The Daily Index — Wednesday, April 10, 2024 · TLDR Index

Across today’s newsletters

Today’s Index

TLDR

WITH VIDS, GOOGLE THINKS IT HAS THE NEXT BIG PRODUCTIVITY TOOL FOR WORK

Google's new Vids app can create collaborative shareable videos for things people do at work. The app makes making videos as easy as making slides - no video production is required. Users line up assets inside the app and edit it all into a finished video. They can choose to do all of this themselves or ask Google's Gemini AI to build storyboards, write scripts, read the scripts aloud using text-to-speech, and create images to use in the video. People with access to the video can add comments, leave notes, and make edits. Vids will launch in public beta this summer.

theverge.com · 4 min

TLDR AI

GOOGLE GEMMA EXPANDED MODELS

Google has trained a code Gemma and Recurrent Gemma models. They get competitive performance and include FIM capabilities. The recurrent model is much faster and more memory efficient.

developers.googleblog.com · 7 min

TLDR Web Dev

REDDIT'S ARCHITECTURE: THE EVOLUTIONARY JOURNEY

Reddit started as a monolithic Python application and has evolved its architecture into smaller microservices in Golang. It replaced database snapshots with real-time data replication using Kafka. Reddit has a dedicated metadata store built with AWS Aurora Postgres and it uses Flink Stateful Functions for modern rule-based content moderation.

blog.bytebytego.com · 18 min

TLDR InfoSec

CRITICAL TAKEOVER VULNERABILITIES IN 92,000 D-LINK DEVICES UNDER ACTIVE EXPLOITATION

Hackers are exploiting vulnerabilities in 92,000 D-Link devices to take control remotely. The vulnerabilities exist in end-of-life devices no longer supported by the manufacturer. Users should update firmware or replace outdated hardware to protect against these attacks.

arstechnica.com · 3 min

TLDR Crypto

ETHEREUM ETF HOPES FADE AS SEC'S CRYPTO CRACKDOWN DASHES APPROVAL EXPECTATIONS

Optimism about the Ethereum ETFs being approved in May has decreased as experts continue to share their opinions. VanEck CEO Jan van Eck stated that he believes the company's ETF application will be rejected in May and CoinShares CEO Jean-Marie Mognetti said he does not think any Proof-of-Stake coins will be approved this year.

decrypt.co · 3 min

TLDR

INTEL’S GAUDI 3 GOES AFTER NVIDIA

Intel gave the first architectural details of its Gaudi 3 third-generation AI processor at Vision 2024 this week in Phoenix, Arizona. Gaudi 3 is made up of two identical silicon dies, each with a central region of 48 megabytes of cache memory, joined by a high-bandwidth connection, surrounded by four engines for matrix multiplication and 32 programmable units called tensor processor cores. It produces double the AI compute of Gaudi 2 using 8-bit floating-point infrastructure. It also provides a fourfold boost for computations using the BFloat 16 number format.

spectrum.ieee.org · 3 min

TLDR

META CONFIRMS THAT ITS LLAMA 3 OPEN SOURCE LLM IS COMING IN THE NEXT MONTH

Meta plans to release an initial version of its next-generation Llama 3 large language model within the next month. The company will release a number of different models with different capabilities and versatilities during the course of the year. Llama 3 will be able to answer a wider range of questions compared to its predecessor, including questions regarding more controversial topics. Meta has not released any details about the model's size, but it is expected to have about 140 billion parameters - the biggest Llama 2 model has 70 billion.

techcrunch.com · 3 min

TLDR

GABE NEWELL'S NEURAL INTERFACE COMPANY UPDATED ITS WEBSITE

Starfish, a neural interface company co-founded by Gabe Newell, recently updated its website, indicating that its team is working hard on its brain-computer solutions. The company is developing minimally invasive one-dimensional implants for neuromodulation and neural recording. Newell's interest in the field goes back to at least 2021, when he brought up the idea of using brain-computer interfaces for gaming. Valve has previously worked to create open source software to allow developers to understand signals coming from people's brains.

80.lv · 2 min

TLDR

GOOGLE LAUNCHES CODE ASSIST, ITS LATEST CHALLENGER TO GITHUB’S COPILOT

Google's Gemini Code Assist is an enterprise-focused AI code completion and assistance tool. It was previously offered under the now-defunct Duet AI branding which became generally available in late 2023. Code Assist is both a rebrand and a major update. It uses Gemini 1.5 Pro, which has a million-token context window. Code Assist will be available through plug-ins for popular editors like VS Code.

techcrunch.com · 5 min