Amazon's new Kindle 📖, SpaceX superfans 🚀, accuracy of predictions about future 🤔

Daily Update 2022-09-14

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Big Tech & Startups

Amazon’s new Kindle offers twice the storage, a sharper screen, and USB-C for $100 (2 minute read)

Amazon's new Kindle includes almost all of the best features from the latest Paperwhite for $40 less. It features 300 PPI pixel density, 16GB storage, and a USB-C charging port. A kids edition with an extended two-year warranty, colorful covers, and a one-year subscription to Amazon's Kids+ service is available. The new Kindle is available for preorder now and will be released on October 12.

Linux Foundation announces the OpenWallet Foundation to develop interoperable digital wallets (3 minute read)

The Linux Foundation has announced a new effort called the OpenWallet Foundation that aims to enable interoperability across digital wallets. A universal digital wallet infrastructure will allow people to carry tokenized identity, money, and objects from place to place in the digital world. The OWF aims to foster an effort to build a secure, multi-purpose open source engine that developers can use to build wallets that are interoperable with other wallets.

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Science & Futuristic Technology

Chinese Researchers Test Cars That Hover Over Road Using Magnets (2 minute read)

Chinese researchers are testing modified cars that can magnetically levitate over a stretch of specially modified highway. The researchers modified a roughly five mile stretch of highway and added an array of permanent magnets to the floor of eight vehicles for the test. The cars could reach a velocity of 143 miles per hour on the track. A link to a short video from the test is available in the article.

Fast charging over 10,000 cycles (4 minute read)

Harvard's Office of Technology Development has granted an exclusive technology license to Adden Energy to scale a solid-state lithium-metal battery for commercial deployment. The battery prototype can charge in three minutes and last over 10,000 charge cycles. Adden aims to create a full-scale vehicle battery within the next five years. Enabling electric vehicles to charge within minutes with batteries that last for many years will make EV technology accessible to many more people.

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Programming, Design & Data Science

s3sqlite (GitHub Repo)

s3sqlite is an APSW SQLite VFS that enables reading databases from S3 using s3fs. It only supports reading operations. The VFS only works when the database file is in any journal mode that is not WAL.

BrainFlow (Website)

BrainFlow is a library for obtaining, parsing, and analyzing data from biosensors. It features a uniform API for all devices, eight language bindings, and a signal processing and machine learning API. All features are available for free.

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Miscellaneous

Rocketland (40 minute read)

Rocket Ranch is an isolated area of land in Boca Chica near the Starbase launch site. SpaceX enthusiasts have been gathering at the site to watch the company's tests from afar. Some fans live at the site full-time. This article explores what it is like to live at the Rocket Ranch. It also looks at how the launch site has affected local residents and the impact the site has on the environment around it.

Futurist prediction methods and accuracy (2 hour read)

This post looks at past predictions of the future to evaluate which prediction techniques worked and which didn't. Most predictors and futurists have a fairly poor track record of predictions. People with big ideas and a shallow understanding of their subject generally fared poorly. Those who had a deep understanding of the problem and had a record of learning lessons from past predictive errors had relatively accurate predictions.

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Quick Links

Scaling Git’s garbage collection (22 minute read)

This post talks about the problems that GitHub has faced when removing junk from repositories and the solutions that they came up with to fix them.

Chinese scientists plan boron-powered supersonic missile that can fly and swim (4 minute read)

China's new missile will be able to cruise at 2.5 times the speed of sound for 200 kilometers before diving and skimming across the waves for up to 20 more kilometers.

cachegrand (GitHub Repo)

cachegrand is a scalable and modular key-value store designed for modern hardware.

This Man Is Trying to Put Mirrors in Space to Generate Solar Power at Night (11 minute read)

Tons of Mirrors is using satellite-mounted mirrors to redirect sunlight to solar panels on Earth at night.

Senior Engineers are Living in the Future (3 minute read)

Senior Engineers have more experience and faster access to information, and that sometimes makes them seem like wizards.

We Spoke With the Last Person Standing in the Floppy Disk Business (16 minute read)

This article features an interview with Tom Persky, the founder of a US-based company dedicated to the selling and recycling of floppy disks.

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Amazon's new Kindle 📖, SpaceX superfans 🚀, accuracy of predictions about future 🤔

Daily Update 2022-09-14

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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iOS 16 launches 📱, Google's secret hi-speed internet project ⚡, how to learn Rust 👨‍💻

Google Pixel fold 📱, Tesla's lithium refinery 🪨, AI text to video 🤖

YC's biggest moonshots 🚀, US Congress launches API 👨‍💻, Tesla Supercharger voting ⛽

Apple hardware announcements 📱, GitHub Copilot's effect on dev productivity 👨‍💻, Snap's leaked turnaround plan 📈

Google Pixel event 📱, Meta's high-end VR headset 🥽, leaving bad work environments 👨‍💻

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