Sponsored By:

• Coder QA: Take $1 a month off your membership for a year, and contribute to our show directly! Promo Code: darthjarjar

Links:

• 💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike — Strike is a lightning-powered app that lets you quickly and cheaply grab sats in over 36 countries.
• 📻 Boost with Fountain.FM — Fountain 1.0 has a new UI, upgrades, and super simple Strike integration for easy Boosts.
• Building for our AI future — But ultimately we are a workplace and our policies and expectations are clear: this is a business, and not a place to act in a way that disrupts coworkers or makes them feel unsafe, to attempt to use the company as a personal platform, or to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics.
• Google, after protester firings, now looks just like every other company — Google's firing of 28 protesting employees Wednesday sends the clearest signal yet that the tech giant — whose founders pledged it was "not a conventional company" — has become just that.
• In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives: Levy, Steven: 9781416596585: Amazon.com: Books — Written with full cooperation from top management, including cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, this is the inside story behind Google, the most successful and most admired technology company of our time, told by one of our best technology writers.
• Meta Debuts Llama 3, Latest AI Model for Powering Chatbots — Llama 3, unveiled Thursday, is an upgrade from an AI model that Meta released last summer. Chief Product Officer Chris Cox said that model, Llama 2, has been downloaded 170 billion times. Llama 2 was billed as open source, though its license included some restrictions such as requiring companies with more than 700 million users to ask for permission to use it.
• Meta's Mark Zuckerberg says energy constraints are holding back AI data center buildout - DCD — "Now I think that's getting less, and you're seeing a bunch of companies thinking 'wow we should really just invest a lot of money in building out these things.' I think that will go [on] for some period of time."
• Private LLM: Secure Offline & Local AI Chatbot for iOS & macOS — Private LLM is a local AI chatbot for iOS and macOS that works offline
• Microsoft launches Phi-3, its smallest AI model yet - The Verge — Phi-3 learned from ‘bedtime stories’ created by other LLMs.
• Phi-3 Technical Report: A Highly Capable Language Model Locally on Your Phone
• Dylan Patel on X: — Synthetic data pipelines are massive improvements over internet data Flywheel only continues with big models too when these techniques are applied
• Aran Komatsuzaki on X: "A few caveats about Phi-3:" — Phi-3-medium performs well on TriviaQA but noticeably underperforms rel. to GPT-3.5. We can guess that Phi-3 recipe doesn't magically make it understand more random factoids. It's more focused on valuable knowledges (e.g. STEM), which makes sense.
• Meta Expands Its Mixed Reality Beyond the Quest Headsets - CNET — Meta opened the Quest Horizon OS to others, and now VR headsets from Asus, Lenovo and even an Xbox variant are on the way.
• A New Era for Mixed Reality | Meta Quest Blog | Meta Store

Sponsored By:

• Coder QA: Take $2 a month off for the lifetime of your membership and contribute to our show directly Promo Code: jarjar

Links:

• 💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike — Strike is a lightning-powered app that lets you quickly and cheaply grab sats in over 36 countries.
• 📻 Boost with Fountain.FM — Fountain 1.0 has a new UI, upgrades, and super simple Strike integration for easy Boosts.
• Piece of 5,800lb battery pallet tossed from NASA's ISS crashes through Florida home - and nearly kills homeowner's so — A piece of metal came crashing through a home in Florida that is believed to be from a 5,800-pound battery pallet discarded by the International Space Station (ISS).
• Amazon Ditches 'Just Walk Out' Checkouts at Its Grocery Stores — “Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts”
• FFmpeg on X — The xz fiasco has shown how a dependence on unpaid volunteers can cause major problems. Trillion dollar corporations expect free and urgent support from volunteers.
• Rust developers at Google twice as productive as C++ devs — Speaking at the Rust Nation UK Conference in London this week, Lars Bergstrom, director of engineering at Google, who works on Android Platform Tools & Libraries, described the web titan's experience migrating projects written in Go or C++ to the Rust programming language.
• Spatial Personas Make Apple Vision Pro a Less Isolating Experience — Up to five people can watch movies and TV shows, play AR games, and collaborate on work together even when they’re across the planet.
• Two Persona Video Demo on X — Here's a video of two Persona (plus the one looking at them) provided by Apple. This wasn't recorded from my demo yesterday. It's just a demo to show what spatial Persona on Apple Vision Pro looks like
• Tailscale happy hour in Raleigh — You are invited to join Tailscale for a happy hour event following DevOpsDays Raleigh. Enjoy drinks and light apps on us.

