AirPods 4 🎧, Elon open sources Grok 🧠, knowing when to quit 💡

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TLDR 2024-03-18

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Big Tech & Startups

Open Release of Grok-1 (1 minute read)

xAI has released the weights and architecture for Grok-1. Grok-1 is a Mixture-of-Experts model with 314 billion parameters. The released model is a raw base model checkpoint from the Grok-1 pretraining phase, which means that it is not fine-tuned for any specific application. It was trained from scratch by xAI using a custom training stack.

Two New AirPods 4 Models Expected to Launch in September or October (1 minute read)

The fourth generation of AirPods is set to begin production in May. They will likely be released in September or October. The upcoming AirPods are expected to feature a new design with better fit, improved sound quality, and an updated charging case with a USB-C port. The higher-end models will also feature active noise cancellation and a speaker in the charging case for Find My location tracking. New AirPods Pros are not expected to launch until next year at the earliest, but current models may get a new hearing aid mode with iOS 18.

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Science & Futuristic Technology

VR Headsets Are Approaching the Eye’s Resolution Limits (5 minute read)

Extremely high pixel density is key for the next generation of augmented, mixed, and virtual reality headsets. More pixels means more life-like visuals and smaller, more compact displays. Building displays at this scale leads to unique technical hurdles that the industry is still learning to leap. This article looks at technological developments in the space, the specific challenges the industry is trying to overcome, and current solutions for these challenges.

Tick-killing pill shows promising results in human trial (5 minute read)

Tarsus Pharmaceuticals is developing a pill that could provide protection against Lyme disease for several weeks at a time. An early-stage trial has shown that it can kill ticks on people for up to 30 days after 24 hours of ingestion. The drug only kills the ticks, rather than the bacteria that causes Lyme disease. It may also protect against other tick-borne diseases.

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Programming, Design & Data Science

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Ask HN: If you've used GPT-4-Turbo and Claude Opus, which do you prefer? (Hacker News Thread)

This Hacker News thread compares GPT-4-Turbo, the default model in ChatGPT Plus, to Claude Opus, Anthropic's competing model. Most developers seem to prefer Claude as it is apparently better at coding and engineering work. Its writing style also seems to be preferred, but part of that is due to the recognizability of GPT-4-Turbo's style. OpenAI's app functionalities, like its code interpreter and ability to search the internet, are still big reasons to continue using ChatGPT Plus.

pg_hint_plan (GitHub Repo)

pg_hint_plan allows developers to tweak PostgreSQL execution plans using hints in SQL comments. Planners estimate the costs of each possible execution plan for a SQL statement then execute the plan with the lowest cost. While PostgreSQL's planner does its best to select the best execution plan using its cost-based optimizer, which uses data statistics rather than static rules, it is far from perfect as it doesn't count some data properties. pg_hint_plan has hints to control scan methods, join methods, join order, behavior on join, row number correction, parallel query configuration, and more.

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Miscellaneous

After Thursday’s flight, Starship is already the most revolutionary rocket ever built (6 minute read)

SpaceX's cameras recorded unprecedented views of atmospheric heating acting on Starship for a couple of minutes during Starship's descent on its third test. These views were possible thanks to Starlink terminals on the ship sending signals to satellites in low-Earth orbit, which were then sent back to Earth. The low-Earth orbit satellites were in space thanks to SpaceX's reusable Falcon 9 rocket, which conducted its first land-based landing days before Christmas in 2015. This article looks at the achievements that made Starship possible and takes a peek at the future of the project. The video of Starship reentering the atmosphere is available in the article.

Stubborn Visionaries & Pigheaded Fools (6 minute read)

Both success through perseverance and failure through obstinance are convenient rationalizations. It is impossible to know the future for anything. Understanding this frees you to make decisions more easily, with less second-guessing in the moment and less guilt afterwards. You can not know whether you're in a winning or losing scenario, so the best you can do is to find out which one you are in as quickly as possible. This article presents some guiding questions to help you figure out which path you're on.

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Quick Links

What I learned from looking at 900 most popular open source AI tools (13 minute read)

This review of open source AI repositories aims to give readers a big-picture view of the seemingly overwhelming AI ecosystem.

Hackintosh is (almost) dead (6 minute read)

Apple has completely removed all traces of driver support for its oldest WiFi/BT cards in the latest macOS (Sonoma).

The vacation town that livestream shopping built (6 minute read)

Xishuangbanna, a tropical town in China near the border with Myanmar and Laos, has seen a surge in property sales despite a nationwide downturn in the real estate market due to livestreamers showing off the city's homes and the beauty of the landscape surrounding it.

Laid-off techies face 'sense of impending doom' with job cuts at highest since dot-com crash (14 minute read)

Tech layoffs are at their highest since the 2001 dot-com crash and many job hunters are being forced to settle for pay cuts.

LLM inference speed of light (13 minute read)

Using theoretical speed of light modeling as grounding is really important for problems where the amount of computation and memory access is known a priori as it helps validate the quality of implementations and predict the impact of architectural changes.

Plentiful, high-paying jobs in the age of AI (20 minute read)

It's possible that many of the jobs that humans do today will continue to be done by humans indefinitely, no matter how much better AIs are at those jobs, due to comparative advantage.

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AirPods 4 🎧, Elon open sources Grok 🧠, knowing when to quit 💡

TLDR 2024-03-18

Big Tech & Startups

Science & Futuristic Technology

Programming, Design & Data Science

Miscellaneous

Quick Links

Older messages

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

GPT-4.5 leak 🧠, conversational robots 🤖, what are design engineers 👨‍💻

TikTok Photos 📱, next-gen AI dev 👨‍💻, startup comp trends 💰

AirPod Hearing Aid mode 🎧, Elon to open source Grok 🤖, how Figma runs dev critiques 👨‍💻

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

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