TLDR 2024-06-20

Netflix plans to open two new in-person experience venues in 2025. The locations, which will be in King of Prussia, Pa., and Dallas, will feature a wide array of shopping outlets, eateries, and activities tied to major franchises. The two new Netflix Houses will have footprints spanning more than 100,000 square feet. Netflix doesn't see these permanent retail destinations as becoming a sizable new business segment - it is aiming for them to serve as marketing vehicles that invite fan engagement to support the core subscription-streaming business.

Ilya Sutskever, one of OpenAI's co-founders and former chief scientist, has launched a new company just a month after formally leaving OpenAI. Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI) has only one goal and one product: a safe superintelligence. Sutskever has previously predicted that AI with intelligence superior to humans could arrive within the decade, and that when it does, it won't necessarily be benevolent. This necessitates research into ways to control and restrict it. SSI has been designed from the ground up as a for-profit entity. It is currently recruiting technical talent in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv.

Framework has partnered with DeepComputing, the company behind the very first RISC-V laptops, to build a RISC-V mainboard for the Framework Laptop 13. While the performance and features of these chips aren't on par with Intel or AMD (a Raspberry Pi 4 is likely faster), the integration is exciting as RISC-V is becoming more accessible. Framework hasn't announced a release date or price yet as the RISC-V mainboard is still in early development.

It's not yet realistic to look for solid-state batteries in production vehicles anytime soon. Semi-solid-state batteries with gel electrolytes still offer significant improvement over lithium iron phosphate batteries. They can be made on conventional lithium-ion battery production lines. Several companies are actively developing semi-solid-state batteries - WeLion, a Chinese company, has created a battery pack that delivers more than 1,000 kilometers of driving range on a single charge.

SQLite, like any other database, has its pros and cons. It's perfect for the majority of applications and scales, and developers can always use PostgreSQL for anything else. Many of the problems SQLite previously had have been fixed. One of the issues with SQLite is that it doesn't allow multiple concurrent writers, but this may not be necessary for all workloads.

There was a lot of hype around building distributed systems using message queues in the late 2000s and early 2010s. That hype seems to have disappeared. One of the reasons for this is because most companies have realized that they're too small for these 'scalability tricks'. Bigger single machines being available for more reasonable prices means that companies are fine running on less hardware. Most companies are better off building well-componentized monoliths that they can break off into independent services later if there's a reason to do so.

SpaceX allows its employees to cash out some of their shares by selling to company-authorized outside investors around every 6 months. This article discusses an internal document from SpaceX about such a tender offer from 2022. Investors paid $70 per share to employees in the offer, an enormous discount compared to the $270 per share during the primary sale that year. The main reason for the price discrepancy comes from employees owning common stock - investors who buy into primary rounds typically buy preferred stock, which entitles them to dividends and liquidation preferences.

Alejandro Caceres, a 38-year-old Colombian-American cybersecurity entrepreneur, wrote a set of programs that kept every publicly visible website in North Korea offline for more than a week in late 2022. Caceres had been personally targeted by North Korean spies who tried to steal his intrusion tools, but had received no real governmental support despite detailing the targeting to the FBI, so he decided to take matters into his own hands. He was adopted informally by a Pentagon contractor and invited to present his techniques to high-level US defense and intelligence officials following his North Korean cyberattacks.

Fully open source models are crucial for efforts to make AI accountable.

Redis alternative Valkey has new backers including Broadcom, the AlmaLinux OS Foundation, and Instaclustr by NetApp.

A lot of our information networks have become more dense, causing us to change the way we see and process information that comes our way and change our culture.

Lambda school, one of the largest educational startups of all time, was never registered in California and was operating illegally in the state for at least two years.

Google has entered into an agreement with Berkshire Hathaway electric utility NV Energy to power its Nevada data centers with advanced geothermal electricity as part of its goal to run on entirely clean energy by 2030.

Chinese AI startup DeepSeek has released DeepSeek Coder V2, an open source mixture of experts code language model that supports more than 300 programming languages and outperforms state-of-the-art closed-source models like GPT-4 Turbo, Claude 3 Opus, and Gemini 2.5 Pro.