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How Apple Arcade Has Grown Quietly in the Shadow of Nintendo, Xbox, and PlayStation (12 minute read)
Three years since its launch, Apple Arcade continues to add new games and spotlight small developers who might otherwise have gone unnoticed. Apple Arcade features a large catalog, special in-app events, and a microtransaction-free approach to mobile gaming. Arcade users can expect more improvements to the service in 2023, with another potential big platform refresh and more console-style, graphics-intensive games. This article contains excerpts from an interview with Matt Fischer, Apple's vice president of the App Store, where he talks about how Apple sees the competition for its store, what customers have been asking for, and how he finds new games.
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Microsoft employee accidentally announces Notepad is getting tabs in Windows 11 (2 minute read)
A senior product manager at Microsoft posted a screenshot of a version of Notepad with tabs before deleting the tweet minutes later. The screenshot included a Microsoft internal warning not to discuss features or take screenshots, suggesting that the feature is still in early internal testing. Microsoft has previously tested tab features across all Windows 10 apps, but the project was canceled and never shipped to Windows 10 users. The leaked screenshot is available in the article.
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Science & Futuristic Technology
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A startup says it’s begun releasing particles into the atmosphere, in an effort to tweak the climate (7 minute read)
A startup called Make Sunsets has launched weather balloons in Mexico that release sulfur particles into the stratosphere to reflect more sunlight back into space. While the technique could theoretically ease global warming, it also has unknown, potentially dangerous side effects. The company is already attempting to sell 'cooling credits' for future flights. Luke Iseman, CEO of Make Sunsets, acknowledges that the effort is in part designed to stir up controversy to drive public debate and push forward the field of geoengineering science.
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Neuroscientists have created a mood decoder that can measure depression (8 minute read)
Researchers have developed a mood decoder that can work out how someone is feeling by looking at brain activity. The device measures how severe a person's depression is to help doctors determine where to place electrodes for deep brain stimulation (DBS) treatment. It has been used in several patients, but the scientists don't plan to carry out the procedure more widely as it is invasive, impractical, and expensive. The scientists hope to find trends within their small study in order to develop a generalizable treatment.
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Programming, Design & Data Science
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Clipboard (GitHub Repo)
Clipboard allows users to cut, copy, and paste anything anywhere from the terminal. It works straight out-of-the-box with zero dependencies on Windows, Linux, Android, macOS, and many other operating systems. Clipboard supports English, Spanish, Portuguese, and Turkish locales. An example screenshot is available.
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General guidance when working as a cloud engineer (4 minute read)
This article contains a list of lessons that were learned through experience as a cloud engineer. The list is divided into tech-related and human-related lessons. The tech-related lessons include using git as the only source of truth, reading and understanding docs before jumping into new technologies, and only using microservices to perform a single task. The Human-related lessons include learning to acknowledge gaps in knowledge, asking for help, and keeping perspective when bad things happen.
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Experts debate the risks of made-to-order DNA (15 minute read)
There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of companies nowadays selling DNA at increasingly low prices. The genetic material necessary to begin constructing an influenza virus costs less than $1,500. New technologies promise to make synthetic DNA even more widely available. There has always been the risk that someone may use these services to cause harm. There are few regulations in the industry. While the US government has released guidelines to increase security, companies are free to ignore them.
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What true thing do you believe that few people agree with you on? (Twitter Thread)
In this Twitter thread, Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI) asks his followers what true things they believe in that few people agree with. Altman's response was that technological progress is the only thing that delivers real, sustainable economic growth and the absolute equivalence of Brahman and Atman. Other responses include the theory that we live in a simulation, that ideas and technologies take off based on how well they are distributed and communicated and not how good the idea or tech is, and that major platforms take user privacy more seriously than most people think.
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Task (GitHub Repo)
Task is a task runner and build tool that aims to be simple and easy to use.
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HelloSilicon (GitHub Repo)
HelloSilicon is an introduction to assembly on Apple Silicon Macs that adjusts code from the book 'Programming with 64-Bit ARM Assembly Language' for Apple's ARM64 line of computers.
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PaLM + RLHF - Pytorch (GitHub Repo)
This repository contains an implementation of Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) that is basically ChatGPT on top of the PaLM architecture.
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Yesterday, I made a mistake and accidentally sent the crypto newsletter to this email list, sorry for the confusion and if you did not subscribe to the crypto newsletter you will not receive it again. Happy holidays!
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Dan
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