Waymo says it has doubled its weekly paid robotaxi trips to 100,000 since May (2 minute read)
Waymo is now providing more than 100,000 paid robotaxi rides per week in the US. It serves the most trips in San Francisco. The company claims that its driverless vehicles have driven over 14.8 million rider-only miles. It also claims that the Waymo Driver is 3.5 times better at avoiding crashes that cause injuries and 3 times better at avoiding police-reported crashes than human drivers.
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OpenAI's Most Advanced Model Can Now Be Customized. Here's How (2 minute read)
OpenAI's GPT-4o and GPT-4o mini can now be fine-tuned and customized by developers for business use. Developers can now use their own datasets to enhance the model's knowledge base with proprietary information and control how the model responds to specific questions. It costs $25 for every 1 million tokens used to fine-tune GPT-4o - $3 for GPT-4o mini. 1 million tokens is roughly equivalent to 2,500 pages in a standard-size book.
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Science & Futuristic Technology
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Watch this robot quickly install roof shingles (1 minute read)
Renovate Robotics' Rufus V1 rooftop robot can automate one of construction's most common and dangerous tasks - roofing. The robot can currently only install shingles, but future versions will be able to rip them out and perform solar installs. It is designed for large roofs and works on slopes up to 12:12, helping contractors maximize their productivity. A video showing the robot in action is available in the article.
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Against all odds, an asteroid mining company appears to be making headway (5 minute read)
AstroForge recently announced that it successfully raised $40 million in Series A funding. The company aims to mine asteroids for platinum and other precious metals. It is working to launch a spacecraft in the fourth quarter of this year that will attempt to fly by a near-Earth, metallic-rich asteroid while capturing images and taking data. The company has planned a follow-up mission that involves a larger spacecraft docking with the targeted metallic asteroid using magnets.
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Programming, Design & Data Science
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Effective Changelogs (14 minute read)
Changelogs are a vital and often overlooked method of communication. This post discusses how to write a great changelog. It covers the basics (you need to at least have a changelog file), formatting, writing style, and more. A full example is provided at the end of the post.
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An underrated software engineering interview question (8 minute read)
The bug squash interview involves asking candidates to find a bug and maybe write code to fix it. It is very effective because it reflects everyday software development, it's easy for the candidate to self-assess their own progress, it's difficult to cheat, and candidates who are good at it are good at it because they have practiced debugging day in and day out their entire career. The bug squash interview tests a skill rarely covered by existing interview loops. It's also fun to do.
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North America added a whole Silicon Valley's worth of data center inventory this year. It's not enough (2 minute read)
The eight primary data center markets in North America added 515 megawatts (MW) of new supply in the first half of this year. All of Silicon Valley has 459 MW of data center supply. Data center space under construction is currently at a record high. The vast majority is already leased. The insane amounts of data center capacity being built are still not enough to meet the growing demands of cloud computing and artificial intelligence providers. This demand has raised national rental rates by 6.5% on average.
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Your TV set has become a digital billboard. And it's only getting worse (21 minute read)
Rather than selling as many TVs as possible, TV manufacturers are increasingly seeking recurring revenue from already-sold TVs via ad sales and tracking. Some brands already prioritize data collection and the ability to sell ads and most are trying to boost their appeal to advertisers. Smart TV OS providers are generating revenue by licensing their software and through revenue sharing of in-app purchases and subscriptions. Budget TVs are the leaders in this trend as companies often offset cheap hardware prices with ads and data collection.
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Guide to SB 1047 (98 minute read)
California's SB 1047 applies to entities that are either training a model that requires $100 million or more in compute, or fine tuning such a model using $10 million or more in their own additional compute (or operate and rent out a very large computer cluster).
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