TLDR 2021-03-17

The Wikimedia Foundation behind Wikipedia has created a new division called Wikimedia Enterprise, which will provide commercial products that tailor Wikipedia's content for publication on services provided by

A study of a dirt sample from northwestern Greenland has revealed that most of Greenland was ice-free at some time within the last million years. The material for the study came from a Cold War military science project that was a cover-up for a secret nuclear missile storage facility. A fifteen-foot-long tube of dirt was retrieved from the bottom of the ice as part of the project in 1966. The sample was mostly ignored until it was accidentally rediscovered in 2017.

Researchers from the Netherlands have grown functional tear glands from stem cells. The organoids will help scientists understand how the cells in tear glands produce tears and hopefully lead to treatments for conditions that affect them. It may even be possible to transplant the organoids into patients with nonfunctioning tear glands. Tear glands are made up of many different types of cells, but the lab-grown glands were only made from one of the main cell types. The researchers hope to eventually grow a full tear gland from a broader array of cells for a more robust understanding of the organ.

Vite is a build tool that provides a faster and leaner development experience for modern web projects. It consists of a dev server with rich feature enhancements over native ES modules and a build command that bundles code with Rollup. Vite is highly extensible via its Plugin API and JavaScript API.

The industry-standard way of interviewing software engineers is broken and works against interviewees. They take a ton of prep time, the environments that engineers are tested in are usually different from how they work most effectively, they don't usually test for the job that the candidate will do, and they send a bad message about the company's work culture. A better option for testing a software engineer's coding ability would be to give them a short take-home assignment.

The costs for technology have dropped over the last few decades, and AI is set to make everything even cheaper. Machines will be able to do everything in the next few decades, including changing what we mean by 'everything'. With the drop in costs looming, we need to start thinking of new ways to distribute wealth in society. This article discusses one potential option for the distribution of wealth in the future.

The internet is at risk of splitting apart as countries start blocking specific parts of the internet and companies create ecosystems for their products while providing content only for paying customers. Future regulations could potentially create more problems, as website owners may soon be liable for content created and posted by their users. The Internet Archive is already struggling to save everything. Services like the Wayback Machine now play an important role in legal and other matters. If the balkanization of the internet is avoided, then the Internet Archive could one day transform the way historians learn about larger historical moments.