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Rami's Readings #34

Welcome to Rami’s Readings #34 - a weekly digest of interesting articles, videos, Twitter threads from my various sources across the Internet. Expect a list of reads covering technology, business, culture, fashion, travel and more. Learn about what I do at ramisayar.com/about.

Announcing Upcoming Talk!

Join me in #Montreal on October 18th for the Techaide Product4Good conference! Dive deep into AI product conversations and support a noble cause. Proceeds from the conference are going to Centraide du Grand Montréal (United Way). I am thrilled to share product insights learned from the whirlwind integration of GPT-4 into Bing. We will explore the concept of “play” in the professional context. I’ll delve into team dynamics, nurturing innovation, and how to set up teams for maximum creativity and impact. Finally, while maintaining an eye on quality, I’ll cover the importance of speed and iterating quickly.

Grab your ticket 🎟

💼 Business Reads

Inside Apple’s Spectacular Failure to Build a Key Part for Its New iPhones

Notes: Modems need to combine digital and analog engineering; rare knowledge.

Apple found that employing the brute force of thousands of engineers, a strategy successful for designing the computer brain of its smartphones and laptops, wasn’t enough to quickly produce a superior modem chip.

Notes: Great time to buy Japanese products (USD to JPY: +4.20% in the past year). Use ZenMarket.jp to consolidate shipping.

Pharmaceutical Externalities

Notes: Alex Tabarrok writes about the underestimation of pharmaceutical innovations.

iPhone 15 Pro Facts and Estimates

Notes: Interesting explanation for the unanticipated iPhone 15 feeling of lightness by swapping stainless steel for titanium.

Warning: Update Your iPhone 15 to iOS 17.0.2 Before Transferring Data From Another iPhone

Notes: Surprising to see Apple launch a new phone with setup bugs.

🤖 AI Reads

Amazon Is Set to Supercharge Alexa with Generative AI

Notes: This announcement is late by about 6 months. Still surprised it took so long. It is unclear if Alexa LLM is running on the edge device or not. I track Edge AI advancements in this newsletter.

Prompt Engineering for Claude’s Long Context Window

Notes: From Daniel Tedesco .

The Rise and Potential of Large Language Model Based Agents: A Survey

Notes: Fantastic repository of papers on GitHub.

We provide a systematic and comprehensive survey on LLM-based agents, and list some must-read papers.

From Sparse to Dense: GPT-4 Summarization with Chain of Density Prompting

Notes: Shared by an acquaintance from MIT. Very interesting technique.

🛡️CyberSecurity Reads

Save and Sign in with Passkeys Using 1Password in the Browser and on iOS & The Latest Windows 11 Update Will Help You Ditch Passwords for Good

Notes: One step closer to a password-free future using passkeys. See previous reads.

U.S. Cities Have a Staggering Problem of Kia and Hyundai Thefts. This Data Shows It.

Notes: Bombshell report from Motherboard over at Vice. At what point does insuring Kias and Hyundais becomes unaffordable?

🔀 Other Reads

How to add Markdown support to Google Docs

Notes: 🙌

That is all for this week. Signing off from Montréal.