TLDR 2021-02-02

SpaceX will fly its first all-civilian mission as early as the fourth quarter this year. The Inspiration4 mission was funded by Jared Isaacman, a tech entrepreneur who will serve as commander on the mission. Isaacman intends to use the mission to spread goodwill back on Earth. He will donate $100 million to St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, raffling off one of the four seats on the mission to a US citizen who donates at least $10 to the hospital. The crew will need to undergo training before the mission. It is the second announced commercial mission for SpaceX's Crew Dragon.

Apple has released iCloud Passwords, an official iCloud Keychain Chrome extension for Windows and Mac. Users will now be able to sync passwords across Windows and Mac with ease. Passwords created in Chrome for Windows will sync back to iCloud. iCloud Passwords is available now in the Chrome Web Store.

Transparent wood is usually created by removing a structural component of the wood called lignin. A team of researchers has come up with a method of creating transparent wood by modifying the lignin without removing it completely. The technique produces wood that allows more than 90 percent of light to pass through it and is 50 times stronger than wood with the lignin removed. It is lighter and stronger than glass, and it could be potentially used to make a see-through house.

Eelume is a six-meter-long snake-like robot that will make deep-sea oil and gas operations safer, cheaper, and less polluting. It can be kept at a docking station at depths of up to 500 meters for six months, travel up to 20 kilometers between charges, and it has parts that can be swapped out for different tasks. Eelume can work autonomously in confined spaces and send back video and data. The global underwater robotics market is expected to be worth around $7 billion in 2025. A 3-minute video that features the robot is available in the article.

pipupgrade upgrades all pip packages and automates Python Dependency Management. It can detect packages within multiple Python environments and avoid updates that break changes. pipupgrade works with Python 2.7+ and Python 3.4+ with zero dependencies.

BudgetML allows data practitioners to quickly deploy an ML inference service in less than 10 lines of code. It features automatic FastAPI server endpoint generation, fully interactive docs, built-in SSL certificate generation, 99% uptime using cheap preemptible instances, and complete OAuth2 secured endpoints. Using BudgetML results in significant cost savings.

In the first two years of working on his own business, Michael Lynch earned less than $10k total. His goal for the third year was to earn $20k, but he exceeded the goal by earning $63k in revenue by the end of the year. This article follows his projects throughout the third year, documenting the successes, failures, and lessons learned.

Elon Musk recently made a debut on Clubhouse, a platform that lets people join rooms to listen in on conversations between hosts and guests. He talked on a range of topics, including space travel, colonies on Mars, crypto, AI, and Covid-19 vaccines. Musk also interviewed Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev. More than 5,000 people viewed the stream on Clubhouse, breaking the service's previously maintained limits. Links to recordings of the stream are available in the article.