TLDR 2024-03-14

The US Federal Aviation Administration has approved a commercial launch license for SpaceX's Starship rocket's third test flight. The test is scheduled for this morning at 7 am CDT, with a launch window of 110 minutes. SpaceX will target the Indian Ocean for Starship's slashdown. Details about the changes planned for flight 3 are available in the article.

OpenAI appears to have accidentally published a blog post that was indexed by Bing and DuckDuckGo before it was quickly taken down. The post was an announcement for GPT-4.5 Turbo, a new model that surpasses GPT-4 Turbo in speed, accuracy, and scalability. The cached description mentions a knowledge cutoff date of June 2024 and a 256k context window. OpenAI has not commented on the leak.

Figure has implemented OpenAI's technology to allow its robots to have full conversations with people. OpenAI's models provide high-level visual and language intelligence while Figure's neural networks deliver fast, low-level dexterous robot actions. This X post contains a video showing a person talking to a Figure robot and getting it to perform tasks, explain the reasoning behind the tasks, and self-assess on how the tasks went.

Interlune, a company that has been operating in stealth since its founding by two of Blue Origin's earliest employees in 2022, aims to extract helium-3 from the Moon. The company recently came out of stealth with an announcement that it has raised another $15 million. While the funding is relatively small, its implications are potentially large. Most lunar efforts are focused on providing services to NASA, but Interlune's goal directly derives value from extracting resources on the Moon.

The design engineer is someone who sits at the intersection of design and engineering and works to bridge the gap between them. They know how to run a design process and have the engineering chops to implement it. This allows them to quickly iterate on ideas - their skillset is ideal for prototyping, exploratory interaction design, and building robust design systems. This blog post contains a list of people who are considered design engineers to more fully illustrate what the role entails.

Layoffs are still dragging on and industry veterans are finding it hard to get a callback from recruiters. However, wage gains secured during the good days are still massive, despite what inflation has eroded over the last few years. Developers are still looking mighty privileged compared to premium programmers from a decade ago. AI will have a huge impact on the industry - no profession has ever successfully resisted automation or redundancy in the face of technological advancement over the long term.

MrBeast's influence on YouTube can be seen everywhere, from the types of content people make to the brisk editing styles populating all of YouTube's trending content to even the way YouTubers style their video thumbnails. Copycats can be seen all over the platform. While it is unlikely that MrBeast will be dethroned anytime soon, there are signs that people are growing fatigued with sensationalism and are hungry for authenticity and relatability.

The Vision Pro may just be an over-engineered devkit. There is some genius and audacity behind some of Apple's hardware decisions - gaze and pinch was a major industry 'a-ha' moment. However, the device's software/content story is dull and unimaginative and most people likely won't use the Vision Pro for watching media. The Vision Pro's debut was the best thing that ever happened to Meta's Quest brand as it elevated VR to a level of mainstream consumer curiosity, set new standards and pricing envelopes for VR devices, and created a competitor for Meta teams to chase.

Market demand is pushing for a deeper separation of compute and storage, with customers preferring open formats, as the diversity of demands on data expands.

The US House has voted in favor of a bill that may require ByteDance to sell TikTok or have the app banned in the country.

Flox is a virtual environment and package manager that makes dependencies portable across the full software cycle.

ECSS is a global approach to producing efficient design systems with CSS.

Cerebras Systems' Wafer Scale Engine 3, a third-generation AI chip designed for training AI models, is the world's largest semiconductor.

OpenAI's chief technology officer Mira Murati said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal that Sora, a model capable of generating hyperrealistic video scenes based on text prompts, could be available to the public in the next few months.