Month: January 2023

How Apple’s lean hiring may help it avoid layoffs; Apple’s workforce grew 20% from 2019 to 2022, Amazon’s grew 100%, Meta 94%, Alphabet 57%, Microsoft 53% (Aaron Tilley/Wall Street Journal)

Aaron Tilley / Wall Street Journal: How Apple’s lean hiring may help it avoid layoffs; Apple’s workforce grew 20% from 2019 to 2022, Amazon’s grew 100%, Meta 94%, Alphabet 57%, Microsoft 53%  —  The iPhone maker’s workforce grew 20% in the past three years, a far slower pace than rivals  —  Tech Layoffs Pile Up

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Filings: Signature Bank borrowed $10B in Q4 from Federal Home Loan Banks, the system originally designed to support mortgage lending; Silvergate borrowed $3.6B (Eric Wallerstein/Wall Street Journal)

Eric Wallerstein / Wall Street Journal: Filings: Signature Bank borrowed $10B in Q4 from Federal Home Loan Banks, the system originally designed to support mortgage lending; Silvergate borrowed $3.6B  —  Signature and Silvergate turn to government-chartered lenders after customer withdrawals surge

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Irreproducible, Accumulative Hacks

Last weekend, I made an incredibly accurate CNC pen-plotter bot in just 20 minutes, for a total expenditure of $0. How did I pull this off? Hacks accumulate. In particular, the main ingredients were a CNC router, some 3D-printed mounts that I’d designed and built for it, and a sweet used linear rail that I

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Current and ex-Amazon managers and execs say focus on managing costs should have come sooner, ideas aren’t evaluated with the same rigor as before, and more (Jason Del Rey/Vox)

Jason Del Rey / Vox: Current and ex-Amazon managers and execs say focus on managing costs should have come sooner, ideas aren’t evaluated with the same rigor as before, and more  —  After the largest corporate layoffs in its history, the tech giant is at a crossroads.  —  For years, it seemed as though nothing

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AWS will spend $35B on new data centers in Virginia by 2040, creating ~1,000 jobs, in exchange for tax breaks and potential performance grants of up to $140M (Bloomberg)

Bloomberg: AWS will spend $35B on new data centers in Virginia by 2040, creating ~1,000 jobs, in exchange for tax breaks and potential performance grants of up to $140M  —  Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud unit will spend $35 billion on new data centers in Virginia by 2040, underscoring its determination …

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Emails and sources: Google fired 16% of its ~400-person Fuchsia OS team, Research cut jobs in low traction areas, and Cloud cut operational and other roles (New York Times)

New York Times: Emails and sources: Google fired 16% of its ~400-person Fuchsia OS team, Research cut jobs in low traction areas, and Cloud cut operational and other roles  —  The layoffs amount to about 6 percent of the global work force at the company, the latest tech giant to make cuts after a pandemic

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Google cuts most of the Area 120 team and will graduate three of the incubator’s projects in 2023; sources: staff not involved in those projects were laid off (Julia Love/Bloomberg)

Julia Love / Bloomberg: Google cuts most of the Area 120 team and will graduate three of the incubator’s projects in 2023; sources: staff not involved in those projects were laid off  —  Alphabet Inc.’s Google has cut most of the jobs at Area 120, its in-house incubator for new projects, as part of a

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RC Car Gets F1-Style DRS Rear Wing

DRS, or the Drag Reduction System, has become a key part of Formula 1 in the past decade. [Engineering After Hours] decided to implement the same system on an RC car instead. The DRS system was implemented in Formula 1 to increase passing in the series. By moving a flap in the rear wing of

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Tech companies like Google and Microsoft have offered a muted response to unrest in Iran, prompting side projects by employees to fight censorship and more (Paresh Dave/Wired)

Paresh Dave / Wired: Tech companies like Google and Microsoft have offered a muted response to unrest in Iran, prompting side projects by employees to fight censorship and more  —  Companies like Google have offered a muted response to unrest in Iran.  Grassroots coders are tackling internet censorship on their own.

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Beehive In a Bottle

One of the most common types of beekeeping hive is based around the Langstroth hive, first patented in the United States in 1852. While it does have some nice features like movable frames, the march of history has progressed considerably while this core of beekeeping practices has changed very little. But that really just means

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The main reason ChatGPT is a threat to Google is because the latter’s monopoly position allowed search to degenerate into a spam-ridden, SEO-fueled hellscape (Can Duruk/Margins)

Can Duruk / Margins: The main reason ChatGPT is a threat to Google is because the latter’s monopoly position allowed search to degenerate into a spam-ridden, SEO-fueled hellscape  —  I hate monopolies and welcome our AI overlords … I don’t really cook often, but I do love making pasta aglio e olio.

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US prosecutors provide a list of ~$700M worth of Sam Bankman-Fried’s seized assets, including ~$525M in Robinhood stock and $94.5M cash at Silvergate Bank (Dietrich Knauth/Reuters)

Dietrich Knauth / Reuters: US prosecutors provide a list of ~$700M worth of Sam Bankman-Fried’s seized assets, including ~$525M in Robinhood stock and $94.5M cash at Silvergate Bank  —  Federal prosecutors have seized nearly $700 million in assets from FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried in January, largely in the form of Robinhood stock …

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