Apr 17, 2024

• Amazon is filled with garbage e-books, this is how they get made

• The Mikkelsen twins have capitalized on the ebook publishing market by offering courses that teach how to produce and profit from low-quality, AI-assisted ebooks, exploiting Amazon's platform and its algorithmic vulnerabilities.

• A curious phenomenon called 'Etak'

• The Etak Navigator, launched in 1985, was the world's first practical vehicle navigation system, introducing revolutionary features like augmented dead reckoning and a moving map display.

• Loading a trillion rows of weather data into TimescaleDB

• The project aims to build a weather data warehouse using PostgreSQL and TimescaleDB to analyze historical weather data for signals of climate change, focusing on loading trillions of rows of data efficiently.

• We need to rewild the internet

• The internet's current state of monoculture and centralization mirrors the ecological disaster of 18th-century scientific forestry, leading to a fragile and extractive digital environment.

• Scammers are targeting teenage boys on social media and driving some to suicide

• Teen suicides linked to sextortion have prompted Meta and Snap to address the issue, following a pattern where scammers, posing as teenage girls, blackmail boys into sending money by threatening to release compromising photos.

• Embeddings are a good starting point for the AI curious app developer

• Vector embeddings transform complex human knowledge into numerical arrays, simplifying the integration of advanced search and recommendation features into applications by individual developers.

• Megalodon: Efficient LLM Pretraining and Inference with Unlimited Context Length

• Megalodon introduces a neural architecture for efficient sequence modeling with unlimited context length, outperforming traditional Transformers by addressing their quadratic complexity and weak length extrapolation issues.

• Ten years of improvements in PostgreSQL's optimizer

• PostgreSQL's optimizer has seen significant performance improvements over the last decade, with tail latency dropping by nearly half from version 8 to 16.

• Google DeepMind's Aloha Unleashed is pushing the boundaries of robot dexterity

• ALOHA Unleashed represents a significant leap in robotic dexterity, achieved through the integration of low-cost robots and advanced AI technologies.

• Ollama 0.1.32: WizardLM 2, Mixtral 8x22B, macOS CPU/GPU model split

• Ollama v0.1.32 introduces new models like WizardLM 2 and Snowflake Arctic Embed, enhancing performance in complex chat, multilingual, reasoning, and agent use cases.

• Humane AI – Pico Laser Projection – $230M AI Twist on an Old Scam (2023)

• Humane AI's approach combines outdated laser projection technology with AI hype, attempting to innovate on a concept that has previously failed, such as the projector phone, but without offering substantial improvements or addressing the inherent limitations of laser projection.

• Stable Diffusion 3 API Now Available

• Stable Diffusion 3 and its Turbo version are now accessible via the Stability AI Developer Platform API, boasting advancements in text-to-image generation that rival or surpass competitors like DALL-E 3 and Midjourney v6.

• MKBHDs for Everything

• Marques Brownlee (MKBHD) and Ben Thompson highlight the transformative power of individual creators in media, leveraging platforms like YouTube and subscription-based models to directly connect with and influence their audience.

• Raytracing on Meteor Lake's iGPU

• Meteor Lake's integrated GPU (iGPU) showcases Intel's commitment to enhancing mobile graphics, leveraging the Xe-LPG architecture to support hardware raytracing, a feature inherited from its Arc A770 counterpart.

• Solving the minimum cut problem for undirected graphs

• Google Research's Di Wang and team have developed a deterministic nearly-linear time algorithm for the min-cut problem in weighted graphs, marking a significant advancement in algorithmic graph theory. Read the paper