Cross-browser Apple Pay 💳, China's virtual influencers 💁‍♀️, understanding quantum algorithms ⚛️

Daily Update 2022-08-01

Knock is a Readymade Notifications Engine That Developers Love (Sponsor)

Product notifications are crucial, but building the infrastructure to send them can be a costly distraction. Knock makes it simple to deliver the notifications experience your users expect: timely, cross-channel, and duplicate-free.

Use Knock’s backend API clients and prebuilt React components to add a plug-and-play notifications engine to any product. It’s easy to manage, always delivers, and supports batching and intelligent routing. Once you’re live, business teams can create and update notifications independently (so you can focus on the next feature).

With pay-as-you-go pricing, including 10,000 free notifications per month, it’s simple to get started. If you want to engage users without inundating them with messages, add Knock to your app today.

📱

Big Tech & Startups

Apple Pay may finally work on Chrome, Edge, and Firefox in iOS 16 (3 minute read)

Apple Pay works with Edge, Chrome, and Firefox in the iOS 16 beta 4. The feature is not available for those browsers on the latest macOS beta, likely due to their underlying engines. Edge, Chrome, and Firefox use Safari's WebKit engine due to Apple requirements. The integration of Apple Pay with other browsers in iOS may be related to the EU's plan to go after companies that force app developers to use their own rendering engines.

Thread is Matter’s secret sauce for a better smart home (11 minute read)

Thread is a wireless protocol developed specifically for IoT devices. It is designed to make them work faster, fail less, use less power, and communicate with each other more seamlessly. Thread devices can form a mesh network with upwards of 250 devices. Thread will be the protocol that Matter will use for low-bandwidth devices when it arrives later this year. Many more details about Thread are available in the article.

🚀

Science & Futuristic Technology

China’s AI-driven power grid can recover from a blackout in 3 seconds (3 minute read)

A power grid in China's Xinjiang region can recover from blackouts in just three seconds. The power grid has many sensors that form a powerful AI that can decide the routes of power supply without human intervention. It starts locating and isolating faults and restoring power as soon as an equipment failure occurs in the low-voltage distribution network. The technology will quickly expand to other communities in China.

MIT engineers develop stickers that can see inside the body (5 minute read)

Engineers at MIT have developed a stamp-sized device that sticks to the skin and can provide continuous ultrasound imaging of internal organs for 48 hours. It is able to produce live, high-resolution images of major blood vessels and organs. The stickers were able to maintain a strong adhesion during various activities such as sitting, standing, jogging, and biking. They currently require a wired connection, but there are already many potential uses for them.

💻

Programming, Design & Data Science

Truss (GitHub Repo)

Truss is a bridge from model development to model delivery. It can package models built in any framework for sharing and deployment in any environment, local or production. Truss can turn Python models into microservices with production-ready endpoints, automatically serialize and deserialize models for most popular frameworks, freeze dependencies via Docker to make training environments portable, and more.

Million (GitHub Repo)

Million is a lightweight and fast virtual DOM. It makes creating user interfaces as easy as React, but with faster performance and smaller bundle sizes. Million computes the user interface before bundling with a compiler to reduce the overhead of a traditional virtual DOM. It features a familiar React API, lightweight bundle sizes, and fast runtime operations.

Which tool is Ideal for diverse source mixed computations (Sponsor)

There are a variety of data sources, including RDB, NoSQL, files like CSV and Excel, JSON, XML, HDFS, Elasticsearch, Kafka, etc. Is there a technology that can effectively handle the multiple/diverse mixed computation issue? Of course. The open-source esProc SPL is exactly what you need.

🎁

Miscellaneous

The overworked humans behind China’s virtual influencers (6 minute read)

This article discusses the world of virtual idols and the people behind the characters. The value of business driven by virtual idols was $16 billion in China alone. Many companies in China and Japan have increasingly invested in developing virtual talent over the past decade. These characters are animated personalities who are powered by teams of computer scientists and voice actors. Many of these actors are starting to complain about exhaustion, overwork, and low pay.

Shor, I’ll do it (10 minute read)

This article explains Shor's algorithm without using any math beyond arithmetic. Shor's algorithm is a quantum computer algorithm for finding the prime factors of an integer. It could be used to break public-key cryptography schemes if run on a quantum computer with a sufficient number of qubits that can operate without succumbing to quantum noise and other phenomena. The article provides many links for further reading.

⚡

Quick Links

userver (Website)

userver is an asynchronous framework with abstractions for the fast and comfortable creation of C++ microservices, services, and utilities.

MIT, Autodesk develop AI that can figure out confusing Lego instructions (2 minute read)

The novel framework can interpret 2D instructions to build 3D objects.

Free eBook: Container Monitoring and Orchestration in 2022 (Sponsor)

Learn how to deploy, manage, and scale containerized applications with this free eBook. Download now.

shellfirm (GitHub Repo)

shellfirm can intercept patterns in shell and present small challenges to verify risky actions.

Elon Musk to build his own airport outside Austin (2 minute read)

The conceptual plans have been confirmed by sources, but the exact timetable and location are unknown.

sqlite-lines (GitHub Repo)

sqlite-lines is an SQLite extension for reading lines from a file or blob.

US regulators will certify first small nuclear reactor design (3 minute read)

The new nuclear reactor design will be the seventh that has been approved for use in the US.

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Cross-browser Apple Pay 💳, China's virtual influencers 💁‍♀️, understanding quantum algorithms ⚛️

Daily Update 2022-08-01

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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TikTok's Spotify competitor 🎵, Google's in-house Linux 👨‍💻, DeepMind finds structure of all proteins 🧬

Starlink mobile internet 📱, Meta's first revenue decline 📉, Saudi Arabia's $500B futuristic city IPO 🏙️

Meta/Apple metaverse battle📱, Shopify layoffs 📉, distributed SQLite replication 👨‍💻

Instagram redesign 📱, 75 mile-long skyscraper 🏙️, practical web socket tips 👨‍💻

Apple Watch Pro ⌚, Tesla same-hour service 🚗, AWS open sources React components 👨‍💻

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