SpaceX Starship reaches orbit 🚀, DNA foundational models 🧬, curse of senior devs 👨‍💻

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https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/03/after-its-third-test-flight-spacexs-starship-could-soon-carry-satellites/

TLDR 2024-03-15

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Big Tech & Startups

SpaceX celebrates major progress on the third flight of Starship (7 minute read)

SpaceX's Starship rocket flew halfway around the world yesterday, accomplishing a key demonstration of its ability to carry heavy payloads into low-Earth orbit. The successful launch builds on two previous flights last year. Thursday's flight tested Starship's payload bay door and performed a precursor test of an in-orbit refueling system. Photos from the launch are available in the article.

Who could buy TikTok? These are the people who could acquire the app (7 minute read)

ByteDance may have to sell TikTok in the US if a proposed bill passes the Senate. Some high-profile investors, including former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, online video platform Rumble, and former Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick, have expressed interest in acquiring the app. This article presents a list of known potential buyers along with a primer on companies that have previously tried to purchase TikTok.

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Science & Futuristic Technology

Evo: DNA foundation modeling from molecular to genome scale (9 minute read)

Evo is a long-context biological foundation model capable of both prediction tasks and generative design, from molecular to whole genome scale. The model generalizes across the fundamental languages of biology, DNA, RNA, and proteins to generate DNA sequences using a context length of 131k tokens. It is based on StripedHyena, a deep signal processing architecture designed to improve efficiency and quality over prevailing Transformer architecture. A playground is available where users can generate DNA in their browsers using Evo.

Genetically modified cow makes milk with human insulin (5 minute read)

Researchers have engineered a cow capable of producing milk that contains human insulin. This could result in an alternative for insulin production. The process involves inserting human DNA coding for insulin into cow embryos. It could dramatically simplify the process and cost of producing the drug. A single cow can produce enough milk every day to supply thousands of type 1 diabetes patients with their daily insulin for an entire month. Scaling up production, ensuring the health and welfare of the transgenic cows, and navigating regulatory approvals are still huge challenges that lie ahead before the process can replace conventional methods of insulin production.

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Programming, Design & Data Science

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Falsehoods programmers believe about time zones (10 minute read)

Building a time zone conversion layer on top of a datetime library sounds like an easy task, but it isn't. This article lists 21 misconceptions about time zones the author had before attempting to write a time zone conversion app as well as extra misconceptions from readers. These misconceptions include thinking that there are more countries in the world than time zones, that every time zone has exactly one agreed-upon name, or that time zones are always offset from UTC by an integer number of hours.

HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 explained (25 minute read)

The first HTTP draft had only one method, GET - there were no headers or status codes, and the only data format available was HTML. The protocol has evolved significantly since then. HTTP/3 is designed for unstable connections, resulting in performance tradeoffs. HTTP/2 offers better performance on reliable and stable connections than HTTP/3. Servers can accept both HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 connections so clients can make the decision of which version to use.

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Miscellaneous

The Top 100 Gen AI Consumer Apps (11 minute read)

AI-native products and companies are growing faster and engaging users more deeply than ever before. Over the coming decade, AI will likely underpin category-defining companies. This article examines data on the most popular generative AI products to uncover patterns on how consumers are using the technology. It looks at the rate of progress in the industry, emerging categories, hot niches, the mobile vs web split, and AI as a global pursuit.

The Curse of the Senior Software Engineer (11 minute read)

Titles help normalize pay ranges and allow for progression and evaluation. People who are not job hoppers or get stuck in the same company and title due to laziness, comfort, or other reasons are unfortunately prone to 'The Curse of the Senior Software Engineer'. This is when an engineer who has been senior for too long finds themselves between two worlds upon their next job search: they are too senior to be hired as a senior or they have too little leadership experience to be hired in a leadership position. Avoiding the curse involves either playing by corporate rules or exiting the game by switching to self-employment.

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Quick Links

Snapchat will allow users to save DMs (2 minute read)

Snapchat is experimenting with an 'Infinite Retention Mode' that will allow users to save their direct messages.

After AWS and Google, Microsoft says it’s removing Azure ‘egress’ data transfer fees — but with caveats (3 minute read)

Microsoft will allow business customers to transfer data out of its Azure cloud infrastructure with no egress fees to align with stipulations set out in the European Data Act, but only for customers looking to completely end their association with Azure.

The Most Important Skill in Startup Engineering Leadership (4 minute read)

The singular skill that ultimately decides the success of a leader and their team is pacing - leaders must be in tune with their and their team's abilities and stamina.

The Future of Farcaster with Dan Romero (22 minute read)

Dan Romero, the founder of Farcaster, a disruptive social network, talks in this interview about competing directly against Elon Musk, nerd sniping, prediction markets, and new business models.

To The Space Station (Website)

This page explains SpaceX's Dragon's docking and reentry procedures.

Digital forgeries are hard (6 minute read)

Expert witnesses on both sides of the case over whether Craig Wright is Satoshi Nakamoto agree that much of the digital evidence provided by Wright is unreliable in one way or another.

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SpaceX Starship reaches orbit 🚀, DNA foundational models 🧬, curse of senior devs 👨‍💻

TLDR 2024-03-15

Big Tech & Startups

Science & Futuristic Technology

Programming, Design & Data Science

Miscellaneous

Quick Links

Older messages

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Altman rejoins OpenAI board 🤖, ex-Activision CEO's TikTok bid 📱, understanding AWS S3 👨‍💻

Inside Sam Altman's firing 🤖 , foldable 20-inch MacBook 💻, why Meta doesn't use git 👨‍💻

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