The Daily Index — Wednesday, October 4, 2023 · TLDR Index

Across today’s newsletters

Today’s Index

TLDR

GMAIL IS GETTING EMOJI REACTIONS 🤩

Google is bringing emoji reactions to its Gmail service. It will roll out gradually starting with Android users and to other platforms over the next few months. Users with access will see a smiling emoji at the bottom of messages. Some emojis will enable full-page animations. Emoji reactions will only show up in the Gmail app - people using third-party email clients will receive emojis as separate emails. The feature is not available to users on school or work accounts or for large group messages.

theverge.com · 2 min

TLDR AI

REKA LAUNCHES THEIR FLAGSHIP MULTIMODAL MODELS

Yasa-1 is an audio, video, and text model from the creators of the extremely popular T5 language model. It boasts impressive performance across a number of tasks. Yasa-1 is currently in private preview.

reka.ai · 4 min

TLDR Web Dev

RELATIONAL DATABASES ON AWS

Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service) offers automated management, backups, and scalability, but it comes at a higher cost. On the other hand, self-hosted databases may be cheaper price-wise, but can end up eating up more developer time. This article compares using RDS versus self-hosting.

blog.quastor.org · 13 min

TLDR Crypto

SEC LOSES AGAIN—APPEAL OF LANDMARK RIPPLE RULING REJECTED

A US federal judge rejected the SEC appeal against a judgment that favored crypto firm Ripple Labs. According to the judge, the SEC failed to prove that there was a problem with the initial decision in the case. For context, the court had previously ruled against the categorization of Ripple's cryptocurrency token sale as an illegally unregistered securities offering. The SEC can still appeal following the case's formal conclusion next April.

decrypt.co · 2 min

TLDR Design

SOUND, AND SMELL

The Design Museum in London and Intuit Mailchimp’s in-house creative agency, Wink, collaborated to resurrect the look, feel, sound, and smell of emails in the digital age. The exhibition ‘Email is Dead’ ushers visitors into the obsolescence of the decades-old form of communication, which has dwindled with the advent of DMs and instant messaging apps.

designboom.com · 3 min

TLDR

AMAZON REPORTEDLY USED A SECRET ALGORITHM TO JACK UP PRICES

Amazon deployed a secret algorithm called Project Nessie to gauge how high it could raise prices before competitors stopped increasing their prices as well. The algorithm would inflate prices and monitor whether other retailers would follow suit. If retailers maintained the lower price, the algorithm would revert back to the normal price. Amazon reportedly stopped using it in 2019. Project Nessie is just one of the many ways the FTC has accused Amazon of illegally maintaining its market dominance in the e-commerce industry.

theverge.com · 2 min

TLDR

STARLINK LAUNCHES V2 MINI-SATELLITES WITH 'SPACE LASERS'

Starlink has launched new versions of its satellites that can communicate via lasers. The service has an estimated one million subscribers and is looking to improve its offering as competition warms up in the sector. While Amazon's Kuiper project has so far failed to take off, another rival, OneWeb, is expected to begin offering services soon. Starlink's new satellites will be able to transfer data through laser links at speeds of 100 Gbps over thousands of miles.

interestingengineering.com · 3 min

TLDR

THE WORLD’S FIRST ARTIFICIAL ENERGY ISLAND JUST GOT THE GO-AHEAD

Princess Elisabeth Island, the world's first artificial energy island, has secured its environmental permit in Belgium. The island is an at-sea electricity grid that will connect offshore wind farms to the Belgian mainland. It will serve as a hub for future interconnectors with the UK and Denmark. Construction is planned to be completed in August 2026. The island is expected to be fully connected to all wind farms and the mainland by 2030. A 3-minute video about the project is available.

electrek.co · 2 min

TLDR

POSTGRES

Database schema migrations are essential for keeping systems up to date and in sync with evolving application requirements, but they come with many challenges. Many developers choose to avoid complex migrations due to this and only make additive changes, resulting in an accumulation of technical debt in the database schema. pgroll is a command-line tool for performing schema migrations against Postgres databases. It allows users to define schema migrations using a high-level JSON format and then takes care of executing them.

xata.io · 7 min