Apple AI audiobooks 📚, Amazon & Salesforce layoffs 📉, tech workers rethink risk 👨‍💻

TLDR

Daily Update 2023-01-05

Are your proposals costing you in lost deals? 7 ways to improve them (Sponsor)

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Big Tech & Startups

Death of the narrator? Apple unveils suite of AI-voiced audiobooks (4 minute read)

Apple has quietly launched a catalog of books narrated by artificial intelligence. The books can be found by searching for 'AI narration' in the Books app. If Apple's strategy is successful, it could have significant implications for the market. Producing audiobooks can take weeks and cost publishers thousands of dollars. Amazon and Google have also been exploring AI narration technology.

Nvidia’s latest AI tech can upscale old blurry YouTube videos (2 minute read)

Nvidia's RTX Video Super Resolution technology can upscale any video watched through Chrome or Edge to the equivalent of 4K. Only the most recent 30 and 40 series GPUs will support the feature. The feature will work for any video with a resolution of between 360p to 1440p, up to a frame rate of 144Hz. A video showing what RTX Video Super Resolution upscaling looks like is available in the article.

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Science & Futuristic Technology

Google and DeepMind just launched MedPaLM, an open-sourced large language model (4 minute read)

MedPaLM is an open sourced large language model from Google Research and DeepMind for the medical domain. It is designed to generate safe and helpful answers in the medical field. 92.6% of MedPaLM responses are on par with clinician-generated answers. Its responses are safer compared to clinician-generated answers. Google has also used AI to develop applications for detecting different forms of cancer.

The ‘breakthrough’ obesity drugs that have stunned researchers (11 minute read)

A new generation of anti-obesity drugs can diminish weight without the serious side effects that other weight loss medications have. The drugs mimic hormones known as incretins, which lower blood sugar and curb appetite. They can be expensive, with injections often costing more than $1,000 per month. A drug called tirzepatide can lead to an average 21% drop in body weight. Addressing obesity could allow healthcare systems to save enormous amounts of money by reducing the occurrence of conditions linked to the disease.

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Programming, Design & Data Science

How we improved our documentation (7 minute read)

This article discusses how the team at Medusa improved their documentation. Medusa is an open-source composable commerce platform. The team decided to improve their documentation as while it was good enough to get developers started, it wasn't good enough to guide them through the entire process of creating an ecommerce store. They completely redesigned the documentation by viewing it as a product, refactoring the API reference, collecting user feedback, integrating Vale and ESLint, and running user trials.

Pushup (GitHub Repo)

Pushup is a framework for making page-oriented server-side web apps in Go. It compiles projects developed with the Pushup markup language into standalone web servers. Pushup is still in a pre-release stage, so while it is largely functional, there are still likely significant bugs and performance issues and developers should expect breaking changes.

TLDR Job Board (Sponsor)

TLDR's job board is now live for applicants! We offer filtering jobs by over a dozen fields including compensation, remote friendliness, full time vs contractor, and more. Feel free to reply to this email with any questions/feedback!

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Miscellaneous

Burned by layoffs, tech workers are rethinking risk (7 minute read)

Thousands of tech workers have been forced back onto the job market over the past few months. This article contains excerpts from interviews with several laid-off employees. It looks at how the employees will be approaching their careers differently in 2023. A common thread between all the interviewed was a reframing of how safe it is to work in tech.

CES 2023 Live Blog: Samsung, Sony, LG, TCL, AMD, and Nvidia's Biggest Reveals (Website)

This page contains real-time updates on the latest news from CES 2023. It includes announcements from presentations as they occur and pictures and videos of new technologies presented at the show. Some of the technologies announced include a Samsung phone that folds and slides, a wireless TV, a toilet sensor designed to measure health by analyzing urine, a fridge with see-through LED doors, and an AI-powered robot vacuum.

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Quick Links

Hire through TLDR's free job board (Sponsor)

If you're looking to hire top technical talent, sign up for our free job board. I will be curating the most interesting job listings to showcase in the Jobs section below.

Amazon’s massive layoffs will reportedly affect 17,000 employees (2 minute read)

Amazon has hinted at more role reductions in 2023, but the company is very vague about how many positions will be affected.

Salesforce to cut staff by 10% in latest tech layoffs (1 minute read)

Salesforce will lay off around 10% of its employees and close some offices.

Snow effect (Website)

This code snippet adds a CSS snow effect to any website.

Freelancer Salary (1 minute read)

This page features a calculator for comparing freelancer rates to what an employee would make in the same position salaried with benefits.

Several leaders share their hopes for AI in 2023 (3 minute read)

This Twitter thread shares several AI projects and what they hope to achieve in 2023.

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Jobs

TLDR - Senior Software Engineer (Remote, $120k-$200k)

TLDR is hiring our first engineer to help us build out our hiring platform along with other internal projects. Looking for someone with experience shipping side projects or on small teams, with experience in Next.js and Postgres/Supabase.

Justworks - Director of Engineering, Platform Services (New York, US, $250k-$300k)

Justworks is hiring a director of engineering to grow and mentor engineering teams and collaborate closely with business, product, design, and other partners to improve the efficiency of how we deliver product.

Upbound - Distributed Systems Engineer (Kubernetes) (Remote, $80k-$184k)

Upbound is hiring a Distributed Systems Engineer to work primarily on designing, developing, and supporting features in the Crossplane open source project.

If your company would like to hire on TLDR's job board, please sign up here. It's completely free!

If your company would like to sponsor TLDR, please take a look at our sponsor page here.

If you have any comments or feedback, just respond to this email!

Thanks for reading,
Dan

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Apple AI audiobooks 📚, Amazon & Salesforce layoffs 📉, tech workers rethink risk 👨‍💻

Daily Update 2023-01-05

Big Tech & Startups

Science & Futuristic Technology

Programming, Design & Data Science

Miscellaneous

Quick Links

Jobs

Older messages

Apple AirPods Lite 🎧, Bing working with OpenAI 🤖, CES 2023 preview ⌚

Google vs OpenAI 🤖, Tesla's next-gen platform 🚗, hiring virtual people 🧍

Open source ChatGPT alternatives 👨‍💻, China's parallel AI universe 🤖, new weight loss drug 💊

Tesla dominates Europe 🚗, startup workers sell shares 💰, DevOps trends for 2023 👨‍💻

Google cost cutting 💰 , lessons from being laid off 👨‍💻, moats in the AI economy 🏰

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