IT News

Create a Custom UX/UI Design Portfolio in Hours (Website) This pre-built Framer component library has over 90 fully customizable components that provide everything you need to create your portfolio quickly and easily. more→ https://www.profolio.design/

Big Tech & Startups WhatsApp on Windows 11 gets a new adaptive UI, multi-window, and navigation menu (1 minute read) WhatsApp for Windows 11 has received a significant update that introduces an adaptive UI that optimizes screen space, multi-window support akin to Telegram, and a new hamburger menu for streamlined navigation. The adaptive interface now prioritizes chat readability by separating the contacts list from the chat window. The multi-window feature allows users to open chats in separate windows, enhancing multitasking. The new menu potentially sets the stage for Meta AI integration, streamlining access to features like chats, statuses, and settings. more→ https://www.windowslatest.com/2024/05/04/whatsapp-on-windows-11-gets-a-new-adaptive-ui-multi-window-and-navigation-menu/ Tiger Woods is ready to ruin his new logo design (1 minute read) In a recent press tour for his brand Sun Day Red, Tiger Woods expressed his intention to 'ruin' the logo, which pays homage to his name and achievements, including his fifteen major championship wins. Despite the strong language, Woods sees this as an opportunity for the logo's evolution, hinting at potential modifications with future victories. His departure from Nike and the launch of his independent brand signal a new era for Woods, where he takes control of his branding and image. more→ https://www.creativebloq.com/news/tiger-woods-wants-to-ruin-logo Artists Accuse Google of “Massive Copyright Infringement” with Imagen AI (1 minute read) Several artists are suing Google for its Imagen AI image generators, which they claim were trained on their work without their permission. According to the lawsuit, Google has committed "massive copyright infringement" by using the open-source corpus LAION-400M to train Imagen. The artists have asked for the destruction of all copies of their work and compensation for legal costs. more→ https://www.creativebloq.com/news/artists-sue-google-imagen-ai-image-generator Science & Futuristic Technology 3D Illustrations Enhance Twitch App on Apple Store (2 minute read) Leo Natsume's collaboration with Apple brings vibrant 3D illustrations to the App Store's Twitch page, merging digital artistry and interactive design. With meticulous detail and adept 3D composition, Natsume's creations transcend mere art, becoming immersive storytelling tools. Set within a gamified digital realm, these illustrations elevate user interaction, enriching understanding and engagement with the app. more→ https://abduzeedo.com/3d-illustrations-enhance-twitch-app-apple-store The Anatomy of a Component Sprint (9 minute read) The Washington Post team created its design system in 2019 and has been improving it ever since. Through years of refinement, the organization developed component sprints that considered design and engineering needs. This article describes how the team creates a new component from scratch, ensuring balanced and democratic input. more→ https://www.figma.com/blog/the-anatomy-of-a-component-sprint/ Is ⌘ + C the new design process? (9 minute read) Designers often preach passion and craft, not profit. They started this journey for the love of art - to create beautiful things and make products and services people would use and love. It's up to them to change how design is perceived. Designers need to articulate and evangelize the value of design and its impact on business. more→ https://uxdesign.cc/is-c-the-new-design-process-e6fc11394a6b Programming, Design & Data Science Tailwind CSS Color Generator (Website) This color generator uses Tailwind's approach to create a custom color scale based on a single hex code or HSL values. more→ https://uicolors.app/create The World's Largest Push Notifications Library (Website) Pushkeen is a curated collection of the latest push notification patterns from mobile apps, reflecting the best in growth and user re-activation. more→ https://pushkeen.ai/

Miscellaneous AI engineers report burnout and rushed rollouts as 'rat race' to stay competitive hits tech industry (15 minute read) Accelerated timelines, competition, and a lack of concern from superiors about real-world effects are themes common across a broad spectrum of the biggest effect companies. Engineers are increasingly saying that a large part of their jobs is focused on satisfying investors and not falling behind in the competition rather than solving actual problems for users. Some have been switched over to AI teams to help support fast-paced rollouts without adequate training, even if they are new to the technology. The immense pressure, long hours, and constantly changing mandates are causing burnout. more→ https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/03/ai-engineers-face-burnout-as-rat-race-to-stay-competitive-hits-tech.html The business of wallets (33 minute read) This article discusses digital wallets - electronic systems that hold money. It covers the regulations surrounding them, their history, different types of wallet products, and more. The article details the various revenue streams that wallets use to make wallet providers money. more→ https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/the-business-of-wallets/

