The Daily Index — Tuesday, October 10, 2023 · TLDR Index

Across today’s newsletters

Today’s Index

TLDR

GITHUB COPILOT LOSES AN AVERAGE OF $20 PER USER PER MONTH

GitHub Copilot costs users $10 per month, but it is costing Microsoft an average of $20 per user per month. Some users are costing the company as much as $80 per month. This is likely why Microsoft decided to charge a lot more for the AI capabilities in Microsoft 365 Copilot. The costs are also likely why the company is developing its own in-house AI chip sets for its data centers and pushing the adoption of Neural Processing Units across the industry.

thurrott.com · 2 min

TLDR AI

REPLIT AI FREE FOR EVERYONE

Replit has its own coding assistant that runs across its products. It is quite powerful, trained with Mosaic, and free for all user tiers.

blog.replit.com · 1 min

TLDR Web Dev

HOW SLACK PROCESSES 33,000 JOBS PER SECOND

Slack manages many tasks asynchronously, including push notifications and billing. It previously used Redis for task queuing, but as Slack scaled, it faced limitations such as memory constraints and coupling between workers and Redis instances. To address these issues, Slack integrated Apache Kafka, added Kafkagate as a new scheduler, and used JQRelay to relay jobs from Kafka to Redis. This improved Slack’s scalability and durability and reduced complexity in managing job queues.

blog.quastor.org · 14 min

TLDR Crypto

BITVM: COMPUTE ANYTHING ON BITCOIN

BitVM, a new computing framework, allows the execution of Turing-complete Bitcoin contracts without needing to modify the network's consensus rules. Instead of running computations on Bitcoin, they're validated, similar to optimistic rollups. If any false claims are made, a verifier can enact a succinct fraud proof to punish the false claimer. The framework can potentially give Bitcoin some smart contract-like capabilities and create a bridge between BTC and other chains.

bitvm.org · 9 min

TLDR Design

WAYS

Apple engineers are now working on the next version of the Vision Pro, aiming to make it lighter and smaller so it's more comfortable. Additionally, the company is exploring ways to simplify the headset for people who wear glasses.

digitaltrends.com · 2 min

TLDR

STRAIN”

Apple has a long history of releasing intriguing first-generation devices followed by second- or third-generation revisions that realize the full potential of the original idea. The company is already working on a next-generation version of its Vision Pro to address early complaints about the yet-to-be-released first-generation model. It aims to reduce the device's size and weight as it is apparently causing neck strain among some testers. The company is also considering changing the way prescription lenses are built into the headset and looking into a lower-end model.

arstechnica.com · 3 min

TLDR

SOFTBANK

Symbotic and Softbank have created a joint venture called GreenBox Systems that promises to deliver AI-powered logistics and warehousing to small companies. It will provide its services in facilities that different companies will share. GreenBox aims to help companies that can't afford the multi-million dollar investments required to build and operate such facilities in the same way cloud companies make high-end compute tech accessible.

cnbc.com · 8 min

TLDR

EXTREME PARKOUR WITH LEGGED ROBOTS

This study is an attempt at developing robot parkour on a small low-cost robot with imprecise actuation and a single front-facing depth camera for perception. It shows how a single neural net policy operating directly from a camera image can overcome imprecise sensing and actuation to output highly precise control behavior end-to-end. The resulting robot is able to high jump on obstacles two times its height, long jump gaps two times its length, do handstands, run across tilted ramps, and more. A video of the robot performing different movements is available.

extreme-parkour.github.io · 1 min

TLDR

HEIST

FTX staff witnessed hundreds of millions of dollars worth of crypto being stolen in real time on November 11, 2022. The company quickly assembled a team to save the assets. It decided to contact BitGo, which had been in talks with FTX for custody of its crypto holdings, to request the immediate creation of cold storage wallets. While BitGo was creating the wallets, FTX temporarily stored its assets on an employee's personal Ledger Nano hardware wallet. The siphoning of funds stopped once the money was moved to the new wallet and the rescued crypto was eventually transferred to BitGo.

bitcoinist.com · 2 min