The Daily Index — Friday, March 22, 2024 · TLDR Index

Across today’s newsletters

Today’s Index

TLDR

U.S. SUES APPLE, ACCUSING IT OF MAINTAINING AN IPHONE MONOPOLY

Apple is being sued by the US for employing a strategy that relies on exclusionary anticompetitive conduct that hurts both consumers and developers. The 88-page lawsuit says that the company violated antitrust laws with practices that were intended to keep customers reliant on their iPhones and make them less likely to switch to competing devices. It seeks to put an end to those practices and possibly a breakup of the company. The lawsuit is likely to drag out for years before any type of resolution.

nytimes.com · 12 min

TLDR AI

JAPAN’S PREMIER AI LAB LAUNCHES ITS FIRST MODEL

Sakana AI creates state-of-the-art Japanese language, vision, and image generation models. It introduced an evolutionary model merge that aims to evolve foundation models without expensive pretraining. The model merge has been released along with an explanation of the method.

sakana.ai · 12 min

TLDR Web Dev

THE TRAGIC RACE CONDITION

The Therac-25, a radiation therapy machine, suffered from a software flaw that led to fatal radiation overdoses for multiple patients. The machine's software contained a race condition – safety settings would be ignored if operators entered commands too quickly in a specific sequence, leading to massive radiation doses. Between 1985 and 1987, at least six patients received lethal levels of radiation, causing severe injuries, disability, and death. The disasters stemmed from multiple failures, such as poor software development practices, inadequate testing, overconfidence in the system's safety, and a lack of regulatory oversight.

codereliant.io · 4 min

TLDR InfoSec

UNPATCHABLE VULNERABILITY IN APPLE CHIP LEAKS SECRET ENCRYPTION KEYS

Researchers have discovered a side-channel vulnerability in the Apple M-series chips. This vulnerability allows attackers to extract secret encryption keys during common cryptographic operations. The flaw is inherent to the chip design and cannot be patched with software updates.

arstechnica.com · 5 min

TLDR Crypto

FTX ESTATE FACES ESTIMATED $3 TO $5 BILLION IN US GOVERNMENT CLAIMS AMID BANKRUPTCY PROCEEDINGS, COURT FILING SHOWS

Bankrupt crypto exchange FTX is reportedly facing claims totaling $3-5 billion from the U.S. government in addition to its customer claims. Payouts to customers, lenders for Alameda Research, administrative expenses, and non-government creditors will be prioritized before governmental or tax claims. The final amount owed for US tax claims will be uncertain until all other claims are settled.

theblock.co · 3 min

TLDR

HERE’S HOW MICROSOFT IS PROVIDING A ‘GOOD OUTCOME’ FOR INFLECTION AI VCS, AS REID HOFFMAN PROMISED

Unnamed sources say that Microsoft is paying approximately $650 million in its deal with Inflection AI. $620 million was paid for non-exclusive licensing fees for Inflection's technology and $30 million was paid to get Inflection to agree not to sue over Microsoft's poaching. Inflection will pivot away from building a personalized AI chatbot to becoming an AI studio that helps other companies work with large language model AI. Microsoft has several reasons for needing a backup for OpenAI - for one, its deal with OpenAI is being scrutinized by the FTC.

techcrunch.com · 4 min

TLDR

PIG KIDNEY TRANSPLANTED INTO LIVING PERSON FOR FIRST TIME

Doctors have performed a pig-to-human kidney transplant for the first time at Massachusetts General Hospital, the first hospital to perform a kidney transplant. The genetically modified kidney was implanted into a 62-year-old patient who had been diagnosed with end-stage kidney disease. They are recovering well and are expected to be discharged from the hospital soon. It is unknown how long the kidney will last for. This was the third transplant of a pig organ into a living human. The first two patients, who received heart transplants, died weeks after receiving their organs.

cnn.com · 6 min

TLDR

THE BAFFLING INTELLIGENCE OF A SINGLE CELL/

E. coli cells forage for nutrients using a process called chemotaxis. While the bacteria don't have brains, they possess something similar to a sense of smell, drive, and even memory. Chemotaxis involves 'smelling' chemicals and then deciding where to swim. The system is able to adapt to different environments with varying levels of attractant concentration. This article introduces the clever system that powers chemotaxis and explains how the complex signaling network works.

jsomers.net · 51 min

TLDR

THE REDDITS

Reddit was one of the reasons Y Combinator was started. This post tells the story of how the site came to be. Despite being rejected in the first round for their food delivery app idea, Reddit's founders were offered funding after agreeing to work on a project that would eventually become Reddit. The project was launched on a quick schedule. It had a core set of real users after just a few weeks. Reddit is now a fundamentally useful tool that seems almost unkillable.

ycombinator.com · 6 min