TLDR 2025-01-03

SpaceX's Starlink now serves over 4.6 million users across 118 countries and territories. The company reported 3 million users back in May. It has since expanded its services to 27 new markets. SpaceX completed 89 launches dedicated to building and enhancing the Starlink satellite constellation throughout last year. The Starlink network currently has over 7,000 active satellites in low Earth orbit, with nearly 350 designed to connect directly to LTE phones.

Tesla shares fell by around 7% in trading on Thursday after Tesla released its fourth-quarter vehicle production and deliveries report. The company's shares finished up 63% for the year. They reached an all-time high in mid-December. Tesla aims to offer lower-cost and autonomous vehicles in 2025. This is predicted to lead to 20% to 30% growth over 2024.

Anthrobots are synthetic biological proto-organisms made of living cells with un-edited genomes. They could have many future uses in the human body, including laying down pro-regenerative molecules, clearing plaque from arteries, healing spinal cord or retinal damage, dealing with cancer cells or bacteria in the gut, or informing doctors of the status of the surrounding tissues. Anthrobots do not exponentially reproduce and just biodegrade at the end of their lifespan. Scientists are still experimenting with these lifeforms to get a true idea of their capabilities in various problem spaces.

Wi-Fi 8 looks to be focused on greater reliability rather than on pushing bandwidth even higher. It will make the speed gains promised by Wi-Fi 7 more of a reality. End users will not see the full benefits until they have upgraded both their access points and endpoint devices to the new standard. The first devices with Wi-Fi 8 are not expected to roll out until the second half of 2028.

Zasper is an IDE designed to support massive concurrency. It has a minimal memory footprint and provides exceptional speed. Zasper can be used to run REPL-style data applications like Jupyter notebooks. It is currently fully supported on Mac, with limited support on Linux.

Deepseek's flagship model, v3, is a 607B Mixture-of-Experts model with 37B active parameters. The company achieved remarkable performance while keeping training costs surprisingly low. The model outperforms other alternatives at its price point. It excels at reasoning and math, surpassing GPT-4 and Claude 3.5 Sonnet.

Heaps of companies want employees with long-term experience. Many of these companies aren't attractive to younger workers and would be glad to hire someone with experience. Experienced workers can also enter into consulting/professional services, which provides a varied and interesting work environment. The expiry date for a software engineer is definitely much later than 40 - many are still working late into their 50s and 60s.

Many people are convinced that companies are targeting ads to them by listening through their phone's microphones. For this to be true, companies would have to record audio snippets, transmit them back to their servers for additional processing, and then feed that data into a system that forwards it to advertising partners. This is far-fetched, especially for companies like Apple, which has a brand and reputation as a privacy-first company and spends large amounts on product design and engineering to prevent apps from doing exactly this kind of thing. The more likely scenario is that the quality of targeting is high and that people just aren't that different from each other.

Object identifiers are a standardized key-value system for naming any object or concept.

The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals said that the FCC lacked the authority to oversee wireless and home-broadband services.

If approved, Apple will pay up to $20 per Siri-enabled device (for up to five devices) to customers who made purchases between September 17, 2014, and December 31, 2024.

Last week, AWS added another layer to S3 Buckets and introduced S3 Tables for storing data in Apache Iceberg.

A reflection of how life has been after selling a company from Vinay Hiremath, the CTO and co-founder of Loom.

The projects include 'This is Not My Name' by Liuhuaying Yang, 'Your Name In Landsat' by NASA Landsat Science, and the 'Climate—Conflict—Vulnerability Index' by the German Federal Foreign Office.