Original link: http://www.ruanyifeng.com/blog/2022/08/weekly-issue-220.html
Here is a record of weekly tech content worth sharing, published on Friday.
This magazine is open source (GitHub: ruanyf/weekly ), welcome to submit issues, contributions or recommend scientific and technological content.
Weekly discussion forum post “Who’s Hiring? “ , provides a lot of programmer employment information, welcome to visit or post job/internship positions.
cover picture
The high temperature in Chongqing has caused the water level of the Jialing River to drop sharply, the shallows at the bottom of the river are exposed, and there is no water under the piers of the Qiansimen Bridge. ( via )
Topic of the week: Where are the opportunities for artificial intelligence
OpenAI ‘s artificial intelligence model DALL·E 2 has recently been opened to the public.
It can generate pictures based on text, a bit like the “magic mirror” in fairy tales. You tell the mirror what you want to see, and it shows you what you want. The current price is $15 to generate 460 images, with an average of $0.03 per image (about two cents of RMB).
It was immediately apparent that this tool had practical uses.
The database query software OctoSQL lacks a Logo, and the author describes what Logo he wants.
A cute little octopus wearing a yellow hard hat and playing with colorful pearls, full of energy and joy, the picture is on a black background.
DALL·E 2 gave him the picture below.
The logo is now on the homepage of his project. Of course, the final product is not obtained at one time, and has been adjusted many times in the middle. For details, please refer to his article .
Another developer tried to generate illustrations for blog posts. He has an introductory article on Docker containers with the illustration description “a blue whale with stacks of containers on its back” and the model gives the image below.
The article on data flow operations in the Go language, the picture description is “a fluffy blue gopher, programming on multiple monitors”, and the following picture is obtained.
As you can see from the above example, for individual developers and small businesses, this tool is a free designer from the sky.
It’s useful even for big companies that actually have designers. Someone took the picture it generated “astronauts riding on the moon” and asked the artist on Twitter: ” How long would it take if you were to draw the picture below? “
The average answer was 5.25 hours, while the DALL·E 2 actually took only 22 seconds. This means that AI can save 99.9% of designer time! The time saved can be used in other areas to create greater value for the company.
In fact, the most economical way is that the designer is responsible for communicating with the client (or project manager) to find out what the other party wants, and then input the requirements into the software, so that DALL·E 2 can generate the actual work, and at most do some manual work ‘s repair.
Speaking of which, everyone should have seen that DALL·E 2 can partially replace designers. It’s faster and cheaper than designers, and it does the actual work, which is likely to reduce the need for designers to recruit, and it may also lower designers’ salaries.
Pessimistic friends may think this is another example of artificial intelligence taking jobs. This idea is not wrong, but from the opposite perspective, this is precisely the opportunity presented by artificial intelligence.
Projects that could not afford designers before can now have design resources; projects that used to only have a design fee of 5,000 yuan can now save this money and have multiple designs to choose from. This is the opportunity that artificial intelligence creates for everyone.
We should not think about competing with artificial intelligence, which will definitely be pessimistic, but should see artificial intelligence as an opportunity to amplify its own capabilities and expand its results.
Artificial intelligence is everywhere, and it’s not just designers: GitHub’s Copilot software automatically generates code (replacing programmers), OpenAI’s GPT-3 model generates text (replacing writers), and Deepmind’s Alphafold model generates Predicting protein structures (replacing biochemists)…and they’re still evolving at a breakneck pace, getting “smarter” every day.
In my opinion, the rational attitude is not to challenge or deny artificial intelligence, to fantasize that humans are better than them, or to feel anxious and hopeless. The only viable option is to see them as an opportunity. They are better and more worthwhile tools to learn and use. We should take the initiative to understand these models, adapt to them, use them, and turn them into our own productivity as soon as possible.
If I were a designer, I’d learn to use DALL·E 2 now and see how to get the most out of it. After all, if this model will succeed, it must be inseparable from the people who promote and operate it. The opportunity may be here. Rather than leaving it to others, it is better to take it in your own hands earlier.
Rare Earth Developer Conference Information
At the end of last month, the rare earth nuggets community held the second developer conference .
