TLDR 2024-05-22

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While SpaceX's Starlink system for cell phones is still in its testing phase, the technology is already good enough to power a video call. SpaceX recently posted a video that showed a video call being completed through Starlink Direct to Cell satellites from unmodified mobile phones. The company has increased the number of cellular Starlink satellites from six to 38. Starlink tech can deliver download speeds as high as 17Mbps to unmodified Android phones.

Google will soon start testing search and shopping ads within AI Overviews for users in the US. The company says it will display ads in AI Overviews when they're relevant to both the query and the information in the AI Overview. Advertisers already running certain campaigns through Google will automatically become eligible to appear in AI Overviews. It is unclear when exactly the change will roll out.

Data from a small clinical trial shows that a zap of electricity from well-placed electrodes on the back of the tech can help patients with tetraplegia regain modest yet potentially life-changing functioning off their hands and arms. The non-invasive procedure offers an accessible and more affordable means for those living with paralysis to regain some meaningful function. The therapy's potential remains limited as it is not yet fully understood why it works. A startup working to make the therapy commercially available has submitted a device to the Food and Drug Administration for review.

The focus for the next Starship mission will be to control the reentry of the rocket's Super Heavy booster and Starship upper stage - both vehicles broke apart during their descent on the last flight. The company aims to make the Super Heavy booster make a controlled pinpoint splash down in the Gulf of Mexico as the Starship upper stage attempts to survive its reentry back into Earth's atmosphere. The test will be a repeat of the previous test without the propellant transfer, without the Pez door open, and without the other items that SpaceX was working to demonstrate. NASA's main interest in the test will be seeing that SpaceX replicates the good engine performance it demonstrated on the last two flights. SpaceX is not planning to attempt a Raptor engine restart during the test.

Stripe's codebase is mostly written in Ruby and lives in a single large monorepo. It supports a number of services that share code extensively. The company's tooling was built and is maintained by a succession of teams and individuals, with the needs of the environment changing as the team and codebase grew and evolved. This article discusses the features of Stripe's developer environment and explains the reasoning behind the choices made during its development. Maintaining developer productivity as an engineering organization grows is difficult - it is almost inevitable that per-engineer productivity drops as companies and codebases grow.

GitHub Copilot Extensions enables developers to build and deploy to the cloud in their natural language with their preferred tools and services without leaving the IDE or GitHub.com. It helps developers stay in the flow longer, uplevel their skills, and innovate faster. Extensions can be found on the GitHub Marketplace. Organizations can create private Copilot Extensions for their homegrown developer tooling.

Braindump allows developers to build top-down/2.5D games or interactive worlds by simply typing prompts. It generates 3D models, game data, and scripts to make prompts come to life. This article shares learnings from Braindump's development. Challenges in its development include designing a UX for prompting and a game API for large language models. The game API has opened up interesting UX flows like generated macros. While Braindump is pretty good at executing commands, its team wants to expand it to handle more vague and bigger tasks. Braindump will open up for alpha testing in the coming weeks.

Anthropic recently published a public research paper explaining why its AI chatbot chooses to generate content about certain subjects over others. Its researchers deciphered what parts of the chatbot's neural network mapped to specific concepts using a process known as 'dictionary learning'. The research showed how neurons associated with a topic fired together when the model was thinking about something associated with the topic - similar sets of neurons firing can evoke adjacent subjects. A link to the paper is available at the end of the article.

The StreamSaver bundle, which cuts more than 30 percent off the separate price of certain tiers of each service, will be rolled out on May 29 in the US.

Interfaces are becoming less dense - this article suggests how we might regain density.

Amber is a high-level programming language that makes it easy to create shell scripts.

Shoichiro Irimajiri, who was chairman and CEO of Sega, led Sega to invest $5 million into Nvidia, which the GPU manufacturer desperately needed - Sega later sold its Nvidia stock for about $15 million.

Open-source model providers will lose the capital expenditure war as open-source ROI continues to decline.

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This post shares how to make a tiny raycasting engine and city generator that fits in a standalone 256 byte HTML file.