Apple kills Android iMessage 📱, OpenAI Q* 🤖, version control beyond git 👨‍💻

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TLDR 2023-12-11

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Big Tech & Startups

Apple cuts off Beeper Mini’s access after launch of service that brought iMessage to Android (3 minute read)

Beeper Mini, an app that brought iMessage to Android, recently experienced an outage. It appeared that Apple found a way to make the app stop functioning. The service is now back online. Apple claims that the app poses significant risks to user security and privacy. Beeper claims that its service increases iPhone security as without it, texts would be sent to Android devices unencrypted.

The real research behind the wild rumors about OpenAI’s Q* project (15 minute read)

OpenAI's Q* model can reportedly perform math on the level of grade-school students. While Q* might not be the crucial breakthrough that will lead to artificial general intelligence, it might be an important step towards an AI with general reasoning abilities. This article takes a look at the area of AI math research and explains why step-by-step reasoning techniques designed for math problems could have much broader applications. Building a general reasoning engine will require a way for language models to learn new abstractions that go beyond their training data and have these evolving abstractions influence the model's choices as it explores the space of possible solutions.

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Science & Futuristic Technology

Why scientists are making transparent wood (7 minute read)

Transparent wood could soon find uses as super-strong screens for smartphones, glowing light fixtures, and structural features like color-changing windows. The material outperforms plastic and glass in tests measuring how easily materials fracture or break under pressure. It is a far better insulator than glass, so windows made out of the material could help buildings retain heat or keep it out. For now, transparent wood still has a higher environmental impact than glass, but scaling up manufacturing and embracing greener production schemes could help make it more sustainable.

FDA approves first CRISPR therapy (3 minute read)

The FDA has approved two gene therapies for treating sickle cell disease. These treatments have been shown to be highly effective at preventing vaso-occlusive events and crises. One of the treatments, the first CRISPR/Cas9 therapy approved in the US, turns on the production of fetal hemoglobin to replace deformed red blood cells. The other therapy uses a Lentiviral vector to insert the genetic code for a modified type of hemoglobin designed to be anti-sickling.

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Programming, Design & Data Science

Media Queries in HTML Video (18 minute read)

This article demonstrates how to serve videos using some of the features used for serving content based on user preferences and accessibility features. It presents alternate versions of a video for assorted media queries. Each example embeds the video with its alternate version, shows the HTML code used, and provides the alternate version alone. The examples are designed so developers can compare and confirm whether changes made to their browsers, systems, or within dev tools were successful.

FrankenPHP v1.0 is Here (2 minute read)

FrankenPHP is a modern PHP application server that can create a production-grade PHP server with just one command. It has native support for Symphony, Laravel, WordPress, and more. Most popular PHP extensions should work with FrankenPHP.

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Miscellaneous

The quiet plan to make the internet feel faster (22 minute read)

A new internet standard called L4S could significantly lower the amount of time we spend waiting for things to load. Many Big Tech companies are on board with the plan, which could help developers create applications that currently aren't possible. The standard allows packets to inform devices whether they experienced congestion on their journey, allowing devices to start making adjustments immediately to keep congestion from getting worse and potentially eliminate it altogether. It keeps data flowing as fast as possible and gets rid of the disruptions and mitigations that can add latency with other systems.

Is the Texas boom town of Austin losing its luster? (5 minute read)

Investors and startup founders flocked to Austin during the COVID-19 pandemic due to its lower cost of living, hip lifestyle, and business-friendly environment. Some are now leaving or looking to leave the city. The weather and economy were not as favorable as they'd expected. This article looks at a few of the companies that are leaving and the reasons why.

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Quick Links

Oneschema: a CSV importer you can implement in one day (Sponsor)

Writing a CSV importer from scratch = undifferentiated heavy lifting. Oneschema is performant, customizable, and auto-fixes errors. Stop manually fixing customer data

Ask HN: Can we do better than Git for version control? (Hacker News Thread)

Git already does everything, and abstracting away the complexity of the UI will only abstract away its power - any effort put into seeking or building an alternative should just be spent on becoming a Git expert.

Scientists Have Reported a Breakthrough In Understanding Whale Language (2 minute read)

Researchers have identified elements of whale vocalizations that may be analogous to human speech.

Nova Mode: The Ultimate ChatGPT Custom Instruction (4 minute read)

Nova Mode is a ChatGPT prompt that is extremely useful for generating, revising, and iterating on ideas and content.

OpenAI Cofounder Who Pushed Out Sam Altman Is In a Confusing Limbo (2 minute read)

It is unclear whether Ilya Sutskever will play a role in OpenAI moving forward.

Meta Teases Render Of Advanced 'Mirror Lake' Headset It Says Is "Practical To Build Now" (5 minute read)

Mirror Lake is not a specific future product, but its technology could be seen in products in the second half of the decade.

SpaceX shares cinematic footage of last month’s Starship mission (2 minute read)

The video (available in the article) shows the first-stage Super Heavy booster and the Starship spacecraft blasting skyward, close-ups of the stage separation, the explosive endings for both the booster and spacecraft, and behind-the-scenes footage of mission operators and Elon Musk watching the mission unfold.

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Apple kills Android iMessage 📱, OpenAI Q* 🤖, version control beyond git 👨‍💻

TLDR 2023-12-11

Big Tech & Startups

Science & Futuristic Technology

Programming, Design & Data Science

Miscellaneous

Quick Links

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