Reading list

• The three stages of "Find it - Nail it - Scale it" as applied by the GitHub Copilot team when they developed an LLM (Large Language Model) application is well described here.
• Astronomers have used gravitational lensing to observe a galaxy multiple times, providing insights into dark matter and the expansion of the universe. Okay nice, what does it have to do with tech and design you say?
  
• EY has created their own LLM, costing them $1.4M.
• If real life was like a Vercel Engineering article. Here's an excellent read on just why all application migrations should be incremental.
• The Norwegian Government Pension Fund Global has one task, and one alone: to be profitable. It owns on average 1.5% of every listed company on the planet, and has traditionally taken a very quiet, back seat position in the daily goings-on within those companies. Often critiqued for a lack of political, geopolitical or even ethical considerations, it is now trying to leverage it's heft by making companies more responsible in their use of AI, likening the overall status to the hindsightednes of cyber security. The Fund CEO lists three vital topics in this FT article, and warns it could vote agains those who do nothing.
• Karel Čapek's R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) was written more than 100 years ago, and remains hugely relevant to this day, and is about to get a major movie adaption.

Design of the week

• Zuzana Spustova, a fine jeweller from Oslo, has this intriguing and unapologetic new page, practically forcing visitors into the intended headspace. The site balances arts and rationality in a good way.
• Staying local, we like Værsågods new page, where they find time to eat their own medicine. The Pirate language mode is highly encouraged. Nice!
• An interesting thread on design subscription services. No surprises there.
• Not entirely sure how this is massively relevant to Design, tech, or anything we do on a daily basis around the office, but that shouldn't stop you from learning a few knots over at "Animated Knots". It could be argued that the animations lack a lot to be desired, but who here has a patent pending way of making knot animations any other way? It could even be claimed that this site could very well be 100 times better in every way, but hey, you're going to learn some knots if you check it out.
• At the latest Apple iPhone reveal, Mr. Cook could be seen strolling amongst some wavy glass walls. Turns out there is a quite intriguing back story to the installation, and you can read about it here.

Tech of the week

• Databutton, an Oslo-based startup that’s aiming to put the power of AI-based assistants, chatbots, and automation (for better or for worse) in the hands of any and all, has raised $5.1 million in a round of Seed funding.
  
• Falcon 180B is out over at Hugging Face. While hard to quantify or say certainly, it's widely recognised to be at the very top of natural language models, on par with PaLM-2 Large, and certainly the largest openly available LLM at that.
• You know those rapid response security updates you sometimes see as X.X.1 updates on your devices? Here's a little back story on why one such update was sped through the iOS update channels about a week ago. It had to do with a an actively exploited zero-click vulnerability in iOS 16.6, meaning it required NO user input to place mercenary spyware on your device. Yeah, it's a froggy world out there.
• Fans of interactive ways to learn, we really appreciated React.gg by ui.dev.
• Guthib. And just like that, auto completion in your browser address bar might be as damaged as ours.
• Exploring the fine line between being a passionate evangelist and becoming a dogmatic crusader, David Heinemeier Hansson, of 37signals fame, takes a stab at Open source hooliganism and the TypeScript meltdown.
• Speaking of 37signals, some might recall founder and CEO Jason Fried, one of the most well travelled personalities in online business. Do you remember last time you paid once for a piece of software that you then owned forever? Mr. Fried argues that SaaS pricing models might have gone out of control. Perhaps there are some things we should own, and not simply rent. We certainly agree, looking over our monthly accumulated micro services bills. Once.com is about to spearhead the post-SaaS era, and we can't wait to find out more later in 2023.
• Procreate has been around for a while, and are launching Procreate Dreams later this month. It promises to be a powerhouse for 2D animations.
• Unity is about to launch a new pricing method, "Unity Runtime Fee" which is based on game installs. Developers aren't exactly overjoyed.
• Revisiting Bun, an all-in-one toolkit for running, building, testing, and debugging JavaScript and TypeScript, from a single file to a full-stack application. It's now out of beta and good to go!