TLDR 2024-03-12

We’re hiring BDRs (to reach out and build new relationships with advertisers) and account executives (to manage our sales cycle from initial meeting to close) to join our ad sales team to lead the next phase of our revenue growth.

If you love TLDR and work in sales, apply on our careers page!

Apple's AirPods Pro will reportedly gain a new 'hearing aid mode' with iOS 18. The device already offers a Conversation Boost feature, but Apple has not advertised it as a hearing aid device as that requires FDA regulatory approval. It is unclear whether Apple will need FDA clearance to make explicit or implicit claims about the 'hearing aid mode' or whether it will adopt that exact name. The FDA approved a new category of over-the-counter hearing aids called Personal sound amplification products in August 2022 that doesn't require legal registration by manufacturers or listing with the FDA. iOS 18 is set to be previewed in June and released sometime in September.

xAI will open source Grok this week. The move follows Elon Musk's complaint that OpenAI has deviated from its open source roots. Musk has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI claiming that OpenAI, which was supposed to make its technology freely available to the public, has become closed-source and has shifted its focus to maximizing profits for Microsoft. Musk has long been a proponent of open source - Tesla has open sourced many of its patents. It is unclear what aspects of Grok will be open sourced.

Covariant has announced a robotics foundation model that gives robots a human-like ability to reason. The 8 billion parameter RFM-1 can expand its abilities through more data consumption. It incorporates images, video, joint angles, force reading, suction cup strength, and more into its prediction engine to produce images, videos, or a series of commands for a robot. It can be used as a simulation tool, generating action sequences that are both realistic and accurate. With enough data, it could be a useful world simulation tool more capable than one built from the ground up. Covariant aims to make the model be able to do any task in any body.

A novel therapy for Parkinson's disease has shown promise in early clinical trials. UB-312 is designed to clear toxic clumps of a protein thought to be responsible for the disease. It has been shown to be generally safe with relatively mild side effects. There are currently no treatments that address the underlying condition of Parkinson's. The therapy's initial success is exciting as it suggests that scientists are on the right path to finding a safe and effective means of improving quality of life for Parkinson's patients.

Figma employees are encouraged to get early feedback on their in-progress work. Sharing early work can be daunting - it requires an environment and culture in which individual contributors feel comfortable bringing up unpolished ideas. Leaving technical reviews too late can lead to a lot of wasted time. Figma uses engineering crits to brainstorm novel approaches to technical problems, get feedback on the existing work, and unblock team members. This article talks about how Figma implemented its style of engineering crits and presents a template for other organizations to follow.

TypeScript lets developers write type unions that often feel more ergonomic compared to other languages, which may force them to tag the union. These untagged unions often lead to cleaner user-side APIs that don't require boilerplate boxing up of values. However, if you have overlaps when using them, the result type might hold less information than you think. To get the composition to actually represent something like what you get with data types in other languages, make sure there is no overlap between the types.

The decision to add usernames to the upcoming version of Signal was nowhere near as simple as it sounds. Many countries around the world are making it increasingly difficult to obtain phone numbers. Using phone numbers as an identifier is also a security risk for some users. Signal had to implement usernames without having to deal with large-scale moderation obligations. Its system is far more limited than on other platforms that have usernames as canonical identifiers for users. Beta users can claim their usernames now.

TikTok's shareholder agreement bans current and former employees from criticizing the company or risk losing any stock they own. While the non-disparagement provision is unusual, it isn't illegal as long as it doesn't prevent, intimidate, or punish employees for filing complaints with government agencies. The terms in the agreement defining disparagement are vague. It is unknown whether TikTok has ever seized stock from any shareholders.

Version 6.8 of the Linux Kernel contains 9.996 million objects.

The top Quest apps include social apps, browsers, and video players, and there is a passionate community around fitness apps as well.

Apple is aiming to cut the cost of the headset's most expensive components, its two 4K micro-OLED displays, by as much as 50%.

This tutorial goes through how to implement training and sampling code for a toy data set to introduce diffusion models from an optimization perspective.

Midjourney has accused Stability AI employees of causing a systems outage earlier this month during an attempt to scrape Midjourney's data.

Andreessen Horowitz led an investment round totaling $100 million to get Kickstarter to move its entire platform to the Celo blockchain.