The weekly has issued a preview of the event, and I hope everyone can sign up to watch the live broadcast. Because they invited a lot of people this time, 18 technical sessions and nearly 100 speeches were lined up in two days.
I also watched it online that day. Here are a few more impressive speeches, their videos and PPT are now online.
1,
First of all, the morning of the opening ceremony was a speech by You Yuxi, the founder of Vue.js.
He made two main points. The first point is some of the shortcomings of the React Hooks way of writing, how other frameworks (including Vue.js) overcome.
The second point is more interesting. He mentioned that the framework gradually became a “middle layer”.
The upper layer of the framework is some full-stack frameworks (such as Next.js and Nuxt), which connect the front and back ends. The lower layer is some binary tools (below), which are not written in JS, but mainly implemented in native compiled languages.
Therefore, in the future, front-end frameworks may develop towards “middle-tier tools”.
2,
Another great talk, from Ao Xiaojian, a Microsoft engineer and maintainer of Dapr .
He talked about a common concern of Java developers: cloud tools such as microservices + containers + serverless are eroding the market of large-scale Java systems , so how should Java and Spring frameworks face the challenges of cloud native?
There are also two interesting presentations. (1) Chen Manyan, the product manager of Feishu, introduced how to manage a team of 300 people to make Feishu this product. (2) Chen Xu, engineer of ZTE, introduced the algorithm implementation of visual multi-person real-time editing.
3.
Now, all the speech videos are online, on the official website of the Rare Earth Developers Conference.
The PPTs of these speeches are free to download, and there are a total of 78 files, including the ones I mentioned above. The official made these PPTs into a complete Nuggets booklet , saving everyone from downloading them one by one.
Click here or scan the QR code to read these PPTs for free, it requires a Nuggets account. In addition, there are many official gifts, and friends who read the booklet have the opportunity to draw a lottery. For details, please refer to the lottery description .
By the way, the “Nuggets Booklet” is actually a good channel for monetizing knowledge. If you have knowledge worth sharing and are willing to write a systematic booklet, you can apply to be listed on their official website. You set your own price. If you write well, the official will help you promote it. Interested friends can try it out.
Technology trends
Due to the high temperature and power cuts, the Chongqing Metro briefly turned off the lighting of the stations and carriages, and there was a peculiar scene of riding the subway in the dim light.
The LED displays at both ends of the car are still on, making the whole car glow red, giving people a “cyberpunk” feeling.
These photos reflect the dependence of modern society on energy. Reminds us of what a city can be like when there is a shortage of energy.
2. Visible light communication for IoT
How do household appliances connect to mobile phones? The current solutions are all built-in Bluetooth or WiFi appliances, which greatly increases the cost and complexity.
A British start-up company has proposed a visible light communication solution. Home appliances are equipped with LED light-emitting diodes, which constantly flash and emit information.
The phone uses the camera to receive the light signal and interpret it. It is claimed that the transfer rate can reach 1.5kb/sec at a distance of 5cm.
However, it is difficult for household appliances to receive mobile phone signals. It allows home appliances to receive flashes from a phone’s flash, the company said, without giving details. Netizens speculate that the electrical end may need an infrared receiver to sense visible light.
3. The thinnest mechanical watch in the world
A Swiss luxury watch brand has launched the world’s thinnest mechanical watch, only 1.75mm thick.
It is an engineering marvel, with a complex internal structure, the various parts are extremely thin, and it also includes the case and sapphire crystal surface.
On its dial, the time display area is actually very small, occupying only about one-sixth of the space, in the upper center.
The upper left and lower left corners of the dial are the rotary operation buttons. The upper right corner is the exposed balance wheel, and the lower right corner is the partner Ferrari Logo.
Its price is also sky-high, as high as $1.888 million, and it is limited to 150 pieces worldwide.
LG recently released a 16:18 monitor.
The aspect ratio of ordinary monitors is generally 16:9, so this monitor is equivalent to two ordinary monitors stacked on top of each other.
This near-square display is now more and more, and Ezio has released one before. The advantage of a square display is that the upper and lower parts can open two applications at the same time, and both can be fully displayed.
And, for graphics and video processing, it also has a larger display area. Both horizontal and vertical screen videos can be displayed in the largest area.
