The Daily Index — Monday, November 27, 2023 · TLDR Index

Across today’s newsletters

Today’s Index

TLDR

TESLA STARTS RELEASING TO EMPLOYEES FSD V12

Tesla has started releasing its Full Self-Driving v12 update to employees. The biggest difference with the update is how vehicle controls will be taken over by neural nets rather than being hardcoded by engineers. Tesla may be able to push the update to customers by the end of the year. Elon Musk has previously said that he believes that Tesla will achieve true self-driving capability by the end of the year.

electrek.co · 2 min

TLDR AI

WHAT IS Q*?

A recent leak that stated the OpenAI leadership debacle was caused by an internal breakthrough that combined search and RL. This post outlines one theory explaining what might actually be happening with this new method.

interconnects.ai · 10 min

TLDR Web Dev

AN INTERACTIVE STUDY OF COMMON RETRY METHODS

This article explores common retry methods for network requests, which are necessary for preventing errors from reaching users. The article starts by demonstrating basic retry handling without delay, which increases server load and the risk of overload. To counter this, exponential backoff is introduced, which is a method that initially retries quickly and then gradually increases the wait time. The interactive study concludes with a Go code example implementing exponential backoff with jitter, a technique to randomize wait times between retries.

encore.dev · 11 min

TLDR InfoSec

BLACKCAT CLAIMS IT IS BEHIND FIDELITY NATIONAL FINANCIAL RANSOMWARE SHAKEDOWN

Fortune 500 insurance giant Fidelity National Financial disclosed a cyberattack that shut down systems and disrupted title insurance and mortgage transaction services. The intruder accessed systems and acquired credentials. The financial and operational impact of the attack is still under investigation.

theregister.com · 3 min

TLDR Crypto

UK INVESTMENT FUNDS GET GREEN LIGHT FOR TOKENIZATION

Investment funds can now officially tokenize their assets in the UK, which officials hope will increase efficiency, transparency, and competitiveness in the investment management sector. This move, facilitated by the UK Treasury, Financial Conduct Authority, and various investment managers, requires that funds meet specific criteria for tokenization.

theblock.co · 3 min

TLDR

GOOGLE WILL START DELETING OLD ACCOUNTS THIS WEEK. HERE'S HOW TO SAVE YOUR GOOGLE ACCOUNT

Google will start deleting inactive Google accounts from December 1. Accounts are deemed inactive if the user hasn't logged on for at least two years. Gmail addresses for deleted accounts cannot be used again when creating a new Google account. Users just need to sign into their accounts to preserve them.

cnet.com · 3 min

TLDR

SPACEX LAUNCH EXPECTED IN DECEMBER FOLLOWING 2 EXPLOSIVE STARSHIP TESTS

SpaceX plans to test Starship for the third time in December. There are now three ships in final production. SpaceX launched the second Starship test on November 18. The ship successfully performed a hot-stage separation, but it exploded after it completed a flap and boostback burn.

mysanantonio.com · 1 min

TLDR

‘TREASURE TROVE’ OF NEW CRISPR SYSTEMS HOLDS PROMISE FOR GENOME EDITING

Researchers used an algorithm to sort through millions of genomes to find new rare types of CRISPR systems that could eventually be adopted into genome-editing tools. Single-celled bacteria and archaea use CRISPR systems to defend themselves against bacteriophages. The algorithm helped scientists identify the code for an entirely unknown CRISPR system that targets RNA. Researchers will be able to use the algorithm to look for other types of protein across species.

nature.com · 3 min

TLDR

NEED A PRNG? USE A CSPRNG

Developers should always use a Cryptographically Secure Pseudorandom Number Generator (CSPRNG) when choosing a Pseudorandom Number Generator. While people typically say to only use CSPRNGs when doing cryptography and need security against adversarial attackers, they are really the only thing that makes sense to use. This article talks about why developers should only use CSPRNGs by comparing them with other random number generation methods. CSPRNGs are better by definition as given the first n bits, there is no efficient algorithm that will predict the next bit with a success rate non-negligibly better than 50%.

sortingsearching.com · 10 min