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Google Chrome AI summaries 🤖, rival iOS app store 📱, Microsoft Office redesign🎨

Google's AI-powered Search Generative Experience will soon be able to summarize articles on the web. 

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TLDR 2023-08-16

There’s no single right way to build software (Sponsor)

Every software team is different. What’s common to all of them? The desire to build the right things faster. But as software teams grow, their ability to deliver on that core mission gets compromised by technical debt, cross-team dependencies, and poor communication.

Swarmia is a productivity platform that helps the best software teams get better — making engineering work visible and helping you balance speed with quality.

Swarmia has tools to answer your most pressing questions and unblock your most blocked processes. Leaders love Swarmia because it gives them visibility into dev work based on research-backed metrics (such as DORA and SPACE). And developers love Swarmia because it helps them get better without invasive tracking.

Find out what Swarmia can do for your team

📱

Big Tech & Startups

Google Chrome will summarize entire articles for you with built-in generative AI (2 minute read)

Google's AI-powered Search Generative Experience will soon be able to summarize articles on the web. The new feature is being rolled out as an early experiment in Google's opt-in Search Labs program. It will first be available in the Google app on Android and iOS, with a desktop launch for the Chrome browser planned for later. The feature will only work on articles that are freely available to the public.
Microsoft’s new Office default theme and font arrives in September (1 minute read)

Microsoft is rolling out a new Office default theme to Microsoft 365 subscribers next month. Aptos will replace Calibri as the default after more than 15 years. Yellow has been removed from the color palette and replaced with a dark green and one of the lighter blues has been replaced with a dark teal. The default style in Word and Outlook will now be easier to read and navigate. An image showing the difference between the old and new themes is available in the article.
🚀

Science & Futuristic Technology

Meta’s AI Agents Learn to Move by Copying Toddlers (4 minute read)

Meta has released the MyoSuite 2.0 collection, a project that applies machine learning to biomechanical control problems. The MyoSuite platform includes a collection of baseline musculoskeletal models and tasks for researchers to attempt. Emulating the human body is extremely complicated. The research could help develop more capable robots and realistic avatars for the metaverse.
Intuitive Machines says it is ready to fly to the Moon (4 minute read)

Intuitive Machines is ready to launch its Nova-C lander to the Moon. The company is competing with other US companies for NASA-funded missions to deliver science experiments and other payloads to the surface of the Moon. Intuitive Machines has booked a flight on SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket and is expected to launch in November. It has a backup window in December in case of any issues.
💻

Programming, Design & Data Science

Kubernetes Monitoring with Datadog (Sponsor)

You need to understand your entire Kubernetes environment: hosts, containers, and applications, down to Kubernetes itself.

Learn how Datadog Kubernetes Monitoring enables you to:

✔️ Keep your Control Plane healthy

✔️ Troubleshoot Kubernetes performance issues with metrics, logs, and distributed traces

✔️ Autodiscover and monitor services, no matter where they spin up

✔️ Autoscale workloads with any metric from your Datadog environment

Download the free one-pager

Layerform (GitHub Repo)

Layerform is a Terraform wrapper for building reusable infrastructure. It uses plain Terraform files and layers to allow teams to reuse core pieces of infrastructure. Engineers are able to spawn only the infrastructure layers they need. Layerform makes development infrastructure much cheaper and quicker to spin up.
The cost of convenience (16 minute read)

Abstractions can end up causing frustrations with developers if not done right. This blog post takes a look at what makes a good developer experience. Developers should think about their target audience and what skills the audience is likely to bring to the table when creating abstractions. The abstraction should rely on these skills to minimize cognitive friction.
🎁

Miscellaneous

Setapp readies alt app store for iPhone, entices devs with up to 90% revenue share (4 minute read)

Apple could be forced to open up iOS to third-party app stores in the EU next year. Setapp has officially announced its mobile app store and is now taking applications from developers. It is offering developers access to a dedicated community of users, seamless onboarding, and the ability to offload commerce and distribution. Developers have the potential to earn up to 90% of revenue from user fees per month.
Employees in Asia are spending the most time looking busy at work, says Slack report (5 minute read)

Workers in Asia spend the most time on performative work according to a survey of more than 18,000 desk workers. Performative work involves spending time appearing busy rather than doing work. South Korea and the US are tied in first place as countries where workers spent the least amount of time doing performative work. Worker focus on appearing busy is likely influenced by the way productivity is measured.

Quick Links

Google's next big swing at AI rumored to launch this fall (3 minute read)

Gemini combines the text generation capabilities of large language models with image generation to create a multifunctional product that is able to create contextual images.
How is LLaMa.cpp possible? (7 minute read)

This article explains how LLaMa.cpp is able to run on consumer devices even though large models are supposed to require expensive GPUs.
America’s Electrical Grid Is an Incredible Feat of Engineering - And Its Biggest Bottleneck (25 minute read)

America's power grid is under unprecedented strain due to climate change and it desperately needs modernizing.
OpenAI is using GPT-4 to build an AI-powered content moderation system (3 minute read)

OpenAI is using GPT-4 to build a scalable, consistent, and customizable content moderation system that can aid in developing policies and swiftly iterating on policy changes.
Thinking Fast and Slopes (11 minute read)

Prospect theory, an explanation for how people make decisions, may not be entirely applicable to the current economic landscape - embracing both caution and boldness allows people to navigate this new era of uncertainty and capitalize on the opportunities it presents.
How car theft went high-tech (6 minute read)

An overview of the vulnerabilities present in modern-day cars.

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