The Daily Index — Tuesday, February 27, 2024 · TLDR Index

Across today’s newsletters

Today’s Index

TLDR

APPLE VISION PRO’S COMPONENTS COST $1,542 — BUT THAT’S NOT THE FULL STORY

The materials for the Apple Vision Pro are estimated to cost around $1,542. Its dual displays are the most expensive component, costing $456. The external display used for EyeSight costs around $70. The M2 system-on-a-chip and the R1 processor together cost around $240. A full table of materials and their estimated costs is available in the article. The cost estimate doesn't take into account manufacturing, shipping, marketing, or research and development.

arstechnica.com · 2 min

TLDR AI

MISTRAL LARGE

Mistral, a French AI start-up, has announced a new model for its API along with an Azure partnership. Mistral Large excels at multilingual tasks, is within a few percent of GPT-4 on MMLU, and generally has powerful performance. The startup also added a new mistral-small model to its API.

mistral.ai · 4 min

TLDR Web Dev

FUTURE SOFTWARE SHOULD BE MEMORY SAFE

The White House Office of the National Cyber Director (ONCD) released a report emphasizing the need to shift cybersecurity responsibility to large tech companies and the government. The report urges the adoption of memory-safe programming languages to prevent common vulnerabilities and calls for better tools to measure software security. It uses C#, Go, Java, Python, Rust, and Swift as examples of memory-safe languages. C and C++ are considered non-memory-safe languages.

whitehouse.gov · 3 min

TLDR Crypto

NEW BITCOIN SPOT ETF TRADING VOLUME SETS DAILY RECORD, BESTING LAUNCH DAY

The nine recently launched spot bitcoin ETFs recorded a combined daily volume of $2.4 billion on Monday, setting a new record for the nascent products. BlackRock's ETF led the way, accounting for $1.3 billion of the total volume. The products, introduced on January 11, have collectively done nearly $52 billion in trading so far, pushing the price of Bitcoin to within 20% of its all-time highs.

theblock.co · 2 min

TLDR Product

CORPORATE OZEMPIC

AI's role in recent layoffs is more significant than corporations admit. The tech industry's recent job cuts are less about economic conditions and more about technological innovation's impact.

medium.com · 8 min

TLDR

MISTRAL AI RELEASES NEW MODEL TO RIVAL GPT-4 AND ITS OWN CHAT ASSISTANT

Mistral AI has launched a new language large model called Mistral Large to rival other top-tier models like GPT-4 and Claude 2. The company is also launching a new service called Le Chat to compete with ChatGPT. Access to Mistral Large costs $8 per million input tokens and $24 per million output tokens through the company's API. The model supports a context window of 32k tokens and English, French, Spanish, German, and Italian. Le Chat is free, but it can't access the web.

techcrunch.com · 4 min

TLDR

PEERING THROUGH LENOVO’S TRANSPARENT LAPTOP INTO A SCI-FI FUTURE

Lenovo's ThinkBook Transparent Display Laptop is a 17.3-inch notebook with a see-through screen. Its bezel-less MicroLED display offers up to 55% transparency when its pixels are set to black or turned off. The display becomes less and less see-through as its pixels light up. Due to technical challenges, the laptop's display resolution is only 720p and it is not currently possible to manually set the whole laptop screen to be opaque. The laptop has a flat touch keyboard as its base that is also designed to work as a drawing tablet. Pictures of the device are available in the article.

theverge.com · 7 min

TLDR

THE ODYSSEUS LUNAR LANDER IS ON ITS SIDE AND WILL LIKELY RUN OUT OF ENERGY SOON

The Odysseus lander will likely stop operating today as its panels and antennas aren't oriented exactly as planned, making it difficult to generate power and communicate. The lander almost failed its landing due to issues with its range finder lasers, but a last-minute software patch allowed engineers to use one of NASA's experimental LIDAR systems to retrieve the required data to ensure its safe landing. Despite this, Odysseus landed on its side. The only cargo on the side facing down is a piece of art sent by a commercial customer.

theverge.com · 2 min

TLDR

DECODING APPLE'S PLOY TO SCUTTLE PROGRESSIVE WEB APPS

Apple plans to stop supporting Progressive Web Apps on March 6. The EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA) mandates that Apple must allow competing browsers on its App Store. Apple's response to this is to geofence browser choice and kneecap web apps. This choice will break many apps across the EU, affecting schools, governments, startups, gamers, and more. None of this is required by the DMA, despite Apple blaming its decision on the law. By doing this, Apple is cementing a future where the mobile web will never be permitted to grow beyond marketing pages for native apps.

infrequently.org · 24 min