TLDR 2019-07-24

Traditional wiring for vehicles is inefficient, and due to its lack of rigidity, assembly is difficult to automate and usually requires using human hands. Tesla has redesigned the wiring architecture for its cars, enabling more robot automation during manufacturing while using fewer materials. The Model 3 has about 1.5 kilometers of wiring harnesses, and the new design will bring this down to just 100 meters starting with the Model Y. Tesla has released drawings of its new design with its patent application, which are available to view on the article.

Apple will release three new iPhone 11 models this fall, all featuring the Apple A13 chip. The smartphones will have a Lightning port despite the iPad Pro moving to USB-C last year. All three models will have the same screen resolution as last year's models, but the replacements for the XS and XS Max will have a new 3x OLED Retina display. A new type of Taptic Engine will be introduced, but it is unknown what new features the engine will enable. The devices will have three cameras on the back contained within a square, including a camera capable of wide-angle images.

A website developed by the researchers at the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab is able to transform selfies into classical portraits. Trained on 45,000 classical portraits from a huge number of styles, covering a range of methods and artists, the website uses a generative adversarial network to generate new features from scratch. The AI might decide on certain styles of art depending on features within the selfies submitted. While apps like FaceApp have been criticized for its privacy policies, the researchers promise that the data collected won't be used for any other purposes and images are immediately deleted after use.

Over the next few decades, the demand for heart surgery to repair damage to the valves is set to rise due to an aging population, lack of physical exercise, and poor diet. 3D-printed heart valves are able to be tailored more precisely to a patient compared to current heart valve implants. Using computer tomography and magnetic resonance imaging, researchers can create a digital model and computer simulation to calculate the forces acting on an implant. Unlike traditional transplant methods, using the printed valves will not require a life-long regimen of immunosuppressants or anticoagulants. The method is also cheaper, faster, and the implants last at least as long as the current transplant methods. It will be at least 10 years before the new artificial heart valves will be able to be used in treatments as they have to first go through exhaustive clinical trials.

No CS degree is a website that features interviews with successful self-taught and bootcamp developers. Developers who learned to code through self-education talk about their experiences in learning code without going through a degree, and how they managed to build products and profitable businesses.

Cube.js is an open-source modular framework to build analytical web applications. It comes with caching, pre-aggregations, and other tools to handle large data sets. Developers can easily integrate Cube.js with existing frameworks and visualize data using their visualization library of choice.

The US Department of Justice has launched a broad antitrust review of big tech companies, without revealing specific company names. As a result, shares for the largest companies, Amazon, Alphabet, Apple, and Facebook dropped in value during extended trading. Big Tech is coming under more scrutiny as its market power grows and also due to the tremendous amount of consumer data that they control. The DOJ claims that digital platforms might be acting in ways that are not responsive to consumer demands, and the investigation will be looking into competition, stifled innovation, and the impact on customers.

Apple claims that it doesn't favor its own apps in the App Store's search results. However, less popular Apple apps often rank higher than better-reviewed software from competing developers. For example, in the books and map categories, even though Apple's offerings are far less popular than their competitors, its apps rank highest. Apple has suggested in the past that all apps under two stars should be removed from the store, but this idea was never realized as it would mean removing Apple's own Podcasts app, which had less than two stars at the time. Many of Apple's apps no longer have ratings attached. Apple has been facing controversy against its App Store business as users and developers are finding its practices to be unfair.