Google's new app store rules 📱, Blue Origin launches 🚀, understanding technical debt 👨‍💻

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Big Tech & Startups

Blue Origin successfully launched and recovered its New Shepard booster (2 minute read)

Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket successfully took off from West Texas on Tuesday morning. Its booster and crew capsule safely separated mid-flight, with both landing back on Earth. The mission carried 33 payloads to space, more than half from NASA. It was originally scheduled for December 18 but was delayed due to cold temperatures and ground issues. A replay of the livestream is available in the article.

All the changes coming to Google Play and sideloading following $700M settlement (3 minute read)

Google will pay $700 million as part of a settlement with the US attorney general for a lawsuit over the Google Play Store. It has also agreed to implement third-party app stores, side-loading, and alternative billing on Android. Google will not be able to enter deals with phone makers to have Google Play as an exclusive app store on devices for at least five years. More details about the settlement agreement are available in the article.

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Science & Futuristic Technology

NASA video highlights first commercial delivery service to the moon (2 minute read)

NASA recently shared a video detailing its plan to launch a commercial delivery service to the moon. It is currently working with 14 companies to deliver science and technology to the lunar surface. NASA has a long-term plan to build a permanent moon base. A commercial delivery service to the moon would radically increase the amount of science that can be achieved. It could pave the way for a similar service to other destinations like Mars.

Watch 'world's most powerful' humanoid robot withstand brutal kicks (4 minute read)

Unitree's H1 features a powertrain that provides it with the highest level of speed, power, maneuverability, and flexibility of any humanoid robot in the world. The robot can run across demanding terrains and intricate environments while dealing with disruptions. Unitree plans to initiate deliveries of the robot in the first quarter of 2024 with a price of approximately $150,000 per unit. A video of the robot dealing with disruptions, such as being kicked or pushed/pulled, is available in the article.

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Programming, Design & Data Science

Quint (GitHub Repo)

Quint is a specification language particularly useful for distributed systems. It combines the robust theoretical basis of the Temporal Logic of Actions (TLA) with state-of-the-art type checking and development tooling. Quint features a simple and familiar syntax, an expressive type system, a novel effect system, a simulator, a symbolic model checker, and more.

Technical Debt is not real (6 minute read)

Technical debt is a metaphor about the accumulated consequences of past decisions and shortcuts. This article examines this metaphor to see how technical debt has less to do with code and more to do with the choices and compromises that emerge from the challenges within software development. It looks at emergent technical debt, which arises from evolving system requirements, and deliberate technical debt, a strategic choice to prioritize rapid development over code quality. The article aims to refine understanding of technical debt and identify effective strategies for managing it.

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Miscellaneous

The road ahead reaches a turning point in 2024 (35 minute read)

2023 signaled the start of a new era and 2023 is an opportunity to shape the world's next chapter for the better. The year gave us a glimpse of how AI will shape the future. The technology will be used to help improve many aspects of our lives and reduce inequities around the world. While these are still challenging times, the future remains bright as the speed of innovation has never been faster.

SSH protects the world’s most sensitive networks. It just got a lot weaker (4 minute read)

Researchers have devised an attack with the potential to undermine cryptographic SSH protections. Terrapin is a man-in-the-middle attack that affects SSH connections secured by ChaCha20-Poly1305 or CBC with Encrypt-then-MAC. Around 57% of servers list these encryption modes as their preferred choice. Anyone using SSH should check whether they are vulnerable to the attack and make the appropriate updates. The attack invalidates proofs published in 2016 concluding that such attacks weren't possible. Details about the attack and how it works are available in the article.

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Quick Links

Tesla to offer package that turns Cybertruck into an actual boat (2 minute read)

Tesla plans to offer a mod package to turn the Cybertrack into a boat that can traverse 100 meters of water.

Solid Queue (GitHub Repo)

Solid Queue is a DB-based queuing backend for Active Job that supports delayed jobs, concurrency controls, pausing queues, numeric priorities per job, and priorities by queue order.

You don't present to execs, you sell to execs (1 minute read)

From a CEO's perspective, the point of a presentation is to answer why they should invest in an initiative and how the initiative ties to the mission of the company.

2023 in social media: the case for the fediverse (6 minute read)

The fediverse, an interconnected set of social media apps that no company or platform controls that can all read and write the same content, will allow developers to choose specific features of social apps and try to do better, resulting in an explosion of better social products.

The Big Cloud Exit FAQ (7 minute read)

An FAQ on exiting the cloud written by a company that was able to quickly complete a cloud exit without customers noticing anything and save a projected $7 million over five years.

Projects (6 minute read)

It's impossible to finish a personal project you're doing just for yourself because it's impossible to really know what you want and separate it from what you want to want, and it's impossible to start something and not have it grow and evolve into something else entirely given enough time and input.

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Google's new app store rules 📱, Blue Origin launches 🚀, understanding technical debt 👨‍💻

TLDR 2023-12-20

Big Tech & Startups

Science & Futuristic Technology

Programming, Design & Data Science

Miscellaneous

Quick Links

Older messages

Adobe abandons $20B deal 💰, scientists contact whales 🐋, embeddable interactive code 👨‍💻

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

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 👨‍💻

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