Apple asked for Meta's ad revenue 📱, open source DALL-E competitor 🖼️, next-gen terminal for devs 👨‍💻

Daily Update 2022-08-15

Can you measure a dev team’s productivity without spying on developers? (Sponsor)

The software industry has a long history of using harmful metrics to measure developer productivity (ahem, lines of code written). But there’s an alternative: Swarmia rallies software teams around meaningful metrics that help ship better code faster. Instead of spying on developers, Swarmia helps find bottlenecks - which are almost always processes, not people.

Over 1,000 teams use Swarmia to gain visibility into well-researched metrics around focus, delivery, collaboration, and quality. “The perfect overview of engineering productivity” - Roland Fiala, SVP of Engineering, Productsup.

Swarmia is free for small teams and offers a 14-day free trial

📱

Big Tech & Startups

YouTube is reportedly planning to launch a 'channel store' for streaming services (2 minute read)

YouTube is developing a channel store where customers can purchase subscriptions for various streaming services. It is currently in talks with potential partner companies. Partner companies will likely have to share their earnings for purchases made on YouTube. The store could launch as soon as fall this year.

Apple asked for a cut of Facebook’s ad sales years before it stifled Facebook’s ad sales (3 minute read)

Apple and Meta were in talks to share Facebook's ad revenue, with most of the discussions taking place between 2016 and 2018. Apple claimed that boosted posts were in-app purchases, but Facebook argued that they were ads and won. The companies also discussed the idea of a Facebook subscription that would remove ads from the platform. They weren't able to reach an agreement and now the two companies are ideologically opposed when it comes to ads.

🚀

Science & Futuristic Technology

Breakthrough in nuclear fusion energy: Ignition confirmed in record 1.3 megajoule shot (3 minute read)

A nuclear yield of more than 1.3 megajoules was achieved in August 2021. The results of the experiment were published in three peer-reviewed papers exactly one year later. The experiment establishes that fusion ignition in the lab is possible. The researchers have not been able to recreate the same level of fusion yield since.

Chinese scientists say maglev ‘sky train’ floats without power using permanent magnets (3 minute read)

China has launched an 800-meter experimental maglev line with permanent magnets that can keep a maglev train afloat forever without a power supply. It uses powerful magnets rich in rare earth elements. The magnets can lift a train with 88 passengers in the air. The new technology generates little electromagnetic radiation and costs about a tenth of what it costs to build a subway. China controls more than 80% of the world's permanent magnet producing capacity.

💻

Programming, Design & Data Science

Puppertino (GitHub Repo)

Puppertino is a CSS framework based on Human Guidelines from Apple. It is designed to mimic the look of macOS. Puppertino was created to be lightweight, modular, and cool looking.

Zellij (GitHub Repo)

Zellij is a workspace for anyone who loves the terminal. It features a layout system and a plugin system that can create plugins in any language that compiles to WebAssembly. A GIF preview is available.

The fastest-growing open data platform adds support for event-driven workflows (Sponsor)

Directus, the leading open-source data platform, has released Flows, an event-driven automation system for creating custom data workflows. This new feature of Directus Studio enables developers to quickly automate alerting, data transformation and synchronization, service integration, and more. Did we mention there’s a free forever Community Cloud? Go check Directus out

🎁

Miscellaneous

This startup is setting a DALL-E 2-like AI free, consequences be damned (9 minute read)

Stability AI is releasing Stable Diffusion, a DALL-E 2-like image generation system, to the public in the coming weeks. It recently released the system to just over a thousand researchers ahead of the launch. Stable Diffusion will let users generate fake images of public figures, unlike DALL-E 2. There is minimal filtering aside for illegal content. Examples of images generated by Stable Diffusion are available in the article.

The Zoom installer let a researcher hack his way to root access on macOS (4 minute read)

An exploit in the macOS version of Zoom allows attackers to gain access to the entire operating system. The exploit was reported to Zoom in December 2021. While the company issued a patch to fix the problem, the patch contained a bug that meant the vulnerability was still exploitable. Zoom's security and privacy PR lead says that the company is working diligently to address the issue.

⚡

Quick Links

Erg (GitHub Repo)

Erg is a Python-compatible statically typed language that is simple, robust, functional, and object-oriented.

Amazon launches AWS Private 5G so companies can build their own 4G mobile networks (3 minute read)

AWS Private 5G allows companies to set up their own private 4G LTE mobile networks on-site.

Histoire (GitHub Repo)

Histoire is a tool that provides interactive component playgrounds.

GPT Language Model Spells Out New Proteins (3 minute read)

ProtGPT2 is a language model based on OpenAI's GPT-2 that can generate novel protein sequences.

oasis (GitHub Repo)

oasis is a small statically-linked Linux system.

Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Program Better (3 minute read)

Future language models will have superhuman coding abilities as it is possible to generate unlimited data to train them.

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Apple asked for Meta's ad revenue 📱, open source DALL-E competitor 🖼️, next-gen terminal for devs 👨‍💻

Daily Update 2022-08-15

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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Google Search games 🎮, Xiaomi humanoid robot 🤖, no-code vs. developers 👨‍💻

AirPods switch to USB-C ⚡, $20B Unity acquisition offer 🎮, Meta's new CFO 👩🏻

Samsung Galaxy event📱, Google Fiber expands 🌐, how teens use social media 🧒

Google worldwide outage ⚡, SoftBank loses $21.6B 📉, what's the next big thing 💡

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

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