Original link: http://www.ruanyifeng.com/blog/2022/10/weekly-issue-226.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
Photovoltaic parking shed in Jinzhong, Shanxi Province. This kind of parking lot is very suitable for electric vehicles, as long as it can be parked, it can be charged. ( via )
Topic of the week: What’s wrong with Google?
On the last day of last month (September 30), Google announced without warning that it would shut down its own gaming platform, Stadia.
This incident was very sudden. My own employees left a message on the Internet the day before, asking netizens to provide feedback.
News reports reveal the scene of the day:
“At seven in the morning, the person in charge of Stadia sent an email to all the staff, telling them that there would be an important meeting at 8:30, and I hope everyone will move on to other things and be sure to attend.
The meeting lasted only ten minutes. The person in charge said that the business would be completely closed in January next year, and the meeting was announced after that. Then, he immediately published an article on Google’s official blog to announce the news. “
That said, the employee also only knew about it that morning, only an hour before the outside world.
This is not the first time that Google has suddenly shut down its own products, and it has really hurt a lot of people.
Overnight, employees’ jobs were gone, and game software and hardware purchased by players were useless. Although Google promises a refund, the game props and archives you have finally obtained will definitely disappear.
This time is different, Stadia is a platform with games from outside game companies and studios. As the platform shuts down, the time, money, and manpower invested by these outside agencies is all wasted , and it’s hard to say whether Google will compensate.
In the “Digest” section of this week’s magazine, there is an encounter with a small game studio. I really want to cry without tears. You can take a look.
After this incident, one thing is certain, no one in the gaming industry will trust Google anymore. Google has actually said goodbye to the game industry. Its services are closed when they say it is closed, and they completely ignore the life and death of external developers. Who would dare to develop games for it in the future.
I think this incident will definitely be included in Google’s strategic mistakes in the future. The game industry is developing so fast, has such a big impact, and is so profitable, it is a pity to not be able to enter.
Although the Stadia platform itself is not successful, the business continues to lose money, the growth of new users is slow, and there is a lack of influential masterpieces. However, its strategic significance is that it gives Google a place in the gaming market , where it can form partnerships with game companies and major studios to create possibilities for future development. If you close this platform, you will cut off the connection with the game industry, and it will be difficult to enter this industry in the future.
Even worse, Google actually needs the gaming industry in particular. Games require investment in various technologies. Google’s artificial intelligence achievements, cloud platform, Youtube video platform, Android system, and Play market could have been integrated through the game industry to make a revolutionary product, but now there is no chance. I feel really stupid.
In recent years, Google doesn’t know what’s wrong, and there are fewer and fewer exciting new products.
I ask everyone, in the past 10 years, what new products from Google have impressed you, and I can’t think of them. Google’s official website has a page that lists all of its products (below is a partial screenshot).
You can find out which ones are new? It seems not hey.
It is said that only if it has more than 1 billion users will it be regarded as an important product within Google. There are currently nine such “billion products” : Search, Maps, Gmail, Chrome, Drive, Android, Play Store, Photos, and Youtube.
Have you found out, what do these 9 products have in common?
The answer is that they were all born before 2012. That is to say, in the past ten years, Google has never produced a “billion product”.
Once upon a time, there were technology news related to Google every day on the Internet, and it was a company that was at the forefront of the Internet. But in recent years, it seems to have quieted down, no longer has the amazing innovative ability it used to be. I don’t know why either.
Now, it’s shutting down Stadia, giving up its own opportunities in the gaming industry, and it doesn’t care about losing the confidence of users and external partners. Is the prospect of such a company worth looking forward to?
Technology trends
In 2021, Tesla announced that it would remove lidar and rely solely on camera machine vision for autonomous driving. This month, it announced the removal of the ultrasonic radars on the front and rear bumpers.
The main function of ultrasonic radar is to sense surrounding objects when parking. Once removed, it will rely entirely on the camera for automatic parking.
Not sure what Tesla is thinking, is their machine vision model really so powerful that it can replace physical sensors?
American scientists have built the world’s largest camera, which will soon be shipped to an observatory in the Chilean desert to take astronomical photos.
With a lens diameter of 1.57 meters and a weight of 3 tons, it has been certified as the world’s largest camera lens. Its 3.2 billion pixels per photo can generate 15TB of data in one night.
Its photosensitive element is too large to make a whole piece, and can only be assembled with 189 small sensors.
3. The 100-meter record of the biped robot
The bipedal robot made by the University of Oregon in the United States has created a world record for the 100-meter run by a robot: 24.73 seconds.
