The Daily Index — Monday, December 11, 2023 · TLDR Index

Across today’s newsletters

Today’s Index

TLDR

APPLE CUTS OFF BEEPER MINI’S ACCESS AFTER LAUNCH OF SERVICE THAT BROUGHT IMESSAGE TO ANDROID

Beeper Mini, an app that brought iMessage to Android, recently experienced an outage. It appeared that Apple found a way to make the app stop functioning. The service is now back online. Apple claims that the app poses significant risks to user security and privacy. Beeper claims that its service increases iPhone security as without it, texts would be sent to Android devices unencrypted.

techcrunch.com · 3 min

TLDR AI

MISTRAL'S NEW MODEL AND NEW FUNDING

The 8-month-old AI group is set to raise $400m+ in a new round. It also released an 8x7B Mixture of Experts model which is currently being evaluated by the community.

ft.com · 7 min

TLDR Web Dev

EXAMPLES OF GREAT URL DESIGN

Thoughtful URL design strikes a balance between the needs of computers and humans. For example, StackOverflow’s URLs combine a unique identifier and a human-readable slug, so both computers and humans can understand a URL without having to visit it. Slack incorporates natural language sentences into URLs. GitHub and NPM map well to their respective domain semantics, making navigation efficient.

blog.jim-nielsen.com · 4 min

TLDR InfoSec

YOUR MOBILE PASSWORD MANAGER MIGHT BE EXPOSING YOUR CREDENTIALS

Researchers from IIIT Hyderabad discovered a vulnerability that allows malicious apps to expose credentials when a user autofills with a password manager on Android. The attack involves tricking password managers into autofilling into the app as well as a Login with Google WebView.

techcrunch.com · 3 min

TLDR Crypto

FIDELITY HELD MEETING WITH SEC ABOUT SPOT BITCOIN FUND, SUBMITTED PRESENTATION ABOUT ETF WORKFLOWS

Fidelity reportedly met with the SEC again to discuss its proposed spot Bitcoin ETF. In this meeting, Fidelity provided a detailed explanation of the "In-Kind" creations and redemptions model. The company argued that physical creations and redemptions are crucial for trading efficiency and market pricing. The amended S-1s by the companies vying for these spot Bitcoin ETFs are stacking up, and analysts are suggesting that this means progress is being made toward the approval of these ETFs.

theblock.co · 2 min

TLDR

THE REAL RESEARCH BEHIND THE WILD RUMORS ABOUT OPENAI’S Q* PROJECT

OpenAI's Q* model can reportedly perform math on the level of grade-school students. While Q* might not be the crucial breakthrough that will lead to artificial general intelligence, it might be an important step towards an AI with general reasoning abilities. This article takes a look at the area of AI math research and explains why step-by-step reasoning techniques designed for math problems could have much broader applications. Building a general reasoning engine will require a way for language models to learn new abstractions that go beyond their training data and have these evolving abstractions influence the model's choices as it explores the space of possible solutions.

arstechnica.com · 15 min

TLDR

WHY SCIENTISTS ARE MAKING TRANSPARENT WOOD

Transparent wood could soon find uses as super-strong screens for smartphones, glowing light fixtures, and structural features like color-changing windows. The material outperforms plastic and glass in tests measuring how easily materials fracture or break under pressure. It is a far better insulator than glass, so windows made out of the material could help buildings retain heat or keep it out. For now, transparent wood still has a higher environmental impact than glass, but scaling up manufacturing and embracing greener production schemes could help make it more sustainable.

arstechnica.com · 7 min

TLDR

FDA APPROVES FIRST CRISPR THERAPY

The FDA has approved two gene therapies for treating sickle cell disease. These treatments have been shown to be highly effective at preventing vaso-occlusive events and crises. One of the treatments, the first CRISPR/Cas9 therapy approved in the US, turns on the production of fetal hemoglobin to replace deformed red blood cells. The other therapy uses a Lentiviral vector to insert the genetic code for a modified type of hemoglobin designed to be anti-sickling.

arstechnica.com · 3 min

TLDR

MEDIA QUERIES IN HTML VIDEO

This article demonstrates how to serve videos using some of the features used for serving content based on user preferences and accessibility features. It presents alternate versions of a video for assorted media queries. Each example embeds the video with its alternate version, shows the HTML code used, and provides the alternate version alone. The examples are designed so developers can compare and confirm whether changes made to their browsers, systems, or within dev tools were successful.

adrianroselli.com · 18 min