TLDR 2024-01-29

Google's Gemini Pro has claimed the second position in HuggingFace's Chat Bot Arena Leaderboard. Gemini Pro is Google's second-best model - Gemini Ultra's capabilities have yet to be revealed. OpenAI risks losing its lead if it fails to introduce a new model soon. Google is integrating a 'Help me Write' feature directly into Google Chrome to reduce the need for users to draft content on other AI platforms.

Apple has announced a broad, wide-ranging, and complex set of new policies regarding its intended compliance with the EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA). This article looks at Apple's proposed changes. Anti-big-business regulation and pro-consumer results often go hand-in-hand, but the DMA exposes issues with these types of regulations. The DMA will likely not change much for the better for iOS users in the EU. Its practical effects will likely make things worse for users.

Solar panel salespeople obscuring the specific terms of financial agreements and clouding the value of their products are causing a storm in the solar panel industry. Law firms across the US are claiming to receive multiple calls every week from potential clients with stories of dodgy salespeople causing them to sign up for deals that they can't afford. Some of the nation's biggest public solar companies are struggling to stay afloat as questions arise over the viability of the financial products they sold to both customers and investors. These factors could topple the residential solar industry: more than 100 solar dealers and installers in the US declared bankruptcy in late 2023 alone.

Prophetic, a neurotechnology startup, has a new AI model called Morpheus-1 that it claims can help people enter a lucid dream state. The model takes the current brain state as a prompt and generates ultrasound holograms that can be sent to the brain to start the lucid dream state and keep it stable. Lucid dreaming is a type of dream state where the dreamer is aware they are asleep and can control the dream. Prophetic plans to release a headband product called The Halo in beta in the Spring. The device sends sound waves into the brain to connect with the current brain state and put the mind into a lucid state.

cssfact is a lossy CSS compressor. It takes CSS and outputs other CSS that retains most of the information in the input but with fewer rules than the original. cssfact only works on style rules, leaving non-style rules unchanged. This article discusses how cssfact was built and the reasons behind creating the project.

This post presents a look at what's inside the .git directory. It covers each directory and file, with an explanation and example for each section. An image with a ~15-word explanation for each part of a .git directory is available at the beginning of the post.

This article features an interview with Simon Willison, one of the co-creators of the Django framework, where he discusses AI, software development, intellectual property, and related matters. In the discussion about intellectual property, Willison acknowledges how some activities can be legal and still be morally wrong, like how models can be trained on creators' content and then used to compete against the original creators. The issues he discusses are complex, but Willison takes the time to explain them in detail.

The dynamics of joining a friend's startup as an employee aren't widely discussed. This Hacker News thread provides many personal anecdotes of what the experience is like. While some people report positive experiences, many replies tell the story of how the decision to work at a friend's startup ultimately cost them the friendship. Working with friends may be more enjoyable, but the decision to join a startup should be based on the startup itself rather than the friendship - is the opportunity good, does it progress your career, does it pay you well, and is the equity fair?

An Arm-native version of Chrome for Windows 11 has been spotted in the latest nightly builds of Chrome in the Canary channel - it provides a significant performance boost compared to the regular x86 version.

Looking for technical sales specialist interested in AI/LLMs with 3+ years of sales experience in cloud computing/infrastructure to help drive adoption of our NVIDIA GPU cloud. Apply here.

Apple's plan to comply with the EU's new rules will mean that independent browsers like Firefox will be forced to build and maintain two separate browser implementations.

The production ramp will be challenging and not an off-the-self 'it-just-works' type of thing.

Checkboxes used to be square, and radio buttons were round - Apple's new visionOS will have round checkboxes.

If you want to do something, you're going to have to make time for it - that's just what life is like.

Arc Search takes search queries, finds answers, and then builds pages around the answer that contain key information, related links, and other helpful data.