TLDR 2021-05-13

Amazon has revealed images of its second headquarters in northern Virginia. It will hire 1,900 new employees at the site. Amazon plans to create 25,000 jobs in the area over the next decade. The campus will have space for retail shops and can serve as a place for public gatherings. Amazon hopes to begin construction in 2022 and finish in 2025. Renderings of the campus design are available in the article.

Tesla has suspended vehicle purchases using bitcoin due to concerns over the increasing use of fossil fuels for bitcoin mining. The price of bitcoin dropped 5% in the minutes following the announcement. Tesla had bought $1.5 billion worth of bitcoin earlier this year and it has supported other cryptocurrencies like Dogecoin. The company is looking at other cryptocurrencies that use less energy per transaction. Tesla will not sell the bitcoin it already has.

A team of researchers used neural implants to enable a paralyzed person to type using their imagination. The implants were placed in the premotor cortex, an area that is thought to be involved in forming the intentions to perform movements. Catching the signals for intentions produced clearer results than trying to catch the signals for the movements themselves. The researchers trained a neural network to estimate the probability of a signal corresponding to each letter, resulting in a system that could type at roughly 90 characters per minute with an error rate of about 5 percent.

A team from Intel Labs trained a convolutional network that enhances images using intermediate representations produced by conventional rendering pipelines. The method can be used to enhance computer-generated images to photorealistic quality frame by frame. It can be run at interactive rates. Several video examples are provided in the article.

AWS SaaS Boost is a tool that helps software developers migrate to a Software-as-a-Service delivery model. It provides core software elements for running SaaS workloads in the cloud, including tenant management, deployment automation, analytics dashboards, billing, and more.

Kobra is a visual programming language for machine learning. It allows data scientists and engineers to build things quickly without having to write code or deal with programming concepts. Kobra can help people learn about machine learning without needing to learn how to code first. The beta is now available to try online.

There has been some debate about the growth of Bitcoin's blockchain for years now, with some groups wanting to increase transaction throughput by increasing block size while others want to focus on technologies that decrease the resources necessary to run the network as it grows. This article analyzes the major throughput bottlenecks that restrict Bitcoin's safe throughput capacity and discusses what throughput capacity we can expect in the future.

Vitalik Buterin sent over $1 billion worth of cryptocurrencies to several charities. The creators of the tokens had gifted them to Buterin in the hopes that he would hold them. Some of the coins plummeted in value after Buterin gave them away. The coins were new to the Ethereum network and were attempting to mimic the rise that Dogecoin recently experienced.