The Daily Index — Thursday, March 14, 2024 · TLDR Index

Across today’s newsletters

Today’s Index

TLDR

SPACEX HAS A LICENSE TO LAUNCH STARSHIP—THIS TIME IT MIGHT FLY AT DAWN

The US Federal Aviation Administration has approved a commercial launch license for SpaceX's Starship rocket's third test flight. The test is scheduled for this morning at 7 am CDT, with a launch window of 110 minutes. SpaceX will target the Indian Ocean for Starship's slashdown. Details about the changes planned for flight 3 are available in the article.

arstechnica.com · 6 min

TLDR AI

TOGETHER AI $106M ROUND OF FUNDING

Together AI, a compute provider and AI research group, has raised additional funding in a round led by Salesforce Ventures and other top VCs. The company is growing 3x month over month.

together.ai · 6 min

TLDR Web Dev

HOW DISCORD'S LIVE STREAMING WORKS

Discord's live streaming feature broadcasts users' screen activity to others in their group. To achieve this, Discord uses OS-specific APIs for screen and audio capture along with robust fallback mechanisms. The captured video data is then encoded using codecs like VP8 and H264 for efficient transmission, with Discord servers handling quality adjustments and routing for high-quality delivery to viewers.

blog.quastor.org · 6 min

TLDR Crypto

ETHEREUM FINALIZES 'DENCUN' UPGRADE, IN LANDMARK MOVE TO REDUCE DATA FEES

Ethereum has activated the Dencun upgrade, which is expected to catalyze growth on L2 networks like Arbitrum and Polygon by reducing fees. The hard fork accomplished this through "proto-danksharding", adding a new place for data storage on the blockchain at a lower cost. The upgrade is expected to make transaction settlements more efficient and cheaper for rollup networks, which will in turn bring down fees for end users.

coindesk.com · 6 min

TLDR Design

YOUTUBE’S REDESIGNED TV APP FOCUSES ON EVERYTHING BUT VIDEO

YouTube's TV app is set to receive a redesign to enhance user engagement by allowing easy access to comments and introducing new experiences like shopping, focusing on interaction during video playback. The update, which does not address all user requests, will also include features for sports fans to check live scores and improved video chapters. It will roll out over the coming weeks.

engadget.com · 1 min

TLDR

DID OPENAI JUST ACCIDENTALLY LEAK THE NEXT BIG CHATGPT UPGRADE?

OpenAI appears to have accidentally published a blog post that was indexed by Bing and DuckDuckGo before it was quickly taken down. The post was an announcement for GPT-4.5 Turbo, a new model that surpasses GPT-4 Turbo in speed, accuracy, and scalability. The cached description mentions a knowledge cutoff date of June 2024 and a 256k context window. OpenAI has not commented on the leak.

androidauthority.com · 2 min

TLDR

FIGURE 01 CAN NOW HAVE FULL CONVERSATIONS WITH PEOPLE

Figure has implemented OpenAI's technology to allow its robots to have full conversations with people. OpenAI's models provide high-level visual and language intelligence while Figure's neural networks deliver fast, low-level dexterous robot actions. This X post contains a video showing a person talking to a Figure robot and getting it to perform tasks, explain the reasoning behind the tasks, and self-assess on how the tasks went.

twitter.com · 1 min

TLDR

MINING HELIUM-3 ON THE MOON HAS BEEN TALKED ABOUT FOREVER—NOW A COMPANY WILL TRY

Interlune, a company that has been operating in stealth since its founding by two of Blue Origin's earliest employees in 2022, aims to extract helium-3 from the Moon. The company recently came out of stealth with an announcement that it has raised another $15 million. While the funding is relatively small, its implications are potentially large. Most lunar efforts are focused on providing services to NASA, but Interlune's goal directly derives value from extracting resources on the Moon.

arstechnica.com · 5 min

TLDR

A COLLECTION OF DESIGN ENGINEERS

The design engineer is someone who sits at the intersection of design and engineering and works to bridge the gap between them. They know how to run a design process and have the engineering chops to implement it. This allows them to quickly iterate on ideas - their skillset is ideal for prototyping, exploratory interaction design, and building robust design systems. This blog post contains a list of people who are considered design engineers to more fully illustrate what the role entails.

maggieappleton.com · 6 min