The Daily Index — Friday, August 25, 2023 · TLDR Index

Across today’s newsletters

Today’s Index

TLDR

QUALITY IN LEAKED TESLA EMAIL

Tesla's Cybertruck design, which features sharp edges and a stainless steel finish, will require the manufacturer to achieve a level of accuracy in the single-digit micron range on all parts in order for it to look perfect. The straight edges of the design will amplify every imperfection. Elon Musk compared the approach to the requirements of products like LEGO and soda cans. Tesla has been criticized for its fit and finishes in the past, but it is generally accepted that the quality of its products has improved over the years.

electrek.co · 3 min

TLDR AI

META LAUNCHES CODE LLAMA

Meta has released Code Llama, a Llama 2-based large language model for coding. The 7B, 13B, and 34B parameter models are now available. They performed strongly on HumanEval (53.7) and MBPP (56.2). Code Llama models can generate and debug code, are instruction-tuned, and have extremely long context - as much as 100k tokens.

ai.meta.com · 6 min

TLDR Web Dev

CREATE A CI/CD PIPELINE FOR FRONTEND PROJECTS

Automating the testing and deployment of your apps is mandatory to avoid wasting time or making mistakes. This article will show you how to go about achieving this goal.

blog.openreplay.com · 13 min

TLDR Cybersecurity

RANSOMWARE INFECTS ALL OF CLOUDNORDIC’S DATA

CloudNordic, a large Danish cloud provider, has suffered a ransomware attack that encrypted all customer data. The company cannot and will not meet the ransom demands and advises customers to consider their data lost. CloudNordic doesn’t believe that any data was accessed by the attackers.

theregister.com · 2 min

TLDR Crypto

FTX TAPS GALAXY TO SELL, STAKE, AND HEDGE ITS CRYPTO BILLIONS

Bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX is looking to stake, sell, and hedge its ~$3 billion in digital assets. FTX wants to hire Mike Novogratz’s Galaxy as an advisor to optimize its sales. The company's goal is to protect the value of the holdings through calculated trading, potentially via weekly sales limits, and ultimately return funds to users in fiat instead of crypto.

coindesk.com · 3 min

TLDR

META LAUNCHES OWN AI CODE-WRITING TOOL: CODE LLAMA

Meta has released Code Llama, a large language model built on top of Llama 2 that specializes in generating and debugging code. It has also released a Python-specific version and another version that can understand instructions in natural language. These models are not interchangeable. Meta claims that Code Llama performs better than other publicly available LLMs on coding tasks, but it did not specifically name which models were tested.

theverge.com · 2 min

TLDR

THIS UNIVERSAL CHARGER COULD SIMPLIFY THE EV LANDSCAPE

The constant evolution of EV tech has made it challenging to create infrastructure that can support the wide range of technologies available. A group of researchers have created a novel battery charger that can support a vast range of present and future generations of EV battery packs. The charger is compatible with batteries between 120 and 900 volts with an efficiency consistently greater than 94%. It can be used as a portable unit. The researchers have filed a patent and are in the process of commercializing the technology.

spectrum.ieee.org · 2 min

TLDR

NEW ROBOT SEARCHES FOR SOLAR CELL MATERIALS 14 TIMES FASTER

Researchers at North Carolina State University have enlisted the help of robots to help search for the ideal perovskite. Perovskites are a type of material with a rhombus-in-a-cube crystal structure that can be used to create highly efficient solar cells. There are a vast number of possible perovskite materials. Predicting and testing the potential properties of all these materials is time-consuming and difficult. The robot combines chemicals in different proportions to form perovskites and then applies them onto a surface for testing. It speeds up the synthesis and characterization of materials by a factor of 14 compared to manual exploration.

arstechnica.com · 6 min

TLDR

INTRODUCING PROOF-OF-WORK DEFENSE FOR ONION SERVICES

Tor's Proof-of-Work (PoW) defense for Onion services is designed to prioritize verified traffic as a deterrent against denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. Tor Onion services are vulnerable to DoS attacks as Tor obfuscates IP addresses. PoW defense will start prompting incoming client connections to perform a number of successfully more complex operations when an Onion service is under stress. The Onion service will then prioritize connections based on the effort level demonstrated by the client. This will thwart DoS attacks without compromising user privacy.

blog.torproject.org · 4 min