Good Morning! Mark Zuckerberg has said he regrets bowing to pressure from the Biden administration to censor certain Covid-19 content on Facebook and Instagram during the pandemic. He’s saying that the senior White House officials "repeatedly pressured" Meta to censor content, including humor and satire, and expressed frustration when Meta didn't comply.

— Forrest Knight & Meghanadh Vasireddy

Telegram's CEO Arrested: What You Need to Know

Pavel Durov, the brains behind Telegram, got nabbed at a Paris airport. Why? French authorities are eyeing Telegram for some pretty serious stuff.

Durov's in hot water over allegations that Telegram's been a playground for illegal activities, including:

• Child pornography

• Drug trafficking

• Money laundering

• Organized crime transactions

Telegram's known for its massive group chats (up to 200k users!) and optional end-to-end encryption. But unlike Signal or WhatsApp, Telegram's E2EE isn't on by default. This has raised eyebrows about content moderation and user privacy.

Telegram's Response: The company's standing its ground, saying it's "absurd" to hold a platform or its owner responsible for user abuse. They claim their moderation is "within industry standards and constantly improving."

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Why Cutting Costs is Expensive: How $9/Hour Software Engineers Cost Boeing Billions

Context: Boeing, facing heat from Airbus' fuel-efficient A320neo, rushed to upgrade their 737. The result? The 737 MAX 8, which tragically crashed twice due to software issues, costing lives and billions in market value.

Boeing's cost-cutting culture led them to outsource critical software development to $9/hour engineers. Yikes! This decision backfired spectacularly:

• Inefficient code required multiple revisions

• Senior engineers were sidelined, leaving juniors without proper guidance

• Quality control measures were neglected in favor of speed

As devs, we know "slow is smooth, and smooth is fast." Boeing's rush job proves that cutting corners in software development can have catastrophic consequences. Next time your PM pushes for that quick fix, remember: in tech, fast is slow, and cheap is expensive.

Food for Thought: How do we balance speed, cost, and quality in our own projects? Maybe it's time to revisit those TDD practices and code reviews we've been "too busy" for lately.

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Amazon's AI Typo Blunder

Context: Amazon's been touting its new AI-powered code transformation tool, Amazon Q, as a game-changer for Java upgrades. They've been bragging about saving 4,500 developer-years and $260M in efficiency gains. Impressive, right?

Turns out, their shiny new AI isn't immune to good old-fashioned typos. In a demo video shared by Amazon CEO Andy Jassy and former AWS CEO Adam Selipsky, Amazon Q kicked off by offering to upgrade "Jave 8 and 11 codebases to Java 17." Yep, you read that right – "Jave."

Amazon claims their developers couldn't find mistakes in 79% of Q's auto-generated code reviews. But if it can't spell "Java" correctly, what else might it be missing?

Bottom line: This gaffe is more than just a funny typo. It's a wake-up call for all of us working with AI in software development. As we push forward with AI-assisted coding, let's not forget the importance of thorough testing and human review. After all, even the smallest errors can lead to big headaches down the line.

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🔥 More Notes

• Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team: Microsoft is donating the Mono Project, an open-source .NET implementation, to the Wine team. Mono has been an important part of the .NET ecosystem since 2001, but Microsoft is now recommending that active Mono users migrate to their modern .NET fork instead.

• How Google DeepMind's AlphaGeometry Reached Math Olympiad Level Reasoning By Combining Creative LLMs With Deductive Symbolic Engines: DeepMind's AlphaGeometry represents a significant leap forward in automated geometric reasoning, tackling olympiad-level geometry problems with performance rivaling human experts.

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Training AI to Play Fortnite (Reinforcement Learning + Computer Vision)

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