The Daily Index — Thursday, May 25, 2023 · TLDR Index

Across today’s newsletters

Today’s Index

TLDR

THE STRANGE STORY OF THE TEENS BEHIND THE MIRAI BOTNET

The Mirai botnet, which exploited vulnerable Internet of Things devices, was put together by three teenage boys. They rented out the botnet to paying customers and used it to attack targets of their own. Its use has affected millions of people. This article looks at how Mirai was created, the market around botnet providers, the malware behind the botnet, and the events that led to the creators' arrest and subsequent sentencing.

spectrum.ieee.org · 12 min

TLDR AI

ELON WANTS TO CHALLENGE GOOGLE AND MICROSOFT

Elon Musk said he sees the need for an artificial-intelligence business to rival Google and Microsoft that could involve different parts of his corporate empire, including Twitter.

archive.ph · 3 min

TLDR Web Dev

HOW TO START A GO PROJECT IN 2023

This comprehensive guide goes over how to get started with Go in 2023. It covers all the topics needed to be set up with Go in a productive manner, such as unit testing, profiling, OS specific code, and useful tools.

boyter.org · 25 min

TLDR Crypto

WHY SNX HAS SURPASSED GMX IN VOLUME

Synthetix has surpassed GMX in trading volume, driven by several key factors. It lowered trading fees to as low as 0.02% for certain pairs, significantly increasing trade volume. Additionally, an airdrop program incentivizes traders with $OP tokens that essentially outpace the trading fees they incur on the protocol. Increased decentralization, with trades settled by incentivized keepers and the use of Pyth Network as a primary oracle, has given it greater trust and uptime. Further, decentralizing frontends has increased Synthetix's censorship resistance.

threadreaderapp.com · 10 min

TLDR AI

QLORA 65B PARAMETER MODELS FINE-TUNED ON 48GB GPU

LoRA is a way to fine-tune models much more cheaply than full fine-tuning. It works by just updating a small, carefully selected, subset of the model. However, even then it is often too expensive to fine-tune large (more than 13B parameter) models on commodity hardware. Quantization reduces the precision of parameters in the model which in turn takes less space. More great open source progress.

arxiv.org · 32 min

TLDR AI

SEAHORSE: A TOOL FOR EVALUATING MULTILINGUAL SUMMARIZATION SYSTEMS

SEAHORSE is a dataset created to assess the quality of summarization systems in multiple languages. It contains 96,000 summaries that have been rated by humans based on six important aspects: clarity, repetition, grammar, attribution, main ideas, and conciseness. This dataset not only serves as a benchmark for evaluating the performance of automated metrics but also provides a valuable resource for training such metrics, helping researchers advance the field of multilingual summarization evaluation.

arxiv.org · 9 min

TLDR AI

MODELS

This paper introduces meta-in-context learning, a recursive self-improvement process for large language models. By studying regression and decision-making tasks, the researchers demonstrate that meta-in-context learning enhances the models' in-context learning abilities, modifies their strategies, and achieves competitive performance on real-world problems. This work sheds light on improving language models without relying solely on traditional fine-tuning approaches.

arxiv.org · 12 min

TLDR AI

AMAZON’S AI SEEN AS INCOMPLETE

Amazon’s cloud customers are clamoring to get their hands on the ChatGPT-style technology the company unveiled six weeks ago. But instead of being allowed to test it, many are being told to sit tight, prompting concerns the artificial intelligence tool isn’t fully baked.

archive.ph · 4 min

TLDR AI

THE DIRE DEFECT OF AI CONTENT MODERATION

The article discusses the challenges of using artificial intelligence to moderate content across multiple languages. It argues that current AI systems are not able to accurately detect harmful content in all languages, and that this can have serious consequences. It finishes by calling for more research into how to improve the accuracy of AI content moderation systems, and for more transparency from social media companies about how they are using AI to moderate content.

archive.ph · 7 min