TLDR 2024-12-25

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Here are just a few holiday-ready destinations you could explore:

🇫🇷France: $282 roundtrip

🇨🇷Costa Rica: $173 roundtrip

🇪🇸Spain: $247 roundtrip

🇯🇵Japan: $455 roundtrip

🇺🇸Hawaii: $161 roundtrip

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Google contractors working to improve Gemini are comparing its answers against outputs produced by Anthropic's Claude. It is unknown whether Google has permission for its use of Claude in testing against Gemini. Anthropic's terms of service forbids customers from accessing Claude to build competing products or services or train competing AI models without approval. Google is a major investor in Anthropic.

Apple is seeking to intervene in Google's US antitrust trial over online search, saying that Google can no longer adequately represent its interests in the case. The company has concerns over its multi-billion dollar revenue-sharing agreement with Google. Apple received an estimated $20 billion from Google in 2022 for making Google the default search engine on Safari. The trial could potentially force Google to divest its Chrome browser or Android operating system to restore competition in the online search market.

The Parker Solar Probe swooped through the Sun's atmosphere early on Christmas Eve. Flying around 3.8 million miles above the solar surface, the probe was designed to explore how solar storms are formed. It is fitted with instruments to measure and image solar winds, which may enable us to better forecast when and where a potent coronal mass ejection or solar flare may hit. Solar storms have huge implications for energy grids and communications systems on Earth.

The Unitree B2-W robot dog can now do handstands thanks to a few upgrades, including high-powered wheel motors, M107 joint modules, and replaceable wheel/foot legs. It is equipped with a 32 wire automotive-grade LiDAR, a depth camera, and an ultra large 2200Wh battery, and can achieve a top speed of 12.4 miles per hour. It can travel 31 miles with an 88 pound load and pull up to 220 pounds. A video of the robot dog performing tricks is available in the article.

AuthorTrail lets users explore Git repositories' history by author. It can find and browse files users have contributed to. Once found, users are able to quickly access to view and edit them. AuthorTrail features file search by author email, hierarchical file tree visualization, a built-in code viewer with syntax highlighting, quick open in the default editor, and dark mode support.

Many IDE features, like autocomplete, language servers, and Copilot, can be taken for granted today. However, not every developer uses these tools. Some developers work in environments where they aren't able to access IDEs (for example, on remote servers that only have Vim), so they have had to learn different ways of doing things. Organizing software in a way where every piece of code has a clear and logical place is a skill - tooling that helps with code navigation can result in code that lacks structure.

This article contains an interview with Will Eden from Cosmos, Zvi Mowshowitz (an economist who spent 2.5 years trading at Jane Street Capital), and Noah Kreutter, who has roughly four years of quant-y finance experience at IMC and Bridgewater. The interview covers how to construct a portfolio that will go well when Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) becomes a bigger deal, the broad market effects of AGI, career capital in an AGI world, debt in interest effect of AGI, and much more. The interview was in November last year - the interviewer recently posted an update showing that the investment advice in the interview backtested well.

Late-year PhD students and postdocs at NeurIPS'24 expressed anxiety and frustration as the job market looks and feels very different from what they expected when they were applying for PhD programs five or so years ago. Years ago, competition for artificial intelligence researchers with PhDs was fierce - companies were recruiting them to prepare themselves for a revolution. Many of the researchers, who were paid well, were free to choose what they wanted to work on and publish whatever they wanted to publish. This incentivized a large number of brilliant students to apply to PhD programs. Universities have started to train undergraduate, graduate, and master's students on these technologies, making PhDs less valuable to companies.

OpenAI closed its robotics division in 2021 but it recently explored the topic of building its own humanoid robot again.

Despite restrictions in buying advanced chips, China is showing signs of catching up with America's leading AI models more quickly than many in the industry had expected.

Taking a career break can be good for mental health and growth, but you have to weigh the decision against the opportunity cost of lost earnings, the amount of savings you have available, and your sense of value for the time you'll take off.

AI has ushered in a new era of slop security reports for open source.

Netflix says that VMware's vSphere virtualization platform for deploying and managing virtual machines infringes on its patents related to virtual-machine communications.

Apple is looking to further sever its ties with Nvidia by partnering with Broadcom to design its own AI server chip.