The Daily Index — Wednesday, February 14, 2024 · TLDR Index

Across today’s newsletters

Today’s Index

TLDR

OPENAI EXPERIMENTS WITH GIVING CHATGPT A LONG-TERM CONVERSATION MEMORY

OpenAI is experimenting with adding a form of long-term memory to ChatGPT. Users will be able to ask the chatbot to remember something, see what it remembers, and ask it to forget. The feature is currently available to a small number of users for testing. OpenAI hasn't revealed what technique it is using for the system, but the implementation is similar to that of Custom Instructions, a feature that was introduced in July last year.

arstechnica.com · 3 min

TLDR AI

STABILITY AND WURSTCHEN RELEASE NEW TEXT TO IMAGE MODEL

The Stable Cascade model is a new research-only text-to-image model that outperforms SDXL in aesthetics, prompt faithfulness, and text quality. It was trained using the Würstchen architecture and has a multi-step architecture that makes tuning easy.

stability.ai · 8 min

TLDR Web Dev

INTRODUCING SAFETEST: A NOVEL APPROACH TO FRONT END TESTING

UI tests have traditionally been conducted through either unit testing or end-to-end (E2E) tests. Both approaches have tradeoffs. With unit tests, you have control over what to render and how the underlying services and imports should behave. However, you lose the ability to interact with an actual page. With E2E tests, you have control over the page but deal with pain points like the inability to make assertions on mocks and test segments of the app. SafeTest aims to address these issues by having a snippet of code in the application bootstrapping stage that injects hooks to run tests. It uses Playwright to run regular tests, thereby achieving ideal browser control. SafeTest also provides reports on when and how any failures occurred which include playback videos or steps to reproduce the failure.

netflixtechblog.com · 7 min

TLDR InfoSec

FRENCH HEALTHCARE PAYMENTS PROCESSOR BREACHES AFFECT HALF OF POPULATION

Payments outfits Viamedis and Almerys both experienced breaches of their systems in late January leading to the theft of data belonging to more than 33 million customers. Affected data on customers and their families includes dates of birth, marital status, social security numbers, and insurance information.

securityweek.com · 3 min

TLDR Crypto

CRYPTO GAMING PLATFORM PLAYDAPP LOSES $290 MILLION WORTH OF TOKENS IN TWO EXPLOITS

PlayDapp, a crypto gaming and NFT platform, has been exploited twice within the past few days. A hacker minted 1.79 billion PLA tokens worth over $290 million and then laundered the funds via crypto exchanges. The gaming platform failed in its attempt to negotiate the return of the stolen funds for a $1 million reward. PlayDapp is currently working with law enforcement, crypto exchanges, and blockchain forensic firms to mitigate the situation.

theblock.co · 2 min

TLDR

META’S CEO FINALLY TRIED APPLE’S NEW HEADSET AND HE HAS THOUGHTS

Mark Zuckerberg recently posted a video to his Instagram account giving his official verdict on the Apple Vision Pro versus the Meta Quest 3. He says that the Quest 3 is the better product. The Quest 3 weighs less and its lack of a wired battery and wider field of view allows for greater motion. While Zuckerberg thinks the Vision Pro is a better entertainment device, he notes that the Quest has a better immersive content library than Apple. The video is available in the article.

theverge.com · 2 min

TLDR

EARLY DEMENTIA DIAGNOSIS: BLOOD PROTEINS REVEAL AT-RISK PEOPLE

A study has identified blood proteins that appear to predict the risk of developing dementia up to 15 years before diagnosis. High levels of the blood proteins GFAP, NEFL, GDF15, and LTBP2 are strongly associated with dementia. Blood levels of these proteins can be outside of normal ranges more than 10 years before symptom onset. The findings, once validated, may lead to the development of blood tests that identify people at risk of developing dementia.

nature.com · 3 min

TLDR

SOMEONE IS GOING TO DIM THE SUN, AND IT WILL BE SOON

Solar Radiation Management (SRM) is starting to gain more attention due to 2023's high temperatures. It's much easier to artificially dim the sun than most people imagine. Injecting sulfur into the stratosphere could be a cheap way to cool down the Earth. It would have an almost instant effect, but once it starts it would be dangerous to suddenly stop. SRM will not fix the root cause of the problem, but it could buy time for us to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. However, its implementation could make us more complacent about fixing the core issues.

climate.benjames.io · 12 min

TLDR

IS SOMETHING BUGGING YOU?

Antithesis is now coming out of stealth after five years of development. One of the fundamental problems of software development is that software has to handle many situations that the developers have never thought of or will never anticipate. To overcome this, Antithesis built a fully-deterministic platform that hunts for bugs in software. The platform is designed to one day be able to find many kinds of bugs in many kinds of software, but it currently focuses on distributed systems reliability/fault tolerance testing. Antithesis is now looking for organizations running distributed systems for testing.

antithesis.com · 12 min