This record is far slower than the human record of 100 meters in 10 seconds, but because it can’t leave its feet off the ground, it is actually a 100-meter race walk, and the speed is quite fast. Please watch the live running video , the coherence and speed of the movements are amazing.
Scientists say the hardest part is not balancing while running, but how to start from a still standing position and how to stop.
The robot also has two small arms that, in addition to running and walking, can also pick up and carry small packages.
A British civil society is lobbying the government to ban outdoor advertising in the UK. They believe that the outdoors is a public space and should not be polluted by advertising.
They worry that without restrictions, advertising will spread indefinitely, “until every empty surface, every quiet moment, every thought gap is covered. Only by restricting advertising can other uses of public space flourish. develop.”
Nearly 100,000 cases of obesity have been prevented since London banned advertisements for alcohol, high-fat, high-salt food and high-sugar beverages on subways and buses in 2019, a study says.
5. Encrypted signature of camera
Sony has announced cryptographic signatures for cameras, which automatically add cryptographic signatures to photos as soon as the shot is taken.
In the future, even if the photo changes by one pixel, the photographer can check it out to prove that the photo has been tampered with. The main reason is that the current photo forgery and tampering technology is becoming more and more sophisticated, and it is difficult to identify. With this signature, it can be confirmed whether it is a real photo, which protects the interests of the photographer.
Currently, only Sony’s high-end Alpha 7 IV camera supports this feature, and it will be gradually extended to other models in the future.
article
1. Why don’t Chinese operators promote eSIM? (Chinese)
eSIM cancels the physical SIM card and is a consumer-friendly technology. At present, it is mainly mobile phone manufacturers who are promoting, and domestic communication operators are not active. This news report analyzes the reasons.
2. Metaverse Wedding (Chinese)
The post-90s chairman of Zhongqingbao, a listed company, held a wedding in Metaverse. Guests could watch and participate in the ceremony online, and they could also recharge gold coins to send red envelopes to the new couple.
3. Why was there no glass industry in ancient China? (English)
China’s glass has a long history, it appeared during the Warring States Period, but there was no glass manufacturing until modern times. It is quite interesting for a foreigner to analyze the reasons.
He believes that a big reason is that Chinese porcelain is too developed, so people are not keen to discover new materials, and the system does not encourage innovation.
4. React re-rendering (English)
This article explains in detail how React re-renders are triggered. The article is long, but not difficult.
5. Mildly dynamic website (English)
This post reviews the history of website development, from static websites to dynamic websites, to static website generators, to full stack frameworks like Next.js.
Then, the author proposes a concept that the future trend may be “lightly dynamic websites”, which are static websites in general, but some parts are dynamic components rendered directly by the server, a bit like PHP in the past.
6. Introduction to PowerToys usage (English)
PowerToys is a set of Windows tools officially launched by Microsoft. It contains 11 useful gadgets. This article introduces their usage.
7. 25 Useful Mac Small Apps (English)
A series of articles, the author introduces 25 useful Mac applets one by one, many of which are free.
tool
1. Lyra
A full-text search engine written in TypeScript, all data is placed in memory, which is equivalent to a powerful JavaScript search library, but I am not sure whether it supports Chinese.
2. Fleet
JetBrains’ next-generation IDE claims to have IntelliJ’s code processing engine, but the architecture and UI have been redesigned, and it is currently free to use.
3. Make-A-Video
A tool released by Meta can automatically generate a video based on the input text, such as “running a group of horses.” A similar tool is Phenaki .
4. Pagefind
A static full-text search tool, designed for static websites, can complete site-wide search without a server, see the introduction article .
An open source browser plug-in that can customize the browser’s start page. (Contributed by @leon-kfd )
6. MusicFree
An open source free music player for Android, written in React Native, supports custom plugins. (Contributed by @maotoumao )
7. pcl.js
This tool compiles the large C++ library Point Cloud Library (PCL) into WebAssembly, which runs in the browser and is called by JavaScript. It implements a large number of related general algorithms and data structures, involving point cloud acquisition, filtering, feature extraction, recognition, visualization and other functions. (Contributed by @luoxuhai )
8. OneDev
A self-hosted Git server, similar to open source GitHub/GitLab, with built-in CI/CD and Kanban features.
9. Stormah
A simple web note to specify a remote Git repository as a backend. You take notes in your browser and store them in a remote Git repository.
10. NoSleep.js
This JS library can keep the mobile phone from going to sleep, and the web page window is always on. The principle is to insert an invisible video that is always playing on the page, at the cost of increasing CPU load and power consumption.
resource
An ancient book digital platform jointly developed by Peking University and Douyin Public Welfare. At present, 390 classic ancient books can be searched for free, with a total of more than 30 million words. In the next three years, the intelligent sorting of 10,000 ancient books will be completed.
