TLDR 2024-01-23

Analysts are estimating that Apple Vision Pro sales were between 160,000 to 180,000 units over the first three days. The estimate is over 40% of the 400,000 units Apple is expecting to sell in the first year. The estimate is based on pre-order inventory and shipping times. Apple likely didn't have enough stock on hand to meet initial demand, but demand and supply now appear to be balanced.

MrBeast posted a video to X last week with the explicit goal of seeing how much ad revenue a video on the platform would make. The video made $260,000 with more than 150 million views. While the video performed well, MrBeast noted that advertisers bought ads to run specifically on his video, earning him a higher rate. There were also multiple reports that X was quietly boosting the video to viewers, artificially inflating the view count.

Disney's HoloTile is a system composed of hundreds of small round tiles, each serving as a kind of mini omnidirectional treadmill. The tiles work together to prevent users from walking off the HoloTile. Users can walk on the HoloTile in any direction they want and it will automatically do whatever it needs to keep them on the floor. It supports multiple people walking independently. The technology will likely become part of a Disney Parks VR experience. Video of the HoloTile in action is available in the article.

The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) is a fusion reactor that may one day provide the Earth with unlimited energy. The project started in 2005. Fusion reactions occur when two small particles collide, forming a heavier atom and producing a significant amount of energy without creating radioactive waste. If successful, ITER will be arguably the most complex machine ever designed.

The Machine Learning Engineering Open Book is an open collection of methodologies to help with the successful training of large language models and multi-modal models. The material is suitable for LLM/VLM training engineers and operators. It contains lots of scripts and copy-n-paste commands to enable readers to quickly address their needs. The book covers key hardware components, performance, operation, development, and much more.

This repository contains tips and resources to help people prepare for behavioral interviews. It covers general tips, questions that you may be asked, and questions you can ask the interviewer. Each interview question comes with prepared answers.

While GPT-4 is proficient in many tasks, it is also imperfect in odd ways. For example, it can speak all languages, but barely do math. As AI becomes more competent, the technology will have an increasingly large impact on the world. This post lists several ways AI could impact the world and asks some important questions about how these impacts will change the world. The areas affected by AI include markets, real estate, energy, data centers, nations, inflation, and geopolitics.

Dopamine does not generate pleasurable feelings. It's the other way around - pleasurable feelings generate dopamine. The neural circuits that lead us to like things are separate from the circuits that generate wanting. It is easy to confuse 'liking' and 'wanting'. The brain is a prediction machine for rewards, and dopamine represents errors in predicting rewards. When bets by the brain are resolved, dopamine serves as a signal for whether the outcome was better or worse than expected and how much better or worse the outcome was than expected. The higher the surprise, the higher the reward prediction error - resulting in higher activity of dopamine neurons.

The X Lab, Alphabet's 'moonshot' experimental group, is part of the company's 'Other Bets' group, which burns through a billion dollars every quarter.

This post presents a system for generating 'random enough' numbers in your head within half a minute.

This post discusses the challenges in building a fair multi-tenant queuing system, the reasons for building one, and how Inngest's multi-tenant queuing system works.

AST SpaceMobile, which already had Vodafone as an investor, announced Google and AT&T's funding along with a $100 million public offering of its stock on the same day.

This article presents 12 CSS properties to start incorporating to reduce technical debt, remove JavaScript, and score easy wins for user experience.

The Apple Vision Pro could change how media is consumed in the future - its success depends on its apps, but there aren't many developers who are particularly motivated to build experiences for the platform.