Sponsored By:

• Coder QA: Take $2 a month off for the lifetime of your membership and contribute to our show directly Promo Code: jarjar
• Trusteebook: TrusteeBook - a simple, easy-to-use workbook that helps you take control of your digital legacy. Get started today, and take $10 off. Promo Code: CODER

Links:

• 💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike — Strike is a lightning-powered app that lets you quickly and cheaply grab sats in over 36 countries.
• 📻 Boost with Fountain.FM — Fountain 1.0 has a new UI, upgrades, and super simple Strike integration for easy Boosts.
• Microsoft to share details on bringing Xbox games to PlayStation in mid-February — Microsoft has news to share about the future of Xbox in an event next week.
• Michael Dominick on X — The vital #VisionPro question: “what is this for?” I’m just not seeing it. Am I missing something. #AppleVisionPro
• Meta Quest 3 — New Mixed Reality VR Headset
• Immersed on Meta Quest — VR Offices! FREE app for *multiple* Virtual Screens in VR for Mac/PC/Linux (with no extra hardware) in stunning virtual worlds. Immersed is great for solo work with multiple screens in a virtual cafe, or for collaborating with your team around even more screens and whiteboards!
• Meta Quest 3 - Swappa
• Visor — The world's smallest 4K headset.
• Rails 7.1 expands its support for ActiveRecord asynchronous queries — ActiveRecord async queries are a way to execute Active Record queries in parallel, which can improve the performance of your Rails application. This is especially useful for slow or complex queries or for applications that need to handle a lot of concurrent requests.
• In-depth Guide to ActiveRecord load_async in Rails 7 — This seemingly simple change of just adding a single new method that takes no arguments has profound implications for database layer interactions. In this tutorial, we’ll deep dive into the intricacies of this new load async API. We’ll discuss lazy-loaded queries, Ruby threading model, blocking IO, database pool vs. max connections limit, and performance impact of concurrent database clients.

And our spicy take on why AI safety is really about stopping a movement.

Sponsored By:

• Coder QA: Take $2 a month off for the lifetime of your membership and contribute to our show directly Promo Code: jarjar

Links:

• 💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike — Strike is a lightning-powered app that lets you quickly and cheaply grab sats in over 36 countries.
• 📻 Boost with Fountain.FM — Fountain 1.0 is out with a new UI, upgrades, and super simple Strike integration for easy Boosts.
• Apple says UK could 'secretly veto' global privacy tools — Apple has attacked proposals for the UK government to pre-approve new security features introduced by tech firms.
• Apple won’t give up control of the iPhone — The EU wants to weaken Apple’s gatekeeper power, and the company is on the wrong side of history by fighting it.
• Apple’s Proposed Changes Reject the Goals of the DMA
• AI companies will need to report safety tests to US government | AP News — Chief among the 90-day goals from the order was a mandate under the Defense Production Act that AI companies share vital information with the Commerce Department, including safety tests.
• New GitHub Copilot Research Finds 'Downward Pressure On Code Quality' — "We find disconcerting trends for maintainability," explains the paper's abstract. "Code churn -- the percentage of lines that are reverted or updated less than two weeks after being authored -- is projected to double in 2024 compared to its 2021, pre-AI baseline. We further find that the percentage of 'added code' and 'copy/pasted code' is increasing in proportion to 'updated,' 'deleted,' and 'moved 'code. In this regard, AI-generated code resembles an itinerant contributor, prone to violate the DRY-ness [don't repeat yourself] of the repos visited."
• Apple Vision Pro review: magic, until it’s not - The Verge — The Apple Vision Pro is the best consumer headset anyone’s ever made — and that’s the problem.
• Apple Has Sold Approximately 200,000 Vision Pro Headsets — Apple has sold upwards of 200,000 Vision Pro headsets, MacRumors has learned from a source with knowledge of Apple's sales numbers. Apple began accepting pre-orders for the Vision Pro on January 19, so the headset has been available for purchase in the U.S. for 10 days.
• Apple Vision Pro Review — We have rounded up some of the videos below from well-known YouTube creators and reporters, including Marques Brownlee, Joanna Stern, and others.
• President Biden is preparing to announce chipmaker subsidies. — So says The Wall Street Journal in a report this morning that his administration will give “billions of dollars” to the likes of Intel and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), both of which have started US manufacturing projects, although TSMC, at least, is behind schedule.

Sponsored By:

• Linode: Receive a $100 60-day credit towards your new account. Promo Code: linode.com/coder
• Tailscale: Tailscale is the easiest way to create a peer-to-peer network with the power of Wireguard.

