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

TLDR

Daily Update 2022-06-20

Webinar: A Privacy Professional’s Guide to the Modern Data Privacy Stack (Sponsor)

Join Skyflow’s Chief Privacy Officer, Robin Andruss, and Co-founder and CEO, Anshu Sharma, as they share what you should know about the data privacy technologies that companies can use to tackle common data privacy problems, such as tracking data flows, determining where sensitive data resides, and governing how it’s used. Join us on Wednesday, June 22, 2022 at 10am PT. Register for the webinar today!

If you would like to sponsor TLDR, please let me know by replying to this email or check out our sponsorship page!

📱

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.

🚀

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.

💻

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.

🎁

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!

⚡

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

I also write TLDR Crypto, a newsletter that follows tech and innovation in the blockchain ecosystem. If this is something you would be interested in, please sign up here.

If you enjoy TLDR, I would really appreciate you spreading the word by sharing the link https://tldr.tech/signup

If you have any comments or feedback, just respond to this email!

Thanks for reading,
Dan

If you don't want to receive future editions of TLDR, please click here to unsubscribe.

Modern Data Privacy Stack common data privacy problems The Elastic UI Framework functional plastic processor A Privacy Professional Chief Privacy Officer data privacy technologies full documentation site tech startup world stable output beam different digital outfits React UI Components reusable UI components next big breakthrough TLDR Daily Update small business customers Silicon Valley lender Python MQTT Tutorial Time Series Database Data Science Bolt

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

Key phrases

Older messages

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

Apple's CAPTCHA killer 🤖, $3.5B food truck startup 🚚, Firefox Total Cookie Protection 🦊

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

Amazon drone delivery 🚁, Elon Musk Twitter all-hands 🐦, Internet Explorer shut down 🌎

Chrome fights ad blockers 🛡️, Googler claims AI sentient 🤖, how big tech does project management 👨‍💻

You Might Also Like

Hacker Newsletter #696

Google's massive reorg 🧑‍🤝‍🧑, Meta's Llama 3 launch 🤖, China bans WhatsApp 💬

Is your Notes app completely disorganized?

Data Science Weekly - Issue 543

A deal made in cloud security heaven

💎 Issue 413 - RubyJS-Vite

💻 Issue 406 - Swift for C++ Practitioners, Part 1

💻 Issue 413 - How to implement HLS Video Streaming in a React App

📱 Issue 407 - Textual Healing: iOS Text Editing Minutiae

💻 Issue 413 - Interview with Senior JavaScript Developer 2024 [video]