Amazon's $465M TV show 📺, DALL-E generated icons 🎨, 1 billion Chinese citizens hacked 💻

Daily Update 2022-07-05

LEX is taking buildings public – and that’s good news for your investment portfolio. (Sponsor)

LEX is taking buildings public – and that’s good news for your investment portfolio. Now you can build a real estate portfolio that opens up direct and tax-advantaged ownership in an asset class that’s been hard to access. Customize your portfolio by picking the buildings you want, buying equity shares, and watching as the distributions roll in. No accreditation, no lockups, no holds. Freely trade in and out of your positions like your other stocks. Access to commercial real estate is finally here. Learn more.

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Big Tech & Startups

Amazon spending $465 million on season 1 of The Lord of the Rings series (3 minute read)

The first season of Amazon's Lord of the Rings TV show will cost $465 million to produce. New Zealand will be rebating the production around 25% of its costs due to the considerable economic and tourism potential of the project. There is no premiere date for the show yet as there were some setbacks in filming due to the pandemic. Amazon has canceled its plans for its Lord of the Rings MMO as it was unable to secure terms to continue development.

Tesla can now scan for potholes and adjust vehicle suspension to avoid damage (2 minute read)

Tesla's 2022.20 update enables Tesla vehicles to scan the road ahead for potholes and adjust the suspension for rough roads. The feature can be activated by selecting 'Comfort' under the Adaptive Suspension Damping setting. It will not affect Autopilot or Full Self-Driving, meaning that vehicles won't try to automatically steer around or avoid road damage. The update also includes a green light chime for vehicles equipped with the hardware 3.0 computer.

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Science & Futuristic Technology

Airbus’ solar-powered Zephyr S has been flying non-stop for more than 17 days (2 minute read)

Airbus' 165-pound uncrewed Zephyr S solar-powered aircraft has flown for more than 17 days. It flew several patterns over the Yuma Test Range and Kofa National Wildfire Refuge, after which it flew over the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea to the airspace above Belize, before returning to the US. Its previous record was 26 days in 2018. The latest flight will test the aircraft's energy storage capacity, battery longevity, solar panel efficiency, and station-keeping abilities.

A new breakthrough could turn windows into active solar panels (3 minute read)

A team of researchers has created perovskite cells with a conversion efficiency of 15.5% that allow more than 20% of visible light through. The technology will allow solar windows to reach glazing levels, making them more useful for real-world applications. The new cells display exceptional long-term stability when tested under constant illumination and heating, making them appealing candidates for scaled device manufacture.

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Programming, Design & Data Science

Red Engine (GitHub Repo)

Red Engine is a modern scheduling framework for Python applications. It uses elegant syntax and offers more features than Crontab or APScheduler. Red Engine is minimal on the surface but extensive and customizable underneath.

Nx - The fastest growing monorepo solution in the JS ecosystem (3 minute read)

Nx is a fast, extensible build system that features built-in monorepo support. It is lightweight and it has a plugin system with support for Angular, React, Next, Next.js, Node, and more. Nx doesn't just help set up monorepos and execute tasks, it also guides developers through the development lifecycle. Links to courses and more resources about Nx are available in the article.

Free Auth for any Project - Learn Authentication with FusionAuth (Sponsor)

Get authentication and authorization up and running in minutes for your side project or POC. User registration, SSO, MFA, and more. Download and learn it on your own. Free forever with FusionAuth Community!

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Miscellaneous

I generated this set of icons in 3D style using DALL-E 2 by @OpenAI (2 minute read)

This Twitter thread features 3D icons generated by DALL-E 2. It shows the text prompts used to generate the icons and explains how keywords were used in the prompts. While DALL-E only exports in 1024x1024px, the images would work fine as small icons on a website.

Hacker claims to have stolen data on 1 billion Chinese citizens (2 minute read)

A hacker under the handle 'ChinaDan' is selling several databases that they claim contains terabytes of stolen information on roughly one billion Chinese citizens for 10 bitcoins. The hacker says the information was leaked from the Shanghai National Police database. It includes data such as names, addresses, national ID numbers, contact numbers, and criminal records. This could be the most significant data breach yet for China and its citizens.

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Quick Links

Sight of mouthwatering meals triggers inflammation linked to diabetes (3 minute read)

A study has demonstrated how the sight or smell of a meal can trigger an inflammatory response that guides insulin production.

A Swedish company offers plant based burger, and it tastes like human meat (3 minute read)

Oumph! is a Swedish company that created human-flavored plant-based meat to encourage people to try out plant-based meats.

Sun Valley 2022 will discuss inflation, future of streaming video; Tim Cook expected (3 minute read)

Sun Valley 2022 is a conference that has been described as a ‘summer camp for billionaires’.

RETRO Is Blazingly Fast (7 minute read)

RETRO models are 25x smaller than the competition, leading to huge savings in training and inference costs.

How do painkillers kill pain? It’s about meeting the pain where it’s at (9 minute read)

There are multiple pathways that signal pain and there is redundancy to these pathways.

Beast (GitHub Repo)

Beast is a build system designed for the purpose of power, speed, and productivity.

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Amazon's $465M TV show 📺, DALL-E generated icons 🎨, 1 billion Chinese citizens hacked 💻

Daily Update 2022-07-05

Big Tech & Startups

Science & Futuristic Technology

Programming, Design & Data Science

Miscellaneous

Quick Links

What did you think of today's newsletter?

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Zuckerberg "turns up heat" 🔥, Meta's product roadmap 📱, first CRISPR drug 💊

TikTok Shop feed 📱, Tesla tracks employee attendance 🚗, drug free painkillers 💊

Gmail launches redesign 🎨, CEO wears smart contact lens 👀, cool GitHub Profiles 👨‍💻

ARM's Immortalis GPU ⚡, Pinterest's new CEO 📌, how to learn practical COBOL 👨‍💻

Apple's new HomePod 🔊, Instagram Reels API 📱, is remote work here to stay 👨‍💻

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