TLDR 2025-04-02
Visa's Apple Card bid π°, SpaceX's polar mission π, pragmatic open source π¨βπ»
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Visa Offers Apple Roughly $100 Million to Take Over Credit Card From Mastercard (3 minute read)
Visa has offered Apple around $100 million for its credit card. Goldman Sachs is exiting the consumer lending world, leaving Apple's card up for grabs. Apple is increasingly becoming the epicenter of many consumers' daily payments and other financial habits - the network that locks in this deal is expected to stay close to Apple's future payments efforts. The Apple credit card program has roughly $20 billion in balances.
Trump to consider final TikTok proposal Wednesday, sources say (1 minute read)
A final proposal for TikTok will be issued today. Trump's administration is finalizing plans for potential investors. ByteDance has until Saturday to sell its stake in TikTok or potentially face a ban in the US market. Trump says there is a lot of interest in the deal and that the final decision will be his to make.
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Science & Futuristic Technology
SpaceX launches Fram2, the first crewed spaceflight to explore Earth's polar regions (2 minute read)
The Fram2 private crewed mission launched successfully on March 31 on top of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The mission is the first human spaceflight to explore the Earth's polar regions. It will fly from the North to the South Pole around every 46 minutes over three to five days. The mission is expected to provide a healthy amount of footage of the polar regions - the first views are available in the article. The crew will also conduct 22 experiments designed to better understand human health in space.
How Meta's Upcoming $1,000+ Smart Glasses With a Screen Will Work (5 minute read)
Meta is working on a deluxe version of its Ray-Ban smart glasses. It plans to include hand-gesture controls and a screen for displaying photos and apps. The first glasses with a screen will be introduced as early as the end of this year at a price of over $1,000 - it may cost as much as $1,400. The Ray-Ban Meta Glasses have been a surprise hit - Meta plans to continue selling the device as its popularity will push users towards the higher-end models.
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Programming, Design & Data Science
The Pragmatic Open Source Contributor (23 minute read)
The pragmatic open source contributor is motivated by their drive to fix tooling that isn't enabling them to do the best job they can. That mindset influences all aspects of the contribution process. This article discusses how to contribute to open source projects once you have identified a potential contribution. Working on open source technology can provide developers with a great opportunity to spot issues and areas of improvement that can benefit everyone.
The case against conversational interfaces (12 minute read)
Natural language is a slow method of data transfer and it isn't the best method to interact with computers. It takes much longer to say 'What's the weather like today?' than to simply tap on the weather app icon on a device. While the quality of large language model output is improving at an astonishing rate, the input modality is a step backwards from what we already have. We shouldn't have to describe a desired action using natural language when we could simply press a button or keyboard shortcut. The technology should instead complement existing methods, acting as an additional input mechanism that increases the bandwidth of data transfer to make human-computer interaction feel effortless.
Tech's big anxiety: fewer jobs, lower pay, more AI (9 minute read)
Until recently, there were abundant jobs in tech. Today, an increasing number of people are stuck in job-search purgatory. AI is transforming the job market - some companies have publicly stated that they do not plan to hire engineers this year due to AI. Workers are being pushed harder to keep what they have. Students are advised to learn how to use AI tools and look for jobs at smaller companies - many tend to underestimate how applicable and transferable their skills are.
DeepMind is holding back release of AI research to give Google an edge (4 minute read)
DeepMind has introduced a tougher vetting process and more bureaucracy to make it harder to publish studies about its work on AI. It has been most reluctant to share papers that reveal innovations that could be exploited by competitors or research that casts Google's Gemini model in a negative light. This is a significant shift for the company, which has long prided itself on its reputation for releasing groundbreaking papers. The company still publishes hundreds of papers each year and is among the largest contributors to major AI conferences.
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