Tesla Spends Weekend Cutting Prices of Cars and FSD Software (4 minute read)
Tesla has cut the prices of its models across China, Europe, and the US. Full Self-Driving is now $8,000 in the US. In China, the revamped Model 3 is now 241,900 yuan (~$32,000), down from 245,900 yuan previously and the Model Y was discounted to 249,900 yuan (~$34,500) from 263,900 yuan. The cheapest Model Y in the US is now $42,990. Tesla is facing several challenges, including a recall of almost 3,900 Cybertrucks, sales drops, interrupted production schedules, and more.
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Google's Top Secret Camera Lab Is Like an Ikea for Pixel Testing (10 minute read)
Google's Real World Testing Lab is an elaborate environment where Google tests the cameras in its Pixel phones. The lab looks more like a cluster of Ikea displays than a testing room. It allows Google to test its devices in realistic environments that simulate where customers will actually use them. This article takes a look inside the lab and the kind of testing that Google does to make sure its devices capture moments in just the right way.
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Science & Futuristic Technology
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The GMO tooth microbe that is supposed to prevent cavities (14 minute read)
Lumina is a one-time treatment that can present cavities. It can be applied either at home or by a dentist. The treatment, which can be pre-ordered for $250 (before taxes and shipping fees), is expected to be released by mid-June. Marketed as a cosmetic product, the treatment has yet to successfully move through human clinical trials, leading to safety and ethical concerns.
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Programming, Design & Data Science
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How does ChatGPT work? As explained by the ChatGPT team (9 minute read)
When users ask ChatGPT a question, OpenAI chunks the question into tokens, creates embeddings, multiplies the embeddings by model weights, and then samples a prediction. This article explains this process in detail. It covers pretraining and inference as well as the system's limitations. Links to other resources that also explain how ChatGPT works are available in the article.
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The PostgreSQL community debates ALTER SYSTEM (5 minute read)
The PostgreSQL community recently resolved the question of whether to merge a brief patch adding a new configuration parameter. This article tells the story of the decision process, which involved one of the longest-running development discussions in recent PostgreSQL history. The success of the effort was due to the persistence of a small number of developers who saw it through months of opposition and 'helpful' implementation suggestions.
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Measuring personal growth (6 minute read)
Measuring things can often help to make life better. This article presents three metrics for measuring personal growth: rate of change, time to solve problems, and number of future options. Rate of change looks at how long it takes to become a new person. Time to solve problems looks at what big problems have been solved and what needs to be solved. Number of future options looks at options gained and lost.
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Samsung shifts executives to six-day workweeks to ‘inject a sense of crisis' (1 minute read)
Samsung has introduced a company-wide six-day workweek policy for executives. The company had disappointing financial results last year and is now trying to tackle ongoing business uncertainty. The new workweek policy aims to inject a sense of crisis as part of an all-out effort to overcome its current challenges. Employees under the executive level are not expected to follow suit. Samsung is facing increased competition in the production of high-bandwidth memory chips alongside wider economic concerns like rising borrowing costs and oil prices and a rapid depreciation of Korean currency.
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The dangers of “decentralized” ID systems (14 minute read)
Decentralized ID systems cannot protect users against state surveillance and exclusion as seen in current government ID systems unless they allow users to participate without linking government ID, allow pseudonyms and throwaways, and keep regular login methods for people who prefer it.
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Looking for AI use cases (15 minute read)
New use cases will be things that are still automated one at a time, but that could not have been automated before, or that would have needed more software and capital to automate.
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