Amazon buys Roomba 🤖, Meta's AI chatbot 💬, advice for junior devs in current market 👨‍💻

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Big Tech & Startups

Amazon is buying Roomba vacuum maker iRobot for $1.7 billion (3 minute read)

Amazon has agreed to acquire iRobot for approximately $1.7 billion. The deal is subject to approval by shareholders and regulators. Amazon hasn't had much success with household robots, but the acquisition will provide a massive foothold in the consumer robot market. iRobot's CEO Colin Angle will remain in his position. The purchase of iRobot is Amazon's fourth-largest acquisition.

Meta is putting its latest AI chatbot on the web for the public to talk to (4 minute read)

Meta is letting members of the public in the US talk to its new state-of-the-art chatbot to collect feedback on its capabilities. BlenderBot 3 can engage in general chitchat and answer queries like a digital assistant. It is able to search the internet in order to talk about specific topics and users can click its answers to view its sources. Meta is also publishing the underlying code, training dataset, and smaller model variants. A link to the chatbot is available in the article.

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Science & Futuristic Technology

SpaceX Polaris Dawn is planning its first crewed launch in December (2 minute read)

Polaris Dawn is planning its first crewed launch on a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft in December. The mission will last five days and include the first spacewalk on a private mission. Its crew will include billionaire Jared Isaacman and three others. SpaceX will have to upgrade the life support systems on the Crew Dragon spacecraft for the mission.

The first-ever complete map of immune system connections offers new pathways to therapies (2 minute read)

Researchers from the UK and Switzerland have developed a comprehensive map of the network of connections that make up the human immune system. The map highlights the individual cell types, messengers, and relative speed of each conversation taking place between immune cells. It could revolutionize how researchers approach drug development and immunotherapies. The map includes many previously unknown interactions and provides a new understanding of the cell-to-cell signals happening in the immune system.

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Programming, Design & Data Science

Froebel (GitHub Repo)

Froebel is a strictly typed TypeScript utility library. It contains TypeScript helper functions and utilities from various projects. Froebel runs in Deno, Node.js, and the browser.

Advice for Less Experienced Software Engineers in the Current Tech Market (9 minute read)

This article contains advice for entry-level software engineers. While the job market was heated in the second half of 2021, there wasn't a huge demand for less experienced software engineers. Neither demand nor compensation for entry-level software engineers increased during this time. The market has now cooled down for experienced software engineers, making it even worse for those with less experience.

Stream is the Chat API that runs messaging + feeds for Adobe, Strava, and SoundCloud (Sponsor)

Stream powers Chat Messaging and Activity Feeds for billions of global end-users across thousands of apps. With an obsessive focus on API ease of use, tutorials, and documentation, Stream can be implemented as a component in your app very quickly. Sign up for free to try it out

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Miscellaneous

Tesla Model Y is on track to be the world’s best-selling car (2 minute read)

The Tesla Model Y will likely be the best-selling vehicle by total volume next year. It is on track to be the best-selling vehicle by revenue this year. The current best-selling vehicle in the world is the Toyota Corolla. Tesla is expected to have the capacity to produce over 1 million Model Y vehicles per year by the end of this year.

A masterclass in corporate strategy (7 minute read)

This Twitter thread talks about how Apple's App Tracking Transparency (ATT) policy blew up the digital advertising ecosystem. ATT disrupts behavioral profiling across apps and websites. The move bolstered Apple's ads business while positioning the company as a champion of consumer privacy. Companies like Facebook were unable to defend against the policy and have seen their revenues severely diminished.

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Quick Links

Mailing (Website)

Mailing is a system for building, testing, and sending emails with React.

Thousands of hackers flock to 'Dark Utilities' C2-as-a-Service (2 minute read)

Dark Utilities provides an easy and inexpensive way to set up a command and control center for malicious operations.

Almost Every Turtle Being Born Female Due to Global Warming (2 minute read)

No male sea turtles have been observed hatching in Florida in the past four years due to record high temperatures.

DreamWorks Animation to Release MoonRay as Open Source (3 minute read)

MoonRay is DreamWorks' state-of-the-art Monte Carlo Ray Tracer renderer built on a highly scalable architecture with no prior legacy code.

I can't save you, nobody can (3 minute read)

The best you can do as a manager is to point people in the right direction, give them the opportunity to prove themselves, and encourage them.

Fiddler crab’s eyes inspire researchers to develop amphibious artificial vision (3 minute read)

Scientists have created a form of artificial vision that works equally well on land and in water.

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Amazon buys Roomba 🤖, Meta's AI chatbot 💬, advice for junior devs in current market 👨‍💻

Daily Update 2022-08-08

Big Tech & Startups

Science & Futuristic Technology

Programming, Design & Data Science

Miscellaneous

Quick Links

What did you think of today's newsletter?

Older messages

SpaceX moon launch 🚀, organ harvesting startup 🫁, North Korean Gmail hackers 📧

Tesla's new solar roof ☀️, self hostable coding AI 👨‍💻, flying car FAA approved 🚗

Meta livestreaming 📹, inside Google/Meta hiring freezes 👨‍💻, YCombinator reduces cohorts by 40% 📉

Amazon mall delivery 🚚, Google says worker productivity must improve 👨‍💻, Intro to Apple Silicon 💻

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

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