TLDR 2024-04-03

Tesla reported a drop in vehicle deliveries in the first quarter. Deliveries are the closest approximation of sales reported by Tesla. The numbers for the quarter fell far below even the most bearish of analysts' expectations. Tesla faced numerous challenges in the first quarter. The company has scheduled an earnings call on April 23 to discuss quarterly results.

The Apple Vision Pro's new Spatial Personas feature creates floating animated portraits in users' session spaces, using AI to sync the avatar to match users' head, mouth, and hand movements. It uses real-time movement tracking to create a more personal sensation of the other user being in the room. 2D tiles are still the default. The feature works with up to five users on a FaceTime call. Spatial Personas is still in beta.

A team from the University of Utah has developed an all-in-one hybrid energy-generation unit designed specifically for eye-based tech. The device combines a flexible silicon solar cell with a device that converts electrolytes within tears into energy. It can reliably supply enough electricity to operate smart contacts and other ocular devices. The system is an exciting development in the realm of smart contact lenses as the field has been held back by a lack of a sustainable power source.

Researchers have created a wearable brain-computer interface (BCI) that allows wearers to play games using their minds. The cap can be used without extensive calibration or the invasive surgical procedures required by other BCIs. It has been tested on healthy people with no motor impairments who were able to use it to control robots within minutes. The technology has yet to be proven on people with disabilities.

Lightning Whisper MLX is an incredibly fast implementation of Whisper optimized for Apple Silicon. It features batched decoding for higher throughput, distilled models for faster decoding, and quantized models for faster memory movement. Lightning Whisper MLX is 10 times faster than Whisper CPP and four times faster than the current MLX Whisper implementation.

Bun is an all-in-one toolkit for running, building, testing, and debugging JavaScript and TypeScript. Its 1.1 update contains thousands of bug fixes, tons of new features and APIs, and Windows support. This post details the changes in Bun 1.1. The Bun team is currently hiring for its in-person team in San Francisco.

A new 'right to disconnect' proposition introduced in California, if passed, would make employers in California lay out exactly what a person's hours are and ensure that they aren't required to respond to work-related communications while off the clock. There are exceptions for emergencies and salaried employees may have periods in which they may have to work longer hours. Companies would be fined a minimum of $100 for wrongdoing. It is unclear how much support exists for the bill, which follows similar legislation in other countries.

Malware can hijack login sessions by accessing browser cookies. Google is trying to mitigate this threat with a new system called Device Bound Session Credentials, which uses encryption to prevent hijacking attempts. It will develop the system openly on GitHub as a public coding project. There is already a prototype of the system running as an experiment for some users on Chrome Beta. Google plans to kick off more trials of the system with website developers and users by the end of the year.

'Jia Tan', the attacker who implemented the first serious known supply chain attack on widely used open source software, worked as a diligent, effective contributor to the xz compression library for over two years.

We live on the edge of experiencing historic global catastrophes every day - the solution is to have many people working on a large number of solutions to make these catastrophes even less likely.

Amazon is switching its 'Just Walk Out' system to 'Dash Carts', where customers scan products as they put them into carts.

This post explains how Cloudflare integrated a Python implementation into workerd, an open-source Workers runtime, going into how Python Workers work, what its team learned in the process, and what's next for the company.

Yahoo is acquiring Artifact’s tech rather than its team - Artifact's co-founders will be 'special advisors' for Yahoo but won't be joining the company and the company's five remaining employees have either gotten other jobs or are planning to take some time off.

At least three high-level Meta AI employees, including senior director of engineering Erik Meijer, senior director of generative AI Devi Parikh, and research scientist Abhishek Das, have departed from the company in the past few weeks to strike out on their own.