# 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](https://platform.stability.ai/docs/api-reference#tag/Generate/paths/~1v2beta~1stable-image~1generate~1sd3/post), 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](https://epubs.siam.org/doi/10.1137/1.9781611977912.111)