The Daily Index — Monday, August 28, 2023 · TLDR Index

Across today’s newsletters

Today’s Index

TLDR

WITH BIGGER TRACKPAD

Apple is planning a major update to the iPad Pro for next year. The new iPad Pros will have slightly larger OLED displays and a revamped Magic Keyboard. They will feature M3 chips. The new Magic Keyboard will have a larger trackpad to make the iPad Pro more like a laptop. Apple will release the new iPad Pro in the spring or summer of next year. No updates to the devices are planned between now and then.

9to5mac.com · 2 min

TLDR AI

FINE-TUNED LLAMA CODE MODEL BEATS GPT-4 ON CODE BENCHMARK

Companies with stores of high quality internal data have released fine-tuned versions of Llama that are extremely adept at code just days after Meta released its new programming language models. It is important to note that the current version of GPT-4 is still better than any open-source model at coding. This article compares the new Llama models with the March version of GPT-4.

phind.com · 1 min

TLDR Web Dev

TO TEST OR NOT TO TEST, A TECHNICAL PERSPECTIVE

This article delves into the creation of test cases from a technical perspective, detailing what should be included in each test and what to avoid. It answers the age-old question of what to test vs. what not to test.

web.dev · 7 min

TLDR Cybersecurity

MALWARE

ReversingLabs found over a dozen malicious npm packages mimicking the roblox.js gaming API wrapper. The packages drop Luna, an info stealer malware, into the code. This attack is a continuation of a campaign seen in 2021. It targets Roblox community developers and highlights npm supply chain risks.

reversinglabs.com · 7 min

TLDR Crypto

BIDEN ADMINISTRATION UNVEILS NEW CRYPTO TAX REPORTING RULES

The US Treasury Department is proposing a new rule to place tighter requirements on brokers to report user transactions to the IRS. The way it’s written also seems to include decentralized exchanges and NFT marketplaces, meaning those entities would be required to collect customer information. The proposed Form 1099-DA is said to help simplify the process for users to report their gains and losses. This proposal comes as part of the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and is expected to take effect in 2025.

reuters.com · 3 min

TLDR

IN LA

Tesla has won permit approval for its Diner and Drive-In Movie Supercharger in Los Angeles. The site will house 32 Supercharger stalls, a restaurant, rooftop seating, and two movie theater screens. It was originally going to be built in Santa Monica. A copy of the approval documents is available in the article.

teslarati.com · 4 min

TLDR

IBM’S AI CHIP MAY FIND USE IN GENERATIVE AI

IBM's latest AI chip is more than a dozen times as energy efficient as conventional microchips on automated transcription tasks. It is capable of 12.4 trillion operations per second per watt. When tested on speech recognition tasks, the chip was able to perform as accurately as neural networks run on conventional hardware while completing the job seven times as fast and up to 14 more efficiently. The chip can support transformers and may be beneficial for many types of AI systems.

spectrum.ieee.org · 3 min

TLDR

WE ARE NOT EMPTY

There are no empty spaces within an atom. The empty atom picture often shown in popular science is incorrect. It is unclear who created the myth, but it was popularized in Carl Sagan's Cosmos TV series. This essay explains why the idea of an empty atom is wrong by carefully interpreting quantum theory.

aeon.co · 20 min

TLDR

WITH ONLY 32 ENGINEERS

This post outlines the engineering techniques that WhatsApp used to scale quickly. WhatsApp was able to support 50 billion messages a day from 450 million daily active users with only 32 engineers. The company focused on messaging, its core feature, and eliminated feature creep at all costs. With this focus, the team was able to prioritize reliability over everything else.

newsletter.systemdesign.one · 7 min