China bans Starlink 🛰️, a day in the metaverse 🌎, working multiple remote jobs 👨‍💻

Daily Update 2022-10-11

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Big Tech & Startups

China asked Elon Musk not to sell Starlink within the country (2 minute read)

Elon Musk says that figures from the Chinese government asked him directly to withhold Starlink access within China. The Chinese government made clear its disapproval of the Starlink rollout in Ukraine and wanted assurances that Starlink would not be sold in China. While Musk did not reveal whether he would comply, the Starlink service map shows no plans to deploy in China. Starlink connections could help people from around the world circumvent network-based censorship.

This is Microsoft’s Xbox game streaming device (2 minute read)

Microsoft’s head of Xbox, Phil Spencer, recently published a photo of Microsoft's dedicated Xbox game streaming device on Twitter. Codenamed Keystone, the small white box looks similar to an Xbox Series S. It will be dedicated to streaming games from Microsoft's Xbox Cloud Gaming service. Microsoft has launched an Xbox TV app that supports streaming games from Xbox Cloud Gaming on 2022 Samsung TVs and monitors.

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Science & Futuristic Technology

Ageless and scandal-proof: Chinese tech groups bank on virtual influencers (3 minute read)

Virtual celebrities are becoming more attractive to companies in China as the Chinese government cracks down on human celebrities deemed to be politically outspoken or morally questionable. China's virtual idol industry is predicted to increase to 48 billion RMB by 2025. Companies like Tencent and ByteDance have spent hundreds of millions of dollars developing digital influencers. While virtual celebrities are more controllable, they aren't completely immune to scandal and they are currently earning far less than what human influencers used to earn.

Stoke Space aims to build rapidly reusable rocket with a completely novel design (11 minute read)

Stoke Space began in 2019 with the goal of building a fully reusable rocket from day one. They aimed to build a design that did not require any new scientific discoveries and could be turned around as quickly as possible. This article tells the story of how Stoke was founded and how the team developed the novel design for its reusable rocket. Stoke still has a long way to go before its rockets will go to space.

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Programming, Design & Data Science

Mike Acton’s Expectations of Professional Software Engineers (10 minute read)

Games industry veteran Mike Acton listed 50 things he expects of developers he works with during a talk in 2019. This article contains the list along with expansions on each point and further quotes from Acton. The suggestions in the list are not specific to the games industry. They form a baseline for software engineers to compare themselves against.

Satori (GitHub Repo)

Satori is a library for converting HTML and CSS to SVG. It supports the JSX syntax and renders elements into 600x400 SVGs. Satori handles layout calculation, font, typography, and more.

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Miscellaneous

This Is Life in the Metaverse (25 minute read)

This article describes an experience of being inside Meta's Horizon metaverse. The author visits the metaverse platform at every hour of the day and night at least once to learn about the platform and to meet the earliest adopters. During this time, they visited gathering spaces, played games, watched shows, and partied.

These Remote Tech Workers Secretly Juggle Multiple Jobs (5 minute read)

Some tech workers are working multiple full-time jobs in secret. Remote work allows employees to work far more flexibly, making it easier to accept and juggle multiple roles. This article looks at how some workers manage their multiple roles and the problems that come with overworking. While it may seem like an attractive way to earn more money, overworking can be difficult to manage and many companies are against the idea.

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Quick Links

Transcribe and understand any audio with Deepgram's speech-to-text API (Sponsor)

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How Wine works 101 (12 minute read)

Wine is a compatibility layer capable of running Windows applications on several POSIX-compliant operating systems.

The art behind NASA’s scientific space photos (6 minute read)

Science visuals developers at the Space Telescope Science Institute translate the data captured by the James Webb Space Telescope into art.

InvokeAI (GitHub Repo)

InvokeAI is a version of Stable Diffusion that features a WebGUI, an interactive command-line script, and other enhancements.

Why we stopped making Einsteins (19 minute read)

The introduction of the internet shows that access to information counts for little in producing genius.

Improving Firefox responsiveness on macOS (6 minute read)

Mozilla recently improved the responsiveness of Firefox on macOS by making a small change in how locking is implemented within Firefox's memory allocator.

Intel Confirms 6GB Alder Lake BIOS Source Code Leak, New Details Emerge (3 minute read)

A 6GB file containing tools and code for building and optimizing Intel Alder Lake BIOS/UEFI images was recently leaked.

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China bans Starlink 🛰️, a day in the metaverse 🌎, working multiple remote jobs 👨‍💻

Daily Update 2022-10-11

Big Tech & Startups

Science & Futuristic Technology

Programming, Design & Data Science

Miscellaneous

Quick Links

Older messages

Meta's metaverse crisis 🌎, music generation AI 🎵, how open source is eating AI 👨‍💻

Google Pixel event 📱, Meta mass layoffs 📉, TikTok financials leaked 📈

Elon's plans for Twitter 🐦, Google's video AI 🎥, exercising startup options after leaving 💰

Elon will buy Twitter 🐦, Meta rescinds offers 👨‍💻, new social app taking over Stanford 🤓

Apple's ad empire 📱, automating your job 👨‍💻, world's largest camera 📷

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