Weekly recap

Weekly Tech Recap - № 237 - Tesla Cybertruck, Google Search, Diple, Linus Torvalds, Raku, Dash Smart Shelf

By Laurent Gloaguen,

November 22, 2019.

Tesla Cybertruck

Cybertruck. © Tesla.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk revealed the car maker’s long-promised electric pickup truck, dubbed the “Cybertruck,” in Los Angeles, Calif. near Space X’s rocket factory. The retrofuturistic truck will come in three versions with 250 miles, 300 miles and 500 miles of range. The starting price is USD 39,900 for the 250-mile range version that tows 3,400 kg. The mid-range Cybertruck adds on 10,000, USD while the top range, “tri-motor” variant (presumably with one front motor and two rear motors) comes in at 69,900. Tesla will target production beginning in late 2020 or early 2021, with deliveries starting in early-to-mid 2021. Tesla is now accepting USD 100 refundable deposits for the Cybertruck.

⇨ YouTube, “Tesla Cybertruck event in 5 minutes.”

⇨ YouTube, “Tesla Cybertruck first ride: inside the electric pickup.”

⇨ Axios, Gigi Sukin, “Tesla debuts its first electric pickup truck.”

⇨ Ars Technica, Jonathan M. Gitlin , “Tesla wants to reinvent the pickup with the $39,900 Cybertruck.”

Google Search and elocution

How do you pronounce anemone? © Google.

Google has added a useful little feature to its search engine. Just type “How do you pronounce” in the query bar, followed by the word you’ve been wondering about, and Google Search will say it out loud for you, in American or British English (and soon in Spanish!). It can also pronounce extra-slowly so you can fully appreciate every nuance of every syllable. And if your phone is Google Assistant-enabled, you can say the word in your phone’s microphone and “receive feedback on what, if anything, can be adjusted in your pronunciation.” Unfortunately, a lot of words are still missing, and of course, they’re the ones we needed most: “otorhinolaryngological”, “antidisestablishmentarianism”, and even “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”!

⇨ YouTube, “How do you pronounce anemone? Practice with Google Search.”

⇨ Mashable, Marcus Gilmer, “Google will now tell you how you've been mispronouncing words your entire life.”

⇨ Tke Keyword, Tal Snir, “How do you pronounce quokka? Practice with Search.”

From smartphone to microscope

Diple. © SmartMicroOptics.

The team behind this product had already made macrophotography lenses back in 2016. Now, they’re back, with a more advanced product, the DIPLE, which promises true microscope quality to examine all manner of microorganisms, bacteria, and even all the cooties living on your keyboard. DIPLE provides backlighting and it comes in three magnification levels (35x, 75x, and 150x), which can be increased to 1000x using your phone’s zoom. It also comes with the traditional glass slides for microscopes to hold your samples. DIPLE is being crowdfunded on Kickstarter, for a planned delivery date of May 2020. You can see examples of DIPLE magnifications on this Instagram account.

⇨ YouTube, “Fresh blood observation on DIPLE.”

⇨ Circuit Breaker, James Vincent, “Smartphone microscope kit promises up to 1,000x magnification.”

Linus Torvalds no longer a programmer

Linus Torvalds. Krd, CC BY-SA 4.0.

What is the creator of Linux and Git, Linus Torvalds, doing these days? Well, he’s spending his life responding to email, and the major part of his role as “benevolent dictator for life” consists in saying “no”, he said to Dirk Hohndel, VP of VMware in charge of open source, during a chat at Open Source Summit Europe. “I don't know coding at all anymore. Most of the code I write is in my e-mails. So somebody sends me a patch ... I [reply with] pseudo code. I'm so used to editing patches now I sometimes edit patches and send out the patch without having ever tested it. I literally wrote it in the mail and say, 'I think this is how it should be done,' but this is what I do, I am not a programmer. […] I see one of my primary goals to be very responsive when people send me patches. I want to be like, I say yes or no within a day or two.” Torvalds also said that while he’s happy with what he’s doing for Linux now, he, like many of us, sometimes doubts his abilities. Even he has imposter syndrome! Could this be age-related humility?

⇨ ZDNet, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, “Linus Torvalds: 'I'm not a programmer anymore'.”

Dash Smart Shelf

After canceling its Dash Buttons, Amazon now has a new and improved product for SMEs: the Dash Smart Shelf, a smart scale for office supplies. Just stock like items on these shelves and, when supplies run low, the device automatically re-orders through a Wi-Fi connection. Or, if you’re not too keen on automatic reorder, the Dash Smart Shelf can simply send a notification to your stockroom person to order manually. The Dash Smart Shelf is about 2.5 cm high and comes in three sizes: small (18 x 18 cm), medium (25.5 x 30.5 cm), and large (33 x 45.75 cm). It is currently being tested with Amazon Business clients in the US. If it also works for toilet paper, maybe their best market will be homes, not businesses.

⇨ Circuit Breaker, Chaim Gartenberg, “Amazon’s Dash Smart Shelf can automatically order new office supplies when they run out.”

Good-bye Perl 6, hello Raku

Rumors of a name change for Perl 6, derived from the script language developed by Larry Wall in 1987, had been swirling for months. The thing is, Perl 6 is fundamentally incompatible with Perl 5, and many programmers don’t believe that the two are even part of the same family. The Perl 6 community is split between those who think that Perl 6 is a sister language to Perl 5, and those who think of Perl 6 as a successor to Perl 5. When the idea of a new name for this latest iteration was floated, the only question was, which name? The two finalists were Camelia and Raku, with Raku winning out when Larry Wall gave it the deciding vote at PerlCon 2019, in Riga. As expected, the change unleashed quite the controversy within the community. Indeed, the old name, Perl 6, had been in use for some 20 years already, and many members of the community had invested a lot of time, effort and emotional energy developing and defending Perl 6. Which made the change gut-wrenching. But open-source is nothing without drama. Long live Raku !

⇨ YouTube, “Larry Wall greeting PerlCon attendees in Riga 2019.”

⇨ The Register, Thomas Claburn, “We, Wall, we, Wall, Raku: Perl creator blesses new name for version 6 of text-wrangling lingon.”