Vision Pro app stats 🌎, tech accelerationism 🤖, inside DNS 👨‍💻

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TLDR 2024-02-13

WorkOS is a modern identity platform for B2B SaaS (Sponsor)

Auth is crucial for B2B SaaS, but legacy vendors like Auth0 offer opaque pricing, low usage caps, and insufficient enterprise capabilities.

WorkOS is changing the auth space. It provides flexible and easy-to-use APIs for authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning. And more importantly, it's free up to 1 million monthly active users!

Hundreds of high-growth scale-ups are already powered by WorkOS — including Vercel, Webflow, Plaid, and Loom.

If you want to provide a seamless experience from your first user, all the way through to your largest enterprise customer, you should definitely check out WorkOS.

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Big Tech & Startups

Microsoft prepares to take Xbox everywhere (7 minute read)

A number of Xbox exclusives are coming to the PS5 and Nintendo Switch. The first two games set to appear on rival consoles are Hi-Fi Rush and Pentiment, with Sea of Thieves set to launch later this year. The move is a seismic shift in strategy - while it will give Microsoft more reach, it comes with plenty of risks. Microsoft plans to continue its Xbox hardware efforts, but its vision for the platform is unclear.

How many people are downloading Apple Vision Pro apps? (11 minute read)

More than 600 apps made for the Apple Vision Pro were available when the device launched on February 2. Developers are complaining that weak discovery and search functionalities in the App Store are dampening the potential success of their apps. The top paid news app receives over 300 installs a day, which is great for a headset that just launched. Promoting apps on social media appears to give transient success, but this might not be enough for consistent gains over the long run.

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Science & Futuristic Technology

Shining Laser Light on Glass Creates a Solar Cell (3 minute read)

Glass made from tellurium behaves like a photovoltaic cell, generating a current when a femtosecond laser light is fired at it. This discovery opens up the possibility of windows that may double up as energy-generating surfaces. The effect may possibly be seen in other forms of glass - scientists have had no reason to explore how femtosecond lasers affected different kinds of glass until now. Tellurite glass has enhanced transparency in the mid-infrared region and higher solubility for rare-earth ions, making it attractive for optical fibers and optical amplifiers.

The VR race is back on (7 minute read)

The VR market size is growing fast but still relatively small. Retention is just OK - the technology is stickiest for use cases that most people might not understand. There is real money to be made in the space. One effective strategy seems to be using VR to create an experience that creates a lot of buzz and then add cross-platform capabilities, allowing apps to reach a much larger audience. The competition between the Apple Vision Pro and Meta Quest platforms will benefit developers and create more experimentation within the ecosystem.

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Programming, Design & Data Science

Conductor (GitHub Repo)

Conductor is a platform for orchestrating microservices and events. It supports a wide range of database persistence layers and queuing services and has been battle-tested in production at Netflix. Conductor provides powerful flow control constructs, client libraries in multiple languages, and a distributed scalable architecture. It features a bundled UI with an integrated interface to create, refine, and validate workflows. It also has a full-featured API for custom automations.

The top of the DNS hierarchy (22 minute read)

Not all distributed systems are decentralized - many are not. One of the easiest and most practical ways to organize a distributed system is according to a hierarchy. The most prominent example of this is one of the drivetrain mechanics of the internet: DNS. This article looks at how DNS works. It covers how domains work, root servers, anycast, attacks, and more. While DNS may seem simple, it relies on a great deal of complexity within other parts of the system.

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Miscellaneous

“Accelerationism” is an overdue corrective to years of doom and gloom in Silicon Valley (30 minute read)

E/acc, or effective accelerationism, is a movement that is growing within the tech hivemind. Its founders believe that the tech world has become captive to a monoculture that is preventing it from producing meaningful benefits. E/acc encourages more ideas, growth, competition, and action. It is acting like a counterbalancing force to widespread public concerns about the risks posed by the tech industry at large. This article looks into the origins of e/acc and its impact on the tech industry.

The compounding seeds of creativity (3 minute read)

Creativity can't be saved for later - it has to be discharged regularly or it will spoil. Being fully engaged at work is how you best plant the seeds for your own adventures. Those who constantly use up their creativity grow their intellectual granary many times over than those who keep holding back. People who turn boring problems into interesting pursuits always end up ahead in creativity and competence.

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Quick Links

Elevate your skills in 15 minutes (Sponsor)

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How Slack brought the group chat to work (12 minute read)

Slack was a rare piece of enterprise software - it spread through word of mouth because it was actually good.

Mob sets Waymo car ablaze in San Francisco (1 minute read)

Most of the people attacking the car had their faces uncovered and the incident was recorded by both attendees and the Waymo car's cameras.

Chess-GPT's Internal World Model (18 minute read)

This study looks at how a large language model-based chess AI works.

The Scarcity of the Long-Term (3 minute read)

If there was no material or energy scarcity, the only real scarcity would be a long attention span - there will be a need for tools for transmitting values and missions into the future.

Massed Muddler Intelligence (38 minute read)

Massed Muddler Intelligences are to AI what Service-Oriented Architecture is to traditional computing - similar to concepts like microservices, containers, and APIs.

On the Proposed California SB 1047 (20 minute read)

This article looks at the proposed California SB 1047, a bill designed to regulate AI from a state level, examining the impact that it will have on the industry.

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Vision Pro app stats 🌎, tech accelerationism 🤖, inside DNS 👨‍💻

TLDR 2024-02-13

Big Tech & Startups

Science & Futuristic Technology

Programming, Design & Data Science

Miscellaneous

Quick Links

Older messages

OpenAI agents 🤖, Sam Altman's $7T chip fund 💰, tech employment in 2024 👨‍💻

Google Gemini Ultra 🧠, 1X's robotics demo 🤖 , Windows launches sudo 🧑‍💻

Disney's Epic Games stake 🎮, Google's morale crisis 📉, jQuery 4.0 👨‍💻

Adam Neumann's WeWork bid 🏢, WhatsApp cross-app messaging 💬, fastest growing dev populations 📈

OpenAI's democratic AI 🤖, Xbox's cross-platform plans 🎮, LLM side projects 👨‍💻

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