The Daily Index — Tuesday, October 3, 2023 · TLDR Index

Across today’s newsletters

Today’s Index

TLDR

APPLE COULD FIX IT

Microsoft's Satya Nadella says that a deal to be the exclusive search provider on Apple devices would be a game-changer for Bing. The company was prepared to give Apple all of the economic upside of a deal if Apple were to switch to Bing. It was willing to hide the Bing brand and respect any of the company's privacy wishes. Microsoft was willing to make the deal at any cost due to the data it would gain access to if it became the default search engine for Apple devices.

theverge.com · 9 min

TLDR AI

NETWORK

Cloudflare unveils "Workers AI," a serverless AI inference platform on its global GPU network. Workers AI features popular open-source models and collaborates with Hugging Face.

blog.cloudflare.com · 12 min

TLDR Web Dev

HOW PINTEREST SCALED TO 11 MILLION USERS WITH ONLY 6 ENGINEERS

Pinterest reached 11.7 million monthly active users (MAUs) in January 2012 with just six engineers. It was the fastest company at the time to surpass 10 million MAUs. Pinterest's growth journey involved several lessons, such as favoring database sharding over clustering and sharding incrementally over time. It faced numerous problems along the way, like data corruption due to some bugs in its clustering algorithm. This article dives into how Pinterest’s backend architecture evolved over time, such as the fact that it transitioned from Django to Flask as it grew.

engineercodex.substack.com · 5 min

TLDR Crypto

UBS TAPS ETHEREUM TO PILOT TOKENIZED MONEY MARKET FUND

UBS has initiated a live pilot of a tokenized money market fund on Ethereum through Project Guardian, an industry initiative led by Singapore's Monetary Authority. As part of UBS's exploration of tokenizing funds, this pilot will allow the testing of on-chain fund activities. It is aimed at improving market liquidity and access for clients. Following the pilot, UBS plans to explore various investment strategies with a wider set of partners.

theblock.co · 2 min

TLDR Design

ORGANIZER

Google is rolling out ChromeOS 117 to Chromebooks with several new features, including Material You design, a customizable window-switching panel, and the ability to join video calls directly from the calendar view. After selecting wallpaper and a color palette, Material You settings will be reflected in quick settings, desktop, and window head bars.

techcrunch.com · 1 min

TLDR

CHROMEBOOKS

Chromebook Plus is a new certification to help shoppers identify high-quality Chromebooks. It will be awarded to laptops that have an Intel Core i3 or higher or AMD Ryzen 7000 CPU, an iPS panel with at least 1080p resolution, a 1080p webcam, 8GB of RAM, and 128GB of storage. Chromebook Plus-certified devices will have access to several AI-powered features such as a magic eraser tool in Google Photos, improvements to lighting and noise cancellation in video conferencing, and Offline File Sync.

theverge.com · 4 min

TLDR

SPEAKING THE SAME LANGUAGE

Scientists have been working to standardize image formats for biological microscopy data for two decades. There are now around 160 standard file formats. A new project aims to shrink that number of formats down to a small handful. Having a common format would make it much easier for scientists to do their work - many are currently dealing with formatting issues by relabeling data by hand. There are several cultural and technical barriers to overcome before the project can become successful.

nature.com · 15 min

TLDR

OBJECTS IN THE NIGHT SKY

The BlueWalker 3 communications satellite can turn ordinary smartphones into satellite phones. It is the brightest satellite in low Earth orbit yet, and there are concerns that it may usher in a new generation of satellites that create way more light pollution than their predecessors. The satellite is bright due to its large size. It is about as bright as the eight-brightest star visible from Earth.

theverge.com · 4 min

TLDR

IN 2023

Unicode is a standard that aims to unify all human languages and make them work with computers. In practice, it is a table that assigns unique numbers, called code points, to different characters. This article explains what Unicode is and how it works. It covers all the basics as well as some advanced concepts and why some 'bugs' occur with certain characters.

tonsky.me · 22 min