Fossil is selling its smartwatch IP to Google for $40 million. Some Fossil employees will be joining Google, and it looks like Google will be working on a smartwatch that they hope will be for Wear OS (their struggling wearable operating system) what Pixel is to Android.
The Google Pixel 3 Lite will have a Snapdragon 670 processor and 4GB of RAM. There's a video in this article with a leak showing many angles of the phone. It's made of plastic, has a headphone jack, and comes with a 5.56-inch 2220 x 1080 LCD display.
In a large scale experiment based on three large data sets from the US and the UK, researchers examined the effect of digital-technology use on well-being. The effect was so small, explaining at most 0.4% of variation in well-being that it was about as negative as regularly eating potatoes. While this study relies on associations rather than potential causal relationships, it does suggest that warnings against excessive screen time are unwarranted. Thank God.
Professors from 7 universities including MIT and Stanford are teaming up to create a cryptocurrency called Unit-e, which will be able to process tens of thousands of transactions per second compared to 3-7 for Bitcoin or 10-30 for Ethereum. The group plans on launching in the second half of this year. This will be made possible by new consensus and sharding mechanisms.
This is a collection of books, articles, and other materials to self-study any area of being a professional programmer (algorithms, project management, dotfiles, security etc.). Incredibly comprehensive.
This op-ed by Tim Cook calls for US Congress to pass comprehensive federal privacy legislation. Companies should avoid collecting identifying information if possible, tell people what data is collected and why, and allow people to delete their personal data. This legislation should also target online data brokers, who buy your purchasing data from online retailers and sells it to other buyers, all without your knowledge. Cook wants the FTC to shine a light on this practice.
Get the most important tech, science, & coding news in a free daily email. Read by +1,250,000 software engineers and tech workers.