The Daily Index — Friday, January 12, 2024 · TLDR Index

Across today’s newsletters

Today’s Index

TLDR

GOOGLE CONFIRMS IT JUST LAID OFF AROUND A THOUSAND EMPLOYEES

Google has eliminated around a thousand positions across its Pixel, Nest, Fitbit, Core engineering, and Assistant teams. The company may still be planning further layoffs. Google's parent company Alphabet employed 182,385 employees as of September 30 last year. The layoffs so far represent around half a percent of the company's total employees.

theverge.com · 2 min

TLDR AI

[7] to Cloudflare’s developer platform — including Workers AI

(GPU-powered compute) and Vectorize — and walk you through building and optimizing AI applications with Cloudflare. The series starts with AI foundations (embeddings, models, vector DBs), and moves on to practical sessions where you’ll deploy working AI applications.

bit.ly

TLDR Web Dev

FRONTEND PREDICTIONS FOR 2024

In 2023, there were significant advancements in server-side rendering, increased interest in AI integration, browser and JavaScript engine improvements (like Bun), and improvements to cross-platform frameworks like React Native and Flutter. In 2024, there will be a focus on consolidating tools and frameworks, increased competition to own the entire software stack, more diversity in web engines with Apple's changes that will open up the web on mobile, continued AI advancements, and the dominance of existing UI frameworks like React. Native mobile development is expected to remain relatively unchanged.

buttondown.email · 13 min

TLDR InfoSec

BITCOIN X HACK AN ‘EMBARRASSMENT’ FOR CYBER SECURITY-CONSCIOUS SEC

The SEC's official X account was hacked and made to tweet a false claim that the bitcoin ETF was approved. This highlights cyber risks the agency has long warned companies about. SEC chair Gary Gensler prioritizes cybersecurity, mandating disclosures and punishing misleading claims. The hack was caused by an individual hijacking the SEC's phone number via a third party. X said the SEC account lacked two-factor authentication.

ft.com · 5 min

TLDR Crypto

STABLECOIN ISSUER CIRCLE FILES FOR IPO

Circle Internet Financial, the issuer of the USDC stablecoin, has filed a confidential draft S-1 document with the SEC for an initial public offering. The number of shares to be offered and the price range for the proposed offering have not yet been determined. USDC is the second-largest stablecoin, with a market cap of about $25 billion. Circle's initial public offering is expected to take place after the review process, subject to market and other conditions.

coindesk.com · 2 min

TLDR

“SUCH SIGNAL, MUCH WOW”: STARLINK’S FIRST TEXTS VIA “CELLPHONE TOWERS IN SPACE”

SpaceX has successfully sent and received its first text messages using the T-Mobile network spectrum through one of its new direct-to-cell satellites. The new satellites are expected to provide text messaging services around the world sometime this year, with voice and data services beginning sometime in 2025. They are equipped with custom silicon, phased array antennas, and advanced software algorithms. The satellite-to-phone service should work just about anywhere on the planet, but it will be most useful in areas with no coverage due to terrain limitations, land-use restrictions, and other factors.

arstechnica.com · 1 min

TLDR

MEET THE ETH, AN EXPANDABLE ELECTRIC RV THAT TURNS INTO AN OFF-GRID LUXURY MINI-HOME

The Electric Transformer House is an expandable luxury mini-home with 400 square feet of living space, solar panels, and much more. The RV features a luxurious interior, smart tech, and clean energy for off-grid capabilities. It has a gourmet kitchen, a spacious living and dining room, and a private bedroom. Its cockpit features a flexible dashboard/office desk, integrated entertainment, drive assist tech, and a Starlink connection. Pictures and videos showing the RV in both its vehicle and mini-home modes are available in the article.

electrek.co · 3 min

TLDR

CHINESE RIVAL TO SPACEX PULLS OFF ROCKET LAUNCH AT SEA

Orienspace declared a complete success after launching a rocket at sea into low-Earth orbit on Thursday. Its rocket deposited a total of three satellites into orbit using its Gravity 1 commercial launch system. The three-stage, 100-foot-tall spacecraft is the world's largest solid launch vehicle. Launching from the sea offers several advantages, including less chance of damage and lower costs.

themessenger.com · 1 min

TLDR

GITHUB ACTIONS AS A TIME-SHARING SUPERCOMPUTER

GitHub Actions can be used for batch jobs. Developers can submit work to the service and receive the results later on asynchronously. actions-batch is a command-line tool that is essentially an API that turns GitHub Actions into a time-sharing computer. It creates new GitHub repositories, writes a workflow that runs 'job.sh' upon commits, and triggers jobs when a local bash file is written to the repository as 'job.sh'. actions-batch can be used for jobs like building kernels and running machine learning inference using Llama2.

blog.alexellis.io · 12 min