Google Backs New Nuclear Plants to Power AI (4 minute read)
Big Tech companies are increasingly investing into nuclear power. Google has committed to buying power generated by seven nuclear-power reactors to be built by Kairos Power. The project aims to add 500 megawatts of nuclear power starting at the end of the decade. The project site (or sites) have yet to be determined. Google will have its data centers somewhere near the reactors, but it hasn't been determined whether they will receive power directly from the plants or from the grid.
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OpenAI Unveils Secret Meta Prompt — And It's Very Different From Anthropic's Approach (8 minute read)
OpenAI has revealed the meta-prompt for its new o1 model family to help developers improve and fine-tune their products. Meta-prompts are used to instruct models to create good prompts based on user task descriptions or to improve existing prompts. This article looks at both OpenAI and Anthropic's approaches and compares them. The companies are using very different engines and their prompts reveal a lot about how each company thinks and what they expect from their products. OpenAI conceptualizes ChatGPT as a powerful computational tool while Anthropic envisions Claude as a friendly, human-like assistant.
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Science & Futuristic Technology
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Scientists Use Human Stem Cells to Restore a Monkey's Vision (2 minute read)
Scientists successfully used human stem cells to patch a hole in a monkey's retina, restoring the primate's vision. Macular holes, a condition associated with aging, cause vision to blur and decline over time. Current fixes for the condition come at the cost of a loss of peripheral vision as they involve transplanting cells. Using stem cells to repair the problem would introduce new cells, avoiding this issue. More research is needed to determine whether the treatment is suitable for human eyes.
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Solar-powered desalination system requires no extra batteries (7 minute read)
MIT engineers have built a solar-powered desalination system that removes salt from water at a pace that closely follows changes in solar energy. It automatically adjusts to any sudden variation in sunlight, maximizing the utility of solar energy. The system can produce large quantities of clean water regardless of sunlight variation throughout the day without any batteries or supplemental power supply. It is geared towards desalinating brackish groundwater, a huge untapped source of potential drinking water.
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Programming, Design & Data Science
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Lodash Replacements (Website)
This page contains a complete catalog of all the functions that Lodash provides. For each function, it provides a description of how to implement the same behavior in plain JavaScript. The page is still a work in progress.
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Vortex (GitHub Repo)
Vortex is a toolkit for working with compressed Apache Arrow arrays in-memory, on-disk, and over-the-wire. It is a highly extensible and extremely fast framework for building a modern columnar file format. Vortex features a state-of-the-art, batteries-included reference implementation. It has dramatically faster random access reads and scans than Apache Parquet while preserving approximately the same compression ratio and write throughput.
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Terence Tao, mathematician: ‘It's not good for something as important as AI to be a monopoly held by one or two companies' (16 minute read)
This article contains an interview with Terence Tao, indisputably one of the best mathematicians in history. At 49, Tao, who was born in the Australian city of Adelaide, received his doctorate from Princeton University at 21 and was already a professor at the University of California in Los Angeles at 24. In the interview, Tao discusses the results from the recent presidential election in Venezuela, whether AI is a threat that could destroy humanity, AI systems like AlphaProof and AlphaGeometry, whether water could spontaneously explode and destroy the world, and more.
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Capture less than you create (2 minute read)
The success of others shouldn't diminish your satisfaction with your own efforts. Working on open source means you will capture vanishingly less than you create as you are offering software with no strings attached to anyone who might wish to build. Thus, developers shouldn't feel envious of their users and their success. Having 'enough' is a special kind of wealth.
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