TLDR 2025-04-03
Amazon's TikTok bid 📱, Nintendo Switch 2 🎮, Deel spy confesses 🕵️
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Science & Futuristic Technology
Neuralink Recruits Globally for Research on Brain Implants (2 minute read)
Neuralink is looking for patients worldwide to participate in research on its brain implant. The company has invited people with quadriplegia to sign up for its patient registry. Neuralink has implanted its device in three patients so far. The device allows people to use their thoughts to control computers.
Amazon to launch first batch of Kuiper satellites on April 9 (2 minute read)
Amazon's Kuiper internet satellites are scheduled to take off on United Launch Alliance's Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral on April 9 at 12 PM ET. Project Kuiper, which launched in 2019, aims to provide broadband internet from a constellation of more than 3,000 satellites. Amazon completed the first test of its service in October 2023 and was expected to set its first operational satellites aloft last year, but the launch was delayed in favor of two US Space Force missions. Amazon is marketing Kuiper to consumers who lack adequate access to broadband internet, along with governments and companies.
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Programming, Design & Data Science
💸 Cloud Cost Management With Datadog (Sponsor)
Grepping logs remains terrible (7 minute read)
Databases were created because scanning through raw data over and over again was inefficient and did not scale. This applies to logs just as much as any other kind of data. Programs should output to a log-ready database - this will make querying them require less computing power and RAM and take less time. It also enables aggregations, computations, build stats, and many other database functionalities.
pico.sh (Website)
pico.sh allows users to publish content without needing to install anything. The platform enables developers to rapidly probate type on the web and share their projects with the world. It can host static sites and public web services, stream data between computers, serve data using SSH, and more. pico.sh was designed to be like a hacker lab where developers can experiment with new ways to interact with the web.
The affidavit of a Rippling employee caught spying for Deel reads like a movie (5 minute read)
According to an affidavit filed by Rippling, a workforce management platform, which accuses rival Deel of alleged spying, Keith O'Brien was hired by Deel to spy on Rippling after O'Brien had pitched Deel on working together on a payroll consulting business. O'Brien was working at Rippling at the time and had planned to quit to work full-time on the consulting business, but Deel offered to pay him €5,000 per month in crypto, with the first payment at US$6,000, to turn over information on sales leads, product roadmaps, customer accounts, employee names, and more. The alleged spying took place over four months.
Google shakes up Gemini leadership, Google Labs head taking the reins (3 minute read)
Longtime Googler Sissie Hsiao will step down from her role of leading the Gemini team effective immediately and be replaced by Josh Woodward, who currently leads Google Labs. The change is aimed at sharpening Google's focus on the next evolution of the Gemini app. Woodward will remain in charge of Google Labs while leading the Gemini team. Hsiao has opted to take some time off before returning to Google in a new role.
Wikipedia's overlords bemoan AI bot bandwidth burden (4 minute read)
The Wikimedia Foundation, which oversees Wikipedia and similar projects, says that the bandwidth spent serving requests for multimedia files has increased by 50% since January 2024, largely due to automated programs that scrape the Wikimedia Commons image catalog to feed images to AI models.
Actually Run Javascript Everywhere (Website)
Bare allows developers to run JavaScript everywhere, making servers obsolete.
‘TikTok America' is Trump's new proposal for saving TikTok, per report (2 minute read)
President Donald Trump has a plan for a new company called TikTok America that would be 50% owned by new US investors and license TikTok's algorithm from ByteDance.
Bill Gates Publishes Original Microsoft Source Code in a Blog Post (2 minute read)
Bill Gates and his friends coded day and night for two months to create software that they said already existed.
How Trump Could Make Larry Ellison the Next Media Mogul (10 minute read)
Larry Ellison, who co-founded database company Oracle, appears to be planning to grow his corporate empire, as Oracle keeps emerging as a possible bidder for TikTok.
OpenAI's o3 model might be costlier to run than originally estimated (2 minute read)
The Arc Prize Foundation, which maintains and administers ARC-AGI, a benchmark designed to test highly capable AI, estimates that it costs around $30,000 for the best-performing configuration of o3 to solve a single ARC-AGI problem.
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