Apple is still standing in the way of Epic's app store (6 minute read)
Epic launched its iOS store in the EU last week thanks to new regulations opening up the platform. It's not clear whether Epic will be able to grow the store far beyond its own games. While Epic's game store may offer better terms for developers, every developer is still subject to fees from Apple. Epic is in active discussions with almost every one of the top 250 mobile developers about putting their apps on the Epic Games Store for mobile, but almost all of them have said they can't make it work on iOS.
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Google is shoving its apps onto new Windows laptops (2 minute read)
Google's new desktop app, Essentials, will be included with many new Windows laptops. The app packages a few Google services, like Messages and Photos, and includes links to download many others. A full list of apps has not yet been announced. Users will be able to uninstall any part of Essentials or the whole thing.
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Science & Futuristic Technology
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SpaceX's Polaris Dawn Is Sending Astronauts to a Literal Radiation Belt to Test New Spacesuits (8 minute read)
Polaris Dawn, a collaboration between SpaceX and Shift4 CEO Jared Isaacman, will launch on Monday. The mission will send four astronauts in a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule on an orbit that will carry them through the innermost of the Van Allen belts, the bands of high-energy radiation that surround our planet. Two of the crew members will complete a spacewalk midway through the 5-day mission. The mission will be the first flight test of SpaceX's new pressure suits for extravehicular activities.
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A newly approved βliving drug' could save more cancer patients' lives (19 minute read)
Iovance Biotherapeutics has developed a 'living drug' made up of immune cells from patients' own tumors. The therapy involves taking the immune cells from the patient's tumor, growing them in the lab, and then infusing them back into the body. The massive influx of immune cells zeros in on and attacks cancer cells, and in some cases, appears to wipe out every last one. The drug doesn't work for everyone, but it can still be a lifesaver for some patients. It has been approved in the US for advanced melanoma.
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Programming, Design & Data Science
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Instant (GitHub Repo)
Instant is a client-side database that makes it easy to build real-time and collaborative apps. Users just have to write relational queries in the shape of the data they want and it handles all of the data fetching, permission checking, and offline caching. It also handles optimistic updates and rollbacks. Instant supports ephemeral updates and it has SDKs for JavaScript, React, and React Native.
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Continuous reinvention: A brief history of block storage at AWS (27 minute read)
This post provides a history of Elastic Block Store, one of AWS's foundational services. It covers queuing theory, the importance of comprehensive instrumentation, and the value of incrementalism versus radical changes. EBS's development team's approach, which was to make a series of incremental improvements over time, allowed them to develop customer value sooner and course correct as they learned more about changing customer workloads. They were able to make significant improvements to the service without taking it online.
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The Top 100 Gen AI Consumer Apps (8 minute read)
This post looks at which generative AI apps people are actually using. Creative tools are still drawing in consumers. ChatGPT is still the number one product on web and mobile by a large margin, but the competition is starting to heat up. New use cases are emerging, with some apps giving users beauty tips and others helping users uplevel their dating messages. Discord traffic is a leading indicator for apps that will climb the web and mobile ranks.
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The Silicon Valley Canon: On the PaΔ±deΓa of the American Tech Elite (16 minute read)
Most Silicon Valley types make time to read books, book reviews, or listen to podcasts about books enough to fool others into thinking they have read a book. Books have an inordinate impact on the Silicon Valley mindspace. These books often have no obvious connection to software. They form a sort of vague tech canon. This article presents the list of books that form the Silicon Valley canon. These books cover the major ideas that are influential in tech.
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Quarkdown (GitHub Repo)
Quarkdown is a Markdown parser and renderer that provides support for functions and many other syntax extensions.
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The Compounding Loophole (12 minute read)
Compounding pharmacies, pharmacies that make some drugs on site, may be the answer to how the economy will handle the supply of expensive drugs in high demand like GLP-1 agonist drugs.
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