The Daily Index — Thursday, January 25, 2024 · TLDR Index

Across today’s newsletters

Today’s Index

TLDR

TESLA PLANS TO BUILD NEW ELECTRIC VEHICLES IN MID-2025

Tesla has told suppliers it wants to start production of a new electric vehicle in mid-2025. Codenamed 'Redwood', the next-generation vehicle is expected to drive a new wave of growth. Tesla has forecasted a weekly production volume of 10,000 vehicles. The new vehicle may be the entry-level $25,000 car that Elon Musk first promised to build in 2020. Tesla plans to make an inexpensive robotaxi based on the same vehicle architecture as the $25,000 electric car.

reuters.com · 3 min

TLDR AI

EMBEDDING ENGLISH WIKIPEDIA IN 15 MINUTES

Embeddings serve as the foundation for many AI use cases. They can be expensive and slow due to rate limits. This blog walks through using Modal to scale up the embedding process efficiently and correctly.

modal.com · 18 min

TLDR Web Dev

HOW WE BUILT IT: SMART RETRIES

Stripe developed a “smart retries” tool that uses ML to determine the best time to retry failed payments. The tool helped some businesses recover over $100 million in revenue. This article goes into detail on how the tool was implemented and provides 4 key lessons on building and choosing the right ML model and giving customers control over how often payments are retried.

stripe.com · 10 min

TLDR Crypto

HASHKEY CAPITAL LAUNCHES THREE CRYPTO INDICES WITH FTSE RUSSELL

Crypto investment firm HashKey Capital has partnered with London Stock Exchange subsidiary FTSE Russell to introduce three indices that track the performance of crypto assets. These are meant to guide investors seeking to gain exposure to cryptocurrency. The indices include the top 20 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, infrastructure-focused tokens, and tokens for crypto apps.

theblock.co · 2 min

TLDR Design

CHROME IS GETTING 3 NEW GENERATIVE AI FEATURES

These experimental AI features enable users to organize their tabs, create custom themes, and get help writing on the web. Chrome users can enable these experimental features in settings, but because these features are early public experiments, they’ll be disabled for enterprise and educational accounts for now.

blog.google · 2 min

TLDR

GOOGLE’S LATEST AI VIDEO GENERATOR CAN RENDER CUTE ANIMALS IN IMPLAUSIBLE SITUATIONS

Lumiere is an AI video generator that uses a space-time diffusion model for realistic video generation. The Space-Time U-Net architecture that it uses generates the entire temporal duration of a video at once with a single pass. It is designed to handle both where things are and how things move and change throughout a video. Lumiere can perform text-to-video generation, convert still images into videos, generate videos in specific styles using a reference image, apply consistent video editing using text-based prompts, create cinemagraphs, and inpaint videos. It excels in creating videos of cute animals in ridiculous scenarios - examples are available in the article.

arstechnica.com · 3 min

TLDR

CHINA'S NEW DARK MATTER LAB IS BIGGEST AND DEEPEST YET

The world's deepest and largest underground laboratory is around 2,400 meters below the Jinping Mountains in southwest China. The enormous space, with a sprawling capacity of 330,000 cubic meters, is home to scientists studying dark matter, a hypothetical substance thought to make up more than 80% of the mass in the Universe. It opened in 2010 but only became operational in December 2023. The layers of rock above the laboratory shield it from background noise such as cosmic rays.

nature.com · 3 min

TLDR

CHILDREN WITH GENETIC DEAFNESS HAVE HEARING RESTORED WITH GENE THERAPY

Five children with a form of genetic deafness called DFNB9 regained their hearing thanks to a new type of gene therapy. The therapy involves the use of an inactive virus carrying a functioning version of the gene associated with the disease. The children, who were previously totally deaf, recovered their hearing and were able to conduct normal conversations. Further studies will enroll more patients and follow them for a longer period of time to ensure that the treatment works.

abcnews.go.com · 2 min

TLDR

MAKING RUST BINARIES SMALLER BY DEFAULT

Cargo by default now uses `strip = 'debuginfo'` for the `release` profile unless debuginfo is explicitly requested for some dependency. This new default will be used for any profile that does not enable debuginfo anywhere in its dependency chain. This article looks at how a developer noticed that Rust binaries were unnecessarily large and then developed and submitted a fix for it.

kobzol.github.io · 6 min