folding a shirt. The project has come a long way since a very early prototype was shown at Tesla AI Day 2022. Tesla aims to eventually have the robot in people's homes performing a wide range of tasks, but it first plans to have them in its own manufacturing operations for repetitive and or dangerous tasks. The video of the robot folding a shirt is available in the article.

YouTube appears to be reducing video and site performance for ad-block users (1 minute read)

YouTube appears to be slowing down the site for ad-block users. Turning off ad blockers immediately improves loading performance for affected users. The ad-block detection causes strange issues, like a lag that makes full-screen and comments not work or Chrome being unable to load other webpages while YouTube is open. The slowdowns may be due to ad blockers altering YouTube's code and unrelated to YouTube.
🚀
Science & Futuristic Technology

ID of five subtypes of Alzheimer's has huge implications for treatment (5 minute read)

An international team of neuroscientists has identified five distinct subtypes of Alzheimer's disease. The finding has breakthrough implications for treatment approaches and efficacy. The subtypes can be identified by the categories of fluid surrounding the brains of patients. Each of the five subtypes is linked to a unique genetic risk profile. They reveal different molecular pathways to what has traditionally been considered as one overall disease.

New solid state battery charges in minutes, lasts for thousands of cycles (4 minute read)

Researchers at Harvard John A. Paulson SEAS have developed a new lithium metal battery that can be charged in minutes and lasts at least 6,000 charging cycles. Lithium metal batteries offer far better energy density and much lower weight than their lithium-ion counterparts. The team has a list of other materials that could potentially yield similar performance. The technology has been licensed through a Harvard spinoff company that has scaled it up to build a smartphone-sized pouch cell battery.
💻
Programming, Design & Data Science

Surya (GitHub Repo)

Surya is a multilingual document OCR toolkit that can provide accurate line-level text detection. Text recognition and table and chart detection are coming soon. Surya works on a range of documents and languages.

Slashing Data Transfer Costs in AWS by 99% (8 minute read)

One of the easiest ways to accidentally spend too much money on AWS is by carelessly transferring data. Any application that involves sending data between resources in different availability zones will incur such charges. These prices easily add up and are an extremely high-margin source of profit for cloud providers. This article looks at how to set up cross-availability zone infrastructure without paying for data transfer costs. It suggests using S3, which already replicates data between availability zones as part of its service.
🎁
Miscellaneous

Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable? (Hacker News Thread)

People with a lot of coding experience and good referrals are suddenly finding it hard to get employed. The job market has been difficult for many job seekers. It appears that companies are looking for very specific skills. The market is much slower than it was between 2020-2022. Several commenters in this thread provide CV and job-searching advice for those struggling to find work.

Elon Musk wants more control of Tesla, seeks 25% voting power (3 minute read)

Elon Musk said on Monday that he wants about 25% of voting control over Tesla. Musk already owns around 13% of the company. He says that he is uncomfortable growing Tesla to be a leader in AI and robotics without having the control. He wants to be influential, but not so much that he can't be overturned. The bid for more control will add to the pressure on Tesla's board of directors, who is already facing investor concerns over several issues, including Musk's split focus, the use of company resources, and federal probes.
Quick Links

Compressing Text into Images (3 minute read)

Image compression algorithms are generally good at finding patterns in images and squashing them down - it looks like they're a pretty efficient way to compress ASCII text as well.

Microsoft’s new Copilot Pro brings AI-powered Office features to the rest of us (3 minute read)

Copilot Pro, which provides access to AI-powered features inside Office apps, is launching today as a $20 monthly subscription.

Screens keep getting faster. Can you even tell? (5 minute read)

LCD monitors have been pushing 500Hz for around a year now, and multiple OLED monitors hitting speeds of 360Hz and 480Hz were introduced at CES 2024.

High-speed 10Gbps full-mesh network based on USB4 for just $47.98 (10 minute read)

Gaining knowledge about hardware is equally important to learning code - this post by a software engineer explains how they learned how to build a bare-metal Kubernetes cluster and set up the network for it.

AI Sleeper Agents (13 minute read)

A deeper look into a recent study where researchers tried and failed to remove 'sleeper agents' from AI.

App Store to Be 'Split in Two' Ahead of EU iPhone Sideloading Deadline (1 minute read)

Apple plans to split the Apple Store in the EU from the rest of the world by March 7.
Get the most important tech, science, & coding news in a free daily email. Read by +1,250,000 software engineers and tech workers.
Join 1,250,000 readers for