The Daily Index — Friday, March 15, 2024 · TLDR Index

Across today’s newsletters

Today’s Index

TLDR

SPACEX CELEBRATES MAJOR PROGRESS ON THE THIRD FLIGHT OF STARSHIP

SpaceX's Starship rocket flew halfway around the world yesterday, accomplishing a key demonstration of its ability to carry heavy payloads into low-Earth orbit. The successful launch builds on two previous flights last year. Thursday's flight tested Starship's payload bay door and performed a precursor test of an in-orbit refueling system. Photos from the launch are available in the article.

arstechnica.com · 7 min

TLDR AI

OPENAI PARTNERS WITH LE MONDE AND PRISA MEDIA

OpenAI has announced partnerships with Le Monde and Prisa Media involving the integration of their content into ChatGPT to provide users with interactive and insightful access to news and to aid in model training.

openai.com · 2 min

TLDR Web Dev

HOW FIGMA'S DATABASES TEAM LIVED TO TELL THE SCALE

Figma's database team had to deal with hypergrowth that was starting to outpace their database's capacity. To address this, they first focused on vertical partitioning, which bought them time but was not a long-term solution. They then embarked on a complex nine-month project to implement horizontal sharding, tailoring their approach to Figma's specific needs. To manage their horizontally sharded databases, they built a service in Golang to support load-shedding, transaction support, database topology management, and more.

figma.com · 20 min

TLDR InfoSec

NISSAN TO LET 100,000 AUSSIES AND KIWIS KNOW THEIR DATA WAS STOLEN IN CYBERATTACK

Nissan will be informing around 100,000 people in Australia and New Zealand that their data was breached over the next few weeks. Up to ten percent of victims had government identification stolen while the rest had other PII stolen. Nissan will be offering 12 months of free credit monitoring for affected individuals.

theregister.com · 2 min

TLDR Crypto

ARBITRUM EYES $400 MILLION CRYPTO GAMING FUND WITH PROPOSAL TO DAO

The Arbitrum Foundation plans to set aside approximately $400 million over two years to promote gaming projects through its new "Gaming Catalyst Program". The project, which is awaiting approval from the Arbitrum DAO, will primarily use the funds to encourage builders and publishers to create video games using its blockchain. The foundation believes this strategy will attract quality game creators and retain new users within Arbitrum.

theblock.co · 2 min

TLDR

WHO COULD BUY TIKTOK? THESE ARE THE PEOPLE WHO COULD ACQUIRE THE APP

ByteDance may have to sell TikTok in the US if a proposed bill passes the Senate. Some high-profile investors, including former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, online video platform Rumble, and former Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick, have expressed interest in acquiring the app. This article presents a list of known potential buyers along with a primer on companies that have previously tried to purchase TikTok.

nbcnews.com · 7 min

TLDR

EVO: DNA FOUNDATION MODELING FROM MOLECULAR TO GENOME SCALE

Evo is a long-context biological foundation model capable of both prediction tasks and generative design, from molecular to whole genome scale. The model generalizes across the fundamental languages of biology, DNA, RNA, and proteins to generate DNA sequences using a context length of 131k tokens. It is based on StripedHyena, a deep signal processing architecture designed to improve efficiency and quality over prevailing Transformer architecture. A playground is available where users can generate DNA in their browsers using Evo.

arc-website-git-foundation-model-tool-arc-institute.vercel.app · 9 min

TLDR

GENETICALLY MODIFIED COW MAKES MILK WITH HUMAN INSULIN

Researchers have engineered a cow capable of producing milk that contains human insulin. This could result in an alternative for insulin production. The process involves inserting human DNA coding for insulin into cow embryos. It could dramatically simplify the process and cost of producing the drug. A single cow can produce enough milk every day to supply thousands of type 1 diabetes patients with their daily insulin for an entire month. Scaling up production, ensuring the health and welfare of the transgenic cows, and navigating regulatory approvals are still huge challenges that lie ahead before the process can replace conventional methods of insulin production.

zmescience.com · 5 min

TLDR

HTTP/2 AND HTTP/3 EXPLAINED

The first HTTP draft had only one method, GET - there were no headers or status codes, and the only data format available was HTML. The protocol has evolved significantly since then. HTTP/3 is designed for unstable connections, resulting in performance tradeoffs. HTTP/2 offers better performance on reliable and stable connections than HTTP/3. Servers can accept both HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 connections so clients can make the decision of which version to use.

alexandrehtrb.github.io · 25 min