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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:

• Alderon Games: Alderon Games is looking to hire talented remote workers. They believe in the power of play and the magic of immersive worlds and are looking for passionate individuals.
• Tailscale: Tailscale is the easiest way to create a peer-to-peer network with the power of Wireguard.

Links:

• ⚡ 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 — Boost from the Web. Once you have Alby topped off, you can Boost from our page on the Podcast Index.
• 🔌 Grab Sats with Strike Around the 🌎 — Strike is a lightning-powered app that lets you quickly and cheaply grab sats in over 36 countries.
• 📷 Boost from Fountain's Website — Use Strike, Cash App, or your favorite app with Lightning support and Boost via QR Code. No other app is needed!
• Spotify lays off 17 percent of workforce in latest round of job cuts — CEO Daniel Ek announced the cuts in a memo to employees today. They’re expected to impact around 1,500 people at the company.
• Broadcom cuts at least 2,800 VMware jobs — Broadcom's first big move is going to be layoffs: according to WARN notices filed with multiple states (catalogued here by Channel Futures), Broadcom will be laying off at least 2,837 employees across multiple states, including 1,267 at its Palo Alto campus in California.
• Gerald Pfeifer on X — "Broadcom CEO tells VMware workers to ‘get butt back to office’ after completing a $69 billion merger of the two companies"
• Apple contractors to be cut - Austin Business Journal
• Twilio Lays Off Another 5% of Staff in Third Round of Cuts — Company has shed one-third of workforce since September 2022
• Unity Layoff 3.8% Of Workforce — Videogame software provider Unity Software (U.N) will eliminate 265 jobs or 3.8% of its global workforce and end an agreement with a digital video effects company founded by the “Lord of the Rings” director as part of a “reset,” the company said on Tuesday.
• Stefan Ottenbrite on X — CBC/Radio-Canada employees will have a virtual meeting on Monday with CEO Catherine Tait. Between 600 and 700 employees are expected to be laid off across the country, 300 just in Quebec.
• LFNW2024: Ready or not — Quick on the heels of our wildly successful MiniFest this Fall, LinuxFest Northwest is proud to announce a full event: LinuxFest Northwest 2024 1 - April 26-28 2024!
• LinuxFest Northwest 2024: Call for Speakers — We invite you to submit your proposal
• Activision Blizzard had a plan — or ploy — to launch its own Android game store — Court documents show the gaming giant wanted more from mobile.
• Xbox Talking to Partners for Mobile Store, CEO Spencer Says — “It’s an important part of our strategy and something we are actively working on today not only alone, but talking to other partners who’d also like to see more choice for how they can monetize on the phone,’’ Spencer said in an interview in Sao Paulo during the CCXP comics and entertainment convention.
• Microsoft is building an Xbox mobile gaming store to take on Apple and Google — Microsoft’s Activision Blizzard deal is key to the company’s mobile gaming efforts. Microsoft is quietly building a mobile Xbox store that will rely on Activision and King games.
• What's new in .NET 8 — .NET 8 is the successor to .NET 7. It will be supported for three years as a long-term support (LTS) release.
• .NET Aspire overview — .NET Aspire is an opinionated, cloud ready stack for building observable, production ready, distributed applications.​ .NET Aspire is delivered through a collection of NuGet packages that handle specific cloud-native concerns.
• Google to face investigation over deleted chat history — “I’m going to get to the bottom of who is responsible,”
• OpenAI Agreed to Buy $51 Million of AI Chips From a Startup Backed by CEO Sam Altman — Documents show that OpenAI signed a letter of intent to spend $51 million on brain-inspired chips developed by startup Rain. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman previously made a personal investment in Rain.
• @laurengoode — "Altman talked to investors in the Middle East in recent months about raising money to start a new chip company to help OpenAI and others diversify beyond their current reliance on Nvidia GPUs and specialized chips from Google, Amazon, and a few smaller suppliers, according to two people."
• Nixified AI — The goal of nixified.ai is to simplify and make available a large repository of AI executable code that would otherwise be impractical to run yourself, due to package management and complexity issues.