2. Practical deep learning for programmers
The latest online open course launched by fast.ai introduces programmers to how to do a deep learning project, with videos and detailed course materials, as well as a course warehouse .
3. Musk chat
Musk’s takeover case with Twitter has gone to court. This page has been organized. The court released Musk’s private chat records, which contain a lot of content. It’s interesting to see what the rich talk about.
4. AI Podcast
Foreign netizens used AI to generate a podcast. The famous host interviewed Jobs. The two talked for 20 minutes, which was very realistic. For details, please refer to this article .
In the future, many audio-visual contents of the media may be generated by AI.
picture
1. Correct tearing of post-it notes
The correct way to tear a Post-it note is not to lift each sheet from the bottom to pull it apart, but to tear each sheet from the side.
This is to prevent the upper part of the sticky note from rolling up.
The scientific discovery of mankind is inseparable from the progress of tools.
Below are pictures of Jupiter from 1900.
In 1900, telescopes could see only a shadow. But by 2020, the telescope can already take a clear detailed picture of Saturn.
2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine
The 2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine was awarded to Swedish genetic biologist Svante Pääbo.
His main achievement was sequencing the DNA of Neanderthals, an extinct species of ape-man.
The difficulty of this matter is that it has been buried underground for hundreds of thousands of years. Can the DNA be preserved?
His academic autobiography, called Neanderthals, tells how he got on the road to scientific research. This book is aimed at the general reader, it is written very popularly, and it is very readable.
I have read the Chinese translation, and I really like this book. “Weekly Issue 60” has my post-reading feeling, and there is also a “digest” of the book.
Interested friends, you can go back and watch that issue.
abstract
1. Small studios react to Stadia’s closure
After Google announced the closure of Stadia, the head of a US game studio took to the Reddit forum to publicly complain about Google.
“It took our team 4-5 months to port the game to Stadia. The first time it was submitted to their platform, the staff gave us more than 20 problems that needed to be solved. After two weeks, they reported 10 new ones. question.
To solve these problems, we spent a lot of time learning the technology behind Stadia. It finally arrived on September 29th, all the issues were fixed, all the work was done, and the game was running fine. However, after one night, today, September 30, they suddenly announced that the platform is going to close.
Overnight, all our work was in vain.
This morning, I was compiling a working version when I heard the bad news on the news. It’s a sad day.
Five months we could have used to do other things, but we chose Stadia, learned their system, and put in the money and sweat. I can’t say a word now…”
The first message below, readers give him an idea.
“What you need to do now is not to be sad and sigh, but to write a detailed review of what happened and post it to the game forum.
You want to take advantage of Stadia events to increase awareness and sales of your game.
You also need to make a video about the pain you went through, the things you learned, your regrets… In short, all the factors that can be hyped, you should use. “
speech
1,
Whenever I see a “Subscribe for Free” button on a website, I submit the email address of the website host.
I also keep these mailboxes and submit them one by one to various subscription services when I’m free.
2,
The era of social networking began with the rise of Friendster in 2003 and officially ended in 2022, marked by Facebook abandoning its own algorithms and launching a Douyin-like discovery engine.
— “The End of Social Networking”
3.
Don’t force yourself to do anything you hate in your heart. Because once you get used to doing these things, it’s hard to make up your mind to quit.
— “Imitating others is a trap in life”
4.
I googled “real life blockchain projects” and found 34 projects.
Among them, 13 projects have died, 6 projects are only used for cryptocurrency and NFT ecology, and have nothing to do with real life, and 14 projects have no impact on products even if they do not use blockchain. Only one project called Chainalysis is related to real life, which helps governments find the real identities of anonymous users of the blockchain.
— “I Investigated 34 Top Real-World Blockchain Projects”
5.
In my opinion, Node.js is still inferior to traditional programming languages. Because it has no type system and no compilation, only packaging, it means that code correctness checking ends up happening on the user’s machine, not the developer’s machine.
this week in history
October 8, 2021: Spring for home solar power
October 9, 2020: Is this society becoming “cyberpunk”?
October 4, 2019: Any hobby can turn into a career, as long as you can make videos
October 5, 2018: Reflections on the 10th anniversary of Android phones
thanks
The domestic software FlowUs provides a personal column service (see the weekly column ), which integrates “document + table + network disk”, which is suitable for knowledge base, data management, and file storage.
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document information
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- Date published: October 14, 2022
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