Slack’s biggest redesign ever tries to tame the chaos of your workday (6 minute read)
Slack is about to roll out a redesign that will change both the look and layout of the app to make things easier to find and manage. There is a new sidebar that shows Slack's features in a few new ways: the DMs section manages all chats no matter what channel or workspace they come from, and the Activity window shows all messages, mentions, and reactions across all Slack workspaces. The top right corner of every chat window will have a button for Huddles video chats and creating new canvases. Screenshots of the redesign are available in the article.
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Supreme Court says Apple can keep its App Store payment rules for now (2 minute read)
The Supreme Court has rejected Epic's request to make Apple loosen its App Store rules that limit how iOS app developers direct their users to alternate payment methods. There was no explanation for the decision. Moving payments outside of the App Store system will let developers avoid the 'Apple tax'. Apple has reserved the right to charge a commission separately if the practice is widely adopted.
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Science & Futuristic Technology
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Liquid-Metal Battery Will Be on the Grid Next Year (3 minute read)
Researchers estimate that energy storage needs to cost $20 per kilowatt-hour for the grid to be completely powered by wind and solar. It currently costs significantly more than that. A new liquid-metal battery scheduled for real-world deployment next year could lower energy storage costs considerably. The new battery currently costs $180 to $250 per kilowatt hour, depending on its size and duration, but the company manufacturing it projects that it will cost about $21 per kilowatt hour by 2030. The battery's lower cost comes from simpler materials, chemistry, system design, and its longer lifetime. It is resistant to capacity fade and is not flammable.
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AI supercharges drug discoveries, potentially changing medicine (5 minute read)
Biotech company Recursion used artificial intelligence and supercomputers to predict possible chemical interactions that might lead to new drugs. The company says it now conducts about 2.2 million experiments per week and has generated 25 petabytes of data using AI models. If any of these compounds turn out to be useful, it will take years for any of these compounds to make it into US FDA clinical trials. The FDA is still trying to figure out how to handle drugs developed by AI. It is soliciting feedback and plans to develop and adopt a risk-based regulatory framework that promotes innovation and protects patient safety.
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Programming, Design & Data Science
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SpacetimeDB (GitHub Repo)
SpacetimeDB is both a database and server combined into one. It allows developers to upload application logic directly into a relational database system using fancy stored procedures called modules. SpacetimeDB allows apps to be written in a single language and deployed as a single binary without microservices, VMs, Docker, infrastructure, or servers. It employs ideas similar to smart contracts except that SpacetimeDB has nothing to do with blockchain and is orders of magnitude faster than any smart contract system.
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Radix Themes (GitHub Repo)
This repo contains a component library optimized for fast development, easy maintenance, and accessibility. It supports custom typefaces, visual styles, layouts, and dark mode. The library includes themes, primitives, icons, and colors.
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Reddit’s menswear hub is the latest casualty of its battle with moderators (3 minute read)
Reddit has forcibly reopened r/malefashionadvice, the largest subreddit that stayed dark after the blackout, by booting the moderators and appointing new ones. The new mod team has little to no experience moderating fashion spaces and the subreddit has effectively fallen apart since. Some former moderators of smaller subreddits believe they were removed in retaliation for shutting down their subreddits during the blackout. Reddit says that it is only enforcing the moderator Code of Conduct, which says that the company can replace mods if the former mods abandon the community.
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Temptations of an open-source browser extension developer (71 minute read)
Chrome extension developers are sometimes put under a lot of pressure to monetize their work. Fortunately, some developers are in a favorable enough financial position that allows them to keep their moral compasses and ignore these propositions. This post is a collection of proposals that one developer received for their Chrome extension. The main reason this dev continues to maintain their extension is that they can't trust other devs not to fall for one of these offers, which could result in user data being shared.
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SQLedge (GitHub Repo)
SQLedge streams changes from a source Postgres database to SQLite databases running on the edge to provide local, fast, and eventually consistent access to data.
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The Two Bets (22 minute read)
Some of the wealthiest and most powerful tech entrepreneurs in the world see those who criticize their technologies as villians, but it's clear that the critics are not the problem.
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