Vision Pro presales 📈, MrBeast's Twitter test 🐦, AI market impact questions 🤖

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Big Tech & Startups

Vision Pro sales estimated at 160k to 180k over first three days (3 minute read)

Analysts are estimating that Apple Vision Pro sales were between 160,000 to 180,000 units over the first three days. The estimate is over 40% of the 400,000 units Apple is expecting to sell in the first year. The estimate is based on pre-order inventory and shipping times. Apple likely didn't have enough stock on hand to meet initial demand, but demand and supply now appear to be balanced.

Why Elon Musk needs MrBeast (4 minute read)

MrBeast posted a video to X last week with the explicit goal of seeing how much ad revenue a video on the platform would make. The video made $260,000 with more than 150 million views. While the video performed well, MrBeast noted that advertisers bought ads to run specifically on his video, earning him a higher rate. There were also multiple reports that X was quietly boosting the video to viewers, artificially inflating the view count.

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Science & Futuristic Technology

Disney offers an elegant solution to VR’s movement problem (3 minute read)

Disney's HoloTile is a system composed of hundreds of small round tiles, each serving as a kind of mini omnidirectional treadmill. The tiles work together to prevent users from walking off the HoloTile. Users can walk on the HoloTile in any direction they want and it will automatically do whatever it needs to keep them on the floor. It supports multiple people walking independently. The technology will likely become part of a Disney Parks VR experience. Video of the HoloTile in action is available in the article.

World's largest nuclear reactor, capable of providing unlimited forever energy, in making (1 minute read)

The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) is a fusion reactor that may one day provide the Earth with unlimited energy. The project started in 2005. Fusion reactions occur when two small particles collide, forming a heavier atom and producing a significant amount of energy without creating radioactive waste. If successful, ITER will be arguably the most complex machine ever designed.

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Programming, Design & Data Science

Awesome Behavioral Interviews (GitHub Repo)

This repository contains tips and resources to help people prepare for behavioral interviews. It covers general tips, questions that you may be asked, and questions you can ask the interviewer. Each interview question comes with prepared answers.

Machine Learning Engineering Open Book (GitHub Repo)

The Machine Learning Engineering Open Book is an open collection of methodologies to help with the successful training of large language models and multi-modal models. The material is suitable for LLM/VLM training engineers and operators. It contains lots of scripts and copy-n-paste commands to enable readers to quickly address their needs. The book covers key hardware components, performance, operation, development, and much more.

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Miscellaneous

I think we can all agree that GPT-4 completes many tasks at human-level proficiency (2 minute read)

While GPT-4 is proficient in many tasks, it is also imperfect in odd ways. For example, it can speak all languages, but barely do math. As AI becomes more competent, the technology will have an increasingly large impact on the world. This post lists several ways AI could impact the world and asks some important questions about how these impacts will change the world. The areas affected by AI include markets, real estate, energy, data centers, nations, inflation, and geopolitics.

A primer on dopamine (15 minute read)

Dopamine does not generate pleasurable feelings. It's the other way around - pleasurable feelings generate dopamine. The neural circuits that lead us to like things are separate from the circuits that generate wanting. It is easy to confuse 'liking' and 'wanting'. The brain is a prediction machine for rewards, and dopamine represents errors in predicting rewards. When bets by the brain are resolved, dopamine serves as a signal for whether the outcome was better or worse than expected and how much better or worse the outcome was than expected. The higher the surprise, the higher the reward prediction error - resulting in higher activity of dopamine neurons.

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Quick Links

Google lays off “dozens” from X Labs, wants projects to seek outside funding (1 minute read)

The X Lab, Alphabet's 'moonshot' experimental group, is part of the company's 'Other Bets' group, which burns through a billion dollars every quarter.

An RNG that runs in your brain (12 minute read)

This post presents a system for generating 'random enough' numbers in your head within half a minute.

How we built a fair multi-tenant queuing system (10 minute read)

This post discusses the challenges in building a fair multi-tenant queuing system, the reasons for building one, and how Inngest's multi-tenant queuing system works.

Google and AT&T invest in Starlink rival for satellite-to-smartphone service (2 minute read)

AST SpaceMobile, which already had Vodafone as an investor, announced Google and AT&T's funding along with a $100 million public offering of its stock on the same day.

12 Modern CSS One-Line Upgrades (15 minute read)

This article presents 12 CSS properties to start incorporating to reduce technical debt, remove JavaScript, and score easy wins for user experience.

The Apple Vision Pro’s Missing Apps (19 minute read)

The Apple Vision Pro could change how media is consumed in the future - its success depends on its apps, but there aren't many developers who are particularly motivated to build experiences for the platform.

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Vision Pro presales 📈, MrBeast's Twitter test 🐦, AI market impact questions 🤖

TLDR 2024-01-23

Big Tech & Startups

Science & Futuristic Technology

Programming, Design & Data Science

Miscellaneous

Quick Links

Older messages

Sam Altman's AI chip project 🤖, Samsung's smart ring 💍, relearning math as an adult 🧠

Meta's open AGI plan 🧠, Figure deploys robots 🤖, Whisper speech generation 👨‍💻

TLDR Hall of Fame

Galaxy S24 📱, DeepMind solves Olympiad geometry 📉, Kindle LLM 🤖

iPhone hits all-time high 📱, OpenAI's pentagon project 🤖, ChatGPT dev tips 👨‍💻

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