Weekly#508

  • Amazon’s hardware team is on pace to lose $10 billion this year
  • History of ARM part1part2
  • Thanksgiving 2022 online sales pip past forecasts at $5.3B, up 2.8% on last year, mobile accounted for 55% of all purchases
  • Consumer finance app Djamo eyes Francophone Africa expansion, backed by new $14M round
  • A 10-Minute Workout Can Do More Than You Think
  • Intel Officially Introduces Pay-As-You-Go Chip Licensing…Intel’s Xeon Sapphire Rapids CPUs to activate additional features on demand
  • “…Google is working on a secretive project that uses machine learning to train code to write, fix, and update itself..The project, which began life inside Alphabet’s X research unit and was codenamed Pitchfork, moved into Google’s Labs group this summer, according to people familiar with the matter….”
  • Cottingham: Europe’s biggest battery storage system switched on…The facility has the capacity to store up to 196 MWh of energy in a single cycle.
  • Microsoft says attackers are hacking energy grids by exploiting decades-old software
  • E-commerce advertising is driving much of Criteo’s growth, with the firm hoping to hit $1 billion in revenue from retail media by 2025.
  • Meituan’s Revenue Climbs 28% After Covid Drives Meal Delivery
  • OpenAI has built the best Minecraft-playing bot yet by making it watch 70,000 hours of video of people playing the popular computer game.
  • 3.2 billion gamers
  • “…Since 1959, more than 350 people have become NASA astronauts…It takes two years of training…For NASA’s 2021 class of astronauts, the space agency said it chose just 10 candidates from more than 12,000 applicants…a NASA astronaut, summed up what the agency was looking for in future spacefarers: “Be adaptable, trustworthy, tenacious, and detail-oriented…Astronauts endure grueling desert survival training in case of an emergency landing…In 1964, Apollo 11 astronauts traveled to Nevada to spend three days in the hot, dry desert and practice survival skills
  • Engineering Productivity: What Not to Do
  • Learning From Failure With Blameless Postmortem Culture, Google SRE Book chapter15
  • Google SRE Books
  • IBM has filed a lawsuit against Micro Focus, alleging the enterprise software company copied and reverse-engineered its CICS mainframe service to develop a rival product, the Micro Focus Enterprise Server
  • Windows Subsystem for Linux is now packaged as a Microsoft Store app
  • Turning Water Into $700 Million: A Day in the Desert With Liquid Death Founder Mike Cessario

Weekly#507

  • Spot AI raises $40M to build smarter CCTV security camera tech
  • Qualcomm debuts latest flagship Snapdragon chip and a new AI platform
  • “…An estimated $3.37 trillion worth, or 21% of all global trade, transited through the South China Sea in 2016, according to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development…”
  • “…Prediction is only useful if it’s going to change something that you do. You wouldn’t check your weather forecast app every day if it didn’t help inform your clothing or routine. Prediction has to inform a decision…”
  • AI Tools Directory
  • A Lab-Grown-Meat Startup Gets the FDA’s Stamp of Approval
  • AWS Opens New Region in Switzerland
  • Ford CEO: 40% Less Labor To Build Electric Vehicles
  • Apple’s iPhone 14 Satellite Emergency SOS Is Live (WSJ)
  • Study: AirPods Pro are this close to being full-fledged hearing aids
  • Netflix gives account holders the ability to kick freeloaders
  • 5 New CNCF Projects To Watch In 2023
  • Apple Wireless Direct Link (AWDL) Ad hoc Protocol
  • Classic HCI Demos
  • Activate 2023 Report
  • State of the OpenCloud 2022 Report
  • German Mobile Banking App Review
  • Layoff Tracker
  • Fast-Fashion Juggernaut Shein’s Sales Close In on Zara, H&M…The company’s gross merchandise value is projected to grow 50% to $30 billion in 2022…Earlier this year, Shein completed a fundraising round that valued it at $100 billion (WSJ)

Weekly#506

  • Twitter reactivated the ‘Official’ gray check for accounts that are actually verified
  • Amazon introduces ‘Sparrow’ robotic arm that can do repetitive warehouse tasks
  • Amazon’s ad revenue surpassed the money it makes from Prime, Prime Video, and its other audio and e-book subscriptions combined…Successful sellers have to spend anywhere between 10 percent and 20 percent of their sales on Amazon ads.
  • Two Weeks of Chaos: Inside Elon Musk’s Takeover of Twitter
  • SoftBank Vision Fund Loses $7.2 Billion on Tech Writedowns
  • Debezium Releases Version 2.0 of Its Change Data Capture Tooldetails
  • Starlink announces 1TB monthly cap, users who go over will get slower speeds
  • Spotify is the first to launch non-Google Android billing in the US
  • …The latest Drewry composite World Container Index — a key benchmark for container prices — has fallen again to $2,773 per 40-foot container. That’s 73% lower than the peak rate in September last year
  • …Today, Spotify has more than 80 million tracks available to users to stream. In its most recent earnings report, the company touted its 456 million active users with 195 million paid subscribers across 183 markets
  • Apple’s Web Search Technology Chief Returns to Google
  • How reliant are banks and insurers on cloud outsourcing? (2020)
  • Chris Rock is set to be the first to perform live on Netflix
  • Meet Pineapple, the platform aiming to reshape professional networking for Gen Z
  • SoftBank, NEC, Sony, Toyota + more team up for Rapidus, Japan’s bid for next-gen chip domination
  • GitHub teases new Copilot feature that lets developers code with their voice
  • Apple limits AirDrop ‘Everyone’ option to 10 minutes in China
  • Elon Musk details his vision for a Twitter payments system
  • Consumer trends in digital payments
  • 2012 to 2022: What a decade of insights has taught us
  • High-Tech Cars Are Killing the Auto Repair Shop
  • 17 DevOps Metrics You Should Be Tracking
  • Studio Ghibli is teaming up with Lucasfilm

Weekly#505

  • BoF Insights | Gen-Z and Fashion in the Age of Realism
  • Jony Ive on Life After Apple (WSJ)
  • Pantone wants $15/month for the privilege of using its colors in Photoshop
  • HBO series ‘The Last of Us’ premieres this January
  • Wharton, Berkeley, NYU Offering Online M.B.A.s for the First Time (WSJ)
  • US Banks Reported $1 Billion in 2021 Ransomware Payments
  • Geo-Distributed Microservices and Their Database: Fighting the High Latency
  • Ocado shares soar on new South Korea retail partnership (FT)
  • JP Morgan executes first DeFi trade on public blockchain
  • WhatsApp officially launches its new discussion group feature, Communities
  • Port internal development platform gives visibility into DevOps architecture
  • Goldman Sachs Embeds Software Developers Deeper Into the Business
  • “...Goldman also tries to empower its own technology teams by changing up the process of product development. Rather than be told to code a product by teams further up the chain, developers and engineers write together with business development teams what the company calls a working-back memo, in reference to a product development philosophy used by Mr. Argenti’s former employer,Amazon Inc…
  • The science of resting (well)
  • Musk orders Twitter to cut infrastructure costs by $1 billion
  • Rewind.ai