Meta/Google cut staff 📉, Tesla's solar neighborhood ☀️, OpenAI speech recognition 🗣️

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Big Tech & Startups

Facebook Parent Meta, Google To Cut Costs And Staff (3 minute read)

Meta and Google are looking at ways to cut costs as the companies brace for an economic downturn. Both companies are reportedly cutting staff. Meta is reorganizing departments and giving workers a certain amount of time to apply for other roles within the company. Google is also requiring some employees to apply to new roles. Meta employees have about 30 days to find another job internally and Google employees typically have about 60 days to find another role in the company if their jobs are eliminated.

The world’s first Tesla solar neighborhood is becoming reality (2 minute read)

Tesla is deploying solar roofs and Powerwalls in a brand-new development in Austin, Texas. It has partnered with Brookfield Asset Management and Dacra to offer Tesla Solar Roofs and Powerwalls as a package on brand new houses. The project has been going on for a year and there are already quite a few houses in the development with the technology. Homeowners are able to sell excess energy back to the grid, earning them long-term passive income. The installations in the development could eventually be included in Tesla's upcoming Texas virtual power plant.

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Science & Futuristic Technology

OpenAI open-sources Whisper, a multilingual speech recognition system (2 minute read)

OpenAI has open sourced Whisper, a speech recognition system that enables transcription in multiple languages as well as translation from those languages to English. Whisper was trained on 680,000 hours of multilingual and multitask data collected from the web. The model is particularly limited in the area of text prediction and it doesn't perform equally well across all supported languages. OpenAI hopes that Whisper will make automatic speech recognition technology more accessible.

The controversial embryo tests that promise a better baby (14 minute read)

Some companies are testing embryos generated by in vitro fertilization to allow prospective parents to choose those with the lowest risks for disease. Pre-implantation genetic testing for polygenic conditions is a relatively new service, with only a small handful of companies selling it in a few countries. The genomic models used in most tests are too weak to predict disease risk in a meaningful way, so people may be misled by the information they receive. There are indications that people who aren't infertile will turn to IVF to take advantage of the testing.

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Programming, Design & Data Science

Hurl (GitHub Repo)

Hurl is a command line tool that runs HTTP requests defined in a simple plain text format. It can be used for fetching data and testing HTTP sessions. Hurl can perform requests, capture values, and evaluate queries on headers and body responses.

q (GitHub Repo)

q brings SQL's expressive power to the Linux command line and provides easy access to text as data. It can perform SQL-like statements directly on tabular text data and on multi-file sqlite3 databases without having to merge them or load them into memory. q treats ordinary files as database tables. It supports all SQL constructs, automatic column name and type detection, and multiple character encodings.

Last chance to join the Semantic Layer Summit 2022 - save your spot for free (Sponsor)

There’s a lot to look forward to in this year’s Semantic Layer Summit - don't miss your last chance to join! What's on the agenda? Keynotes by Bill Inmon and Kirk Borne. Expert sessions by an all-star lineup of data leaders (from Bank of America, Starbucks, Cigna, and others). Networking opportunities.

Join the free virtual event this Wednesday

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Miscellaneous

I tried replacing Google with TikTok, and it worked better than I thought (7 minute read)

Google has identified TikTok as a possible existential threat to its search engine. Almost 40% of young people use TikTok or Instagram to discover places rather than using Google Maps or Search. This article looks at TikTok as a search engine and how it performs against Google Search. While TikTok excels at showing content related to searches, it isn't able to provide quick access to other sites or answer questions like Google.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is trying to fix a crumbling engineering culture with a new unit that tackles 'foundational pain points' raised by the company's frustrated developers (6 minute read)

The Amazon Software Builder Experience group was formed earlier this year to help turn Amazon into 'Earth's best employer for software builders'. The team has more than 400 employees working on code automation, improved developer tools, enhanced tutorials, and safety infrastructure. Its single focus is to improve the experience of software builders across Amazon. Many Amazon engineers are overwhelmed by software upgrade work, manual testing and deployment, and hard-to-use developer tools.

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Quick Links

Framework’s new Chromebook is upgradable and customizable (3 minute read)

Framework and Google have announced the new Framework Laptop Chromebook Edition, an upgradeable and customizable Chromebook.

The record-setting DDoSes keep coming, with no end in sight (3 minute read)

Massive botnets are being used to bring down servers around the world.

innernet (GitHub Repo)

innernet is a private network system that uses WireGuard under the hood.

IT services group Wipro fires 300 employees for moonlighting (2 minute read)

The employees were moonlighting for competitors, which Wipro considers an act of integrity violation.

Tigris (GitHub Repo)

Tigris is a backend for building real-time scalable web and mobile apps fast.

New JWST image reveals full glory of Neptune, its moons, and rings (2 minute read)

This article links to recently released images of Neptune taken by the James Webb Space Telescope.

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Meta/Google cut staff 📉, Tesla's solar neighborhood ☀️, OpenAI speech recognition 🗣️

Daily Update 2022-09-22

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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Tesla race to finish robot 🤖, the rise of Stable Diffusion 👨‍💻, Nvidia next-gen GPUs 💻

DALL-E face-editing 🧑, how AI impacts coding 👨‍💻, Azure CTO wants C++ deprecated 🛑

Top Widgets iOS app hits #1 📱, Uber hacked 🚗, how to fix a bad code base 👨‍💻

Adobe buys Figma 🖼️, TikTok's VR headset 😎, tech exec job market survey 👨‍💻

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

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