Month: July 2022

Google Quantum, Virtually

Want to try a big quantum computer but don’t have the cash? Google wants to up your simulation game with their “Quantum Virtual Machine” that you can use for free. On the face of it, it sounds like marketing-speak for just another quantum simulator. But if you read the post, it sounds like it attempts

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Chinese grocery delivery startup Missfresh tells employees it has run out of money; Missfresh was valued at $3B after raising ~$300M in its June 2021 IPO (Financial Times)

Financial Times: Chinese grocery delivery startup Missfresh tells employees it has run out of money; Missfresh was valued at $3B after raising ~$300M in its June 2021 IPO  —  Unpaid suppliers occupy Chinese delivery start-up’s offices as it scrambles to raise funds  —  Missfresh, a Chinese grocery delivery start …

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DeepMind says AlphaFold has predicted the structure of almost every protein cataloged by science, over 200M in total, a problem in biology for decades (Matthew Sparkes/New Scientist)

Matthew Sparkes / New Scientist: DeepMind says AlphaFold has predicted the structure of almost every protein cataloged by science, over 200M in total, a problem in biology for decades  —  Artificial intelligence firm DeepMind has transformed biology by predicting the structure of nearly all proteins known to science in just 18 months …

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Twitter tests a status feature for tweets, letting users add a label from a pre-determined list, in the US and Australia (Amanda Silberling/TechCrunch)

Amanda Silberling / TechCrunch: Twitter tests a status feature for tweets, letting users add a label from a pre-determined list, in the US and Australia  —  Facebook is trying to be TikTok, but now, Twitter is bringing us back a little bit of Facebook (or LiveJournal, or Myspace).  Some users are reporting …

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Recent AMD and Nvidia leaks show upcoming GPUs will consume excessive amounts of power, creating a high environmental cost for limited improvement in graphics (John Loeffler/TechRadar)

John Loeffler / TechRadar: Recent AMD and Nvidia leaks show upcoming GPUs will consume excessive amounts of power, creating a high environmental cost for limited improvement in graphics  —  The planet may burn but at least the end will be ray-traced at 8K  —  A number of recent news items over the past few weeks

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Solana blockchain and the Proof of History

As the blockchain concept expands beyond cryptocurrency into software applications, improving transaction-throughput performance has become a critical area of research and development. One of the more visionary improvements in this area is the Proof of History, introduced by the Solana blockchain. This article introduces Solana and the Proof of History (PoH) concept, including a discussion of

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Carbon language aims to be a better C++

Is it time for a successor to the stalwart C++ language? A group of developers at Google and other organizations believe it is. The group is behind an experimental language called Carbon, which offers interoperability with C++ while overcoming purported difficulties in improving the legacy language. Carbon attempts to overcome these obstacles by starting over

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How to test minimal APIs in ASP.NET Core 6

ASP.NET Core 6 introduces a simplified hosting model that can be used to implement lightweight APIs by eliminating the need to write the boilerplate code required in previous versions ASP.NET Core. We discussed how to get started with minimal APIs, and how to use logging and dependency injection with minimal APIs, in previous articles here

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Sources: Jack Ma plans to relinquish control of Alibaba’s Ant Group, potentially pushing back Ant’s IPO for a year or more; regulators approve of the change (Wall Street Journal)

Wall Street Journal: Sources: Jack Ma plans to relinquish control of Alibaba’s Ant Group, potentially pushing back Ant’s IPO for a year or more; regulators approve of the change  —  The shift, long under consideration to reduce governance risks, comes as the Chinese fintech giant seeks to move on from a tough year

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Worldwide Mobile Pricing 2022 survey of mobile data prices: five of the world’s 10 most expensive places are in sub-Saharan Africa; Israel is the cheapest (Annie Njanja/TechCrunch)

Annie Njanja / TechCrunch: Worldwide Mobile Pricing 2022 survey of mobile data prices: five of the world’s 10 most expensive places are in sub-Saharan Africa; Israel is the cheapest  —  A new report detailing the cost of mobile data in different markets across the world, bears the evidence of why internet use …

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An interview with a Baidu robotaxi safety operator, who sits in the passenger seat and monitors how self-driving cars cope with Beijing’s streets (Zeyi Yang/MIT Technology Review)

Zeyi Yang / MIT Technology Review: An interview with a Baidu robotaxi safety operator, who sits in the passenger seat and monitors how self-driving cars cope with Beijing’s streets  —  We spoke to Liu Yang, who has one of the strangest jobs around: to sit in the passenger seat and monitor how self-driving cars cope

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