The Daily Index — Tuesday, March 5, 2024 · TLDR Index

Across today’s newsletters

Today’s Index

TLDR

APPLE LAUNCHES NEW 13-INCH AND 15-INCH MACBOOK AIR WITH M3 CHIP, SUPPORT FOR TWO EXTERNAL DISPLAYS, FASTER WI-FI

Apple has announced next-generation M3 MacBook Airs in 13-inch and 15-inch sizes. Besides the M3 chips, the new laptops feature an upgraded Neural Engine, up to 2x faster Wi-Fi, and the ability to connect to two displays at once - when the laptop lid is closed. The overall design of the M3 MacBook Air is the same as the M2 model. The new MacBook Airs can be ordered from the Apple online store starting at $1099 for the 13-inch and $1299 for the 15-inch model. Shipping will start on March 8.

9to5mac.com · 2 min

TLDR AI

ANTHROPIC CLAUDE 3

Anthropic has trained three new models in the Claude 3 family, the strongest of which matches GPT4’s reported benchmark results. It is also a multimodal model and performs well on vision tasks. Importantly, Claude's coding ability is substantially improved with this release.

anthropic.com · 6 min

TLDR Web Dev

JSDOC AS AN ALTERNATIVE TYPESCRIPT SYNTAX

TypeScript has become the default language of choice as web development has embraced static typing during the past decade. However, there are times when you don’t want to use TypeScript, whether due to tooling constraints, longer setup and compile time, or a team member who does not like static typing. JSDoc is a good alternative as it can be understood by the TypeScript compiler and lets you take advantage of some of the benefits of static typing without needing a single .ts file. This post serves as a crash course in using JSDoc as an alternative syntax for TypeScript and covers the important TypeScript-related features.

alexharri.com · 10 min

TLDR Crypto

BITCOIN TOPS $68K, NEARING SILVER'S $1.38T MARKET CAP

Bitcoin is approaching its all-time high, eclipsing $68,000. With this surge in price, Bitcoin is closing in on silver's $1.4 trillion market cap. Meanwhile, Ethereum also hit a significant milestone, surpassing $3,700 for the first time since January 2022. This comes on the back of record inflows into BlackRock and other funds’ spot Bitcoin ETFs.

coindesk.com · 3 min

TLDR Product

AI CHAT IS NOT (ALWAYS) THE ANSWER

While AI developments open up new opportunities, they also introduce challenges. Rushing to add AI chat into your product will not necessarily solve real user needs. Instead, there are alternative use cases of AI that might add more value to a product.

nngroup.com · 5 min

TLDR

THE AI WARS HEAT UP WITH CLAUDE 3, CLAIMED TO HAVE “NEAR-HUMAN” ABILITIES

Anthropic's Claude 3 apparently sets new industry benchmarks across a range of cognitive tasks. The company claims that it approaches 'near-human' capability in some cases. Claude 3 has three models: Claude 3 Haiku, Claude 3 Sonnet (which powers the Claude.ai chatbot), and Claude 3 Opus (available through a subscription service). All three models feature a 200,000-token context window and are available through an API. Claude 3 beats GPT-4 on a range of widely used benchmarks.

arstechnica.com · 4 min

TLDR

BLUE ORIGIN IS GETTING SERIOUS ABOUT DEVELOPING A HUMAN SPACECRAFT

Blue Origin's new chief executive Dave Limp is working to instill a more productive culture at the firm. The company plans to launch its own heavy-lift rocket later this year, possibly as soon as August. It has been developing hardware to fly on the heavy-lift rocket, including a transfer vehicle for ferrying satellites into precise orbits, and working on a private space station called Orbital Reef. Blue Origin is now hiring staff to develop a commercial space transportation system for humans.

arstechnica.com · 3 min

TLDR

AWS ACQUIRING DATA CENTER CAMPUS POWERED BY NUCLEAR ENERGY

Amazon Web Services purchased a data center campus powered by a nearby nuclear power station in Pennsylvania for $650 million. The nuclear power plant has been in operation since 1983. It will supply AWS with electricity for 10 years as part of the purchase agreement. The data center campus comprises 1,200 acres. AWS also plans to invest $5.3 billion in Saudi Arabia over the next few years to create an AWS Infrastructure Region.

powermag.com · 3 min

TLDR

THE HUNT FOR THE MISSING DATA TYPE

While developers see graphs everywhere and use them to analyze all sorts of systems, there is almost no graph support in any mainstream language. This is because there are too many different kinds of graphs, representations of each kind of graph, and graph algorithms. Also, graph algorithm performance is very sensitive to graph representation and implementation details. Languages don't support graphs in their standard libraries because there are too many design decisions and tradeoffs and too much maintenance burden. This also explains why programmers avoid third-party graph libraries - they're either too limited to too slow.

hillelwayne.com · 16 min