# forck.live — 1–7 February 2021

> AI lab announcements, news reports and podcasts.

forck.live follows what companies announce about their own products. Press may
corroborate an official story; it never leads and never appears as an item of its
own. A missing date stays missing. A title is the publisher's words — where a
company does not publish in English, an English rendering is listed separately
as `Title in English` and named as this site's translation, never as theirs.

This file is one issue of the weekly archive: every confirmed
first-party announcement of ISO week 2021-W05, 1–7 February 2021, newest
first. The window never moves, so this URL always names the same seven days —
but a post published inside them and detected later is added when it arrives,
so a closed week can still gain entries.

Every entry is one first-party announcement, and carries the same eight fields
in this order before any others:

    Company · Announced · Category · Coverage · Announcement · Group · Source · Record

`Source` is the company's own page the announcement was traced to and `Record`
is this site's page for it. Both are safe to cite.

`Coverage` is a number of outlets, or `not counted` — which means this record
reached no count of its own, never that nobody wrote about it.

`Category` is this tracker's own analysis, and is authoritative wherever it is
stated. `not stated` means either that nothing has analysed the post yet or
that the analysis placed it outside this taxonomy; neither is a verdict about
the announcement.

`Announcement` is whether the post is news of something the company did, rather
than a how-to, a customer story, a changelog listing or a staffing note.

`Group` is which of this record's groups the entry falls in, carried on the
entry itself so it holds where the groups are headings and where they are not.
One of: `models`, `covered`, `announcements`, `routine`.

Anything after `Record` is held detail that only some announcements carry.

- This week's page: https://forck.live/week/2021-W05
- The current issue, and the catalogue of the other weeks: https://forck.live/briefing.md
- Catalogue: https://forck.live/llms.txt

## Announcements

### Replit — Introducing Spotlight pages

- Company: Replit (replit.com)
- Announced: 2021-02-03T19:06:40+00:00
- Category: capability-change
- Coverage: not counted
- Announcement: yes
- Group: announcements
- Source: https://replit.com/blog/spotlight
- Record: https://forck.live/items/18114-introducing-spotlight-pages
- Subject: Replit Agent

Replit introduced Spotlight pages, a new interface for viewing, interacting with, and commenting on repls, replacing the previous workflow that required separate Repl Talk posts. The page separates repl creation in the Workspace from presentation, and allows users to request editing access to others' repls.

### Replit — The Internet of Fun

- Company: Replit (replit.com)
- Announced: 2021-02-02T05:00:00+00:00
- Category: not stated
- Coverage: not counted
- Announcement: no
- Group: routine
- Source: https://replit.com/blog/internet-of-fun
- Record: https://forck.live/items/18177-the-internet-of-fun
- Subject: Replit Agent

Replit recounts two instances of accidental chat applications emerging on its platform: a 12-year-old user built a chatroom in a Python REPL in 2018, and later, Hacker News users turned the blog's HTTP logs into a chatroom by sending GET requests to arbitrary paths. The post highlights how Replit's environment fosters serendipitous, fun computer exploration.

### Replit — Killing Containers at Scale

- Company: Replit (replit.com)
- Announced: 2021-02-01
- Category: not stated
- Coverage: not counted
- Announcement: no
- Group: routine
- Source: https://replit.com/blog/killing-containers-at-scale
- Record: https://forck.live/items/18055-killing-containers-at-scale
- Subject: Replit Agent

Replit engineers investigated and fixed slow container shutdowns on preemptible VMs, reducing the session connection error rate from 3% to under 0.5% and the 99th percentile session boot time from 2 minutes to 15 seconds. The root cause was that Docker kill operations took 20+ seconds when killing 100–200 containers simultaneously, far longer than the expected milliseconds.