The Daily Index — Wednesday, January 17, 2024 · TLDR Index

Across today’s newsletters

Today’s Index

TLDR

APPLE HITS “ALL-TIME HIGH” SMARTPHONE MARKET SHARE, TAKES #1 SPOT FOR 2023

Apple was the number one smartphone OEM in 2023. It had a 20.1% market share for the year, a 3.7% growth over 2022. Apple's best-selling phone, and the best-selling model in the world, was the iPhone 14 Pro Max. The company's cheapest phone, the iPhone SE at $429, didn't sell well. Apple's market share is fueled by aggressive trade-in offers and interest-free financing plans.

arstechnica.com · 2 min

TLDR AI

SAKANA AI RAISES $30M SEED

Sakana.ai is building a world-class research lab in Tokyo to build smaller and more efficient foundation models. The company was founded by ex-Google researchers David Ha and Llion Jones, who are responsible for breakthroughs such as Transformers, World Models, and LoRA. It has raised a 30m seed round from Brandon Reeves at Lux Capital and Jon Chu at Khosla Ventures to pioneer this effort and put Tokyo on the AI map.

sakana.ai · 3 min

TLDR Web Dev

MEASURING DEVELOPER PRODUCTIVITY: REAL-WORLD EXAMPLES

Tech companies like Google and LinkedIn measure developer productivity in different ways. Common metrics in the industry that are commonly tracked as proxies for productivity are ease of delivery, experiment velocity, and the stability of services and apps. However, quantitative metrics alone can’t describe the full picture. Teams should start with defining specific goals and problems first, then pick the right quantitative and qualitative metrics for those goals.

open.substack.com · 20 min

TLDR InfoSec

180K INTERNET-EXPOSED SONICWALL FIREWALLS VULNERABLE TO DOS ATTACKS, POSSIBLY RCE

Most internet-facing SonicWall firewalls are unpatched for two high-severity vulnerabilities, allowing remote DoS and potentially RCE without authentication. CVE-2022-22274 and CVE-2023-0656 stem from code reuse issues. Patches were released in 2022 and 2023, but over 178,000 devices remain vulnerable. Exploitation can repeatedly crash devices, disrupting operations.

securityweek.com · 3 min

TLDR Crypto

PROSHARES FILES FOR FIVE LEVERAGED AND INVERSE BITCOIN ETFS

ProShares has submitted proposals for five leveraged and inverse Bitcoin ETFs. This comes on the heels of the SEC's approval of 11 spot Bitcoin ETFs. The five proposed funds are named ProShares Plus Bitcoin ETF, ProShares Ultra Bitcoin ETF, ProShares UltraShort Bitcoin ETF, ProShares Short Bitcoin ETF, and ProShares ShortPlus Bitcoin ETF. The spot Bitcoin ETFs are off to a fast start, with billions of dollars in trading volume in the first few days, so these proposed ETFs are presumably aiming to capitalize on that, giving investors more ways to get exposure to Bitcoin, either by shorting it or being able to leverage long it.

theblock.co · 2 min

TLDR

OPENAI CHANGES ITS STANCE, ANNOUNCES THAT IT IS WORKING WITH THE PENTAGON

OpenAI has announced a partnership with the Pentagon. The company's usage policy previously banned activities like weapons development and military use and warfare, but it recently updated its policies to remove the part about military use and warfare. OpenAI and the Pentagon are working on cybersecurity software and are in discussions about how OpenAI's technology could assist with preventing veteran suicide.

themessenger.com · 2 min

TLDR

EXPERIMENTAL ULTRASOUND TREATMENT TARGETING BRAINS IN TRIALS TO HELP THOSE WITH ALZHEIMER'S, DRUG ADDICTION

A new experimental treatment uses ultrasound to open the blood-brain barrier using a specialized helmet to temporarily allow therapeutic drugs to quickly get inside the brain. Patients are awake during the procedure but they say the procedure is painless. In human trials, the treatment resulted in a clear reduction in the beta-amyloid proteins targeted. The treatment has also shown efficacy in treating patients with severe drug addictions.

cbsnews.com · 5 min

TLDR

A CLONED RHESUS MONKEY IS STILL ALIVE AFTER 2 YEARS

A team of researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences claims one of its cloned monkeys has lived more than two years, the longest any cloned rhesus macaque has survived yet. It was developed using a new method called the trophoblast replacement method. The new technique could have implications for conventional IVF. There is still a lot of trial and error involved - the researchers achieved just one live fetus for every 113 activated embryos, and of all 11 embryos transferred to a womb, only one produced a live fetus.

sciencealert.com · 3 min

TLDR

HOW TO USE CHATGPT TO BUILD SOFTWARE PRODUCTS

This X post provides a small guide on how to use ChatGPT to build software products. The process involves asking the model to go through planning stages first to lay down a structure before getting it to write code. It will take a few attempts with different ideas before users get the hang of how to feed the model information to get good results.

twitter.com · 1 min