Tesla's next-gen cheaper car 🚗, Elon plans 75% Twitter layoff 🐦, State of CSS 2022 👨‍💻

Daily Update 2022-10-21

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Big Tech & Startups

Tesla is working on next-gen electric car platform for half the price (3 minute read)

Tesla's engineering team is developing a next-generation electric car platform. The new platform will produce electric cars for half the cost, labor, and factory space that it takes to produce a Model 3. The new electric cars will likely be priced between $25,000 and $35,000. The company is done with the engineering for its Cybertruck and Semi.

Elon Musk reportedly wants to lay off 75% of Twitter’s staff (2 minute read)

Elon Musk plans to fire 75% of Twitter's workforce, around 5,600 employees. The company had previously planned to cut around a quarter of its workforce. It is possible that Musk's plan may not come to fruition. Musk's deal to purchase Twitter is expected to close by October 28.

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Science & Futuristic Technology

RLHF – Reinforcement Learning from Human Preferences (2 minute read)

RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Preferences) involves fine-tuning models using reinforcement learning from human feedback. This makes models more helpful and less harmful and it also improves performance. In tests, an RLHF model was preferred over a GPT-3 model that was 100 times larger. Humanloop has partnered with CarperAI to develop the first RLHF-trained GPT-3-like model for the open-source community.

Scientists Transformed Pure Water Into a Metal, And There's Footage (3 minute read)

Researchers have demonstrated that metallicity can be induced in water by bringing it into contact with an electron-sharing alkali metal. The resulting conductivity only lasts a few seconds, but the discovery is a significant step towards being able to study this phase of water. Metallic water usually only exists in pressures that are difficult to replicate on Earth. A video of the metallic water is available in the article.

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Programming, Design & Data Science

State of CSS 2022 (29 minute read)

2022 is set to be one of CSS's greatest years in both features and cooperative browser feature releases. This post is the article form of the State of CSS talk given at Google IO 2022. It provides a brief overview of the new features and resources for more information. A link to the full talk is available.

How to create a confetti effect in CSS (12 minute read)

This article teaches readers how to create a confetti effect with pure CSS and HTML. It covers how to make different shapes, how to animate the shapes, and how to randomize their characteristics to create a confetti effect. The skills learned in the tutorial can be used to create amazing animations and layouts.

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Miscellaneous

Why Signal won’t compromise on encryption, with president Meredith Whittaker (51 minute read)

This article contains an interview with Meredith Whittaker, the president of Signal. Signal is a popular messaging app that offers encrypted communication. Whittaker was an AI researcher at Google. Governments around the world really dislike encrypted messaging and Signal often finds itself in the difficult position of refusing to help authorities. In the interview, Whittaker discusses what it is like as a smaller company to stand up to governmental pressure.

Google is giving Apple a dose of its own medicine (3 minute read)

Google's latest update to its Messages app will make texting between iPhones and Androids even more annoying. The new features will allow Android users to reply to individual messages, star them, react to them, and set reminders on texts. Reactions will appear as intended on Android devices with RCS, but iPhone users will receive a text saying the other person reacted with a description of the emoji used. Google is pushing carriers and developers towards using RCS and away from SMS.

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Quick Links

TikTok Parent ByteDance Planned To Use TikTok To Monitor The Physical Location Of Specific American Citizens (7 minute read)

The monitoring system was created to investigate potential misconduct by ByteDance employees, but it was used in at least two cases to collect data about the location of a US citizen who never had an employment relationship with the company.

Stripe Takes Steps To Prune Workforce (7 minute read)

Senior leaders at Stripe have asked managers to start giving lower ratings on performance reviews.

Why we're leaving the cloud (4 minute read)

Renting computers is mostly a bad deal for medium-sized companies with stable growth.

We are still early with the cloud (8 minute read)

There are still many improvements that can be made to the cloud.

Introducing the Overflow Offline project (6 minute read)

Overflow Offline allows people to use Stack Overflow when offline.

Intel i9-13900K and i5-13600K review: Beating AMD at its own game (15 minute read)

Intel's 13th-gen chips are a lot easier to recommend than AMD's Zen 4 and Ryzen 7000 chips.

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Tesla's next-gen cheaper car 🚗, Elon plans 75% Twitter layoff 🐦, State of CSS 2022 👨‍💻

Daily Update 2022-10-21

Big Tech & Startups

Science & Futuristic Technology

Programming, Design & Data Science

Miscellaneous

Quick Links

Older messages

Starlink Aviation ✈️, Microsoft's mobile game store 📱, leaving the cloud 👨‍💻

M2 iPad Pro 📱, DuckDuckGo's privacy-focused browser 🌐, the case against GitHub Copilot 👨‍💻

Google Pixel Fold leaks 📱, Amazon's attrition disaster 📉, inside effective altruism 💰

iPad smart display dock 📱, Google's 8 Gbps internet ⚡, building better desk accessories

Apple savings accounts 🏦, Netflix ad-supported launch 🎬, ghostwriting tweets ✍️

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