Its price will be more expensive than ordinary monitors, it depends on whether consumers can accept it.
article
1. An interview with Jiang Shangyi (Chinese)
Jiang Shangyi (1946-) served as the co-operating officer of TSMC, and later came to the mainland and served as the vice chairman of SMIC.
In March of this year, he accepted an exclusive interview with the “Computer History Museum” in the United States to review his semiconductor career. The content is good, it is worth reading, you can understand the semiconductor industry and TSMC.
2. DuckDuckGo sends @duck.com email (Chinese)
DuckDuckGo has started to open the @duck.com mailbox for free to all users. This is an email forwarding service that strips the tracking code from emails. If you want to register, you need to install its browser extension first.
3. Electric wheelchair as computer chair (Chinese)
The author explores a possibility, can electric wheelchairs be used to replace computer chairs?
4. Why Apple will definitely release an ARM-based Mac
In a 2014 article, the author correctly predicted that Mac computers would switch to ARM-based CPUs, and the analysis was well-founded and insightful.
5. How to use Next.js to build a blog (English)
A tutorial on how to blog on Vercel Free Space with Next.js.
6. Node.js performance differences: CJS vs ESM (English)
This is an issue in the official Node.js repository. It has been found that Node.js processes CJS modules 10 times faster than ESM modules, and Node 18 is not as performant as Node 16.
7. Tauri vs Electron: A Comparison of Real Projects (English)
Electron is currently the preferred development framework for cross-platform desktop software, and Tauri is a recent alternative that tries to solve the former’s biggest pain point: bulky and high resource usage.
The author purposely wrote a desktop application in Tauri. This article is his experience in use, as well as a comprehensive comparison of the two.
8. 103 status code: loading prompt (English)
The Chrome browser has added the 103 status code of the HTTP protocol, which means “early hints”, which means that the browser can preload a resource to replace the server push function of HTTP/2 that has been offline.
tool
1. mjml
A tool for writing HTML emails. It provides a set of mail components and can transcode these components into HTML code. You can try its PlayGround .
2. Upptime
An open source website status monitoring service, it uses GitHub Actions to query whether the website is online every five minutes, submit the response time to the Git repository every six hours, and generate a website (above) for users to monitor the website status.
3. Vanblog
A personal blog system that supports many functions, deployed with Docker, with a management background, a static page in the foreground, and an automatic HTTPS certificate. (Contributed by @Mereithhh )
4. SVNAdmin
Web management interface for SVN source code repository, developed using PHP. (Contributed by @witersen )
5. gossip
This tool can turn a GitHub Issue into a static blog, with content and comments stored in the issue. Blogs are developed using next.js and can be automatically deployed to Vercel or GitHub Pages. (Contributed by @qianxi0410 )
6. BgSub
A web tool that can automatically cut out images, replace background colors or background images, and do it completely locally without uploading to the server. (Contributed by @PearOCR )
7. Listen to podcasts together
An open source website that supports multiple people to listen to podcasts together, and supports Xiao Universe and Apple Podcast China podcasts. (Contributed by @yenche123 )
8. MiraPlayer
A front-end video player and editor component based on Tencent video library FFCreator package. (Contributed by @milkliker )
9. Solon
A lightweight Java application development framework with low resource footprint and supports migration from Spring Boot. (Contributed by @noear )
10. Codeberg
A GitHub/GitLab alternative for self-hosting Git repositories.
Activity
1. Microservice Framework CloudWeGo Technology Salon
Last week, I introduced Byte’s microservice framework CloudWeGo , which supports 100,000+ microservices and 10 million container instances within Byte, and has been completely open sourced for external use, with the same set of code inside and out.
The CloudWeGo team will share the background architecture of byte-based applications (such as Feishu’s architecture ) and how to quickly build enterprise-level microservice applications at the ByteDance Technology Salon at 2 pm tomorrow (August 27). Students who have not signed up can hurry up to sign up and have a chance to win a lot of gifts prepared by the conference team.
In addition, this framework is written in Go. The CloudWeGo team is not satisfied with this and wants better performance, so they tried to develop the first Rust language RPC framework in China, which will also be released on the spot. Welcome to pay attention.
resource
1, according to the meaning of the sentence
Tsinghua University has launched a search engine to search for relevant poems based on keywords. For example, searching for “depressed” will return various sentences related to depression, see the introduction article .
