The Daily Index — Monday, April 15, 2024 · TLDR Index

Across today’s newsletters

Today’s Index

TLDR

GAME EMULATORS ARRIVE IN APP STORE FOLLOWING RULE CHANGES

A recent change to Apple's App Store Review Guidelines means that a rule that effectively banned the submission of console and classic game emulators for iOS and iPadOS has been reversed. The first wave of game emulators have now made their way to the App Store. Emu64 XL is a Commodore 64 emulator and iGBA is a Gameboy Advance and Gameboy Color emulator. Both are free to download without any in-app purchases. Under Apple's rule changes, emulators still have to filter objectionable content, follow all privacy guidelines, and not share data or privacy permissions with other software, but it is unclear how some of the rules will be enforced.

appleinsider.com · 2 min

TLDR AI

GROK-1.5 VISION PREVIEW

xAI has announced that its latest flagship model has vision capabilities on par with (and in some cases exceeding) state-of-the-art models.

x.ai · 6 min

TLDR Web Dev

HOW ONE LINE OF CODE CAUSED A $60 MILLION LOSS

In 1990, half of AT&T's phone network went down as a result of one line of C code that contained a buggy implementation of call handling. The outage affected over a hundred thousand Americans and the company lost $60 million. This article goes over the buggy piece of code that was deployed by AT&T and how engineers fixed it.

read.engineerscodex.com · 4 min

TLDR InfoSec

ROKU SAYS 576,000 USER ACCOUNTS HACKED AFTER SECOND SECURITY INCIDENT

Roku acknowledged a security breach where hackers gained access to around 576,000 user accounts. This is the second such incident for the streaming device maker, raising concerns about the company's data security measures and the potential exposure of users' personal information.

techcrunch.com · 3 min

TLDR Crypto

$256M LIQUIDATED IN LONG POSITIONS

$256 million worth of long positions were liquidated in Bitcoin's recent price drop. Analysts expect this to be a short-term downturn before the market improves. Despite the dip, demand from Bitcoin whales is growing, with demand from holders outstripping the market supply of new Bitcoin for the first time.

cointelegraph.com · 2 min

TLDR

TESLA SLASHES FULL SELF-DRIVING MONTHLY SUBSCRIPTION TO $99

Tesla's Full Self-Driving (FSD) is now $99 a month. The company is currently deploying FSD v12, a new version fully powered by AI that is supposed to be a significant advancement compared to previous versions. Tesla dealers were recently mandated to provide FSD demo drives for all new deliveries. Existing owners in North America are able to receive a one-month free trial of the system.

electrek.co · 2 min

TLDR

STARTUP LOOKING TO LAUNCH STADIUM-SIZED SPACE HABITATS ON SPACEX

Max Space wants to launch expandable stadium-sized habitats into Earth's orbit by the end of the decade. It has designed habitats that minimize the mass and volume of the payload required to be launched into space, providing people with room to live both in space and on other planets or moons. The company plans to launch the scalable habitats on SpaceX's rockets in 2027 and 2030. It will launch its first off-Earth test in two years.

futurism.com · 3 min

TLDR

HOW NEW TECH IS MAKING GEOTHERMAL ENERGY A MORE VERSATILE POWER SOURCE

Project Red is a facility that uses geothermal energy to power a local power grid in Nevada. The facility pumps water thousands of feet into the ground, where it is heated by the Earth's super-hot core, and then sucks the heated water back up to power generators. It leverages techniques from the oil and gas industry to improve reliability and cost-efficiency and make geothermal power possible in many more locations. This article looks at how the facility works and the field of geothermal energy in general, including other projects and attempts at building the technology.

arstechnica.com · 8 min

TLDR

LESSONS AFTER A HALF-BILLION GPT TOKENS

This article contains seven lessons learned by Truss, a startup that released a few LLM-heavy features over the last six months, that cover how to improve prompting, tooling and optimal usage, GPT's limitations, and more. The startup exclusively deals with text using a combination of GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. While GPT is useful, the technology is still in its early days and probably won't result in everyone losing their jobs. It mostly lowers the barrier of entry to ML/AI that was previously only available to Google.

kenkantzer.com · 11 min