The Daily Index — Friday, March 1, 2024 · TLDR Index

Across today’s newsletters

Today’s Index

TLDR

OPENAI WANTS TO MAKE A WALKING, TALKING HUMANOID ROBOT SMARTER

Humanoid robots could be working alongside human manufacturing workers in only a few short years. Figure, a prominent company in the humanoid robot space, recently raised $675 million and struck a new agreement with OpenAI to develop next-generation AI models for its robots. The funding, which was reportedly over $150 million more than the amount Figure had initially sought, will help scale up the company's AI training, robotic manufacturing, and add on new engineers, speeding up the company's timeline for making its product available commercially. OpenAI's technology will help improve Figure's robots' semantic understanding, making them more useful in work scenarios.

popsci.com · 9 min

TLDR AI

FIGURE RAISES $675M FOR ROBOTICS

Figure, a robotics company, has raised $675M from several large investors, including OpenAI, to continue building humanoid robotics.

twitter.com · 1 min

TLDR Web Dev

HAPPY LEAP DAY!

Software systems that don't properly account for Leap Days have a tendency to glitch or fail on February 29th. This year is no exception, with reports of failures in supermarket payment systems, airline ticketing, gas station payment terminals, smartwatches, and even a major video game. To prevent this from happening, software engineers should use framework-level date libraries wherever possible, be wary of edge cases, and not assume fixed durations for months and years.

blog.pragmaticengineer.com · 6 min

TLDR InfoSec

RANSOMWARE GANG CLAIMS IT STOLE 6TB OF CHANGE HEALTHCARE DATA

The BlackCat/ALPHV ransomware gang has claimed responsibility for a cyberattack on Optum, a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group. The attack caused an ongoing outage affecting the Change Healthcare platform, a large payment exchange platform used by more than 70,000 pharmacies across the United States. The gang claims to have stolen 6TB of data from Change Healthcare's network, including sensitive personal information.

bleepingcomputer.com · 2 min

TLDR Crypto

TRADING PLATFORM ROBINHOOD, LAYER-2 ARBITRUM TEAM UP TO OFFER SWAPS TO USERS

Robinhood has revealed plans to enable swaps on Arbitrum, a layer-2 blockchain on Ethereum, for its wallet users in the upcoming months. The collaboration aims to support access to cross-chain swaps and make it easier for non-crypto native users to onboard to on-chain activities from the Robinhood Wallet. The announcement resulted in an over 11% surge in ARB's token price.

coindesk.com · 2 min

TLDR

ASTRO MECHANICA HAS INVENTED A NEW KIND OF JET ENGINE

Astro Mechanica's new jet engine is efficient at every speed. It uses electric motors to drive a compressor, allowing it to spin at any speed. The jet engine could be used in the first stage of an orbital vehicle to get payloads to orbit dramatically cheaper than other all-rocket systems. A video of a demonstration from last year is available in the thread - Astro Mechanica is already working on a new engine with 10x the thrust.

twitter.com · 3 min

TLDR

HIGH-SPEED HUMANOID FEELS LIKE A STEP CHANGE IN ROBOTICS

Sanctuary AI's Phoenix humanoid robot has robot hands that work totally autonomously at near-human speeds. The robot's hands are hydraulically actuated - while hydraulics technology is expensive to develop, it enables the robotic hands to gain a combination of precision, speed, and strength. Sanctuary AI trained Phoenix by using teleoperation to show it how to do things and then letting it figure out more in simulations. A video showing Phoenix manipulating objects is available in the article.

newatlas.com · 6 min

TLDR

IN PRAISE OF NUSHELL

Nushell is a non-POSIX shell for working with structured data. It features redefined common shell commands that output structured data. Nushell's commands and pipes allow users to transform data from within the shell. It is able to replace many database query tools.

lars.yencken.org · 6 min

TLDR

ASK HN: DID YOU ENCOUNTER ANY LEAP YEAR BUGS TODAY? (HACKER NEWS THREAD)

An extra day in the year can have interesting consequences. This Hacker News thread discusses bugs that users observed on February 29. Bugs were seen in card payment systems, parcel delivery websites, and daily post bots. China's app for scheduling marriage certificates apparently has a leap-year bug that prevents people born on February 29 from making appointments as it marks them as too young to marry legally.

news.ycombinator.com