Meta's virtual store 🏪, Brex drops small businesses 💳, near term startup trends 📉

TLDR

Daily Update 2022-06-20

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Big Tech & Startups

Meta is launching an avatar store, and designer clothes are the first products (2 minute read)

Meta is launching an online store where Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger users can purchase digital clothes for their avatars. The store will feature brands such as Prada, Balenciaga, and Thom Browne. There is no information on how much the items in the store will cost. The store is set to launch 'soon'. Pictures of Mark Zuckerberg's avatar wearing different digital outfits are available in the article.

Brex drops tens of thousands of small business customers as Silicon Valley adjusts to new reality (3 minute read)

Brex is a Silicon Valley lender to startups. It recently informed tens of thousands of its small business customers that they have until August 15 to withdraw funds from their accounts and find new providers. The lender was unable to service all of its customers well due to a shift in market conditions so it decided to focus on its core customers instead. It will keep clients with secured institutional backing and traditional companies that are midmarket in size.

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Science & Futuristic Technology

Physicists engineer an atom laser that can stay on forever (3 minute read)

Atoms can be thought of as waves, so it is possible to build atom lasers containing waves of matter. These atom lasers don’t usually last long. A team of physicists from Amsterdam have built an atom laser that can create a continuous beam for a theoretically indefinite period of time. It works by cooling atoms in several steps through space so that there is a continuous supply of ultracold atoms to replenish the atom laser. If the scientists are able to create a stable output beam of matter, the applications will be limitless.

The First High-Yield, Sub-Penny Plastic Processor (3 minute read)

A transatlantic team of researchers has created a simple and fully functional plastic processor that can be manufactured at sub-penny prices. A high percentage of the time, the flexible 4-bit and 8-bit processors continue to work even when bent. The needs of flexible applications tend to be computationally simple. The study shows that flexible electronics may finally be ready for the mainstream.

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Programming, Design & Data Science

Bolt (GitHub Repo)

Bolt is an algorithm for compressing vectors of real-valued data and running mathematical operations directly on the compressed representations. It can help save significantly on compute time for large collections of mostly-dense vectors. Bolt currently only supports x86 machines from fall 2013 or later. Benchmarks are available.

Elastic UI Framework (GitHub Repo)

The Elastic UI Framework is a collection of React UI components for building user interfaces. It provides reusable UI components that can be used throughout Elastic's web products. Elastic is accessible to everyone, flexible and composable, and well documented and tested. Examples of components are available on the full documentation site.

Python MQTT Tutorial: Store IoT Metrics with a Time Series Database (Sponsor)

Learn how to create a smart sensor using Python that transmits measurements using MQTT to store them in InfluxDB. You’ll also learn about the InfluxDB ecosystem that provides the database and UI tools that can visualize and query your data. Learn more.

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Miscellaneous

Some potential things likely to happen in next 3-18 months for tech startup world (2 minute read)

This Twitter thread contains a list of eight things that are likely to happen within the next 18 months in the tech startup world. The market is likely to continue to drop and layoffs are just beginning. Companies will start focusing more on customers, business building, and their core missions, and a number of great companies will be built during this period.

The next big breakthrough in AI will come from hardware, not software (3 minute read)

The next big breakthrough in AI will happen through hardware advances. While general architectures allow many types of computations, they are not optimized for specific computation types. Some manufacturers are working on in-memory processing systems to more closely simulate neuronal processing models, but these computations are less general, so there needs to be a large established use case for them to make these chips profitably. Many architectures are still evolving quickly so manufacturers may be reluctant to mass manufacture designs. It will still take some time for the industry to mature.

Hey guys, I'm changing up the newsletter format a bit to add a quick links section (see below). For the sake of brevity this new section won't have any summaries, just links to stories. It will allow me to add stories that are very interesting to a small subset of the audience (this solves the problem of the newsletter being pushed towards lowest common denominator stories at it grows), and stories that don't fit in any of the existing sections of the newsletter (I try not to put too many programming articles in the Miscellaneous section so this will also serve as an overflow area for additional GitHub libraries that don't fit in the original newsletter). As always, I'd love to hear feedback and ideas on how to make the newsletter better!

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Quick Links

TSMC announces 2nm chip production will start by 2025

Ingenious Technique Leads to Kids Having Kidney Transplants Without Immune Suppression

Citus 11 for Postgres goes fully open source, with query from any node

New paper: Why do we fall for AI-generated language?

VSLook

Scientists discover polar bears adapting to live largely on glacier slush

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Dan

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Meta's virtual store 🏪, Brex drops small businesses 💳, near term startup trends 📉

Older messages

Elon addresses Twitter employees 🐦, homescreen social apps 📱, money-making side projects 💰

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Meta's plan to fight TikTok 📱, iOS 16 photo editing 🖼️, tech talent decentralizes 👨‍💻

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