The Daily Index — Friday, December 15, 2023 · TLDR Index

Across today’s newsletters

Today’s Index

TLDR

GOOGLE WORKING ON ‘PIXIE’ AI ASSISTANT FOR PIXEL 9, DISCUSSED GLASSES WITH OBJECT RECOGNITION

Pixie is an AI assistant from Google that could launch with the Pixel 9. Powered by Gemini, it will use data from Google products on devices to perform complex and multimodal tasks. Google has discussed creating glasses with the ability to recognize objects and advise wearers on how to use tools. The last bit of news on Google AR was how the hardware offer effort was being sidelined for a Samsung partnership.

9to5google.com · 2 min

TLDR AI

DEEPMIND’S AI UNCOVERS NOVEL MATHEMATICS

DeepMind published a paper in Nature about FunSearch, which uses LLM-guided function search to find solutions to open problems in mathematics and computer science. It tackled the capset problem and discovered some of the largest capsets to date.

deepmind.google · 12 min

TLDR Web Dev

HOW I BROUGHT LCP DOWN TO UNDER 350 MS FOR GOOGLE-REFERRED USERS ON MY WEBSITE

This article demonstrates techniques for optimizing LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) on high-traffic websites to under 350ms, even with a lot of images and slow connection. This is done by making Google prefetch HTML and critical resources on the Google Search results page. Google does this for websites that have a high position within Google Search results for a given phrase and have properly implemented Signed Exchanges (SXG). The article focuses on how to add SXG to your web application.

blog.pawelpokrywka.com · 21 min

TLDR InfoSec

SUPPLY CHAIN ATTACK TARGETING LEDGER CRYPTO WALLET LEAVES USERS HACKED

Ledger has reported that hackers compromised the code for the Ledger Connect software development kit used by decentralized apps to interface with Ledger wallets. The hackers pushed out a malicious version of the kit. Ledger pushed out an update of the Connect Kit to replace the malicious one within 40 minutes of becoming aware. The attackers have amassed $600,000 in stolen funds.

techcrunch.com · 3 min

TLDR Crypto

LEDGER PATCHES VULNERABILITY AFTER MULTIPLE DAPPS USING CONNECTOR LIBRARY WERE COMPROMISED

Several dapps using Ledger’s wallet connector kit faced security breaches yesterday. This included platforms like SushiSwap, Zapper, Phantom, Balancer, and Revoke.cash. Ledger later announced that the malicious code had been replaced with an updated, safe version of the code. Applications across the crypto ecosystem were vulnerable to this exploit, so it created quite a scare in the space. Fortunately, the attacker only got away with ~$600k in stolen funds, which were later frozen by Tether.

cointelegraph.com · 2 min

TLDR

AMAZON’S PROJECT KUIPER CONFIRMS ITS SUPER-FAST SATELLITE COMMUNICATION TECH WORKS IN SPACE

Amazon's Project Kuiper has successfully validated key technology that will increase throughput and reduce latency for its satellite internet service customers. Optical Inter-Satellite Links use infrared lasers to send data between spacecraft in orbit. The technology allows Kuiper's satellites to connect with many other spacecraft simultaneously to form a mesh network in space capable of moving data 30% faster than terrestrial fiber-optic cables running along an equivalent distance.

techcrunch.com · 2 min

TLDR

DEEPMIND AI OUTDOES HUMAN MATHEMATICIANS ON UNSOLVED PROBLEM

FunSearch is an AI system that can interact with a specially trained large language model to create short computer programs that generate solutions to math problems. The system checks to see whether these solutions are better than known ones, and if not, it provides feedback to the LLM so that it can improve in the next round. It was able to discover new solutions to an old problem. One important feature of FunSearch is that people can see the code created by the model and learn from it.

nature.com · 3 min

TLDR

MODERNA-MERCK VACCINE CUTS ODDS OF SKIN CANCER RECURRENCE IN HALF, STUDY FINDS

An ongoing randomized vaccine trial involving 157 patients with high-risk stage III/IV melanoma is showing promising results. Those who received the vaccine were 49% less likely to die or have their cancer come back after three years than those who only received treatment with a cancer drug. Phase 3 trials of the vaccine have begun.

cbsnews.com · 3 min

TLDR

ANNOUNCING SVELTEKIT 2

SvelteKit is the official framework for building apps with Svelte. Version 2.0 adds support for Vite 5 and other small improvements. It also adds shallow routing, which allows developers to associate state with a history entry without causing navigation. Shallow routing is useful for creating modals that can be dismissed by swiping back or pop-up views of routes that don't require full navigation.

svelte.dev · 2 min