Links:

• New Xbox Unlikely as Microsoft Gaming Chief Doesn't Feel Need for Upgrade — “That’s not the feedback we’re getting right now,”
• Stephen Totilo on Twitter — At a behind-closed-doors presentation to press, Xbox boss Phil Spencer says gaming revenue for the company is double what it was in the 360 era, says Xbox has more players than ever, expecting more than $1 billion in PC gaming revenue this year
• Apple Releases Tool to Help Developers Port Windows Games to Mac — Developers interested in porting Windows games to the Mac can watch Apple's series of "bring your game to Mac" videos for more details. Apple also has a page on its website outlining various gaming technologies and tools available for developers.
• Whisky — Whisky provides a clean and easy to use graphical wrapper for Wine built in native SwiftUI. You can make and manage bottles, install and run Windows apps and games, and unlock the full potential of your Mac with no technical knowledge required.
• Coder Radio: Bite of the AR Apple | CR 276 — Wes joins Mike to chat all things Apple. We discuss the surprising implications of the iPhone X, including the challenges of its new special shape & the exciting possibilities of ARKit.
• Cheaper Apple Vision Headset Likely to Launch by End of 2025 — Apple still plans to launch a more affordable version of its Vision Pro headset by the end of 2025, with the non-Pro model likely to be called "Apple Vision One," or more simply, "Apple Vision," according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman.
• Apple Executive Discusses New Mac Pro's Lack of Graphics Card Support — "Fundamentally, we've built our architecture around this shared memory model and that optimization, and so it's not entirely clear to me how you'd bring in another GPU and do so in a way that is optimized for our systems," Ternus told Gruber. "It hasn't been a direction that we wanted to pursue."
• Reddit’s users and moderators are revolting against its CEO — Fallout from the unpopular API pricing change and disastrous AMA with CEO Steve Huffman is turning out the lights on some of Reddit’s most prominent communities.
• Reddark
• Sebastiaan de With on Twitter — Reddit’s AMA with its CEO on their API (read: third party app killing) is a train wreck. These are remakes from their CEO. Why does Reddit consistently have such terrible leadership? Before this, Huffman had no public interactions with the community or website for 10 months.
• Paul Hudson on Twitter — Apologies for the interruption on r/swift, but Reddit needs a change in management. See https://reddark.untone.uk for the huge number of other subreddits going dark in support of @ChristianSelig 💪
• Alby: Your Boost companion for the web — Create an Alby Account to get a lightning wallet for payments wherever you go.
• Coder Radio on the Podcastindex.org — Send a Boost into the show via the web. First, top-up Alby, then head over to our entry on the Podcast Index.

Sponsored By:

• Linode: Receive a $100 60-day credit towards your new account. Promo Code: linode.com/coder
• Tailscale: Tailscale is the easiest way to create a peer-to-peer network with the power of Wireguard.

Links:

• Michael Dominick on Twitter — Had a blast chilling with Chandra at #TCGcon Tampa!
• CoderRadioMascot on Twitter — @ChrisLAS, here is another big advantage of having a podcast mascot. Imagine the next podcast convention. You walk up to a fellow podcaster you do not particularly like. Casually ask him: “how is your podcasts mascot doing?” 1/2
• West Coast Crew Chat — Joins our West Coast Matrix chat room.
• Upcoming Jupiter Broadcasting Meetups — Our west coast venues are locked in!
• The silent majority — In software development, the silent majority are the engineers who write the code, debug the programs, and solve the complex issues behind the scenes. They do not participate in controversial discussions about Visual Basic or Pascal — they just do their work in those languages without even knowing that there’s so much controversy surrounding their language of choice.
• What’s Coming at Apple’s (AAPL) Sept. 7 Far Out iPhone 14 Event? — Apple makes it official and will hold its big product launch event on Sept. 7. Also: The company confirms it will delay iPadOS 16 until after the release of iOS 16
• What Will Apple Call Its AR/VR Headsets? Reality One, Reality Pro Names Emerge — The iPhone maker is aiming to enter the new product category next year.
• New Podcast Apps — Grab a Podcasting 2.0 compatible app, and send a boost into the show!

Sponsored By:

• Linode: Receive a $100 60-day credit towards your new account. Promo Code: linode.com/coder

Links:

• JetBrains Fleet — Built from scratch, based on 20 years of experience developing IDEs. Fleet uses the IntelliJ code-processing engine, with a distributed IDE architecture and a reimagined UI.
• Hillel is teaching a workshop on Twitter — Okay, we've all seen this meme, so what's the story behind it? Was it a real book, and was it *actually* intended for children?
• Mommy Why Is There A Server In The House- Animation - YouTube
• Internal Tech Emails on Twitter — Apple execs: Let's take a 30% cut of Uber and Lyft's membership programs
• Dare Obasanjo on Twitter — Apple’s approach to allowing 3rd party payments for IAPs in Netherlands will follow Google’s approach in South Korea. Developers will still need to pay Apple a fee even if they use Stripe,etc. Google reduced their fee by 4% meaning there’s zero benefit.
• Dare Obasanjo on Twitter — Apple & Google are going to tell developers “Fine instead of 30%, the fee is now 26% and after giving Stripe 2.9% + 30¢ plus a worse UX, you’ll be worse off”. This is a diabolical way to meet the letter but not the spirit of laws. World class legal judo.
• Apple's AR/VR headset could be priced above $2,000 — A Friday report indicated that Apple was having trouble with its rumored AR/VR headset due to overheating, camera, and software challenges, which could make the company delay its plans to unveil its Mixed Reality headset this year. Now, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman is back with some more tidbits regarding the product.