Good Morning! Google has laid off hundreds of employees across multiple divisions including engineering, as part of a broader effort to cut costs and prioritize key areas like AI, despite still making billions in profit. Brave Search launched CodeLLM, an AI tool that provides summarized solutions and step-by-step explanations for coding queries directly in search results, with a privacy-first approach. The Vcc project is working to enable the full C and C++ languages on GPUs without sub-setting, though some functions like malloc/free are not yet supported due to needing communication with the host kernel.

— Forrest Knight & Meghanadh Vasireddy

Google’s Huge Layoffs

Google has laid off hundreds of employees across its engineering, voice assistant, and hardware divisions. This decision is part of a broader cost-cutting drive, as the tech giant aims to focus on its key priorities, including artificial intelligence.

The layoffs have affected several hundred employees from the company's core engineering organization, as well as those working on the voice-based Google Assistant and the augmented reality hardware team. This move follows a trend of tech layoffs, with other large companies such as Amazon and Meta also announcing job cuts.

The Alphabet Workers Union, representing over 1,400 workers at Google's parent company, has criticized the layoffs, stating that the company cannot continue to fire employees while making billions every quarter.

This is not the first time Google has made such a move. A year ago, the company announced it would lay off 12,000 employees, or around 6% of its workforce. The recent layoffs are part of ongoing organizational changes, which include role eliminations globally.

The layoffs come at a time when Google is locked in a fierce rivalry with Microsoft, with both firms striving to lead in the field of artificial intelligence. Google's focus on AI is evident in its statement about "responsibly investing in our company's biggest priorities and the significant opportunities."

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Brave Search Introduces CodeLLM for Developers

Brave Search has unveiled CodeLLM, an AI-powered feature that revolutionizes how developers tackle coding queries. This new tool is designed to streamline the coding process by providing high-quality, summarized solutions and step-by-step explanations for common programming challenges.

CodeLLM leverages the capabilities of Mixtral, a sophisticated large language model, to interpret text prompts and generate code. This integration allows Brave Search to offer real-time, context-aware answers from its extensive index of over 20 billion web pages. The feature is readily accessible on both desktop and mobile platforms of Brave Search, requiring no special actions from users—simply search as usual.

When a coding-related query is detected, Brave Search will present an answer box above the standard search results, offering concise and actionable information. Users can also contribute to the feature's improvement by providing feedback directly through a button included in the widget.

Brave's commitment to user privacy is evident in CodeLLM's design, which operates entirely on-device, ensuring that no personal data is transmitted to Brave or any external services. This privacy-centric approach is consistent with other recent Brave Search innovations, such as Goggles for community-driven search rankings and an AI summarizer for quick overviews of search results.

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VCC - The Vulkan Clang Compiler

The Shady Gang team is making strides with their work-in-progress project, Vcc. This ambitious endeavor aims to bring the entirety of C and C++ programming languages to the GPU without sub-setting. The goal is to make all previously mentioned features work reliably, but the team acknowledges that there are still limitations. For instance, certain functions like malloc/free, which require communication with the host kernel, are not currently implemented.

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Brain-Inspired AI Python Library Hits Major Google Cast adds Output Switcher to transfer media

Google has announced a series of significant updates to Google Cast, including the introduction of the Output Switcher, a feature that allows users to transfer and control media across different devices and technical protocols. Accessible via the Android System UI, the Output Switcher 2.0 on Android U brings enhanced volume control, device categorization, and support for devices with custom protocols.

In response to the rising popularity of short-form content, Google Cast has made it easier for users to watch their favorite short videos on TVs or other cast-enabled devices. To ensure a seamless user experience, Google has provided guidelines for integrating Google Cast into apps. These include displaying the Google Cast icon prominently on every screen with playable content and offering an autoplay feature for a continuous viewing experience.

Google has also introduced the "Persistent cast icon" feature to address user feedback regarding the visibility of the cast icon. This feature ensures the cast icon is always visible, providing users with immediate access and assistance in understanding why a specific device may not be appearing.

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Youtube Spotlight

Uncle Bob Martin - The Clean Coder

Uncle Bob Martin discusses the origin of the moon before delving into the importance of architectural design in software development. He emphasizes the need to focus on the intent of the system and not let frameworks dominate the architecture. He also advocates for testing in isolation and deferring major decisions until more information is available. Overall it’s a very interesting talk and worth a listen.

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