Meta's AI glasses 👓, OpenAI's prompt guide 🤖, beyond the Turing test 🧠

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TLDR 2023-12-18

Swarmia’s list of non-toxic engineering metrics (Sponsor)

Between GitHub, Jira/Linear, and Slack, engineering teams create a lot of data. But measuring the wrong things can destroy motivation and productivity.

Swarmia has identified key metrics that are more signal than noise (including DORA and SPACE) — and makes them available to engineering leaders, managers, and teams. No leaderboards, no individual performance data.

Learn more about what you can (and can’t) measure with Swarmia 📏

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Big Tech & Startups

Meta's Ray-Ban Glasses Added AI That Can See What You're Seeing (5 minute read)

Meta's second-generation Ray-Ban glasses can interpret scenes and make judgments using generative AI. A new update is rolling out a feature that uses the on-glasses cameras to look at images and interpret them. The update also brings Bing-powered search to the glasses. This article contains some examples of how the feature can be used.

Why Vision Pro Will Change Photography (10 minute read)

Apple's Vision Pro will redefine our relationship with visual media and content, creating many new possibilities for photographers and filmmakers. Spatial video is a mixed-reality video format that allows videos to record the depth and spatial information of a scene, creating a more immersive three-dimensional experience. It is able to create super immersive photos and videos that look amazing on the Vision Pro. It will not be long before creators start thinking of using the technology to tell a story.

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Science & Futuristic Technology

US nuclear-fusion lab enters new era: achieving ‘ignition’ over and over (4 minute read)

Scientists at the US National Ignition Facility announced that they had achieved ignition in December 2022 after more than a decade of effort. The team can now replicate the feat again and again. It has achieved ignition in four out of its last six attempts. The latest series of experiments features a 7% boost in laser energy, which in theory should lead to larger yields. The team now plans to focus on changes to produce a more symmetrical implosion.

World’s first “self-amplifying” vaccine approved in Japan (7 minute read)

Japan recently approved a COVID-19 vaccine that triggers the body to produce an enzyme that makes copies of its antigen mRNA. It is the first fully approved self-amplifying RNA vaccine. The technology allows smaller doses of the vaccine to achieve the same level of efficacy as current vaccines with cheaper shots, shorter manufacturing times, and fewer side effects. Self-amplifying RNA vaccines could prove to be a powerful weapon in the fight against cancer.

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Programming, Design & Data Science

Prompt engineering (35 minute read)

This guide shares strategies and tactics for getting better results from large language models. The methods can sometimes be combined for greater effect. Some examples only work with the most capable models. Strategies for getting better results include writing clearer instructions, providing reference texts, splitting complex tasks into simpler subtasks, and using external tools.

Why Should You (Or Anyone) Become An Engineering Manager? (17 minute read)

Engineering management has changed a lot over the past decade. Management seems a lot less attractive these days. However, engineering managers are incredibly important and still needed. Managers are responsible for the systems and structural support that enable engineers to deliver products and outcomes. This article lists reasons for engineers to become managers. One of the main reasons is that becoming a manager can make you better at life and relationships - the role changes who you are as a person and the relationships you have with others.

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Miscellaneous

RAG to Riches (17 minute read)

This article contains several stories about new developments in AI. These stories cover the competition in the AI space, the state of employment in the industry, AI strategies, Sourcegraph's Cody AI coding assistant being generally available, and more. Engineers who have committed to commenting on their code throughout the years have provided incredibly valuable context to help large language models reason about their code. The article takes a moment to thank those coders for their service in helping out AI.

If AI is making the Turing test obsolete, what might be better? (5 minute read)

A team of researchers has proposed a novel framework that treats AI programs as if they were a participant in a psychological study. It has three steps: test the program in a set of experiments examining its inferences, test its understanding of its own way of reasoning, and examine, if possible, the cognitive adequacy of the source code for the program. While current generations of AI programs have come close to passing the Turing Test, the results don't imply that these programs can think and reason like humans. The new framework could be an alternative to the Turing Test for evaluating the intelligence of programs.

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Quick Links

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Breaking into VC: The Rough Guide (23 minute read)

This post provides advice for those looking at early-stage VC - it will be continually updated with additional inputs to be useful for candidates in the future as well.

The unfortunate math behind consulting companies (10 minute read)

Consulting is a smart way to self-finance a startup, but founders need to be serious, disciplined, and relentless - this article presents traps to avoid for consulting companies.

Embracing change and resetting expectations (4 minute read)

The usual technology paradigms will not serve as an adequate guide for navigating the new world of AI.

Significantly Enhancing Adult Intelligence With Gene Editing May Be Possible (72 minute read)

There are no known fundamental barriers preventing humans from significantly enhancing adult intelligence with gene editing - many pieces of a viable editing protocol have already been demonstrated independently.

S3 Express One Zone, not quite what I hoped for (6 minute read)

AWS' new lower-latency S3 storage class costs 8 times more than S3 standard - while it is expensive, it might be attractive to new startups as it is a significant time saver.

Spectrum of speculation (1 minute read)

A framework for understanding other people's hopes and fears about AI.

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Meta's AI glasses 👓, OpenAI's prompt guide 🤖, beyond the Turing test 🧠

TLDR 2023-12-18

Big Tech & Startups

Science & Futuristic Technology

Programming, Design & Data Science

Miscellaneous

Quick Links

Older messages

Apple's top apps of 2023 📱, ChatGPT's laziness 🤖, Blue Origin relaunch 🚀

Tesla's next-gen robot 🤖, Netflix's most watched shows 📺, running an open source company 👨‍💻

Google Pixie AI 🤖, DeepMind cracks unsolved math 🔢, SvelteKit 2.0 👨‍💻

Apple's 3D video feature 📱, Google's 2023 top searches 🔎, Mistral launches LLM API 🤖

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

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