The Daily Index — Friday, March 8, 2024 · TLDR Index

Across today’s newsletters

Today’s Index

TLDR

KEY OPENAI EXECUTIVE PLAYED A PIVOTAL ROLE IN SAM ALTMAN’S OUSTER

OpenAI's chief technology officer Mira Murati questioned Sam Altman's management in front of the board last year before Altman was briefly ousted from the company. This move helped to propel the board's decision to force Altman out. Ilya Sutskever, a co-founder and chief scientist of OpenAI, expressed similar concerns. Both executives said that Altman sometimes created a toxic work environment by freezing out executives who did not support his decisions. WilmerHale, the law firm investigating the incident, is expected to release a report in the coming days that could shed more light on the board's decision.

nytimes.com · 9 min

TLDR AI

INFLECTION 2.5

Inflection has launched a new model to power its personal assistant, Pi. The model performs within 94% of GPT-4 with impressive reasoning scores on benchmarks. Inflection claims it only took 40% of the compute to train relative to GPT-4. An interesting insight from this post is that the average conversation with Pi lasts 33 minutes.

inflection.ai · 8 min

TLDR Web Dev

"REACT-STRICT-DOM", WHY IT'S SO GREAT?

Meta’s react-strict-dom (open sourced last week) is an experimental integration of React DOM and StyleX that standardizes the development of styled React components, both web and native. This article goes into the historical background of building a universal codebase that shares components between Web and Native and how react-strict-dom changes the way we can do it. You might need to refresh the page to get it to load!

szymonrybczak.dev · 4 min

TLDR InfoSec

VMWARE SANDBOX ESCAPE BUGS ARE SO CRITICAL, PATCHES HAVE BEEN RELEASED FOR END-OF-LIFE PRODUCTS

VMware is urging customers to patch critical vulnerabilities that allow hackers to escape VMware's sandbox and hypervisor protections across all versions of ESXi, Workstation, Fusion, and Cloud Foundation products. The four flaws, with two rated at a 9.3/10 severity, undermine the products' core purpose of running sensitive operations inside a virtual machine segmented from the host machine.

arstechnica.com · 4 min

TLDR Crypto

SOLANA UP 13% AS POSSIBILITY OF PANTERA BUYING SOME OF FTX'S SOL LOOMS

Pantera is raising funds to purchase $250 million worth of SOL from FTX, aiming to buy at a 39% discount from the 30-day average price. This comes following FTX's bankruptcy proceedings, which allow it to sell up to $100 million per week in crypto assets. Pantera would need to hold the tokens for up to four years after purchase as per the deal's condition.

decrypt.co · 3 min

TLDR

APPLE PLANNING 20-INCH MACBOOK WITH FOLDABLE SCREEN

Apple is planning to release a 20.3-inch MacBook with a foldable screen in 2027, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. It will have a screen measuring about 20 inches diagonally when fully expanded. The laptop is Apple's only foldable product with a clear development schedule. A foldable iPhone or iPad is not likely to come any time soon.

macrumors.com · 1 min

TLDR

NEW WEIGHT LOSS PILL MORE EFFECTIVE THAN OZEMPIC, TESTS FIND

Novo Nordisk's new obesity treatment drug, amycretin, helped patients lose 13% of their body weight in just 12 weeks. The drug may be more effective than semaglutide. Amycretin targets GLP-1 and another hormone called amylin, both of which are believed to be linked to hunger and satiety. The drug still needs to go through much larger trials that will likely drag on for years before it will be publicly available. The results of the initial trials sent Novo Nordisk's stock rising as much as 8.3%.

futurism.com · 2 min

TLDR

ENGINEER PLANS SOLAR PANEL IMPLANT FOR HUMAN RETINA TO RETAIN EYESIGHT

Engineers from the University of New South Wales in Australia are working on a prototype solar panel implant for the retinas to restore sight. The implant converts light into electrical signals that can be directed to the optic nerve, enabling vision. Users may need to wear special glasses or goggles that amplify sunlight for the device to work. The device is still in a proof-of-concept stage - a lot more work still needs to be done before it is ready for human implantation.

interestingengineering.com · 4 min

TLDR

WHY FACEBOOK DOESN’T USE GIT

Mercurial is a tool for creating and managing code changes used at Facebook. Facebook started out on Git, but it began hitting scaling limits in around 2012. Mercurial's developers were receptive to the idea of Facebook engineers contributing patches to scale it better while Git's developers were not. There were other alternatives, but all were quickly disqualified. Facebook adopted Mercurial not because it had better technology, but because the maintainers and codebase felt more open.

graphite.dev · 12 min