TLDR 2024-03-22

Apple is being sued by the US for employing a strategy that relies on exclusionary anticompetitive conduct that hurts both consumers and developers. The 88-page lawsuit says that the company violated antitrust laws with practices that were intended to keep customers reliant on their iPhones and make them less likely to switch to competing devices. It seeks to put an end to those practices and possibly a breakup of the company. The lawsuit is likely to drag out for years before any type of resolution.

Unnamed sources say that Microsoft is paying approximately $650 million in its deal with Inflection AI. $620 million was paid for non-exclusive licensing fees for Inflection's technology and $30 million was paid to get Inflection to agree not to sue over Microsoft's poaching. Inflection will pivot away from building a personalized AI chatbot to becoming an AI studio that helps other companies work with large language model AI. Microsoft has several reasons for needing a backup for OpenAI - for one, its deal with OpenAI is being scrutinized by the FTC.

E. coli cells forage for nutrients using a process called chemotaxis. While the bacteria don't have brains, they possess something similar to a sense of smell, drive, and even memory. Chemotaxis involves 'smelling' chemicals and then deciding where to swim. The system is able to adapt to different environments with varying levels of attractant concentration. This article introduces the clever system that powers chemotaxis and explains how the complex signaling network works.

Doctors have performed a pig-to-human kidney transplant for the first time at Massachusetts General Hospital, the first hospital to perform a kidney transplant. The genetically modified kidney was implanted into a 62-year-old patient who had been diagnosed with end-stage kidney disease. They are recovering well and are expected to be discharged from the hospital soon. It is unknown how long the kidney will last for. This was the third transplant of a pig organ into a living human. The first two patients, who received heart transplants, died weeks after receiving their organs.

Dropflow is a CSS layout engine with a high-quality text layout implementation capable of displaying many languages. It can generate PDFs or images and render rich wrapped text to a canvas in the browser. Dropflow supports bidirectional and RTL text, font fallbacks at the grapheme level, colored diacritics, optimized shaping, and much more.

Tortoise is an automated solution designed to meet all Kubernetes resource optimization needs. It shifts optimization responsibility from service owners to platform teams, requiring service owners to configure only a minimal amount of parameters to initiate autoscaling. Tortoise allows for comprehensive tuning by platform teams. It currently only supports deployment - support for all resources supporting scale subresources is in development.

This article discusses things to consider when thinking about joining a startup. A job may provide higher salaries, more perks, security, less stress, and other benefits, but working in a startup can result in huge payoffs. Startups require a ton of challenging work to be successful, they have minimal infrastructure in place, and startup employees have lower salaries. However, startup employees own a portion of the company, and this could be worth a lot in the future.

Reddit was one of the reasons Y Combinator was started. This post tells the story of how the site came to be. Despite being rejected in the first round for their food delivery app idea, Reddit's founders were offered funding after agreeing to work on a project that would eventually become Reddit. The project was launched on a quick schedule. It had a core set of real users after just a few weeks. Reddit is now a fundamentally useful tool that seems almost unkillable.

Most people in tech don't care much about tech regulations - they don't really affect what people are working on.

Universities are treating computer science as though it were a technical school for producing a certain type of professional when it should be a superordinate realm of scholarship similar to arts or engineering.

DuckDB has many data importers included without requiring extra dependencies - it can natively read and parse JSON as a database table.

The US Department of Justice, 16 states, and the District of Columbia are suing Apple for violating the Sherman Antitrust Act, which specifically regulates monopolies, making some things that are legal for regular companies to do illegal when monopolies do them.

Put aside your ego, get into a beginner's mindset, and ask all the stupid questions.

Musk has promised that his companies will develop sophisticated AI products - doing so requires a lot of hardware.