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Good Morning! AI pioneers just bagged the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for their groundbreaking work on neural networks. Meanwhile, the Halo team is shaking things up by ditching their custom engine for Unreal 5, promising a fresh take on the iconic franchise. And in a move that could revolutionize open-source software, a new pledge is aiming to put real money in the pockets of the unsung heroes keeping our digital world running smoothly.

— Forrest Knight & Meghanadh Vasireddy

AI Pioneers Bag 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics

The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics just came out, and it's all about the brains behind machine learning. John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton snagged the award for their groundbreaking work in artificial neural networks. These guys laid the foundation for today's AI boom way back in the 1980s. They took concepts from physics and applied them to create powerful machine learning methods.

What's New:

• Hopfield's contribution: He invented a network that can store and reconstruct patterns, kind of like an artificial associative memory. Think of it as a way to recover distorted or incomplete images.

• Hinton's magic: He developed the Boltzmann machine, which can autonomously find properties in data. This bad boy can classify images and even generate new examples based on its training.

Both their methods use principles from statistical physics, showing how interdisciplinary approaches can lead to revolutionary tech. Hopfield's work was inspired by atomic spin in magnetic materials, while Hinton leveraged the Boltzmann equation from thermodynamics.

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Halo Devs Ditch Custom Engine for Unreal 5

Halo Infinite, built on Slipspace, faced a rocky development cycle and mixed reception. Now, Halo Studios is looking to streamline their process and tap into industry-standard tools:

• Multiple Halo games are in development using UE5

• The studio showcased a tech demo called "Project Foundry" to validate their UE5 capabilities

Tech Talk: Halo Studios' art director, Chris Matthews, highlighted UE5's Nanite and Lumen technologies as game-changers. These advanced rendering and lighting systems would have been resource-intensive to replicate in Slipspace. Plus, many team members are already familiar with Unreal, potentially accelerating development cycles.

The Tradeoffs: While ditching a custom engine means less control over low-level optimizations, it allows the team to focus on game creation rather than engine maintenance. UE5's robust feature set and widespread adoption in the industry could lead to faster iteration and more efficient workflows.

What's Next: Don't expect new Halo titles immediately – the studio is emphasizing quality over rushed releases. However, this engine switch, coupled with organizational changes, signals a fresh chapter for the iconic franchise.

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Open Source Pledge: A New Era for Maintainer Compensation

Open-source software (OSS) powers much of our digital world, but maintainers often go unpaid for their crucial work. Recent security incidents like the XZ Utils hack have highlighted the need for sustainable funding models in OSS.

What's New: The Open Source Pledge, launched by Sentry and partners, aims to address this imbalance. Companies signing the pledge commit to donating $2,000 annually per engineer to OSS maintainers. So far, 20 companies have pledged nearly $1.3 million.

Key Points:

• Accountability: Companies must publish annual reports detailing their contributions.

• Scale: Sentry alone is committing $270,000 this year, based on its 135 engineers.

• Impact: The initiative seeks to reduce maintainer burnout and improve OSS security.

This model could significantly impact the OSS ecosystem. By directly funding maintainers, we might see faster security patches, more robust codebases, and increased innovation in critical libraries and tools we rely on daily.

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🔥 More Notes

• Interviews with over 20 teams revealed that the main issue is cognitive load

• Rust is rolling off the Volvo assembly line

• What’s New In Python 3.13

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