There is also a Chinese synonym search engine .
The Weekly introduced a GitHub Actions template for grabbing Bing’s daily wallpapers. The author now makes it a static website, where you can browse and download wallpapers online, and update them daily. (Contributed by @niumoo )
An audio podcast crafted by Red Hat. “Linux China” was authorized to translate the text and bring it to domestic developers. It is a pity that the English version has been updated to the ninth season, and the Chinese translation has only reached the fourth season. (Contributed by @CherryLover )
4. Bunny Fonts
A replacement for Google Web Fonts, equivalent to unofficial mirroring, and also avoid leaking user information to Google.
picture
1. $50 bill
The picture below is a $50 bill under a microscope.
It can be seen that in order to prevent counterfeiting, the banknotes have blue security fibers added to the red shading. In addition, the blue fiber forms two five-pointed star patterns, and the five-pointed star in the upper right corner also has the microcosm of “USA FIFTY”.
2. Living vending machine
I saw a man on the Shanghai subway with two lines of words on his transparent satchel.
I couldn’t help being curious, took out the telephoto of my mobile phone, and finally saw it clearly: “Available items, price negotiable”. Is this a living vending machine?
3. Slush
When snow falls into a channel that is freezing but not yet frozen, a mixture of snow and water called snezhura is formed.
This kind of sight is very rare, and the following is a photo of the slush in St. Petersburg.
abstract
Many job search websites and social networking sites require uploading real-life avatars.
Having an impressive headshot will greatly increase your network and chances of success. To meet this demand, an advanced photo-taking service is emerging in the United States.
More and more professional photographers are finding that people are willing to pay a premium for a good-looking portrait. They started taking pictures of themselves.
These professional mug shots are very expensive, with the cheapest costing over $200 a piece. If you want to take more than one shot at a time, it will cost thousands of dollars.
Some photographers also bring their own hair stylist and makeup artist to do your hair and makeup for you. In that case, a headshot would cost $1,000 or $2,000.
Now, taking profile photos for Internet use has become a lucrative new industry in the United States.
But research shows that the money is worth it. If the photo is attractive, your LinkedIn page will get a lot more views. Pages with avatars get 21 times as many views and 9 times as many friend requests as pages without avatars.
On the other hand, if your avatar does not match the image in the boss’s mind, it will reduce the probability of you getting an offer.
speech
1,
If you really want to do a project, the sooner you start, the better. Get valuable results early and you’ll attract clients; if it doesn’t work, you can give up early, save yourself time, and learn what’s not going to work.
— “Don’t Build Your Own Frames”
2,
If your travel is only by car/train/airplane, it may be hard to appreciate how rich the world you see on a bike is. Generally speaking, when you cycle, you don’t choose to pass one dreary transportation hub after another, but follow ancient routes that have connected people’s lives, histories and landscapes for thousands of years.
3.
When I was younger, I was really annoyed by product managers who always asked me to estimate the duration of tasks that were never done.
Now I realize that product managers really need to put a date in the calendar so they have something to say. Also, my own numbers are at least a bit more accurate than their random numbers.
4.
Now it is too difficult to make money by developing mobile apps. The market is completely different, and customers are tired of downloading more apps, let alone paying for them.
5.
Any one person is the end result of a chain of biological reproduction that has existed for 4 billion years. In 4 billion years, the reproduction of each link of this chain has not failed, and you have been born.
this week in history
2021 (Issue 172): Will we die from a climate catastrophe?
2020 (Issue 121): Why aren’t human beings getting more and more idle?
2019 (Issue 70): The world has entered an era of negative interest rates, and what this means
2018 (Issue 19): The movie “Ready Player One” depicts the virtual world of the future
thanks
The domestic software FlowUs provides a personal column service (see the weekly column ), which integrates “document + table + network disk”, which is suitable for multiple purposes of knowledge base, data management, and file storage.
(Finish)
document information
- Copyright statement: Free reprint – non-commercial – non-derivative – keep attribution ( Creative Commons 3.0 license )
- Date of publication: August 26, 2022
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