While SpaceX's Starlink system for cell phones is still in its testing
phase, the technology is already good enough to power a video call

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TLDR

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TLDR 2024-05-22

ZONING OUT IN FRONT OF YOUR LAPTOP? THE REASON MIGHT NOT BE WHAT YOU
EXPECT (SPONSOR) [4]

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BIG TECH & STARTUPS

SPACEX DEMOS CELLULAR STARLINK TECH POWERING VIDEO CALL BETWEEN
PHONES (2 MINUTE READ) [7]

While SpaceX's Starlink system for cell phones is still in its
testing phase, the technology is already good enough to power a video
call. SpaceX recently posted a video that showed a video call being
completed through Starlink Direct to Cell satellites from unmodified
mobile phones. The company has increased the number of cellular
Starlink satellites from six to 38. Starlink tech can deliver download
speeds as high as 17Mbps to unmodified Android phones.

GOOGLE'S AI SEARCH RESULTS ARE ALREADY GETTING ADS (1 MINUTE READ)
[8]

Google will soon start testing search and shopping ads within AI
Overviews for users in the US. The company says it will display ads in
AI Overviews when they're relevant to both the query and the
information in the AI Overview. Advertisers already running certain
campaigns through Google will automatically become eligible to appear
in AI Overviews. It is unclear when exactly the change will roll out.

¨

SCIENCE & FUTURISTIC TECHNOLOGY

SURVIVING REENTRY IS THE KEY GOAL FOR SPACEX'S FOURTH STARSHIP TEST
FLIGHT (6 MINUTE READ) [9]

The focus for the next Starship mission will be to control the
reentry of the rocket's Super Heavy booster and Starship upper stage -
both vehicles broke apart during their descent on the last flight. The
company aims to make the Super Heavy booster make a controlled
pinpoint splash down in the Gulf of Mexico as the Starship upper stage
attempts to survive its reentry back into Earth's atmosphere. The test
will be a repeat of the previous test without the propellant transfer,
without the Pez door open, and without the other items that SpaceX was
working to demonstrate. NASA's main interest in the test will be
seeing that SpaceX replicates the good engine performance it
demonstrated on the last two flights. SpaceX is not planning to
attempt a Raptor engine restart during the test.

NON-INVASIVE ZAPS TO THE SPINAL CORD CAN TREAT PARALYSISÄBUT NO ONE
KNOWS WHY (5 MINUTE READ) [10]

Data from a small clinical trial shows that a zap of electricity from well-placed electrodes on the back of the tech can help patients with tetraplegia regain modest yet potentially life-changing functioning
off their hands and arms. The non-invasive procedure offers an
accessible and more affordable means for those living with paralysis
to regain some meaningful function. The therapy's potential remains
limited as it is not yet fully understood why it works. A startup
working to make the therapy commercially available has submitted a
device to the Food and Drug Administration for review.

¨

PROGRAMMING, DESIGN & DATA SCIENCE

STRIPE'S MONOREPO DEVELOPER ENVIRONMENT (22 MINUTE READ) [11]

Stripe's codebase is mostly written in Ruby and lives in a single
large monorepo. It supports a number of services that share code
extensively. The company's tooling was built and is maintained by a
succession of teams and individuals, with the needs of the environment
changing as the team and codebase grew and evolved. This article
discusses the features of Stripe's developer environment and explains
the reasoning behind the choices made during its development.
Maintaining developer productivity as an engineering organization
grows is difficult - it is almost inevitable that per-engineer
productivity drops as companies and codebases grow.

INTRODUCING GITHUB COPILOT EXTENSIONS: UNLOCKING UNLIMITED
POSSIBILITIES WITH OUR ECOSYSTEM OF PARTNERS (6 MINUTE READ) [12]

GitHub Copilot Extensions enables developers to build and deploy to
the cloud in their natural language with their preferred tools and
services without leaving the IDE or GitHub.com. It helps developers
stay in the flow longer, uplevel their skills, and innovate faster.
Extensions can be found on the GitHub Marketplace. Organizations can
create private Copilot Extensions for their homegrown developer
tooling.

