The Daily Index — Wednesday, April 17, 2024 · TLDR Index

Across today’s newsletters

Today’s Index

TLDR

YOUTUBE PUTS THIRD-PARTY CLIENTS ON NOTICE: SHOW ADS OR GET BLOCKED

YouTube is strengthening its enforcement on third-party apps that violate its Terms of Service, specifically ad-blocking apps. It recently made a post on the official YouTube Community Help Forum putting third-party ad-blocking apps on notice. People using these apps may start experiencing buffering issues or errors when trying to watch videos.

arstechnica.com · 2 min

TLDR AI

GOOGLE'S NEW TECHNIQUE GIVES LLMS INFINITE CONTEXT

Google researchers have introduced Infini-attention, a technique that enables LLMs to work with text of infinite length while keeping memory and compute requirements constant.

venturebeat.com · 5 min

TLDR Web Dev

TEN YEARS OF IMPROVEMENTS IN POSTGRESQL'S OPTIMIZER

PostgreSQL's query optimizer has improved massively over the past decade. Using the Join Order Benchmark (JOB), this author shows that tail latency has been nearly halved between PostgreSQL versions 8 and 16, with each major version offering an average 15% performance increase. One of the best decisions teams can make to make their database query speeds faster is to simply keep their Postgres instances up to date.

rmarcus.info · 3 min

TLDR InfoSec

PUTTY SSH CLIENT FLAW ALLOWS RECOVERY OF CRYPTOGRAPHIC PRIVATE KEYS

A vulnerability in PuTTY 0.68-0.80 could allow attackers with access to 60 cryptographic signatures from a user to compute the private keys offline. These signatures could come from an attacker-controlled SSH server or signed git commits. The vulnerability arises from the way that PuTTY generates ECDSA nonces, which lacks robust cryptographic random number generators on specific Windows versions.

bleepingcomputer.com · 3 min

TLDR Crypto

BITCOIN PRICE SLIPS BELOW 62K

Bitcoin's price has dropped below $62,000. Analysts attribute the decrease to geopolitical tensions, a strengthening dollar, and volatility ahead of the upcoming halving. The wider crypto market has similarly fallen, with large cap cryptocurrencies experiencing double-digit losses and liquidations occurring across the market.

decrypt.co · 2 min

TLDR

BAIDU SAYS ERNIE AI CHATBOT NOW HAS 200 MILLION USERS

Baidu's ChatGPT-style chatbot Ernie Bot has doubled its number of users since December. The chatbot now has over 200 million users and more than 85,000 enterprise clients. Its API is being used 200 million times each day. Ernie Bot was launched in March 2023 and released publicly last August. It is competing with other Chinese generative AI models including Alibaba Group's Tongyi Qianwen, Tencent's Hunyuan, and Alibaba-backed Moonshot AI's Kimi.

wsj.com · 2 min

TLDR

ALOHA UNLEASHED 🌋

ALOHA Unleashed by Google DeepMind is a new generation of AI-powered robots with impressive dexterity. DeepMind recently released a series of videos showing the robots hanging shirts, inserting precise gears, and even tying shoelaces. The robots can generalize to untrained objects. The videos are available in the link.

twitter.com · 3 min

TLDR

NEW CHARGING ALGORITHM COULD DOUBLE LIFE OF LI-ION BATTERIES

A team of researchers from Berlin has developed a charging solution that makes lithium-ion batteries last much longer than they do now. It uses a pulsed current (PC) protocol that results in reduced mechanical stress and cracking in graphite particles within batteries and suppressed structural degradation in cathodes. Using PC charging can double the service life of commercial lithium-ion batteries with an 80% capacity retention. High-frequency pulsing with square-wave current produced the best results.

techspot.com · 3 min

TLDR

EFFECT 3.0

Effect 3.0 is the first stable release of the core Effect Ecosystem. Effect is a TypeScript library that works in every runtime and project. It aims to solve some issues in TypeScript in areas such as dependency injection, error management, data modeling, and logging. Effect was designed from day one with production-grade software in mind.

effect.website · 9 min