An employee was fired for buying glass for Musk, Zhejiang University released its superconducting quantum chip results, GitHub and Google freeze recruitment, more news today here

Daily News from Aofei Temple
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Hello everyone, today is Friday, the last day of work~

What interesting things are happening in the technology circle today?

Let’s take a look with Daily News.

Today's Big News

Musk abused his power to buy glass for personal gain, leading to the dismissal of several Tesla employees

According to Sina Technology, people familiar with the matter revealed that Tesla's Texas factory executive Omead Afshar was investigated by the company because of his construction materials procurement plan.

The reason is that the materials purchased this time were not purchased for the factory, but for Musk's personal use. Among the purchased materials is a special glass, which is difficult to ensure supply due to the supply chain crisis.

Several employees have been fired as a result of the investigation, and people familiar with the matter said Afshar may also leave.

Afshar has worked in the CEO's office for five years. Two former employees said Afshar was the leader of Tesla's Texas factory and often reported directly to Musk.

Using company funds for personal purposes may be illegal. If a public company uses corporate funds for the personal purposes of senior executives, it may be investigated by the IRS and shareholders may also sue.

GitHub, Google freeze hiring

The latest news says that GitHub and Google are freezing recruitment, and most software engineers in the recruitment channel will be affected.

The biggest reason for this hiring freeze is the current unfavorable macroeconomic conditions.

GitHub has emailed many software engineers who are in the interview process, the people said. It is still continuing to hire strategic talent, but general recruitment channels have been closed.

Google has frozen hiring for two weeks and is expected to reallocate currently laid-off employees and slow down overall hiring.

In addition, technology companies such as Amazon and Apple also intend to slow down the pace of recruitment and cut spending.

Huawei under investigation by the United States

According to The Register, Huawei is under investigation by the United States.

The investigation was launched by the U.S. Commerce Department in early 2021, and in April it subpoenaed Huawei to provide information about "the company's policies on sharing with foreign parties data that its equipment can obtain from a phone, including messages and geolocation data."

The U.S. government has been cracking down on Chinese technology companies since a 2019 executive order placed telecommunications equipment from "foreign adversaries" such as China and Russia under close scrutiny.

The U.S. sanctions have caused Huawei's performance to decline sharply, with its revenue falling 28.6% in 2021 and continuing to decline in the first quarter of 2022.

The 2021 Federal Communications Commission (FCC) program, which targets Huawei and rival ZTE Corp. and would compensate U.S. telecom companies for “ripping and replacing” Chinese hardware, was recently revealed to be $3 billion short due to an overabundance of applications.

Nebraska telecom providers with extensive Huawei hardware deployments won't begin any removal work until the FCC can cover the costs.

Webb telescope may discover oldest galaxy in universe

According to Science and Technology Daily, researchers from the United States and Denmark used data provided by the James Webb Space Telescope to discover GLASS-z13, which may be the oldest galaxy known to date.

△ Caption: Image source: British "New Scientist" website

The galaxy is about 13.5 billion light-years away from Earth and was born 300 million years after the Big Bang. Whether the results of this study are true or not needs further observation and confirmation.

Previously, the oldest galaxy was the GN-z11 galaxy observed by the Hubble Telescope, which is about 13.4 billion light-years away from Earth.

Rohan Naidu of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said the two galaxies are about 1 billion times more massive than the sun, much smaller than the Milky Way. GLASS-z13 is only 1,600 light-years across, and GN-z11 is 2,300 light-years across, compared to the Milky Way's diameter of about 100,000 light-years.

Gabriel Bramer, an astrophysicist at the Niels Bohr Institute in Denmark and a member of the team, said that the relevant research still needs to be confirmed by the Webb Space Telescope's spectrometer, which can more accurately measure the "red shift" of light emitted by galaxies as the universe expands.

Three classic Apple products are expected to return

According to IT Home, the three classic products that have been discontinued, the full-size HomePod, 12-inch MacBook and iMacPro, will return again.

HomePod, 12-inch MacBook, and iMac Pro were discontinued in March 2021, July 2019, and March 2021, respectively.

Although Apple HomePod has received rave reviews for its sound quality, its sales have been mediocre due to its higher price than many competing products. However, since the HomePod was discontinued, some people have been hyping it up, and it has become one of the collections of some digital enthusiasts and collectors.

According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple is developing a new HomePod with the same chip as the rumored Apple Watch S8, closer to the original HomePod in size and audio performance, and an "updated top display."

One of the main reasons why the 12-inch MacBook was discontinued was that many customers found its performance to be seriously insufficient. However, as Apple begins to adopt its own Arm chips for its Mac computers, the 12-inch MacBook is very likely to make a comeback.

Gurman said Apple is considering launching a new 12-inch laptop by 2024, but it is not clear whether this laptop will be a MacBook, MacBook Air or MacBook Pro.

As for the iMac Pro, Gurman said he still believes that a larger iMac or iMac Pro is under development and "could be launched as early as next year." Based on this timeline, this top-level all-in-one machine is expected to be equipped with M2 Pro and M2 Max chips.

Zhejiang University releases the application results of "Tianmu 1" superconducting quantum chip

According to Zhejiang University, Zhejiang University released the application results of the "Tianmu No. 1" superconducting quantum chip series at the Hangzhou International Science and Technology Innovation Center.

△ Caption: Image source: Zhejiang University

First, relying on the "Tianmu No. 1" superconducting quantum chip, the School of Physics of Zhejiang University and the Institute of Cross-Disciplinary Information Sciences of Tsinghua University cooperated to use a fully digital quantum simulation method on a superconducting quantum chip for the first time to demonstrate a new type of substance: topological time crystal .

This achievement, Digital quantum simulation of Floquet symmetry-protected topological phases, has been published in the world-class journal Nature. The first author of the paper is the School of Physics of Zhejiang University and Hangzhou International Science and Technology Innovation Center.

Time crystals attempt to extend the characteristics of "crystals" to the time dimension, and they also show certain periodic changes in time.

The Zhejiang University research team tried the experimental scheme of fully digital quantum simulation for the first time , using 26 quantum bits on a superconducting quantum chip ("Tianmu 1") and realizing the new time crystal envisioned by Professor Deng Dongling through a quantum gate circuit with a depth of up to 240 layers.

This is a more versatile experimental scheme than “analog quantum simulation”, using superconducting quantum chips with higher programming flexibility and higher quantum gate accuracy to execute a wider variety of quantum algorithms.

Secondly, the School of Computer Science and Technology of Zhejiang University and the Quantum Computing Innovation Workshop jointly developed the first user-oriented superconducting quantum computing cloud platform that supports parallel scheduling of multiple quantum computers, the Taiyuan-1 quantum cloud platform, based on the self-developed "Tianmu-1" superconducting quantum chip .

Taiyuan Quantum Cloud Platform has three highlights. The first highlight is that based on the "Tianmu-1" chip, a user-oriented job scheduling solution that supports multiple quantum computers in parallel has been developed to increase the scale of available quantum bits.

The second highlight is the friendly programming environment and the self-developed interactive visual programming framework.

The third highlight is the cloud platform's open interface, which supports users to customize and build quantum algorithm applications in various fields, and use quantum computers for calculations through remote access.