TLDR 2024-04-04

OpenAI's DALL-E now offers image editing tools both on the web and on mobile. There are preset style suggestions to help inspire image creation. The image generation platform has been integrated with ChatGPT - users can now edit DALL-E images in ChatGPT across web, iOS, and Android. Videos from OpenAI showing off the new features are available in the article.

Apple is reportedly exploring various personal robotics projects in an effort to create its next big thing. These include a mobile robot that follows people around their homes and a tabletop device that uses robotics to move a display around. The projects are said to be in the very early stages of research and it is unclear if any of them will ever be released. Apple apparently considered developing robots that can handle chores but decided against it for now due to extraordinarily difficult engineering challenges.

The European Space Agency (ESA) plans to use two separate spacecraft to create its own solar eclipse to study the Sun's corona. The spacecraft will fly 150 meters apart, aligned so that one satellite blocks out all but of corona from the other satellite. They will have to fly in precise formation down to millimeter accuracy. Studying the Sun's corona will reveal details about its role in our solar system's weather. The ESA hopes to launch the mission in September.

A new experimental treatment developed by biotechnology firm LyGenesis may lead to patients growing an additional miniature liver. The approach involves injecting healthy liver cells into a lymph node in the upper abdomen of a patient with liver failure. The cells multiply and take over the lymph node to form a structure that can perform a liver's blood-filtering duties. The first person who received the treatment (on March 25) is recovering well, but they will need to be closely monitored for a while to see if the treatment is both safe and effective. The treatment has worked so far in mice, dogs, and pigs.

Googling 'File System API' will bring up a lot of similarly named APIs. This can get confusing as there are multiple standards and names, but there are actually fewer than it seems at first and many build on each other, adding layers of functionality. This article gives a tour of the different file system APIs. Interacting with file systems is complex - the different APIs handle different actions and security concerns.

Observability costs are on top of mind for many organizations. This post covers a brief history of modern observability, how the industry arrived at its current observability cost crisis, and a new way of thinking about observability costs and pricing models. Over the past few decades, infrastructure-as-a-service providers and open source have made it easy to produce voluminous amounts of telemetry, while little regard has been given to the cost or storage of the telemetry output, causing a cost crisis in observability tooling. One solution may be to not send any observability data by default.

There is currently only one third-party iOS app store live in Europe. Other app stores have been announced and some are in the review process. One reason for the lack of alternative app stores is due to Apple's Core Technology Fee, which requires developers to pay Apple 50 euro cents for every annual app install over one million, with third-party app store developers paying the fee for every first annual install of their app marketplace. Apple has also made installing third-party marketplaces a hassle, requiring around a dozen screen interactions to install each store.

One topic in the startup world is extremely opaque: founders' salaries. This causes founders to make all kinds of mistakes, like paying themselves too early, too late, too little, or too much. Founders don't get rich with their salaries: most of the money comes from IPOs, secondaries, and acquisitions. Being a founder means having to learn to deal with financial uncertainty.

The generative AI industry looks like it is facing many issues, but there is still a lot of hype, many people have found a use case for the technology and are using it, and research continues to push the field further at a fast pace.

AWS has seen its sales growth decelerate in recent quarters.

Jpegli is an advanced JPEG coding library that maintains high backward compatibility, enhanced capabilities, and a 35% compression ratio improvement at high quality compression settings.

Independent human resources consulting firms listen to complaints workers don't feel comfortable sharing with their own employers' HR representatives.

Stable Audio 2.0 can create up to three minutes of audio via a text prompt - the tool is free and publicly available through the company's website.

Uber Eats customers in the Phoenix metropolitan area will receive some food deliveries via Waymo's Jaguar I-PACE electric vehicles.