Apple's always-on monitor 🖥️, TikTok book publishing 📚, why transformative AI is hard 🤖

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TLDR 2023-07-04

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Big Tech & Startups

BookTok can make bestsellers. So ByteDance is becoming a publisher. (2 minute read)

BookTok has helped catapult numerous titles to bestseller lists and has become a regular topic in quarterly earnings calls at book retailers. ByteDance has begun soliciting authors to publish their books with its recently launched publishing house, 8th Note Press. The company's trademark filing for '8th Note Press' describes it as an ecosystem where people can find, buy, read, review, and discuss books. 8th Note Press reportedly plans to focus on digital publishing with limited print-on-demand runs.

A future external Mac monitor will have an always-on display (2 minute read)

Apple reportedly plans to introduce an external Mac monitor that can act as a smart home display when the Mac is in sleep mode or shut down. The feature will be available on at least one monitor in an upcoming lineup. The upcoming display could potentially run on the iPhone 14 Pro's A16 chip. Apple is switching the AirPods charging case to USB-C this fall.

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Science & Futuristic Technology

Why transformative AI is really, really hard to achieve (21 minute read)

While humans have a good track record of innovation, the trend growth rate of GDP per capita has never exceeded three percent per year. There has yet to be a technology that breaks the three percent threshold. Only strong evidence should cause us to expect anything different. AI is likely transformative in the same way that the internet was, but it has many hurdles in the way to the accelerating growth rates predicted by some.

At Last, Single-Photon Cameras Could Peer into Your Brain (3 minute read)

Superconductor-based cameras have remained confined to the laboratory over the past two decades due to the inability to scale them past a few pixels. A team at the National Institute of Standards and technology (NIST) has created a 0.4-megapixel single-photon camera that could transition superconductor-based cameras from a lab curiosity to an industrial technology. The technology could be used for space imaging, measuring light in photonic quantum computers, and looking into the brain with noninvasive light-based techniques. The team at NIST is now working closely with several bioimaging groups to adapt the device to various applications.

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Programming, Design & Data Science

tinyvector (GitHub Repo)

tinyvector is a tiny and fast vector embedding database. It is extremely easy to customize and has comparable speed to advanced vector databases on small to medium datasets. tinyvector can scale up to over 100 million vector dimensions without issue.

A Deep Dive Into SVG Path Commands (2 minute read)

SVG icons are usually made up of a bunch of path elements, each with a cryptic d attribute. Understanding the d attribute's inner workings allows developers to make better SVGs, even animations. This guide is an interactive deep dive into the d attribute. It covers different types of path commands and how to use them to draw various icons.

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Miscellaneous

AI and the automation of work (13 minute read)

While pretty much everyone in tech agrees that generative AI is a generational change in what we can do with software, there isn't much agreement on anything else about the technology. Every time humans invent a new wave of automation, whole classes of jobs go away, but new ones are created. Over time, the number of total jobs doesn't go down and everyone becomes more prosperous. Right now, we can see which jobs will be going away but we can't predict what the new jobs will be. This article looks at different paradigm-breaking technologies in the past and tries to imagine how AI will change work in the future.

Fed up with Reddit, mods of popular AMAs quit organizing high-profile interviews (8 minute read)

Reddit's r/IAmA moderators have announced that they will no longer perform many of the tasks that made the subreddit special, including active solicitation of celebrities or high-profile individuals to do interviews. r/IAmA helped popularize the social media platform. The subreddit allows users to interview anyone. There have been appearances by several notable public figures in the past. Its mods say that they are fed up with Reddit due to its history of disregarding users and moderators.

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Quick Links

Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber? (Hacker News Thread)

A discussion on how the AI industry is perceived by outsiders.

How the Shoggoth Meme Has Come to Symbolize the State of A.I (7 minute read)

The Shoggoth was first introduced in H.P. Lovecraft's novella 'At the Mountains of Madness' - it landed in the AI world in December, a month after ChatGPT's release.

Apple forced to make major cuts to Vision Pro headset production plans (4 minute read)

Sources close to Apple and its manufacturer for the Vision Pro headset say that the company is preparing to make fewer than 400,000 units in 2024.

Summer 2024 Software Engineering Internships by Carbos (GitHub Repo)

A constantly updated board that watches a list of over 1,000 high-growth companies for software engineering internships.

Joins 13 Ways (12 minute read)

This article looks at relational joins - different definitions, ways of thinking about them, and interesting ways to implement them.

Google Says It'll Scrape Everything You Post Online for AI (3 minute read)

Google's recently updated privacy policy says that the company reserves the right to scrape everything anyone posts online to build its AI tools.

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Apple's always-on monitor 🖥️, TikTok book publishing 📚, why transformative AI is hard 🤖

TLDR 2023-07-04

Big Tech & Startups

Science & Futuristic Technology

Programming, Design & Data Science

Miscellaneous

Quick Links

Older messages

Twitter's login wall 🐦, Humane launches AI Pin 🤖, quantifying dev performance 👨‍💻

YouTube tests disabling adblock 🎥, Reddit gives mods deadline 📱, GitLab's AI coding copilot 👨‍💻

Tesla app store 🚗, obesity drugs beyond Ozempic 💊, dawn of spatial computing 😎

OpenAI's work assistant 🤖, Reddit blackouts hurt Google 🔍, intro to building AI agents 👨‍💻

DeepMind's ChatGPT rival 🤖, 2023 salary expectations 💰, senior engineer FAANG interviews 👨‍💻

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