Excel adds Python support 👨‍💻, Netflix's DVD giveaway 📀, how game dev works 🎮

TLDR

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TLDR 2023-08-23

Tech Talk: Building a Central Ledger (Sponsor)

This technical deep dive is a great resource if you’re building digital wallets or closed loop payment products, or looking to increase visibility with a central source of truth.

Many companies recognize the role of a central ledger to unlock new products and drive efficiency. In this conversation, we’ll get down to the nitty-gritty. You’ll hear from product managers and engineers at Modern Treasury on:

Using a ledger to build closed loop payment systems, and its role in reconciliation

Why a central system of record is better than many

Spinning out digital wallet products

If you’re involved in building payment systems as a product, engineering or finance manager, you don’t want to miss this. Watch the recording right here

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Big Tech & Startups

Meta’s Threads begins rolling out on the web, as Zuckerberg takes more direct aim at Elon Musk’s X (2 minute read)

Meta's Threads has started rolling out on the web. The web version will be improved to look more like the mobile app over the coming weeks. Meta is currently working on a search feature to improve functionality on Threads and make it more of a competitor to X. The company has no plans to monetize the service until it is more established.

Netflix plans to give away DVDs as service shuts down (3 minute read)

Netflix is shutting down its DVD rental service on September 29. Customers can keep any remaining DVDs they have after the service shuts down. Subscribers can potentially receive up to 10 discs for free as Netflix clears out its inventory. Netflix will allow people to sign up to its DVD plan until midnight on August 28 for a chance to win the DVDs.

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Science & Futuristic Technology

Breakthrough creates stem cells without any “memories” (4 minute read)

Embryonic stem cells are difficult to obtain and they can be rejected following transplants if they don't match the recipient's DNA. Australian researchers have developed a technique to reprogram adult cells to be more like embryonic stem cells. These cells can then be reprogrammed to become any kind of cell. The technique potentially unlocks an endless supply of stem cells for research or treatment.

Meta’s “massively multilingual” AI model translates up to 100 languages, speech or text (5 minute read)

SeamlessM4T is a multimodal AI model for speech and text translations. It can perform text-to-speech, speech-to-text, speech-to-speech, and text-to-text translations for up to 100 languages. Meta developed the model to help people who speak different languages communicate with each other more effectively. SeamlessM4T has been released under a research license. Its code and weights are available on Hugging Face.

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Programming, Design & Data Science

Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel (3 minute read)

Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel. A public preview of the feature is now available. Excel users can now manipulate and explore data in Excel using Python plots and libraries in combination with Excel's formulas, charts, and PivotTables. No additional software is required to access the functionality. Microsoft plans to add a feature that will expose Python data within the grid of an Excel spreadsheet.

FlakeHub (Website)

Flakes are libraries for deployment, packaging, secrets management, system compatibility, and more. FlakeHub is a collection of ready-to-use flakes designed to help developers get to production faster. It brings modern development practices to Nix. FlakeHub allows developers to improve their APIs without disturbing user stability.

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Miscellaneous

How Games Typically Get Built (16 minute read)

This article introduces readers to the world of game development and compares it to the software engineering approaches at tech companies. The game development world is very different from the software development world. Video games are very complex pieces of software and are built in different conditions under different constraints than business applications. The article covers typical roles within game development, how games typically get built, and the game development lifecycle.

The Secret Weapon Hackers Can Use to Dox Nearly Anyone in America for $15 (18 minute read)

Hackers have obtained personal information from credit bureaus and are advertising access to the data in group chats used by violent criminals. The information includes names, dates of birth, phone numbers, email addresses, data contained within driver's licenses, and social security numbers. It only costs around $15-$20 in Bitcoin to access the information. The data includes information on high-profile targets, such as Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, and President Joe Biden.

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Quick Links

Some rough impressions of Worldcoin (21 minute read)

This post looks at Worldcoin's system from a privacy-skeptical point of view to understand how risky the project actually is.

The first conformant M1 GPU driver (9 minute read)

Conformant OpenGL ES 3.1 drivers are now available for M1- and M2-family GPUs in Linux.

Whisper API (GitHub Repo)

This repository contains a self-hostable API for speech-to-text transcription using a fine-tuned Whisper Automatic Speech Recognition model.

Netflix is launching a new series of story games, starting with Love is Blind (2 minute read)

Netflix's new series of story games puts players in the center of their favorite shows and movies, allowing them to interact with characters and immerse themselves into different worlds.

Slack’s Migration to a Cellular Architecture (9 minute read)

Cellular architectures are popular for large online services as they increase redundancy and limit damage from site failures.

Amazon is seeing some employees quit instead of moving to a new state as part of relocation mandate (6 minute read)

Some Amazon employees are being told to relocate to hubs in different states to keep their jobs.

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Excel adds Python support 👨‍💻, Netflix's DVD giveaway 📀, how game dev works 🎮

TLDR 2023-08-23

Big Tech & Startups

Science & Futuristic Technology

Programming, Design & Data Science

Miscellaneous

Quick Links

Older messages

ARM's $60B IPO filing 🏦, SpaceX Bandwagon 🚀, the creator economy's future 📱

Google's account purge 🗑️, Meta's open coding AI 🤖, taste testing synthetic salmon 🍣

Inside SpaceX's finances 🚀, Twitter Community Notes deep dive 💡, email design gotchas 👨‍💻

Ex-Google CEO's AI moonshot 🤖, India makes first iPhone 📱, WordPress's Interactivity API 👨‍💻

Google Chrome AI summaries 🤖, rival iOS app store 📱, Microsoft Office redesign 🎨

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