Big Tech & Startups Siri for iOS 18 to gain massive AI upgrade via Apple's Ajax LLM (7 minute read) Safari, Spotlight Search, and Siri will gain significant AI-related enhancements with the release of iOS 18. One of the key features in the works for Safari is text summarization. Siri will also receive a similar update, allowing it to generate responses to relay the content of messages in a simplified way. Apple's AI model will generate basic responses entirely on-device. More advanced replies or text summaries will need server-side processing. more→ https://appleinsider.com/articles/24/05/03/siri-for-ios-18-to-gain-massive-ai-upgrade-via-apples-ajax-llm Read the wild email Tesla is sending to suppliers amid Supercharger chaos (8 minute read) Tesla sent out an email to suppliers showing how chaotic the decision-making leading up to the company firing its entire Supercharging team was. The email shows there was a lack of structure and consideration in the decision to fire the team. It mentions that suppliers are expected to be paid, suggesting that Tesla is behind on its payment obligations. The email asks suppliers to continue construction on active projects but to hold on breaking ground or doing pre-construction site walks. A copy of the email is available in the article. more→ https://electrek.co/2024/05/03/read-the-wild-email-tesla-is-sending-to-suppliers-amid-supercharger-chaos/ Science & Futuristic Technology The teens making friends with AI chatbots (12 minute read) Many young users have discovered AI companions. While chatbots have been described as helpful, entertaining, and supportive, some users describe feeling addicted to them. This is raising questions about how AI is impacting young people and their social development and what would happen if society becomes more emotionally reliant on bots. more→ https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/4/24144763/ai-chatbot-friends-character-teens World's 1st 'tooth regrowth medicine' to be tested in Japan from Sept. 2024 (2 minute read) Trials of the world's first tooth regrowth medicine are set to commence in September at Kyoto University Hospital. The researchers behind the medicine hope to start selling it in 2030. There have been no major side effects confirmed in animal studies to date. The medicine deactivates a protein called USAG-1, which inhibits the growth of teeth. The medicine is currently targeted at patients congenitally lacking a full set of teeth. more→ https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20240503/p2a/00m/0sc/012000c Programming, Design & Data Science Figma's journey to TypeScript (20 minute read) This article discusses how the team at Figma automatically migrated Skew, a custom programming language, to TypeScript without disrupting a single day of development. Figma created Skew to squeeze additional performance out of its playback engine. Using Skew made it difficult to onramp new hires. Skew couldn't easily integrate with the rest of Figma's code base and it was missing a developer ecosystem outside of Figma. Using TypeScript enabled streamlined integration, modern JavaScript features, and seamless onboarding. more→ https://www.figma.com/blog/figmas-journey-to-typescript-compiling-away-our-custom-programming-language/ How I got promoted as a staff software engineer (6 minute read) This article discusses how a senior frontend engineer and team lead decided to take on more responsibilities at their existing company and worked to get promoted as a staff software engineer. Before asking for more responsibilities, they demonstrated to their CTO that they were excelling at their current role. They then asked for more responsibility and then doubled down on their efforts and shipped more things. The engineer was eventually able to demonstrate undeniably that they were capable of working at a higher level than their current role and pushed for a promotion, which was granted. more→ https://blog.vramana.com/posts/promotion-as-staff-engineer/

