Google tests new homepage 🔍, Apple's cheaper Vision Pro 🌎, Postgres as a platform 👨‍💻

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TLDR 2023-10-16

TLDR is hiring a part time curator for our TLDR DevOps newsletter (Fully Remote, $100/hr)

Description: TLDR is hiring a part time curator to join our TLDR DevOps newsletter curation team. The newsletter already has over 200,000 subscribers pre-launch, it's a great way to build a personal brand within the devops community.

The ideal candidate would work in devops full time and enjoy keeping up with devops news and trends through channels like Twitter, Reddit, blogs, podcasts, and online communities.

Time commitment is ~2-4 hours/week paid at a rate of $100/hr. To apply please send your LinkedIn or resume to jobs@tldr.tech along with a couple sentences on why you'd be a good fit!

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Big Tech & Startups

Google.com tests a news-filled homepage, just like Bing and Yahoo (2 minute read)

Google's latest experiment has its homepage filled with rows of news articles. The experiment is currently being run in India and might not ever see a wide launch. Even if it does launch, it could be an optional setting or alternative mode, with the traditional white page still available as an option. Google used to have a feature that allowed users to customize their home pages with various news, weather, and stock widgets.

Apple’s cheaper Vision Pro follow-up still won’t be cheap (2 minute read)

Apple is apparently aiming for a price point between $1,500 and $2,500 for its more affordable follow-up to the Apple Vision Pro. The cheaper version will likely ditch the external display and run on an iPhone-grade chip, have fewer cameras, and get lower-resolution screens inside. Apple has reportedly shifted people away from its technically-challenging AR glasses project to prioritize the development of the friendlier-priced version of the headset.

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Science & Futuristic Technology

NASA just launched the Psyche mission—no one knows what it will find (14 minute read)

Psyche is an asteroid 2.2 billion miles away that is likely the exposed core of a failed planet. If all goes well, the Psyche spacecraft will settle in an orbit around the asteroid in 2029. Scientists are quite confident that the asteroid is largely made of metal. The Psyche mission's findings will have important implications for asteroid mining.

Turbulence free flights are coming soon! (38 second video)

This video from Turbulence Solutions shows a demo of its turbulence-free flight technology. It shows the difference between turbulence levels with the technology turned on and off. The video ends with footage of a piloted plane using the technology and graphs showing the difference in turbulence levels.

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Programming, Design & Data Science

😘 Kiss bugs goodbye with fully automated end-to-end test coverage (Sponsor)

QA Wolf offers a cost-effective approach to getting 80% test coverage in just 4 months. They will build and maintain your test suite in Playwright (no more dealing with false positives or flaky tests) + provide unlimited parallel test runs on their infrastructure at no additional cost. The benefit? No more manual e2e testing, no more slow QA cycles, and no more bugs.

They have multiple case studies of customers saving $200k+/year in QA engineering and infrastructure costs. Schedule a demo to learn more.

Omnigres (GitHub Repo)

Omnigres allows developers to deploy a single database instance that can host an entire application while scaling as needed. It can run application logic inside or next to the database instance. Omnigres contains application building blocks for authentication, authorization, payments, and more.

Postgres.js (GitHub Repo)

Postgres.js is a full-featured PostgreSQL client for Node.js, Deno, Bun, and CloudFlare. It has ES6 Tagged Template Strings at the core, a simple surface API, and dynamic query support. Postgres.js supports custom types and TypeScript.

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Miscellaneous

Why We Don’t Ship Software as Fast as We Used To (9 minute read)

Software development used to be much faster. However, software is not as simple as it used to be. A lot of the complexity in today's software is invisible. This complexity is required just to meet today's baseline expectations. Slower development isn't necessarily worse - it's just what happens when projects get bigger and more people are involved.

Startup Aims to Build Hundreds of Chip Factories with Prefab Parts and AI (3 minute read)

Nanotronics is a New York-based industrial AI company that wants to build an AI-enabled chip factory that can be assembled and expanded modularly with prefab pieces. Its Cubefabs system uses AI to take away the need for the specialization normally needed in a lab and allow people who are not semiconductor experts to work at the facilities. Each facility will need only about 30 people to operate. The bulk of each facility can be flat-packed and put in a shipping container.

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Quick Links

Behind the scenes (GitHub Repo)

This repository looks at the system messages used for ChatGPT and how they might influence custom instructions.

Sippy helps you avoid egress fees while incrementally migrating data from S3 to R2 (3 minute read)

Sippy is an incremental migration service for AWS that copies data from S3 to R2 as it is requested without paying unnecessary cloud egress fees typically associated with moving large amounts of data.

A Wild Idea to Protect the Great Barrier Reef (11 minute read)

Cloud brightening, a controversial tool, could one day be used to help mitigate the effects of underwater heatwaves.

The Half-Life of the AI Stack (2 minute read)

The infrastructure layer in AI is rapidly changing due to accelerated hardware development, fierce optimization competition, fast-paced research, long feedback cycles, ambiguity in other layers, and the commoditization of infrastructure components.

Microsoft completes $69bn takeover of Call of Duty maker Activision Blizzard (6 minute read)

The deal for Microsoft's takeover of Activision Blizzard, which took almost two years to close, involves Microsoft transferring the cloud gaming rights for Activision's content to Ubisoft for 15 years outside the European Economic Area.

Google’s AI-powered search experience can now generate images (3 minute read)

Google has implemented checks to make sure its image generation tool doesn't generate images that violate the company's prohibited use policy and every generated image will have metadata labeling and embedded watermarking to indicate it was created by AI.

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Google tests new homepage 🔍, Apple's cheaper Vision Pro 🌎, Postgres as a platform 👨‍💻

TLDR 2023-10-16

Big Tech & Startups

Science & Futuristic Technology

Programming, Design & Data Science

Miscellaneous

Quick Links

Older messages

YouTube's adblock crackdown 🛡️, Blue Origin's space platform 🛰️, Andreesen's optimistic manifesto 📜

Microsoft's futuristic data storage 📊, how FTX blew $8B 💰, Pytorch on the edge 👨‍💻

GitHub Copilot's terrible economics 💰, Apple VR neck strain 🌎, ergonomic dev setups 👨‍💻

Meta's plan to beat Apple 🌎, building pop-up mini-cities 👬, engineering workflow hacks 👨‍💻

OpenAI explores AI chips 🤖, Apple discussed ditching Google 🔍, how computers tell time ⏰

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