The Daily Index — Friday, February 16, 2024 · TLDR Index

Across today’s newsletters

Today’s Index

TLDR

MICROSOFT’S GAMING CHIEF ON XBOX GAMES COMING TO PS5, NEXT-GEN HARDWARE, AND MORE

Microsoft is bringing four Xbox-exclusive games to PS5 and Nintendo Switch. The move is part of an 'Xbox Everywhere' effort that will likely see even more games arriving on rival consoles. While there are risks to going fully multiplatform, Microsoft sees an opportunity to make more money on rival consoles to support its game creation. This article contains an interview with Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer where he talks about the future of Xbox gaming, regulatory efforts against Apple that could affect the Xbox business, and next-gen Xbox hardware.

theverge.com · 15 min

TLDR AI

OPENAI SORA

OpenAI released a new video generation model with stunning quality. It is currently available for red teamers to test.

openai.com · 6 min

TLDR Web Dev

SAFE AND RELIABLE PRODUCTION CHANGES FOR FAST MOVING TEAMS; AND HOW RIVIAN RECENTLY GOT THIS WRONG

Rivian recently made a mistake during an over-the-air software update for its cars that caused infotainment screens to reboot and become unusable for several days. It could have prevented this with better practices like canary deployments, pre-flight checks, and rollback mechanisms, which are common in cloud systems. Frequent small deployments and phased rollouts ensure safe changes in production.

blog.substrate.tools · 7 min

TLDR InfoSec

US MILITARY NOTIFIES 20,000 OF DATA BREACH AFTER CLOUD EMAIL LEAK

The Department of Defense notified 20,600 individuals that their information was breached after an unsecured cloud email server was discovered to be spilling sensitive emails to the open internet. This happened between February 3 and February 20, 2023, and the notification was sent out on February 1, 2024.

techcrunch.com · 3 min

TLDR Crypto

HOUSE LAWMAKERS TO HASH OUT CRYPTO, ILLICIT FINANCE AS AML BILLS COME INTO FOCUS

The U.S. House's Financial Services Committee is set to discuss cryptocurrency's role in illicit finance in an upcoming subcommittee hearing. Experts from prominent crypto businesses including Coinbase and Circle will be speaking at the event. Its focus will likely be on how the industry can combat illicit activities. This is part of a larger discussion politicians are having around Anti-Money Laundering laws for the cryptocurrency sector.

theblock.co · 3 min

TLDR

GEMINI 1.5 IS GOOGLE’S NEXT-GEN AI MODEL — AND IT’S ALREADY ALMOST READY

Google has launched Gemini 1.5, making it available to developers and enterprise users ahead of a full consumer rollout. The new Gemini is apparently on par with the high-end Gemini Ultra that Google recently launched. It was created using the Mixture of Experts technique, making the model both faster for users and more efficient for Google to run. Gemini 1.5 has a context window of 1 million tokens, equivalent to tens of thousands of lines of code. Google researchers are currently testing a 10 million context window.

theverge.com · 6 min

TLDR

LENOVO'S TRANSPARENT LAPTOP CONCEPT IS SOMETHING ELSE

Lenovo is reportedly working on a transparent laptop. The company might unveil the laptop at this year's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, which starts on February 26. Transparent display technology is a rising trend, with several companies showing off semi-transparent TVs at this year's CES. A render of Lenovo's rumored transparent laptop is available in the article.

mashable.com · 1 min

TLDR

MOON COMPANY INTUITIVE MACHINES BEGINS FIRST MISSION AFTER SPACEX LAUNCH

Intuitive Machines' inaugural moon mission launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket early Thursday morning. The company's IM-1 lander is carrying 12 government and commercial payloads to the Moon. It will spend about eight days traveling before descending to the Moon's surface on February 22. If all goes well, Intuitive Machines aims to operate the lander on the surface for up to seven days. This is the second mission under NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative.

cnbc.com · 4 min

TLDR

ARE THERE ANY GOOD REASONS TO USE C++ OVER RUST FOR NEW PROJECTS TODAY? (LOBSTERS THREAD)

This thread discusses contexts where using C++ makes more sense than using Rust, things people new to Rust should watch out for when starting new projects, and things that those considering making Rust their go-to language should be aware of. It increasingly looks like Rust can solve all of the problems that C++ can without losing performance while gaining better memory safety guarantees and better type invariance guarantees. However, there are still several reasons to stick with C++, for example, Q2 and Unreal Engine require C++ and platform support for Rust is still limited.

lobste.rs