Google layoffs 💼, China's SpaceX competitor 🚀, hacking on GitHub Actions 👨‍💻

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TLDR 2024-01-12

AWS Security Best Practices [Cheat Sheet] (Sponsor)

Rampant cloud usage requires an advanced security playbook.

Wiz put together these AWS security best practices from leading cloud security orgs. Benchmark your strategy and improve your security posture across your AWS footprint with:

Techniques to enforce least privilege across all identities
How to limit uncontrolled exposure of sensitive assets
Playbooks to extend protection of Kubernetes clusters (EKS)
Plus critical recommendations by resource type (IAM, S3, Cloudtrail)

All of these advanced best practices for AWS are compiled in this checklist.

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Big Tech & Startups

Google confirms it just laid off around a thousand employees (2 minute read)

Google has eliminated around a thousand positions across its Pixel, Nest, Fitbit, Core engineering, and Assistant teams. The company may still be planning further layoffs. Google's parent company Alphabet employed 182,385 employees as of September 30 last year. The layoffs so far represent around half a percent of the company's total employees.

“Such signal, much wow”: Starlink’s first texts via “cellphone towers in space” (1 minute read)

SpaceX has successfully sent and received its first text messages using the T-Mobile network spectrum through one of its new direct-to-cell satellites. The new satellites are expected to provide text messaging services around the world sometime this year, with voice and data services beginning sometime in 2025. They are equipped with custom silicon, phased array antennas, and advanced software algorithms. The satellite-to-phone service should work just about anywhere on the planet, but it will be most useful in areas with no coverage due to terrain limitations, land-use restrictions, and other factors.

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Science & Futuristic Technology

Meet the eTH, an expandable electric RV that turns into an off-grid luxury mini-home (3 minute read)

The Electric Transformer House is an expandable luxury mini-home with 400 square feet of living space, solar panels, and much more. The RV features a luxurious interior, smart tech, and clean energy for off-grid capabilities. It has a gourmet kitchen, a spacious living and dining room, and a private bedroom. Its cockpit features a flexible dashboard/office desk, integrated entertainment, drive assist tech, and a Starlink connection. Pictures and videos showing the RV in both its vehicle and mini-home modes are available in the article.

Chinese Rival to SpaceX Pulls Off Rocket Launch at Sea (1 minute read)

Orienspace declared a complete success after launching a rocket at sea into low-Earth orbit on Thursday. Its rocket deposited a total of three satellites into orbit using its Gravity 1 commercial launch system. The three-stage, 100-foot-tall spacecraft is the world's largest solid launch vehicle. Launching from the sea offers several advantages, including less chance of damage and lower costs.

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Programming, Design & Data Science

GitHub Actions as a time-sharing supercomputer (12 minute read)

GitHub Actions can be used for batch jobs. Developers can submit work to the service and receive the results later on asynchronously. actions-batch is a command-line tool that is essentially an API that turns GitHub Actions into a time-sharing computer. It creates new GitHub repositories, writes a workflow that runs 'job.sh' upon commits, and triggers jobs when a local bash file is written to the repository as 'job.sh'. actions-batch can be used for jobs like building kernels and running machine learning inference using Llama2.

Google challenges cloud rivals by making it free for customers to transfer data when they leave (2 minute read)

Google's cloud unit will stop charging data transfer fees when customers want to leave. The change applies to all customers globally. Data transfer fees are a profitable source of revenue for tech companies and they can reduce churn as they punish clients for going elsewhere. Google is part of the Bandwidth Alliance, a group of companies whose aim is to reduce or eliminate data transfer fees. Alibaba, Microsoft, and Oracle are also members of the alliance.

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Miscellaneous

Chrome Users Now Worth 30% Less Money Thanks to Google's Cookie Killing, Ad Firm Says (6 minute read)

Google disabled tracking cookies for 30 million Chrome users last week, about 1% of the browser's user base. Analysts estimate that the change made cookieless users bring in 30% less revenue. Google plans to block cookies for all users by the end of the year and replace them with a new tracking system called the Privacy Sandbox. The new system will keep all user data on users' devices but let companies still know what topics they're interested in.

Understanding Bridge-Based Ranking (11 minute read)

Bridge-based ranking is a way to score and rank content by adjusting for user polarization. The algorithm works by attempting to model why content receives the reactions it gets and then correcting for bias. It can cancel out the effects of bias. This article explains Bridge-Based Ranking and shows how and why it works. Bridge-based ranking allows communities to self-moderate by preventing influence from user polarization.

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Quick Links

Apple Vision Pro launch quantities rumored to be far tighter than previously estimated (2 minute read)

Renowned Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo thinks that Apple will have between 60,000 and 80,000 Apple Vision Pro units available on launch day.

Meta reportedly laid off 60 technical program managers at Instagram (1 minute read)

The affected employees will be given the chance to be interviewed to be considered for a position as a product manager.

Lots of ppl were asking, why not an app? (4 minute read)

Making the Rabbit R1 a piece of hardware allowed the company to create something capable of all the potentials of its LAM technology while lowering entry barriers for early adopters.

Microsoft briefly tops Apple as most valuable public company (1 minute read)

Microsoft's shares rose in 2023 partly due to hope from investors that the company would be able to expand by selling AI services to businesses.

Discord is laying off 17 percent of employees (3 minute read)

While Discord isn't in dire financial straits, it has yet to become profitable and is still trying to revive user growth after the pandemic surge.

The golden age of Kotlin and its uncertain future (9 minute read)

If Kotlin doesn't make a significant move by 2025, its popularity will decline and reach a critical point.

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Google layoffs 💼, China's SpaceX competitor 🚀, hacking on GitHub Actions 👨‍💻

TLDR 2024-01-12

Big Tech & Startups

Science & Futuristic Technology

Programming, Design & Data Science

Miscellaneous

Quick Links

Older messages

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Apple Vision Pro launch 🌎, ultra-HD transparent TVs 📺, attacks on ML models 👨‍💻

AI-enhanced Siri 📱, CES 2024 🤖, weird things devs believe 👨‍💻

Microsoft's Copilot key 💻, DeepMind's robot constitution 🤖, terminal smooth scrolling 👨‍💻

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