Tesla robotaxi 🚕, Starship's launch plans 🚀, useless projects 👨‍💻

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TLDR 2024-04-08

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Big Tech & Startups

Tesla is unveiling its new ‘robotaxi’ on August 8 (3 minute read)

Tesla is planning to unveil its next-generation self-driving robotaxi vehicle on August 8. The announcement appears to be an acceleration of the robotaxi program, which aims to design a vehicle optimized from the ground up for driverless ridesharing. Some Tesla owners are concerned with the project as it could result in Tesla focusing on achieving self-driving on new hardware rather than on its existing vehicle fleet as promised and sold to customers for years. A picture of an early design prototype is available in the article.

Musk outlines plans to increase Starship launch rate and performance (4 minute read)

The fourth SpaceX Starship/Super Heavy launch may be in the next month or so. Its goal will be to get Starship's upper stage to get through the high heating regime of reentry and make a controlled splat into the ocean. SpaceX aims to bring the Super Heavy booster back intact, having it land on a virtual tower in the Gulf of Mexico. It could attempt to land a Starship booster on the real tower as soon as the vehicle's fifth flight. The company is working to accelerate production of Starship vehicles to support higher flight rates and increase payload capacity.

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Science & Futuristic Technology

Scientists are deep-freezing corals to repopulate the ocean (9 minute read)

Coral reefs are degrading at an unprecedented rate due to pollution, overfishing, and destructive forestry and mining practices on land. Most corals could go extinct within a few generations. The Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute's Reef Recovery Initiative aims to help save coral reefs using cryopreservation, a novel approach that involves storing and cooling coral sperm and larvae at very low temperatures and holding them in government biorepositories. The frozen assets can be used to help reseed the oceans and restore living reefs even 100 years from now. Cryopreserved sperm has already been used to produce new coral across the Caribbean.

Hypersonic startup unveils its first aircraft (4 minute read)

Hermeus, a company that is attempting to build hypersonic aircraft with jet engines that would allow them to take off from runways like traditional planes, has unveiled a flying prototype to demonstrate high-speed takeoff and landing. The Mk 1 is an uncrewed, remotely piloted plane that will allow Hermeus to conduct a comprehensive evaluation of the aircraft's performance and examine the effectiveness of the company's test procedures, safety culture, and interdisciplinary team collaboration. The company's next prototype is expected to demonstrate supersonic flight in 2025. A video featuring the Mk 1 is available in the article.

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Programming, Design & Data Science

9 Best Practices in Developer Enablement (Sponsor)

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pgmock (GitHub Repo)

pgmock is an in-memory mock PostgreSQL server for unit and E2E tests. It runs entirely within WebAssembly without external dependencies on both Node.js and the browser. A link to a web demo is available at the top of the repository.

How Stack Overflow replaced Experts Exchange (19 minute read)

This article tells the story of how and why Stack Overflow was created and discusses whether the site will have a place in engineering culture over the next decade. Before Stack Overflow, there was Experts Exchange, one of the first question-and-answer sites on the internet, coming into existence in 1996. Experts Exchange was free for over a decade, but it moved to a subscription-based model in 2004. This paywall created the perfect moment for a new site to counter-position itself, so the creators of Stack Overflow decided to create a more user-friendly version of Experts Exchange. Stack Overflow launched in 2008, the same year as GitHub, Apple's App Store, and Airbnb. The future existence of Stack Overflow will depend entirely on how well it can adapt to AI.

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Miscellaneous

How Tech Giants Cut Corners to Harvest Data for A.I. (22 minute read)

OpenAI solved its data supply problem in late 2021 by developing a speech recognition tool called Whisper to transcribe audio from YouTube videos, yielding new text to train its AI systems. Its team ultimately transcribed more than one million hours of video to train GPT-4. Google and Meta have also similarly cut corners in the race to lead AI, obtaining data in legally and ethically dubious ways. This article discusses the various methods companies have used to obtain data - or have considered using to obtain data - for AI training purposes.

Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on? (Hacker News Thread)

Developers are sometimes assigned tasks that make no sense. This Hacker News thread contains many examples of this phenomenon. Some of these examples include implementing fixes for a deprecated tool, making an internal tool suck more so people would stop using it, projects that never launched for various reasons, and a company morale meter.

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Quick Links

Brain fog and sugar cravings are killing your productivity (Sponsor)

Get more deep work done with LMNT — a tasty electrolyte drink that keeps you optimally hydrated. Not included: sugars or dodgy ingredients. Special offer for TLDR ↗️

Opera browser dev branch rolls out support for running LLMs locally (3 minute read)

Opera's Opera One Developer browser can now run 150 different large language models from 50 different large language model families without requiring an internet connection except to download the models.

Groq CEO: ‘We No Longer Sell Hardware’ (5 minute read)

Groq is now an AI cloud services provider.

"If this one guy got hit by a bus, the world's software would fall apart." (7 minute read)

The entirety of modern computing infrastructure is built on top of thousands of projects that are built, maintained, and run entirely by one person or by extremely small teams that are more often than not unpaid volunteers.

Scoop: Y Combinator invites alums to invest in new funds (3 minute read)

Alumni must invest a minimum of $250,000 total, which will be split among three funds that Y Combinator is currently raising.

Investors in Talks to Help Elon Musk’s xAI Raise $3 Billion, Adding to Industry Arms Race (3 minute read)

If the funding round is successful, xAI would be valued at $18 billion.

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Tesla robotaxi 🚕, Starship's launch plans 🚀, useless projects 👨‍💻

TLDR 2024-04-08

Big Tech & Startups

Science & Futuristic Technology

Programming, Design & Data Science

Miscellaneous

Quick Links

Older messages

Google may buy Hubspot 💰, the AI talent war 🧠, Signals for Tailwind 👨‍💻

Apple personal robots 🤖, state of founder compensation 💰, why observably is expensive 👨‍💻

Tesla's disastrous quarter 🚗, Vision Pro Personas 🧍‍♂️, Bun supports Windows 👨‍💻

AirPods Lite 🎧, Google deletes Incognito data 🥸, inside the xz exploit 👨‍💻

OpenAI's $100B supercomputer 🧠, Linux almost hacked 👨‍💻, design engineering 🎨

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