TLDR 2021-10-21

PayPal offers to buy Pinterest 💸, Facebook's name change ✍️, mixing COVID vaccines

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Big Tech & Startups

Facebook is planning to rebrand the company with a new name (3 minute read)

Facebook is planning to change its company name next week. The rebrand will reflect the company's focus on building the metaverse and will likely position Facebook and its current apps under a parent company. Facebook recently set up a dedicated metaverse team and plans to hire 10,000 more employees to work on the metaverse in Europe. The new company name is a closely guarded secret and not widely known even among the company's senior leadership. Other tech companies, such as Google and Snapchat, have also changed names as their ambitions expanded.

PayPal might buy Pinterest (2 minute read)

PayPal has made an offer to acquire Pinterest for $45 billion. It plans to finance the purchase mostly in stock. Acquiring Pinterest will help PayPal gain a foothold in the growing social commerce space. The social network is a safe purchase as it has avoided many of the problems that other social networks have faced. PayPal has spent much of the past year expanding outside of its usual business, investing in cryptocurrency trading and in the buy-now-pay-later space.
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Science & Futuristic Technology

Pig Kidney Successfully Transplanted From Hog to Human (2 minute read)

Doctors in New York City successfully transplanted a kidney grown in a pig to a brain-dead woman. The kidney functioned normally for 54 hours before the woman was removed from a ventilator and died. The procedure is the most significant xenotransplantation experiment ever done. Xenotransplantation could potentially help supply enough organs to patients for life-saving procedures.

Elon Musk’s Boring Company gets green light for Las Vegas tunnel system (3 minute read)

The Boring Company has won approval from Las Vegas officials to build a network of vehicle tunnels underneath the city. The Vegas Loop will allow passengers to travel to and from several landmarks inside Tesla vehicles. As many as 57,000 passengers will be able to travel through the tunnels every hour. A smaller version of the system already operates underneath the Las Vegas Convention Center. The Boring Company will foot the bill for building the 29 miles of tunnels, but it has asked casinos and other businesses to pay for the 51 planned stations.
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Programming, Design & Data Science

compatlib (GitHub Repo)

compatlib makes it easy to write backward-and-forwards compatible Python libraries. It resolves the latest-usable version at runtime by comparing the overloaded methods with the interpreter version. An example is available.

vscode.dev (Website)

vscode.dev is a lightweight version of VS Code that runs in the browser. It can edit files locally or on the cloud. vscode.dev supports most UI customization extensions, but extensions that use OS-specific modules or shell out to local executables are unavailable.
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Miscellaneous

Amazon’s Android apps come to the latest Windows 11 beta (2 minute read)

Microsoft has announced the first preview for Android apps on Windows 11. 50 Android apps will be available to Windows 11 users in the US soon, with more to follow in the coming months. Android apps running on Windows 11 will have basic integration with the rest of the operating system, including access to features like the Action Center and Clipboard. The system requirements for running Android apps are higher than the requirements for only running Windows 11.

FDA official: Booster announcements coming Wednesday (2 minute read)

US regulators will rule on Wednesday on authorizing booster doses of the Moderna and Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccines. Some announcements later today may include the allowing of the mixing and matching of Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 booster doses. Several million Americans have already received a third dose to boost Pfizer's vaccine. The booster recommendations won’t become official until after the CDC’s director affirms who should get them and when.

SaaS Email Templates (ProductHunt Page)

Hey guys, this is my personal project that I'm launching on ProductHunt today. It's a curated selection of the best emails from top SaaS companies like Zapier, Buffer, Heroku, and more. All 400+ emails are freely downloadable as HTML and categorized by use case, if this is something you'd be interested in, I'd appreciate it if you showed me some love on ProductHunt! 🙏
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