TLDR 2018-10-17

Lyft now has a monthly subscription, for $299 a month you can get 30 free rides valued at $15 or less. If any of these rides goes over $15, you just pay the difference. You can use this for single passenger or carpool rides, and for a limited time subscribers will get an additional 5% off additional rides.

So Facebook's smart device, which they promised would not track you, is going to track you. After saying last week that "this is something in your living room or kitchen. There should be no surprises on it, period," Facebook surprises no one by admitting now that the Portal actually will be tracking you; the Portal will be logging who you call and what apps you use in order to target you with ads on other Facebook properties. Myspace Tom would never have done this.

Youtube and the Google Play store both went down for over two hours. There's no explanation for the outage yet, but I can't remember Youtube ever going down.

Silicon Valley startup Just has created chicken nuggets from lab grown meat using cells from a chicken feather. The original chicken is actually still alive, and lives at a farm close to the lab. The company places the chicken cells in a bioreactor that encourages the proteins to multiply. It takes about two days to produce a nugget. CEO Josh Tetrick says that Just's meat will be in select restaurants by the end of the year.

Stephen Hawking's posthumously published book "Brief Answers To The Big Questions", warns about the rise of AI. He writes, "Whereas the short-term impact of AI depends on who controls it, the long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all." In the worst case, he imagines a scenario, "People asked a computer, 'Is there a God?' And the computer said, 'There is now,' and fused the plug." He also warned about other disasters, saying its "almost inevitable that either a nuclear confrontation or environmental catastrophe will cripple the Earth at some point in the next 1,000 years." He believes we need to expand to other planets, to not have all of our eggs in one basket. He also warns about gene editing, saying that the wealthy elite with access to gene editing technologies will become "superhumans" while normal people will probably "die out, or become unimportant." While he does have a lot of concerns, he believes that in the best case we can expand beyond Earth, and "elevate humanity, bring people and nations together, usher in new discoveries and new technologies."

A touching eulogy by Bill Gates for his late friend and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who he met when he was in 7th grade.

Github Actions is a new workflow automation tool currently open for beta signups, you can set triggers based on certain Github events (like push, issue, release) and can run arbitrary serial or parallel actions in response.