DeepMind's coding AI 💻, Facebook users decline 📉, why talk to recruiters 🤵

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Big Tech & Startups

Twitter reportedly working on new feature to let users write full articles (2 minute read)

Twitter Articles is a new experimental feature that will let Twitter users write longer texts. The company started with a 140 character limit but raised it to 280 in 2017. It introduced continuous threads in 2020 so that users could attach multiple tweets to the same conversation. Increasing the character limit and allowing articles will let Twitter compete with blogging platforms like Medium. Twitter has confirmed that it will share more details about Twitter Articles soon.

Facebook lost daily users for the first time ever last quarter (2 minute read)

Facebook reported its first-ever quarterly decline of global daily users and lower-than-expected ad growth at an earnings call on Wednesday. The news resulted in a massive stock drop that wiped out roughly $200 billion in market value. Its drop in daily users may be due to Facebook's increasing lack of relevance with young people. Meta is still wildly profitable, making nearly $40 billion last year. It plans to release its next VR headset later this year.

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Science & Futuristic Technology

DeepMind says its new AI coding engine is as good as an average human programmer (4 minute read)

AlphaCode is an AI system by DeepMind that can write computer programs at a competitive level. The research on AlphaCode is still in its early stages, but it was able to achieve a rank that placed it within the top 54% of human coders when tested against challenges on a competitive coding platform. While the challenges were not representative of the real-world challenges that developers face, AlphaCode's abilities could lead to tools that could make programming more accessible. AI coding systems are still far from ready to take over the work of human programmers as the code they produce is often buggy and can contain copyrighted material due to the way they are trained.

"Impossible" 2D material is light as plastic and stronger than steel (2 minute read)

Scientists from MIT have developed a scalable production method that allows polymers to form 2D sheets while keeping their strength intact. Using the method, the team developed a material called 2DPA-1. 2DPA-1 is an extremely thin and lightweight material with a yield strength twice that of steel. It can take six times more force than bulletproof glass and it is completely impermeable to gases and liquids. The material could be used as a protective coating for vehicles and electronic devices and even as construction material.

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Programming, Design & Data Science

Vertex (Website)

This site features a collection of hand-crafted 3D icons that are free for commercial and personal use. The icons are fully customizable, with options for colors, rotation, and materials.

Career Advice Nobody Gave Me: Never ignore a recruiter (12 minute read)

This article gives readers tips on how to best interact with recruiters and negotiate the best career advances. While there are many reasons to not respond to recruiters, they can be one of the best career resources available. Recruiters have real insight into how much any role pays and can help further a career without the worker putting in the effort to search for a role. They can help you to stay aware of your market value and job options.

Building a "Spotify Wrapped" clone (Sponsor)

Follow this step by step guide with working code examples to build a "Spotify Wrapped" clone using Mux's Data API.

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Miscellaneous

North Korea Hacked Him. So He Took Down Its Internet (6 minute read)

North Korea has been dealing with serious internet connectivity issues over the past two weeks. Almost all of the nation's few dozen websites have dropped out on several different days, including a page that serves as the official government portal for the dictatorship. The outage was caused by a single American hacker from his home office. Just over a year ago, the hacker was targeted by North Korean spies. Taking matters into his own hands, the hacker has now automated most of the attack. While it is unknown what effect the attack is having on the regime, the hacker counts annoying them as a success and intends to escalate his efforts.

Mysterious port-less laptop is 7 mm thin (3 minute read)

The Craob X is a laptop with zero integrated ports. It is 7 mm thin and weighs 1.9 lbs. The laptop uses a wireless charger that attaches magnetically to the laptop's lid. The charger has a headphone jack, SD card reader, and USB-C, USB-A, and Thunderbolt ports. It is unclear whether the charger will send data to the laptop. The laptop will use an Intel 12th-generation Alder Lake mobile CPU, with configurations of up to 32 GB of LPDDR5 RAM and 2TB of PCIe 4.0 x4 SSD storage available. No release date has been announced yet. Pictures of the laptop and charger are available in the article.

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DeepMind's coding AI 💻, Facebook users decline 📉, why talk to recruiters 🤵

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