Starlink's laser internet 🛰️, Blue Origin rocket explodes 🚀, how QR codes work 👨‍💻

Daily Update 2022-09-15

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Big Tech & Startups

Starlink brings high-speed internet to all 7 continents, including Antarctica (2 minute read)

Starlink now provides internet to all seven continents. It is able to provide internet to extremely remote locations due to its space laser network, which reduces the need for ground stations. A Starlink terminal has been installed at a US Antarctic research station. The McMurdo Station is the largest community in Antarctica and is capable of supporting up to 1,258 residents. SpaceX has had conversations with Apple about possible Starlink connectivity for iPhones.

Google introduces a set of iOS 16 Lock Screen widgets for your iPhone (3 minute read)

Google is adding iPhone Lock Screen widgets for a number of its popular apps. iOS 16 allows iPhone users to add widgets to their home screen in three different formats: circular, rectangular, and in-line. Google will release widgets for Search, Maps, Gmail, Translate, Lens, Chrome, and more. It has not yet announced a widget for Calendar. The widgets will be rolled out over the coming weeks.

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Science & Futuristic Technology

Action Transformer (3 minute read)

Action Transformer (ACT-1) is a model that can use several software tools. Users can type in high-level requests that ACT-1 will then carry out, for example, searching for properties on a real estate website or entering new leads into Salesforce. The model can look up Wikipedia to learn and it can be coached with feedback. It can complete tasks that require multiple programs. Video demos of ACT-1's capabilities are available in the thread.

Watch Blue Origin’s rocket explode mid-flight (2 minute read)

Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket experienced a mid-flight failure during a mission on September 12. The uncrewed flight exploded around 65 seconds into the mission. The crew capsule's emergency escape system activated successfully and propelled the capsule away from the explosion at high speed. It was the first midair failure in 23 flights.

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Programming, Design & Data Science

8 things you didn’t know you could do with GitHub Copilot (6 minute read)

GitHub Copilot is an AI pair programmer that helps developers write code faster with less work. It uses the Open AI Codex machine learning model to translate natural language into code. GitHub Copilot can be used for more than just generating code. This article presents 8 novel use cases for the tool that may be helpful to developers.

QR codes (6 minute read)

QR codes, or Quick Response codes, were invented by a subsidiary of Toyota to track parts. The company never exercised its patent and released the technology for free. QR codes can store data and be read from many angles. They can still be decoded even if parts of the code are obscured. This article explains how QR codes work.

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Miscellaneous

Five years of data show that SSDs are more reliable than HDDs over the long haul (3 minute read)

Backup and cloud storage company Backblaze has published data comparing the long-term reliability of solid-state storage drives and hard disk drives in its data center. The drives in the report were mostly 2.5-inch drives from Crucial, Seagate, and Dell, with little representation from Western Digital or SanDisk and no data from Samsung drives. SSDs failed at an overall lower rate than HDDs. After the fifth year, HDD failures increased significantly while SSD failure rates remained around the same. Home users may use their drives differently to Backblaze and so their experience may differ.

Zoom is reportedly working on calendar and email tools to take on Office and Google (3 minute read)

Zoom is preparing to launch email and calendar apps before the end of the year. The company aims to integrate more deeply with other businesses as the industry tightens spending. The integrations will turn Zoom into a full-fledged competitor to Google Workspace and Microsoft Office. Google still struggles to steal enterprise market share away from Microsoft despite its wildly popular free tools.

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Quick Links

👋📱Your Contacts App is Holding You Back From Your Next Big Opportunity (Sponsor)

Meet Clay, a private social network, stunning address book, and so much more.

First Batch of Color Fonts Arrives on Google Fonts (6 minute read)

Color fonts enable color specification within the font file while non-color fonts only specify where color goes.

Discord adds Reddit-like Forum channels for chatting about specific topics (3 minute read)

Forum channels are a place for focused discussions.

Git Re-Basin (3 minute read)

Git Re-Basin can merge models in weight space at no cost to the loss.

PrimeVue (GitHub Repo)

PrimeVue is a set of open source UI components for Vue.

How we built Pingora, the proxy that connects Cloudflare to the Internet (10 minute read)

Pingora is an HTTP proxy built by Cloudflare using Rust that provides many benefits while requiring only a third of the CPU and memory resources of Cloudflare's previous proxy structure.

Intel, AMD and Nvidia propose new standard to make AI processing more efficient (3 minute read)

The proposed standard has the potential to accelerate AI development by optimizing hardware memory usage and work for both AI training and inference.

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Starlink's laser internet 🛰️, Blue Origin rocket explodes 🚀, how QR codes work 👨‍💻

Daily Update 2022-09-15

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

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 📈

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