Starship in-orbit refueling , humanoid robot factory , how iMessage's code works

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Big Tech & Startups

Elon Musk’s AI startup — X.AI — files to raise $1 billion in fresh capital (3 minute read)

X.AI has filed with the SEC to raise up to $1 billion in an equity offering. It has already raised nearly $135 million from four investors and has a binding and enforceable agreement for the purchase of the remaining shares. The startup released an AI chatbot with real-time knowledge of the internet called Grok last month. It aims to directly compete with companies like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.

NASA says SpaceX’s next Starship flight could test refueling tech (9 minute read)

SpaceX and NASA may be demonstrating orbital refueling technology on the next Starship test flight. NASA has yet to make a decision on when to start testing the capability. Cryogenic propellants must be kept at super-low temperatures or they turn into a gas and boil off. Rockets using these types of propellants typically need to complete their missions within hours - NASA wants to extend this lifetime to months and enable the transfer of the propellants from one vehicle to another.

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Science & Futuristic Technology

The first humanoid robot factory is about to open (5 minute read)

Agility Robotics is building a manufacturing facility in Salem, Oregon, that will eventually pump out 10,000 bi-pedal robots a year. The RoboFab will open early next year. Agility Robotics' Digit is the first commercially available human-shaped robot designed for warehouse work. Deliveries of the robots will start in 2024.

‘Animate Anyone’ heralds the approach of full-motion deepfakes (4 minute read)

Animate Anyone uses a generative video technique to create videos from pictures of people. While its results are far from perfect, the model is a huge leap over the previous state of the art, which produced way more artifacts or completely lost important details. The team behind the model hasn't released the code for it yet. Videos showing deepfakes made with Animate Anyone are available in the article.

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Programming, Design & Data Science

🎙️Join the tech exploration on Innovation Ambassadors: An AWS Podcast Featuring Behind-the-Scenes Technical Deep Dives (Sponsor)

Explore exciting AWS customer innovations across industries in short episodes, from Generative AI to 3D Spaces via AWS Digital Twin, Secure and Scalable Framework for Genomic Data, Infrared Video Streaming, and many more 💡

Dive into the craft of the possible 🚀

Introducing StyleX (7 minute read)

StyleX is an expressive, deterministic, reliable, and scalable styling system. It was carefully designed to meet the requirements of large application, reusable component libraries and statically typed codebases. StyleX is fully typed and supports an expressive subset of CSS. It takes the developer experience of CSS-in-JS libraries and uses compile-time tooling to bridge it with the performance and scalability of static CSS.

iMessage, explained (6 minute read)

This blog post presents a cursory overview of the internals of iMessage. It glosses over specific technical details, but links to resources to see how things are specifically implemented are provided. The post covers how Apple's Push Notification Service works, how the Identity Services keyserver makes registration requests, and message encryption.

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Miscellaneous

The Inside Story of Microsoft’s Partnership with OpenAI (58 minute read)

This article covers what happened behind the scenes during OpenAI's recent five-day crisis. It also looks at Microsoft's relationship with OpenAI and the company's history with AI. Microsoft's CTO Kevin Scott, the person most responsible for forging the OpenAI partnership, believes that AI is one of the most powerful things humans have ever invented. It will take a lot of time to develop the technology, but it could improve the quality of life for everyone.

Regretful Accelerationism (21 minute read)

The Internet can not be portrayed as a district development from a world increasingly in turmoil. Removing the constraint of physical distribution may have accelerated the development of many technologies, but it also created many problems. An increasingly AI-generated world where all content is customized for every individual may help more people realize the only way to survive online is to pay it increasingly little heed.

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Quick Links

How AWS Can Undercut Nvidia With Homegrown AI Compute Engines (14 minute read)

Amazon's investment in Nvidia hardware is huge - there is clearly room to bend the price/performance curve.

Klarna freezes hiring because AI can do the job instead (3 minute read)

Klarna isn't planning any layoffs, but it will refrain from active recruitment as it expects AI will be able to handle many tasks that were previously performed by humans.

12 lessons from 5 years of running a tech meetup (16 minute read)

This post contains a list of things to know to help put together tech meetup events.

Loco (GitHub Repo)

Loco is a Rust API and web framework for full stack product builders that is strongly inspired by Rails.

Firefox on the brink? (5 minute read)

Unless something dramatically reverses Firefox's trends, the USWDS will soon tell government web devs that they don't have to support Firefox anymore.

MLX (GitHub Repo)

MLX is an array framework for machine learning on Apple silicon with familiar APIs, composable function transformations, lazy computation, dynamic graph construction, and more.

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Starship in-orbit refueling , humanoid robot factory , how iMessage's code works

TLDR 2023-12-06

Big Tech & Startups

Science & Futuristic Technology

Programming, Design & Data Science

Miscellaneous

Quick Links

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