Inside Apple's gaming push 💻, Vitalik's Ethereum manifesto 🪙, impactful prompts across domains 🤖

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Big Tech & Startups

Inside Apple's Massive Push to Transform the Mac Into a Gaming Paradise (20 minute read)

Apple's hardware can finally go toe to toe with some of the best PCs. The company is now aiming to make another attempt at becoming a gaming powerhouse. Its previous attempt in 1999 did not go so well. Now, Apple has larger and more capable teams with plenty of resources, and the company is used to playing the long game. This article looks at Apple's history with gaming, its hardware developments in recent years, and the company's push to make its systems more game-friendly.

Amazon plans to make its own hydrogen to power vehicles (3 minute read)

Amazon plans to produce hydrogen fuel at its fulfillment centers. It has partnered with hydrogen company Plug Power to install an electrolyzer at a fulfillment center in Aurora, Colorado. The electrolyzer, which uses electricity to split water molecules to produce hydrogen, has the capacity to fuel up to 400 hydrogen fuel cell-powered forklifts. Amazon says that hydrogen is an important tool in its efforts to decarbonize its operations by 2040.

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Science & Futuristic Technology

The first EV with a lithium-free sodium battery hits the road in January (2 minute read)

JAC Motors is launching an electric vehicle with a sodium-ion battery through its Yiwei brand. Sodium-ion batteries have lower density than lithium-ion batteries, but their lower cost, more abundant supplies, and superior cold-weather performance make them viable for mass EV adoption. The Yiwei EV will have a 252 km range with a 25 kWh capacity. Deliveries of the vehicle will begin in January.

A Game-Changing Vaccine Could Lower 'Bad' Cholesterol by 30% (2 minute read)

Researchers have been able to lower low-density lipoprotein (LDL) levels using a vaccine based on a non-infectious virus particle that targets a protein known to have an important relationship to LDLs. LDLs can cause dangerous blockages in the arteries, reducing oxygen flow to the heart or causing blood clots that can lead to a stroke. The vaccine was able to reduce the bad cholesterol by up to 30% in animal models. It will still be a while before the technology can be used in humans, but it promises a solution that would be more affordable than current options and last around a year per dose.

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Programming, Design & Data Science

Apache Hudi (GitHub Repo)

Apache Hudi manages the storage of large analytical data sets on distributed file systems. It allows users to atomically publish data with rollback support, snapshot isolation between writer and queries, manage file sizes and layouts using statistics, and more. Hudi supports snapshot, incremental, and read-optimized queries.

Prompt Of The Year: 2023 🌟 (GitHub Repo)

This collection showcases the most impactful prompts of the year across various domains. It covers domains such as job hunting, essay and research, language learning, code generation, mental health, music, marketing, and much more. The complete collection can be accessed through a CSV file. Each prompt includes a backlink to its original author.

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Miscellaneous

Make Ethereum Cypherpunk Again (21 minute read)

This post by Vitalik Buterin takes a look at the core values of the crypto movement and how they have changed. Crypto isn't just about creating isolated tools and games - it's about building holistically toward a more free and open society and economy where the technological, social, and economic parts fit into each other. web3 had a similar vision to build a set of technology that could together form the base layer of a more open internet stack. Unfortunately, these visions have faded somewhat into the background.

Why Masimo thought it could take on Apple (3 minute read)

Apple and medical device maker Masimo have been entrenched in a legal battle over a single feature on the Apple Watch for over three years. Masimo had sued a startup on similar grounds in 2018 and won. Both cases involved employees who helped the companies develop similar technologies. The International Trade Commission's US import on Apple's watches was quickly paused on appeal. The US Customs and Border Protection will make a decision on January 12 on whether the changes Apple made to the watches are significant enough to avoid a patent dispute.

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Quick Links

You can’t do that because I hate you (5 minute read)

Developers shouldn't 'support' features by telling the user 'no' - they should either support the feature, guide the user toward a better solution, or do nothing.

Xiaomi’s first EV is the freshest take on a ‘smartphone on wheels’ (3 minute read)

Xiaomi’s SU7 sedan, slated to roll out in China next year, runs Xiaomi’s HyperOS, a new architecture from Xiaomi that's supposed to be dynamic enough to power phones, smart home systems, and cars.

Microsoft’s next Surface laptops will reportedly be its first true ‘AI PCs’ (2 minute read)

The next generation of Surface devices will come with Intel and Arm-based neural processing unit options.

Google Addresses the Mysteries of Its Hypercomputer (11 minute read)

Google's Hypercomputer is the company's take on a modular supercomputer with a healthy dose of its homegrown TPU v5p AI accelerators.

It’s “shakeout” time as losses of Netflix rivals top $5 billion (3 minute read)

Netflix's top rivals lost more than $5 billion in 2024 from the streaming services they built to compete with it.

Are programmers obsolete? (3 minute read)

The specialist programmer will continue to dominate over the journalist who's just telling the computer to write the code.

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Inside Apple's gaming push 💻, Vitalik's Ethereum manifesto 🪙, impactful prompts across domains 🤖

TLDR 2023-12-29

Big Tech & Startups

Science & Futuristic Technology

Programming, Design & Data Science

Miscellaneous

Quick Links

Older messages

Tesla's Model Y upgrade 🚗, gen AI short films 🤖, new age of CSS 👨‍💻

Microsoft's ChatGPT competitor 🤖, Apple Watch ban starts ⌚, rethinking Unix 👨‍💻

Apple's open source LLM 🤖, next-gen self checkout 🛍️, making LLMs fast 👨‍💻

Apple's AI breakthrough 📱, PHOLED displays 🖥️, Sam Altman's career advice 💼

Tesla stops equity comp 💰, Apple Vision Pro launch 🌎, advice for new devs 👨‍💻

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