¨

MISCELLANEOUS

BUILDING AN AI GAME STUDIO: WHAT WE'VE LEARNED SO FAR (12 MINUTE
READ) [13]

Braindump allows developers to build top-down/2.5D games or
interactive worlds by simply typing prompts. It generates 3D models,
game data, and scripts to make prompts come to life. This article
shares learnings from Braindump's development. Challenges in its
development include designing a UX for prompting and a game API for
large language models. The game API has opened up interesting UX flows
like generated macros. While Braindump is pretty good at executing
commands, its team wants to expand it to handle more vague and bigger
tasks. Braindump will open up for alpha testing in the coming weeks.

NEW ANTHROPIC RESEARCH SHEDS LIGHT ON AI'S 'BLACK BOX' (3 MINUTE
READ) [14]

Anthropic recently published a public research paper explaining why
its AI chatbot chooses to generate content about certain subjects over
others. Its researchers deciphered what parts of the chatbot's neural
network mapped to specific concepts using a process known as
'dictionary learning'. The research showed how neurons associated with
a topic fired together when the model was thinking about something
associated with the topic - similar sets of neurons firing can evoke
adjacent subjects. A link to the paper is available at the end of the
article.

¨

QUICK LINKS

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of smart tech-savvy professionals like yourself, find out more here
[15]!

COMCAST'S STREAMING BUNDLE IS $15/MONTH FOR NETFLIX, PEACOCK, APPLE
TV+, AND ADS (1 MINUTE READ) [16]

The StreamSaver bundle, which cuts more than 30 percent off the
separate price of certain tiers of each service, will be rolled out on
May 29 in the US.

AMBER (GITHUB REPO) [17]

Amber is a high-level programming language that makes it easy to
create shell scripts.

CITY IN A BOTTLE - A 256 BYTE RAYCASTING SYSTEM (15 MINUTE READ)
[18]

This post shares how to make a tiny raycasting engine and city
generator that fits in a standalone 256 byte HTML file.

UI DENSITY (20 MINUTE READ) [19]

Interfaces are becoming less dense - this article suggests how we
might regain density.

THE FUTURE OF FOUNDATION MODELS IS CLOSED-SOURCE (16 MINUTE READ)
[20]

Open-source model providers will lose the capital expenditure war as open-source ROI continues to decline.

THE 84-YEAR-OLD MAN WHO SAVED NVIDIA (11 MINUTE READ) [21]

Shoichiro Irimajiri, who was chairman and CEO of Sega, led Sega to
invest $5 million into Nvidia, which the GPU manufacturer desperately
needed - Sega later sold its Nvidia stock for about $15 million.

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Dan Ni & Stephen Flanders

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[8] https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/21/24161724/google-ai-search-results-ads-test?utm_source=tldrnewsletter
[9] https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/05/surviving-reentry-is-the-key-goal-for-spacexs-fourth-starship-test-flight/?utm_source=tldrnewsletter
[10] https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/05/non-invasive-zaps-to-the-spinal-cord-can-treat-paralysis-but-no-one-knows-why/?utm_source=tldrnewsletter
[11] https://blog.nelhage.com/post/stripe-dev-environment/?utm_source=tldrnewsletter
[12] https://github.blog/2024-05-21-introducing-github-copilot-extensions/?utm_source=tldrnewsletter
[13] https://braindump.me/blog-posts/building-an-ai-game-studio?utm_source=tldrnewsletter
[14] https://gizmodo.com/new-anthropic-research-sheds-light-on-ais-black-box-1851491333?utm_source=tldrnewsletter
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[19] https://matthewstrom.com/writing/ui-density/?utm_source=tldrnewsletter [20] https://blog.johnluttig.com/p/the-future-of-foundation-models-is?utm_source=tldrnewsletter
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