TikTok Nearby 📱, Twitter whistleblower 🐦, sounds from a black hole 🌌

Daily Update 2022-08-24

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📱

Big Tech & Startups

TikTok is testing a new ‘Nearby’ feed to display local content (3 minute read)

TikTok is testing a 'Nearby' feed designed to display local content to users in Southeast Asia. Users who are part of the test will see a new feed tab displayed alongside the 'Following' and 'For You' feeds. The feed is testing alongside a feature that lets creators add location tags to their videos. It could open up new opportunities for local advertisers and help users discover nearby venues and products. TikTok says the feature may change before launch or be scrapped altogether.

Google research AI image noise reduction is out of this world (2 minute read)

MultiNeRF is a project from Google Research that includes algorithms that can figure out what images should look like without noise generated by imaging sensors. The algorithms can remove noise from images to significantly improve their quality, especially in low-light scenes. They can also vary exposure, tone maps, viewpoints, and focus. A video showcasing the technology is available.

🚀

Science & Futuristic Technology

First material found to "remember" its own history (2 minute read)

Vanadium dioxide (VO2) is a material that is normally an insulator, but it changes structure and acts like a metal when heated to 68 degrees Celsius. It can conduct electricity without conducting heat. A team of scientists recently discovered that VO2 can 'remember' phase transitions for at least three hours. It is the only material known so far to behave this way. The discovery could lead to a new class of memory and data processing devices.

NASA Recorded The Sound From a Black Hole, and It's Super Eerie (3 minute read)

NASA has released an audio clip of sound waves from a supermassive black hole located 250 million light-years away. The waves had to be transposed up 57 and 58 octaves to be audible to humans. They include the lowest note in the Universe ever detected by humans, a B-flat just over 57 octaves below middle C. Sound waves may play a vital role in the evolution of galaxy clusters over long periods of time. The audio clip is available in the article.

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Programming, Design & Data Science

Crawlee (GitHub Repo)

Crawlee is a TypeScript web scraping and browser automation library. It makes crawlers appear human-like with its powerful anti-blocking features. Crawlee features a single interface for HTTP and headless browser crawling, a persistent queue for URLs to crawl, pluggable storage for tabular data and files, automatic scaling, and integrated proxy rotation and session management.

Diffusers (GitHub Repo)

Diffusers provides pretrained diffusion models across multiple modalities and serves as a modular toolbox for inference and training of diffusion models. It features state-of-the-art diffusion pipelines, various noise schedulers, multiple types of models, training examples, and inference examples. Diffusers is fully compatible with Stability AI's Stable Diffusion text-to-image model.

Segment is now free for Startups! (Sponsor)

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🎁

Miscellaneous

Remote Startups Will Win the War for Top Talent (4 minute read)

Workers are leaving companies that treat them poorly, underpay them, or hinder their quality of life. Many are moving towards remote work, which allows them to organize work around living. Studies have shown how working in offices can be detrimental to employees and their quality of work. The most talented workers will leave companies that don't adapt and go to companies that embrace remote work.

Twitter’s former security chief says company lied about bots and safety (4 minute read)

Twitter's former head of security has accused the company of negligent security practices. He claims that Twitter misled federal regulators about its safety and that the company fails to properly estimate the number of bots on its platform. About half of Twitter's 7,000 or so full-time employees have access to users' sensitive personal data and internal software. Twitter has failed to delete user data in the past as the records were spread too widely among internal systems to be tracked. The company could face significant fines if the accusations are proven to be correct.

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Quick Links

unspun makes ultra-sustainable & custom-built jeans from 3D iPhone scans (Sponsor)

Our $200 jeans are unique to each customer and the shape of their actual body – no two pairs are alike. Sign up as a beta tester and get a $40 gift card towards your first pair.

How to communicate why your startup is worth joining (22 minute read)

Most startups don't seem to offer a good reason to join them, but that's usually because they fail to communicate them well.

Parsing SQL (26 minute read)

This tutorial teaches readers about SQL parsing and guides them through how to build their own SQL parsers.

Meta officially rolls out its new metaverse ID system (2 minute read)

Users with existing Facebook or Instagram accounts can use them to create Meta accounts or they can choose to create a completely new Meta account.

Unix legend, who owes us nothing, keeps fixing foundational AWK code (3 minute read)

Brian Kernighan released code that could add Unicode support for AWK and patched something to let AWK handle CSV files.

James Webb telescope captures surreal images of Jupiter's auroras (1 minute read)

The image, which is available in the article, shows Jupiter's polar auroras, the planet's extremely faint rings, and two of its smaller moons.

How The New York Times Uses Machine Learning To Make Its Paywall Smarter (7 minute read)

The New York Times uses a causal machine learning model called the Dynamic Meter to set personalized paywall meter limits and to make its paywall smarter.

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advanced access controls browser automation library powerful antiblocking features headless browser crawling APIfirst analytics solution various noise schedulers data processing devices supermassive black hole TypeScript web scraping Sponsor Daily Update pretrained diffusion models new Feed tab Data Science Crawlee

TikTok Nearby 📱, Twitter whistleblower 🐦, sounds from a black hole 🌌

Daily Update 2022-08-24

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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Elon subpoenas Jack Dorsey ⚖️, Instagram copies BeReal 📷, StableDiffusion AI open sourced 👨‍💻

TikTok monitors keystrokes 📱, Carmack's AGI startup 🤖, how to get a 4-day workweek 👨‍💻

Google's SEO crackdown 🔎, Netflix cloud gaming 🎮, how to find interesting jobs 👨‍💻

iPhone 14 event 📱, Amazon's TikTok-style feed 🛍️, Reddit Developer Portal 👨‍💻

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