TLDR 2024-03-26

Tesla requires FSD demo 🚗, Adam Neuman's WeWork bid 💰, problems with CSVs 👨‍💻

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Big Tech & Startups

Elon Musk requires ‘FSD’ demo for every prospective Tesla buyer in North America (2 minute read)

Tesla employees are now required to install and show customers how to use the latest version of the company's Full Self-Driving (FSD) premium driver assistance system before completing a vehicle delivery in North America. All Tesla vehicles have a standard driver assistance system called Autopilot. The FSD option costs $199 per month for most customers. Drivers must remain attentive to the road and ready to steer or brake at any time when using FSD.

Adam Neumann makes a $500 million bid for WeWork that could hit $900 million if financing and diligence firm up (2 minute read)

Adam Neumann, former WeWork CEO, has submitted an unsolicited bid in excess of $500 million to acquire WeWork out of bankruptcy. The bid could potentially go up to $900 million pending due diligence. It is unclear how Neumann will finance the offer. The bid may make WeWork's bankruptcy proceedings more complex. The company is seeking to walk away from some of its longer-term commitments in less lucrative markets, but some of its lessors are fighting these efforts.
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Science & Futuristic Technology

As AI booms, land near nuclear power plants becomes hot real estate (3 minute read)

Land near power plants is set to become a hot commodity due to AI. Several data center operators, including AWS and Microsoft, have explored nuclear-powered options for their operations. While most projects are looking to build on the land surrounding nuclear plants, some projects, like Microsoft's, are exploring the idea of installing tiny modular plants to power existing data centers. While small modular reactors are not yet ready for production, there are still more than 400 reactors around the globe to collocate with.

Inkjets Are for More Than Just Printing (13 minute read)

Inkjet technology has found a host of applications beyond putting dots on paper. It can now be used to make DNA microarrays for genomics, create electrical traces for printed circuit boards, and build 3D-printed structures. The technology could eventually also be used for personalized medicine and the development of advanced batteries. This article looks at the history of the technology, how it developed, as well as what the future holds for inkjet systems.
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Programming, Design & Data Science

The best engineering interview question I’ve ever gotten (12 minute read)

This blog post discusses a programming challenge from a software engineering interview. memcached, an in-memory key-value store, provides a built-in way to atomically add k to a number, but it doesn’t provide other arithmetic operations - there is no 'atomic multiply by k' operation. The challenge required interviewees to add a `mult` command to memcached. The challenge is well calibrated for interviews as there is only one correct answer and it is also a good representation of what most real-world programming is like.

Friends don't let friends export to CSV (10 minute read)

CSV is common in the data science space as it is human-readable, less verbose than options like JSON and XML, and super-easy to produce from almost any tool. However, the format is usually underspecified and CSV files have terrible compression and performance. There are many file formats more suitable for working with tabular data. This post looks at one of them, Apache Parquet, and shows how it is better in both compression and performance with examples.
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Miscellaneous

United States v. Apple (29 minute read)

The US vs Apple case will take years to conclude. Apple's success is built upon integration - its hardware, software, services, and entire ecosystem of products work together to create an experience. Developers who want to enter the iOS ecosystem have to go through the App Store and abide by its rules and restrictions. This article looks at the facts of the case against Apple, which directly attacks Apple's core differentiation: its deep integrations across its devices.

101 things I would tell myself from 10 years ago (10 minute read)

This blog post, written by a former software engineer with experience writing real-time financial systems, contains advice that they needed to hear back during their freshman year of college. The advice is highly personalized to the author. While some of it may be actively bad for some readers, the rest can be helpful for life in general.
Quick Links

Federation is the future of social media, says Bluesky CEO Jay Graber (76 minute read)

This interview with Bluesky CEO Jay Graber covers Bluesky's approach to federation, the growth of the Bluesky app, and the standards and protocols at the heart of the decentralization movement.

Everyone wants the latest chips. That’s causing a huge headache for the world’s biggest supplier (7 minute read)

The soaring demand for chips has caused a shortage of specialist workers in the semiconductor industry, delaying production.

Inclusive Sans (3 minute read)

Inclusive Sans is a text font that incorporates key features that make it highly legible in all uses.

Two open source projects with great documentation (9 minute read)

esbuild and Redis are two examples of codebases with exceptional documentation - good documentation is necessary, especially if other people will see or contribute to the codebase.

Sora: First Impressions (5 minute read)

This page contains examples of artists' work with Sora, OpenAI's new video generation AI model, along with their thoughts on how they see Sora fitting into their workflows and businesses.

Nvidia’s AI chip dominance is being targeted by Google, Intel, and Arm (2 minute read)

The Unified Acceleration (UXL) Foundation, a group formed by Intel, Google, Arm, Qualcomm, Samsung, and other tech companies, is developing open-source software to prevent AI developers from being locked into Nvidia's proprietary technology.
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