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
• Datadog: Try Datadog free by starting a your 14-day trial and receive a free t-shirt once you install the agent.

Links:

• Steam Deck Previews are up — The flood gates are beginning to open around the Steam Deck with a few big YouTube channels doing a hands-on preview now live. Plus, dbrand poke fun at Nintendo with their upcoming Steam Deck accessory kit.
• Swift and C++ interoperability workgroup announcement — To advance the interoperability support between Swift and C++, we are announcing the formation of the Swift and C++ interoperability workgroup as part of the Swift project.
• Facebook says Apple iOS privacy change will cost $10 billion this year — Facebook said on Wednesday that Apple’s App Tracking Transparency feature would decrease the company’s 2022 sales by about $10 billion.
• Apple to Collect 27% Commission on Third-Party App Payment Systems in the Netherlands — Apple says it will take 27% commission on purchases made in dating apps through third-party payment options in the Netherlands, in compliance with a Dutch regulatory ruling.
• Apple's Example in-app Modal Sheet for new Purchase Screen
• Distributing dating apps in the Netherlands — Developers of dating apps who want to continue using Apple’s in-app purchase system may do so and no further action is needed. Those who want to use a different payment system will need to request the StoreKit External Purchase Entitlement or the StoreKit External Purchase Link Entitlement.
• Apple Fined Another 5 Million Euros by Dutch Competition Regulator Over Dating App Payment Requirements — The Netherlands' Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM) has fined Apple five million euros for a third consecutive week for allegedly failing to satisfy the requirements it set regarding alternative payment systems for dating apps
• Google Looks To Be Moving On From Failing Stadia Service — The service has been demoted within Google and will instead power experiences for other companies
• Xbox Cloud Gaming (Beta)

Sponsored By:

• Linode: Receive a $100 60-day credit towards your new account. Promo Code: linode.com/coder
• Datadog: Try Datadog free by starting a your 14-day trial and receive a free t-shirt once you install the agent.

Links:

• Microsoft to acquire Activision Blizzard to bring the joy and community of gaming to everyone, across every device — Microsoft will acquire Activision Blizzard for $95.00 per share, in an all-cash transaction valued at $68.7 billion
• Microsoft Effort to Buy Activision Spurred by Misconduct Fallout at Gamemaker
• Bobby Kotick interview — Bobby Kotick has been CEO of Activision Blizzard since its inception in the merger of Activision and Blizzard in 2008, and he was also CEO of Activision for decades before that. He engineered the $5.9 billion acquisition of King, maker of Candy Crush Saga, in 2015.
• "The deal that will change the industry forever" — This is not only the biggest games M&A deal of recent years, or even the past decade, but the largest in the industry's history.
• Xbox on Twitter — Xbox is committed to our journey for inclusion in every aspect of gaming. We hold all teams to this commitment. We’re looking forward to extending our culture of proactive inclusion to the great teams across Activision Blizzard.
• Vivek Sharma on Twitter — What a time to be alive! Some thoughts on Microsoft + ActiveVision with my usual caveat of these being my own musing and nothing much to do with our work at Meta
• marak 🗿 on Twitter — What's up @Github? Ten days since you removed my ability to publish to NPM and fix the Infinity Zalgo bug in colors.js
• Duane O'Brien on Twitter — The crux of this thread is: we sponsored faker.js, I don't think it helped the maintainer much, we didn't get any notice, and I'd do it all again.
• faker - Open Collective
• Dutch Regulator Says Apple's Plan for Third-Party In-App Payments is Insufficient — As a result, the ACM has hit Apple with an initial 5 million euro fine as a consequence, and fines will continue to be assessed at 5 million euros per week up to a maximum of 50 million euros until Apple complies.
• Introduction to Celery — Celery communicates via messages, usually using a broker to mediate between clients and workers. To initiate a task the client adds a message to the queue, the broker then delivers that message to a worker.
• GE Z-Wave Plus Smart Outdoor Switch — No wiring required. Simply plug in the device and connect to your hub for convenient ON/OFF functions.
• Deezer plans