📱Big Tech & Startups Fitbit Ace LTE: Hands On With Google's First Smartwatch for Kids (4 minute read) The Fitbit Ace LTE, designed for kids between the ages of 7 and 11, focuses on gaming and safety. At $229, the smartwatch can track a child's activity as they play throughout the day. With 16 hours of battery life, the Ace LTE is resistant to drops and can be submerged in up to 164 feet of water. It is available now for preorder and will be in stores on June 5. https://www.pcmag.com/news/fitbit-ace-lte-hands-on-with-googles-first-smartwatch-for-kids Apple's AI plans involves 'black box' for cloud data (3 minute read) Apple is expected to announce AI implementations into iOS 18 and its other operating systems at WWDC. The company intends to process data from AI applications inside a virtual black box that will use only Apple's hardware to perform AI processing in the cloud. The approach will prevent both Apple and potential hackers from being able to see app data. Using a cloud approach allows Apple to reduce the hardware requirements of its products. https://appleinsider.com/articles/24/05/29/apples-ai-plans-involves-black-box-for-cloud-data 🚀Science & Futuristic Technology Neuralink wants 3 more quadriplegic patients for its brain control interface trial (2 minute read) Neuralink is recruiting another three subjects for its brain implant study. It is seeking subjects aged 22 to 75 with severe quadriplegia due to spinal cord injury or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis for at least one year without improvement. Healthy people, people with morbid obesity, or people with an active device already implanted are disqualified from the study. Participants will be monitored for adverse events for 72 months following the implantation procedure. https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/29/neuralink_to_add_more_subjects_to_trial New BYD Hybrid Can Drive Non-Stop for More Than 2,000 Kilometers (3 minute read) BYD has unveiled a new hybrid powertrain that can travel for more than 2,000 kilometers without recharging or refueling. Vehicles with the technology can travel from New York to Miami on a single charge and a full tank of gas. The upgraded tech will be launched in the Qin L and the Seal 06. Both mid-sized sedans, which were unveiled at the Beijing Auto Show in April, cost under $13,800. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-28/byd-shows-off-new-hybrid-powertrain-capable-of-ultra-long-drive 💻Programming, Design & Data Science Three Laws of Software Complexity (or: why software engineers are always grumpy) (3 minute read) Software engineers are destined to wallow in unnecessary complexity due to three fundamental laws: a well-designed system will degrade into a badly designed system over time, complexity is a moat filled by leaky abstractions, and there is no fundamental upper limit on software complexity. Building a new system from scratch without succumbing to these laws is a lot harder than it sounds. Engineers who work on badly designed systems suffer more as badly designed systems have unbound complexity. https://maheshba.bitbucket.io/blog/2024/05/08/2024-ThreeLaws.html What We Learned from a Year of Building with LLMs (Part I) (45 minute read) While the barrier to entry for building AI products has lowered, creating something effective beyond a demo remains a deceptively difficult endeavor. This series of articles identifies crucial lessons and methodologies for developing products based on large language models gathered by people who have been building real-world applications on top of ML systems over the past year. It is organized into three sections: tactical, operational, and strategic. This first part dives into the tactical nuts and bolts of working with large language models and shares best practices and common pitfalls around prompting, setting up retrieval-augmented generation, applying flow engineering, and evaluation and monitoring. https://www.oreilly.com/radar/what-we-learned-from-a-year-of-building-with-llms-part-i

Miscellaneous AI engineers report burnout and rushed rollouts as 'rat race' to stay competitive hits tech industry (15 minute read) Accelerated timelines, competition, and a lack of concern from superiors about real-world effects are themes common across a broad spectrum of the biggest effect companies. Engineers are increasingly saying that a large part of their jobs is focused on satisfying investors and not falling behind in the competition rather than solving actual problems for users. Some have been switched over to AI teams to help support fast-paced rollouts without adequate training, even if they are new to the technology. The immense pressure, long hours, and constantly changing mandates are causing burnout. more→ https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/03/ai-engineers-face-burnout-as-rat-race-to-stay-competitive-hits-tech.html The business of wallets (33 minute read) This article discusses digital wallets - electronic systems that hold money. It covers the regulations surrounding them, their history, different types of wallet products, and more. The article details the various revenue streams that wallets use to make wallet providers money. more→ https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/the-business-of-wallets/

Big Tech & Startups Siri for iOS 18 to gain massive AI upgrade via Apple's Ajax LLM (7 minute read) Safari, Spotlight Search, and Siri will gain significant AI-related enhancements with the release of iOS 18. One of the key features in the works for Safari is text summarization. Siri will also receive a similar update, allowing it to generate responses to relay the content of messages in a simplified way. Apple's AI model will generate basic responses entirely on-device. More advanced replies or text summaries will need server-side processing. more→ https://appleinsider.com/articles/24/05/03/siri-for-ios-18-to-gain-massive-ai-upgrade-via-apples-ajax-llm Read the wild email Tesla is sending to suppliers amid Supercharger chaos (8 minute read) Tesla sent out an email to suppliers showing how chaotic the decision-making leading up to the company firing its entire Supercharging team was. The email shows there was a lack of structure and consideration in the decision to fire the team. It mentions that suppliers are expected to be paid, suggesting that Tesla is behind on its payment obligations. The email asks suppliers to continue construction on active projects but to hold on breaking ground or doing pre-construction site walks. A copy of the email is available in the article. more→ https://electrek.co/2024/05/03/read-the-wild-email-tesla-is-sending-to-suppliers-amid-supercharger-chaos/ Science & Futuristic Technology The teens making friends with AI chatbots (12 minute read) Many young users have discovered AI companions. While chatbots have been described as helpful, entertaining, and supportive, some users describe feeling addicted to them. This is raising questions about how AI is impacting young people and their social development and what would happen if society becomes more emotionally reliant on bots. more→ https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/4/24144763/ai-chatbot-friends-character-teens World's 1st 'tooth regrowth medicine' to be tested in Japan from Sept. 2024 (2 minute read) Trials of the world's first tooth regrowth medicine are set to commence in September at Kyoto University Hospital. The researchers behind the medicine hope to start selling it in 2030. There have been no major side effects confirmed in animal studies to date. The medicine deactivates a protein called USAG-1, which inhibits the growth of teeth. The medicine is currently targeted at patients congenitally lacking a full set of teeth. more→ https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20240503/p2a/00m/0sc/012000c Programming, Design & Data Science Figma's journey to TypeScript (20 minute read) This article discusses how the team at Figma automatically migrated Skew, a custom programming language, to TypeScript without disrupting a single day of development. Figma created Skew to squeeze additional performance out of its playback engine. Using Skew made it difficult to onramp new hires. Skew couldn't easily integrate with the rest of Figma's code base and it was missing a developer ecosystem outside of Figma. Using TypeScript enabled streamlined integration, modern JavaScript features, and seamless onboarding. more→ https://www.figma.com/blog/figmas-journey-to-typescript-compiling-away-our-custom-programming-language/ How I got promoted as a staff software engineer (6 minute read) This article discusses how a senior frontend engineer and team lead decided to take on more responsibilities at their existing company and worked to get promoted as a staff software engineer. Before asking for more responsibilities, they demonstrated to their CTO that they were excelling at their current role. They then asked for more responsibility and then doubled down on their efforts and shipped more things. The engineer was eventually able to demonstrate undeniably that they were capable of working at a higher level than their current role and pushed for a promotion, which was granted. more→ https://blog.vramana.com/posts/promotion-as-staff-engineer/

📱Big Tech & Startups Game emulators arrive in App Store following rule changes (2 minute read) A recent change to Apple's App Store Review Guidelines means that a rule that effectively banned the submission of console and classic game emulators for iOS and iPadOS has been reversed. The first wave of game emulators have now made their way to the App Store. Emu64 XL is a Commodore 64 emulator and iGBA is a Gameboy Advance and Gameboy Color emulator. Both are free to download without any in-app purchases. Under Apple's rule changes, emulators still have to filter objectionable content, follow all privacy guidelines, and not share data or privacy permissions with other software, but it is unclear how some of the rules will be enforced. more→ https://appleinsider.com/articles/24/04/14/game-emulators-arrive-in-app-store-following-rule-changes Tesla slashes Full Self-Driving monthly subscription to $99 (2 minute read) Tesla's Full Self-Driving (FSD) is now $99 a month. The company is currently deploying FSD v12, a new version fully powered by AI that is supposed to be a significant advancement compared to previous versions. Tesla dealers were recently mandated to provide FSD demo drives for all new deliveries. Existing owners in North America are able to receive a one-month free trial of the system. more→ https://electrek.co/2024/04/12/tesla-slashes-full-self-driving-monthly-subscription/ 🚀Science & Futuristic Technology Startup Looking to Launch Stadium-Sized Space Habitats on SpaceX (3 minute read) Max Space wants to launch expandable stadium-sized habitats into Earth's orbit by the end of the decade. It has designed habitats that minimize the mass and volume of the payload required to be launched into space, providing people with room to live both in space and on other planets or moons. The company plans to launch the scalable habitats on SpaceX's rockets in 2027 and 2030. It will launch its first off-Earth test in two years. more→ https://futurism.com/startup-stadium-sized-space-habitats-spacex How new tech is making geothermal energy a more versatile power source (8 minute read) Project Red is a facility that uses geothermal energy to power a local power grid in Nevada. The facility pumps water thousands of feet into the ground, where it is heated by the Earth's super-hot core, and then sucks the heated water back up to power generators. It leverages techniques from the oil and gas industry to improve reliability and cost-efficiency and make geothermal power possible in many more locations. This article looks at how the facility works and the field of geothermal energy in general, including other projects and attempts at building the technology. more→ https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/04/how-new-tech-is-making-geothermal-energy-a-more-versatile-power-source/ 💻Programming, Design & Data Science Lessons after a half-billion GPT tokens (11 minute read) This article contains seven lessons learned by Truss, a startup that released a few LLM-heavy features over the last six months, that cover how to improve prompting, tooling and optimal usage, GPT's limitations, and more. The startup exclusively deals with text using a combination of GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. While GPT is useful, the technology is still in its early days and probably won't result in everyone losing their jobs. It mostly lowers the barrier of entry to ML/AI that was previously only available to Google. more→ https://kenkantzer.com/lessons-after-a-half-billion-gpt-tokens/ PostgreSQL Index Advisor (GitHub Repo) PostgreSQL Index Advisor is a PostgreSQL extension for recommending indexes to improve query performance. It supports generic parameters and materialized views and can identify tables and columns obfuscated by views. more→ https://github.com/supabase/index_advisor

