TLDR 2024-05-17

Bland AI is a lab that built a hyper realistic sounding AI phone agent. Its autonomously taking actions and blowing everyone's minds.

Developers and companies are loving this.

• It can be used for anything from doing sales and instantly calling and pre-qualifying leads to doing customer support.
• It can handle over 1,000,000 phone calls simultaneously for businesses.
• It can respond at human level speeds... with any voice.

This is going to lead to major shifts in US and international jobs...

Pretty insane, huh? Well you can try calling it yourself: Bland.ai

And TLDR readers can sign up here and access something even crazier...

OpenAI has signed a deal that will grant it access to real-time content from Reddit's data API. The deal will allow OpenAI to surface discussions from Reddit within ChatGPT and other products and enable Reddit to bring new AI-powered features to users and mods. OpenAI has also signed up to become an advertising partner on Reddit. It is unclear what the financial terms of the deal are and whether it involves access to training data.

A limited group of TikTok users in select markets are now able to upload 60-minute videos onto the platform. The feature marks a shift from TikTok's original format. While the company rose to popularity due to its short-form video format, it has been slowly embracing long-form content to compete with YouTube. The platform has also been testing a horizontal full-screen mode and video-scrubbing thumbnails. It is unclear if or when TikTok plans to launch the 60-minute video upload option widely.

Laser-induced plasma displays ionize air molecules to create glowing points of light. Japanese researchers have created a laser plasma display that is safe to touch. It uses femtosecond lasers, which create a pulse duration so minuscule that it doesn't result in any appreciable skin damage unless fired at the same spot at one shot per millisecond for a duration of 2,000 milliseconds. Touching the plasma produces a physical sensation, as if the light has a physical substance. The displays are still very small, but researchers suggest that it is possible to scale them with different optical devices. A video explaining the system and showing holograms generated by the display being touched is available in the article.

A study on semaglutide that assessed around 17,600 adults in multiple countries from 2018 to 2021 found that participants lost an average of 10% of their body weight. 17% of the participants left the trial due to side effects that included nausea, diarrhea, vomiting, and constipation, which were most often felt during the initial months of treatment. The drug reduced major cardiovascular events by 20% - this effect was evident even in participants who didn't lose weight. The study suggests the drug could be potentially used for other purposes and could help make a case for more widespread insurance.

React Compiler is an experimental compiler that automatically optimizes React apps. It is a build-time-only tool that works with plain JavaScript. React Compiler understands the Rules of React, so developers don't need to rewrite any code to use it. The compiler also includes an eslint plugin that surfaces analyses from the compiler inside editors. React Compiler is still new and not yet fully ready for production.

This post discusses a process for building high-quality interactive embedding visualizations for a variety of different kinds of entity relationship data. It provides observations about what works and what doesn't and a background on embeddings and embedding visualizations. Embedding visualizations are useful for targeted searches and they are fun to browse around and explore.

Did you know that you can automate the review and approval process for your Confluence documents? Workflows in Comala Document Management are a great way to save time and hassle, while ensuring that critical documents are seen and approved on time. Learn more or try it for free!

Using open source software doesn't entitle one to a vote on the direction of that project. Democratic decision-making never existed in the open source world. The majority of open source projects are run by a small group of core contributors who advance the project, review patches, and guard the integrity of the vision. Open source is first and foremost a method of collaboration between programmers who show up to do the work. It is not a program for users to get free stuff or a seat at the table where decisions are made.

Stability AI is in big financial trouble and is in talks to be sold off. The company generated less than $5 million in revenue in the first quarter of this year while losing more than $30 million. It is reportedly sitting on $100 million worth of outstanding bills. The company lost its CEO Emad Mostaque in March and it is currently facing legal troubles over using Getty Images' intellectual property to train AI models.

While VCs may act friendly, their funds come first.

Money allows builders to create things that can benefit many other people.

AT&T and AST SpaceMobile have signed an agreement that will last until 2030 to provide a space-based broadband network to everyday cell phones.

A list of visual design rules (with examples) that are safe to follow.

This post presents a series of experiments testing GPT-4o's abilities.

Around 700 to 800 Microsoft employees based in China involved in machine learning and other cloud-computing tasks have been offered the opportunity to transfer to countries including the US, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand.