The Daily Index — Tuesday, January 30, 2024 · TLDR Index

Across today’s newsletters

Today’s Index

TLDR

ELON MUSK’S NEURALINK IMPLANTS BRAIN TECH IN HUMAN PATIENT FOR THE FIRST TIME

Neuralink implanted a device in a human for the first time on Sunday. The patient is recovering well, according to a post on X by Elon Musk. Neuralink is developing a brain implant that aims to help patients with severe paralysis control external technologies using only neural signals. The technology could help patients with severe degenerative diseases communicate and interact with devices using their minds. Neuralink has not disclosed how many human patients are involved in its initial in-human trial.

cnbc.com · 2 min

TLDR AI

META RELEASES CODELLAMA 70B MODELS

Meta's new models have been fine-tuned and instruction-tuned on significantly more code. They achieve impressive performance on HumanEval, approaching GPT-4 in some respects. The models are available under the Meta license and on HuggingFace

huggingface.co · 4 min

TLDR Web Dev

THE SCARY THING ABOUT AUTOMATING DEPLOYS

Deploying changes at a large scale is not easy within Slack's monolithic service. Continuous deployment helps its team quickly respond to customer feedback, but also creates risks associated with releasing a large number of changes simultaneously. To address these challenges, Slack has implemented an automated deployment system called ReleaseBot, which uses anomaly detection and monitoring, specifically focusing on z-scores, to ensure safe and efficient deployments.

slack.engineering · 14 min

TLDR Crypto

HONG KONG GETS SPOT-BITCOIN ETF APPLICATION, STABLECOIN INTEREST FROM CHINA’S HARVEST GLOBAL

Chinese asset-management firm Harvest Global Investments is reportedly pursuing a spot bitcoin ETF approval with Hong Kong's Securities and Futures Commission. The company is also in talks with regulators concerning the city's stablecoin sandbox. Meanwhile, Venture Smart Financial Holdings is also planning to apply for a spot bitcoin ETF and engage in discussions about the stablecoin sandbox.

coindesk.com · 2 min

TLDR Product

THREE ORGANIZATIONAL DESIGN PRINCIPLES

This article focuses on the challenges leaders face in complex work environments, such as the limits on maintaining numerous collaborative and trusting relationships. It outlines three principles of organizational design and provides strategies for navigating organizational complexities.

cutlefish.substack.com · 4 min

TLDR

APPLE HAS SOLD APPROXIMATELY 200,000 VISION PRO HEADSETS

A source with knowledge of Apple's sales numbers says that the company has sold more than 200,000 Vision Pro headsets. Pre-orders for the headset began on January 19. Media reviews for the device are set to go live today, so that could increase sales, and there is also an expected uptick in purchases after actual consumers begin sharing hands-on experiences. Apple is prepared for a limited number of sales due to the Vision Pro's niche market and high price tag.

macrumors.com · 1 min

TLDR

SCIENTISTS THINK THEY'RE ON THE VERGE OF BREACHING THE BLOOD-BRAIN BARRIER

The brain and spinal cord are well protected by the blood-brain barrier, which stops almost all drugs from entering the central nervous system. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania are testing the delivery of lipid nanoparticles, fat-soluble packages that can pass through the blood-brain barrier and carry proteins, antibodies, and messenger RNA with them. The technique is able to pass some drugs through the blood-brain barrier, but not all of the medicine made it into brain cells when tested in living mice. The researchers are using a new in vitro model that will help guide the future development of brain-targeted treatments.

sciencealert.com · 3 min

TLDR

SCIENTISTS DOCUMENT FIRST-EVER TRANSMITTED ALZHEIMER’S CASES, TIED TO NO-LONGER-USED MEDICAL PROCEDURE

A decades-old treatment for a number of conditions that caused short stature, which involved patients receiving growth hormone taken from the brains of human cadavers, has been tied to some people as young as in their 30s developing Alzheimer's disease. The treatment, which was banned 40 years ago, transmitted unwanted proteins into recipients' brains, including the beta-amyloid protein that later propagated into the disease-causing plaques that are the hallmark of the disease. These are the first documented cases of transferred Alzheimer's - the disease is not usually contagious. The cadaveric growth hormone treatment has been long replaced with a synthetic hormone treatment.

statnews.com · 8 min

TLDR

THE BIG LITTLE GUIDE TO MESSAGE QUEUES

Message queues are a way to transfer information between two systems. They allow systems to communicate with each other in structured ways they can both understand and at a controlled speed they can both handle. This article discusses message queues, their history, why they're useful, how they work, and more. It compares many popular systems available today. The article covers fundamental concepts that underlie message queues and how they apply to popular queuing systems available today.

sudhir.io · 40 min