A few thoughts on the DOJ’s antitrust case against Apple (7 minute read) None of the things mentioned in the DOJ's case against Apple should be a surprise to anyone who has been following in the Apple space for years. People have been hoping the company would change or tweak its ways in many of these areas. While Apple's actions may be disagreeable, they may not be illegal. The DOJ is fighting an uphill battle with its case, but it will hopefully apply some pressure on Apple to loosen its grip on some things. more→ https://birchtree.me/blog/a-few-thoughts-on-the-dojs-antitrust-case-against-apple/ Google says Apple is bringing RCS to the iPhone in ‘fall of 2024’ (2 minute read) The Android website has added a new landing page for Google Messages which notes that RCS is coming to the iPhone in the fall of 2024. It is not clear whether RCS will arrive with the initial release of iOS 18 or in an update in the last few months of the year. The updated landing page also notes that animated emoji reactions are coming soon to RCS. Screenshots of the landing page are available in the article. more→ https://9to5google.com/2024/03/28/iphone-rcs-fall-2024/

📱Big Tech & Startups Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years for FTX fraud (4 minute read) FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried has been sentenced to a total of 300 months in prison for seven counts of conspiracy and fraud charges. He has also been ordered to forfeit more than $11 billion, including property. The sentence is shorter than the 40 to 50 years requested by the prosecutors, but longer than the six and a half years his lawyers asked for and far less than the maximum of 110 years. Bankman-Fried has been residing in custody since August 2023, where he has been subjected to multiple extortion attempts. more→ https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/28/24112507/sam-bankman-fried-sentence-ftx-alameda Facebook let Netflix see user DMs, quit streaming to keep Netflix happy (2 minute read) Facebook Watch, announced in 2017, never really took off. Recently revealed documents show the company's plans for the platform and how it was confident in its ability to compete with Netflix. Mark Zuckerberg abruptly announced a change in strategy in May 2018, suddenly slashing the budget for the platform. He claimed the budget changes were based on his knowledge of the company's strategy and financial outlook. Months later, Facebook and Netflix announced a new data-sharing agreement that involved Netflix reaching $200 million in advertising spend by 2019. The companies also had a data-sharing agreement that may have allowed Netflix to access Facebook users' private messages. more→ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/03/netflix-ad-spend-led-to-facebook-dm-access-end-of-facebook-streaming-biz-lawsuit/ 🚀Science & Futuristic Technology How We’ll Reach a 1 Trillion Transistor GPU (7 minute read) Recent achievements in AI have been due to three factors: innovation in efficient machine-learning algorithms, the availability of massive amounts of data to train neural networks, and progress in energy-efficient computing through the advancement of semiconductor technology. The industry will need much more powerful devices to continue at its current pace. For the past 50 years, the industry has focused on shrinking the transistor, but now, there are many more possibilities. Future GPUs will not be restricted to the sizes and form factors of current devices - integrated AI systems will be composed of as many energy-efficient transistors as is practical. more→ https://spectrum.ieee.org/trillion-transistor-gpu Memories are made by breaking DNA — and fixing it (4 minute read) A study in mice shows that memories are formed from breaks in DNA. These breaks occur due to a rush of electrical activity and are repaired using an inflammatory response. The findings suggest a mechanism for faulty memory in people with neurodegenerative diseases. more→ https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00930-y 💻Programming, Design & Data Science Valkey: The Open Source Alternative to Redis Backed by AWS, Google, Oracle (5 minute read) Valkey is a high-performance data structure server that primarily serves key/value workloads. It is an open-source fork of the popular Redis data store. The project started as Redis Labs, the company behind the original Redis codebase, changed Redis to more restrictive licensing. The Valkey fork has assembled an impressive roster of maintainers and contributors and has wide-ranging industry support. more→ https://www.cyberkendra.com/2024/03/valkey-new-alternative-to-redis.html Spice (GitHub Repo) Spice is a runtime that makes querying data by SQL across one or more data sources simple and fast. It provides developers with a unified SQL query interface that can locally materialize, accelerate, and query data tables sourced from any database, data warehouse, or data lake. Spice makes it easy to build data-driven and data-intensive applications. It leverages industry-leading technologies like Apache DataFusion, Apache Arrow, Apache Arrow Flight, and DuckDB. more→ https://github.com/spiceai/spiceai 🎁Miscellaneous