The Daily Index — Tuesday, June 20, 2023 · TLDR Index

Across today’s newsletters

Today’s Index

TLDR

TESLA UNVEILS NEW GIGA LABORATORY CONCEPT

Tesla's Giga Laboratory retail concept appears to be a showcase of its manufacturing capacity. There are now 1,000 Tesla retail and service locations, more than double the number from three years ago. The announcement about the Giga Laboratory invites customers to come to the store to meet up with friends and experience the magic of building a car in 45 seconds. Pictures of the new store are available in the article.

electrek.co · 2 min

TLDR Web Dev

HOW CANVA SAVES MILLIONS ANNUALLY IN AMAZON S3 COSTS

Canva stores more than 230 Petabytes of data from its production environments in Amazon S3, with the single largest S3 bucket coming in at a whopping 45 Petabytes. In this blog post, Canva’s engineering team dives into how they have visibility over these vast quantities of data and how moving large amounts of this data to Amazon S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval met their use cases and saved them millions of dollars annually. The team analyzed the usage of various pieces of data in their system and identified what kinds of data worked best to be moved off of the main S3 bucket. These data use cases included log retrieval and backups. As a result of these changes, Canva saves over $3.6 million annually.

canva.dev · 7 min

TLDR Crypto

FIDELITY RUMORED TO MAKE “SEISMIC” CRYPTO MOVE SOON

Fidelity, the third-largest global asset manager, is rumored to be planning a big move in the crypto markets. This could involve either buying out Grayscale or filing an application for a Bitcoin spot ETF. Such a move, along with BlackRock's recent filing of a Bitcoin spot ETF application, could position these firms to dominate the US digital asset space. Grayscale, which operates several cryptocurrency trusts, has been unsuccessful in its attempts to convert its Bitcoin Trust into a spot Bitcoin ETF due to regulatory obstacles.

cryptoslate.com · 2 min

TLDR

REDDIT HACKERS DEMAND $4.5 MILLION RANSOM AND API PRICING CHANGES

A ransomware group that claimed responsibility for a hack on Reddit's systems earlier this year is demanding money and policy changes. BlackCat claims to have stolen 80GB of data from Reddit. It wants a $4.5 million payout and for Reddit to roll back its planned API pricing changes in exchange for the data. The attack occurred in February. Reddit says that the hackers hadn't accessed private user data.

theverge.com · 1 min

TLDR

PARKER SOLAR PROBE IMAGES THE LAUNCH OF THE SOLAR WIND

Solar wind is not very well understood despite its importance. Its immense strength has, up until now, made it nearly impossible for spacecraft to determine where it is generated. NASA's Parker Solar Probe was recently able to image the region where solar wind originates. It found that solar wind starts close to the surface and then gushes through holes in the Sun's corona before being ejected into space. The discovery could help humans predict when solar wind will head towards Earth and enable us to protect sensitive equipment.

arstechnica.com · 5 min

TLDR

PRETTY GREAT

_Temnothorax nylanderi_ ants that contract _Anomotaenia brevis_ tapeworms end up living up to over three times longer than their peers. Uninfected ants end up pampering the infected ants' and do their chores for them. The infected ants barely have to leave their nests. The tapeworms appear to pump antioxidants and other proteins into their hosts. Their goal is to eventually be eaten by a bird, so that might be why they keep infected ants young and plump.

sciencealert.com · 4 min

TLDR

YOU CAN'T TRUST GOOGLE

Google will eventually kill its services if it can't find a way to directly monetize them with ads at a scale of billions. The company is paid for advertising rather than for its products. Google's recent shutdown of Google Domains, a $180 million/year business servicing 10 million domains, is an example of this. People using Google products and services outside of the ad space should prepare a backup plan as the company is one major reorganization or promoted executive away from shutting them down.

world.hey.com · 3 min

TLDR

FSD

A Tesla hacker has uncovered a unique feature in Tesla's Full Self-Driving Beta software named 'Elon Mode'. Elon Mode switches the vehicle from using steering wheel 'nags' to a more advanced driver monitoring method that uses the internal camera to watch the driver and ensure they are not distracted. It is unclear when the hidden mode will be publicly accessible. A video showing Elon Mode in action is available in the article.

notateslaapp.com · 4 min

TLDR

AI HAS POISONED ITS OWN WELL

Tech companies have essentially established a threshold for the maximum improvement of AI products as their early release will lead to model collapse, an effect where irreversible defects are created in models due to being trained on model-generated content - something that will happen once LLMs contribute to much of the content found online.

tracydurnell.com · 5 min