TLDR 2020-12-16

This Twitter thread follows Facebook's company-wide end-of-year meeting. During the meeting, the speakers discuss the company's role in the major events of the year, reflecting on the role it played in almost every geopolitical and societal issue. Issues such as privacy, the content that Facebook allows, integrity, and competition were discussed. Future technologies and projects were also discussed, with Facebook showing off a demo of a neural sensor device.

A noted Tesla hacker-owner has revealed that an augmented reality view exists within Tesla's Full Self-Driving beta. AR view enables Tesla owners to see what their car sees in real-time. There are references to other interesting features in the FSD beta, but Tesla hasn't revealed exactly what these features do. If the FSD beta goes well, it will likely roll out to more users before the end of the year.

Liz Parrish, CEO of BioViva, is patient zero for two anti-aging therapies that the company is researching. BioViva is a biotechnology company that focuses on developing therapies to intervene with human aging. One of the treatments involves injections of a myostatin inhibitor which is expected to prevent age-associated muscle loss. The other therapy is a telomerase gene therapy expected to lengthen telomeres. Early results show that the length of the telomeres of T-lymphocytes in blood samples taken from Parrish had grown in length in the six months since the therapies started. The article contains an interview with Parrish about the therapies and her feelings about being the first test subject.

Over the last two years, researchers have rewritten nearly every major chapter in our galaxy's history due to working with better data. In 2018, the European spacecraft Gaia released a staggering amount of data that described the detailed motions of roughly one billion stars. Using this data, scientists found that some of the stars that exist within our galaxy were actually stellar immigrants that were picked up throughout our galaxy’s lifetime. The data revealed evidence of ancient collisions between the Milky Way and other galaxies, and hints of additional mergers. This process will continue to happen, and the Milky Way will continue to change as dwarf galaxies merge with it.

cloudquery transforms cloud infrastructure into queryable SQL tables. It abstracts various scattered APIs and allows developers to define security, governance, costs, and compliance policies with SQL. cloudquery is easily extensible and it comes with built-in policy packs.

People are often told things early in their careers that turn out to be irrelevant, and even detrimental, to their careers. This article discusses six myths in the software development industry that should be challenged by junior programmers in order to develop into better engineers. Questioning these popular ideas can help developers to become more valuable to their teams.

Pornhub is purging videos from all of its unverified uploaders. From now, it will only host videos created by official content partners and creators from the site's verified models program. At least 10 million videos were removed in the purge, with the site now only hosting around 2.9 million clips. Pornhub made the announcement days after Discover, Mastercard, and Visa stopped accepting payments from the site over concerns it was hosting illegal material.

The World Economic Forum's 'Future of Jobs Report' surveys corporate executives in 35 countries around the world about how they think the workforce will change in the next five years. Its goal is to map the jobs and skills of the future. Unemployment figures were high this year and it doesn't look like it will improve. Automation is on the rise, and most workplaces are accelerating the automation of their processes. While automation will wipe out some jobs, it will generate others. Remote work will likely continue, but leaders remain skeptical about its effect on productivity. Existing inequalities are set to deepen.