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TLDR 2024-05-07

WorkOS acquires Warrant, the Fine Grained Authorization (FGA) service for developers (Sponsor)

WorkOS is bolstering its vision to become the world's best identity platform with the acquisition of Warrant - an open source authorization service.

Fine grained authorization (FGA) determines who has access to what and what they can do within an app. At scale this becomes a significant engineering lift due to the need to implement complicated, permutation-heavy logic.

Warrant's product is based on Zanzibar, the open source authorization system originally designed by Google to power Google Docs and YouTube. This enables fast authorization checks at enormous scale while maintaining a flexible model that can be adapted to even the most complex use cases.

Big Tech & Startups

'iPhone 17 Slim' With Smaller Display Rumored to Launch Next Year (1 minute read)

Apple is reportedly planning an 'iPhone 17 Slim' model to replace the Plus model in its lineup. The Slim model will have around a 6.6-inch display, a slimmer design, an A18 or A19 chip, 8GB of RAM, a 24-megapixel front camera, and a 48-megapixel telephoto camera. It is expected to have an aluminum chassis and some other external design changes. Apple will likely announce the iPhone 17 lineup in September 2025.

Apple Reportedly Building M2 Ultra and M4-Powered AI Servers (2 minute read)

Foxconn is reportedly assembling Apple AI servers that contain the M2 Ultra. It is planning to assemble AI servers powered by the M4 chip in late 2025. While Apple is prioritizing on-device processing for many of its upcoming AI tools, some operations will inevitably have to occur in the cloud. The company is expected to announce on-device AI features at WWDC in June. 2025's iPhone 17 models will apparently be more focused AI devices.

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Science & Futuristic Technology

How Boeing lost the space race to Elon Musk's SpaceX (4 minute read)

The US provided Boeing and SpaceX with funding to build a crewed space vehicle in 2014. Boeing received far more funding than SpaceX and it had far more experience, but the company still allocated fewer resources to the project than it needed to thrive. The company kept carrying technical debt forward so that additional work was lumped onto the final milestones. Other issues, such as the way the company was structured, cost fixation, siloed development, and a lack of proper testing, all worked together to kneecap the project.

In a high-stakes test, Boeing will launch NASA astronauts to space for the first time (5 minute read)

Boeing is set to launch two NASA astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) on its Starliner spacecraft. The inaugural crewed flight is a crucial final test before NASA can authorize Boeing to conduct routine flights to and from the space station for the agency. This will be Boeing's first launch with humans aboard its spaceship. The astronauts will spend about a week at the space station before returning to Earth. While SpaceX has been ferrying astronauts to the ISS since 2020, NASA does not want to rely on a single company.

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Programming, Design & Data Science

Reporting Appsec Risk Up To Your CISO (Sponsor)

Looking to enhance your application security reporting? Check out Snyk's latest resource Reporting AppSec Risk Up to Your CISO - a guide for you on risk prioritization, risk introduction and measuring your AppSec program.

Be proactive on risk reporting and gauge your CISO early on in your application development workflow! Download Snyk's guide

Introducing Artifact Attestations – now in public beta (12 minute read)

GitHub's Artifact Attestations allows project maintainers to create a tamper-proof, unforgeable paper trail linking their software to the process that created it. It creates metadata that can be used as a foundation for new security and validity checks through policy evaluation. Verification support will be expanded to the Kubernetes ecosystem later this year.

A Useful Productivity Measure? (12 minute read)

Software productivity is famously unmeasurable. This article suggests using value-add capacity as a measure for software productivity. In the absence of measures for return on investment, the percent of engineering time spent on value-add activities is a pretty good proxy for productivity. Using this metric can help organizations identify what to focus on to achieve the goals they want.

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Miscellaneous

Tensions Rise in Silicon Valley Over Sales of Start-Up Stocks (11 minute read)

Private stock sales have always felt a bit like the Wild West. Investors continue to find ways around companies' attempts to restrict stock sales using techniques such as forward contracts, which allow employees to cash out their future shares through a pledge to sell the shares to an investor in the future. Some companies forbid these practices and say such deals are void. Companies creating funds with these shares say they are making the market more accessible and that shares obtained through forward contracts are legal.

Tesla announces fourth round of layoffs in four weeks (2 minute read)

Multiple recently-former Tesla employees posted on social media on Sunday to share that they were no longer with the company. The company started laying off employees last month ahead of the release of its Q1 financial results. While Elon Musk has said that he plans to reduce headcount by more than 10% globally, the total may be closer to 20% by the time everything has settled. The latest round of layoffs affected service advisers, engineers, and HR.

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LeRobot (GitHub Repo)

This repository contains models, datasets, and tools for real-world robotics in PyTorch.

New Microsoft AI model may challenge GPT-4 and Google Gemini (2 minute read)

Microsoft's new large-scale AI language model, MAI-1, could potentially rival state-of-the-art models from Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI.

OpenAI and Stack Overflow partner to bring more technical knowledge into ChatGPT (2 minute read)

Stack Overflow and OpenAI have announced a partnership that will give OpenAI access to Stack Overflow's API.

New Disposable APIs in Javascript (21 minute read)

This article presents an overview of how to get started with JavaScript's `using`, Disposables, and explicit resource management.

Quora CEO Adam D'Angelo talks about AI, chatbot platform Poe, and why OpenAI is not a competitor (12 minute read)

Quora's Poe (short for Platform for Open Exploration) lets users ask questions of and talk to a variety of chatbots, lets developers build their own bots, and offers a bot monetization program and marketplace.

How To Understand Things (23 minute read)

Intelligent people simply aren't willing to accept answers that they don't understand.

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iPhone Slim 📱, more Tesla layoffs 🚗, measuring engineering productivity 👨‍💻

TLDR 2024-05-07

Big Tech & Startups

Science & Futuristic Technology

Programming, Design & Data Science

Miscellaneous

Quick Links

Older messages

Siri's AI upgrade 🤖, Tesla Supercharger chaos ⚡, AI engineer burnout 👨‍💻

OpenAI search May 9 rumor 🤖, Tesla cuts interns 🚗, building a rocket engine 🚀

Airbnb Icons 🏠, Microsoft's OpenAI email leaks 🤖, software friction 👨‍💻

Apple AI browser 🌎, Tesla fires Supercharger team ⚡, new sudo replacement 👨‍💻

China approves Tesla FSD 🚗, GitHub Copilot Workspace 👨‍💻, Mystery chatbot appears 🤖

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