Lenovo's transparent laptop 💻, Apple Vision Pro costs 🌎, Nvidia CEO says kids shouldn't code 👨‍💻

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TLDR 2024-02-27

Legacy auth is expensive and broken (Sponsor)

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Big Tech & Startups

Apple Vision Pro’s components cost $1,542 — but that’s not the full story (2 minute read)

The materials for the Apple Vision Pro are estimated to cost around $1,542. Its dual displays are the most expensive component, costing $456. The external display used for EyeSight costs around $70. The M2 system-on-a-chip and the R1 processor together cost around $240. A full table of materials and their estimated costs is available in the article. The cost estimate doesn't take into account manufacturing, shipping, marketing, or research and development.

Mistral AI releases new model to rival GPT-4 and its own chat assistant (4 minute read)

Mistral AI has launched a new language large model called Mistral Large to rival other top-tier models like GPT-4 and Claude 2. The company is also launching a new service called Le Chat to compete with ChatGPT. Access to Mistral Large costs $8 per million input tokens and $24 per million output tokens through the company's API. The model supports a context window of 32k tokens and English, French, Spanish, German, and Italian. Le Chat is free, but it can't access the web.

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Science & Futuristic Technology

Peering through Lenovo’s transparent laptop into a sci-fi future (7 minute read)

Lenovo's ThinkBook Transparent Display Laptop is a 17.3-inch notebook with a see-through screen. Its bezel-less MicroLED display offers up to 55% transparency when its pixels are set to black or turned off. The display becomes less and less see-through as its pixels light up. Due to technical challenges, the laptop's display resolution is only 720p and it is not currently possible to manually set the whole laptop screen to be opaque. The laptop has a flat touch keyboard as its base that is also designed to work as a drawing tablet. Pictures of the device are available in the article.

The Odysseus lunar lander is on its side and will likely run out of energy soon (2 minute read)

The Odysseus lander will likely stop operating today as its panels and antennas aren't oriented exactly as planned, making it difficult to generate power and communicate. The lander almost failed its landing due to issues with its range finder lasers, but a last-minute software patch allowed engineers to use one of NASA's experimental LIDAR systems to retrieve the required data to ensure its safe landing. Despite this, Odysseus landed on its side. The only cargo on the side facing down is a piece of art sent by a commercial customer.

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Programming, Design & Data Science

justpath (GitHub Repo)

justpath is a utility for exploring the PATH environment variable in both Windows and Linux. It can only view the PATH variable - neither justpath nor any of its child processes can modify the shell PATH directly. justpath provides a modified version of PATH that can later be used in a shell startup script or with an environment manager. It can be used to filter directory names, purge incorrect paths, create new content strings for PATH, dump PATH as JSON, and more.

R2R (GitHub Repo)

R2R is a semi-opinionated framework for the rapid deployment of production-ready RAG systems. It aims to bridge the gap between experimental RAG models and production-ready systems. R2R offers a straightforward path to deploying, adapting, and maintaining RAG pipelines in production. A short demo video is available.

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Miscellaneous

Decoding Apple's Ploy To Scuttle Progressive Web Apps (24 minute read)

Apple plans to stop supporting Progressive Web Apps on March 6. The EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA) mandates that Apple must allow competing browsers on its App Store. Apple's response to this is to geofence browser choice and kneecap web apps. This choice will break many apps across the EU, affecting schools, governments, startups, gamers, and more. None of this is required by the DMA, despite Apple blaming its decision on the law. By doing this, Apple is cementing a future where the mobile web will never be permitted to grow beyond marketing pages for native apps.

In Defense of Thin Wrappers (7 minute read)

Many apps find that their variable costs start skyrocketing once they get some form of traction and grow. Having to deal with these issues when growing is really hard as developers have to effectively rebuild their engines while it's running. Founders can get in front of this issue by planning ahead, having multiple choices for infrastructure, finding good advisors, developing better negotiation skills, and raising more money than needed as a buffer. This article discusses how to handle rising costs as a startup, with a particular focus on AI-based projects.

TLDR is hiring a part time full stack developer (Contractor, Fully Remote US Time Zones, $50/hr)

TLDR is hiring a part time full stack dev to help us build scalable internal tools and web apps.

The ideal candidate would have at least 1-2 years full stack dev experience and be familiar with Next.js/Postgres, experience with Clickhouse and Vercel is also a nice to have.

The role will be for 10-15 hours to start and scale up over time, the candidate must live in US time zones.

To apply please send your LinkedIn or resume to jobs@tldr.tech along with a couple of sentences on why you might be a good fit (and if you have it, a link to any personal side projects or portfolio that may be relevant)!

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Quick Links

Instagram is working on a ‘Friend Map’ feature that would let you track friends’ locations (2 minute read)

The feature is currently an internal prototype that is not being tested externally.

🦑 The 14 pains of building your own billing system (9 minute read)

Billing systems are complicated, involving finance, product, experience, customer support, customers, legal, compliance, sales, and sometimes more.

Microsoft invests in Europe’s Mistral AI to expand beyond OpenAI (3 minute read)

Microsoft is investing in Mistral AI to unlock new commercial opportunities and expand to global markets.

Samsung has big ambitions for the Galaxy Ring (4 minute read)

Samsung's Galaxy Ring is part of the company's vision for a future of ambient sensing, which involves data gathering from multiple sources to provide connected care around the home.

Jensen Huang says kids shouldn't learn to code — they should leave it up to AI (4 minute read)

Huang says that AI will allow programming languages to be replaced with human language prompts, thus enabling everyone to be a programmer.

Google's New AI Can Generate Entire 2D Platformer Games (2 minute read)

Genie is a foundation world model trained exclusively on videos from the Internet that can create playable 2D environments from a single image prompt.

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Lenovo's transparent laptop 💻, Apple Vision Pro costs 🌎, Nvidia CEO says kids shouldn't code 👨‍💻

TLDR 2024-02-27

Big Tech & Startups

Science & Futuristic Technology

Programming, Design & Data Science

Miscellaneous

Quick Links

Older messages

Tesla's robot walks 🤖 , private moon landing 🚀, lessons running SaaS startup 👨‍💻

Nvidia's historic day 📈, the AI adoption curve 🧠, GitHub Pages CMS 👨‍💻

Google's open AI 🧠, Redditors get IPO access 💰, Gemini Pro's killer app 🤖

Neuralink's first patient 🧠, Apple ring 💍, false things junior devs believe 👨‍💻

ChatGPT's flatlining growth 📉, Gemini 1.5 vs GPT-4 for code 👨‍💻, LPUs vs GPUs ⚡

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