The Daily Index — Wednesday, May 1, 2024 · TLDR Index

Across today’s newsletters

Today’s Index

TLDR

APPLE TO UNVEIL AI-ENABLED SAFARI BROWSER ALONGSIDE NEW OPERATING SYSTEMS

Apple is testing a version of its Safari web browser that includes an AI-powered tool called Intelligent Search. Intelligent Search leverages Apple's on-device AI technology to identify topics and key phrases within a web page to create summaries. The exact implementation of the feature is still unknown. The new Safari will also have a feature called Web Eraser that will allow users to remove specific portions of web pages. Apple is working on a powerful visual search feature that will allow users to obtain information on consumer products when browsing through images, scheduled for integration sometime in 2025.

appleinsider.com · 7 min

TLDR AI

META RELEASES EXECUTORCH FRAMEWORK FOR LLM ON EDGE DEVICES

Meta's ExecuTorch Framework is a post-training quantization toolkit that enables running Llama models on various iPhone and Galaxy devices. It is able to get as much as 11 tokens per second on mobile phones running 7B sized language models.

pytorch.org · 4 min

TLDR Web Dev

THE THREE BYTE FIX

Our World in Data, a charity org that shows charts about the world, received a complaint about slow map charts. After some profiling, a developer found that the k-means clustering algorithm the site was using was the reason. The issue was due to a 3-character typo in the JavaScript port of the algorithm. Fixing the typo resulted in a 20x speed improvement.

breckyunits.com · 4 min

TLDR InfoSec

GOOGLE DEFENDED THE PLAY STORE FROM 2.28 MILLION MALICIOUS APPS LAST YEAR

Google's enhanced security measures helped block 2.28 million privacy-violating apps from its Play Store in 2023. The company banned 333,000 bad accounts, rejected nearly 200,000 apps using sensitive permissions, and worked with SDK providers to reduce data access and sharing, impacting over 790,000 apps and improving user privacy.

androidpolice.com · 4 min

TLDR Design

BUMBLE'S APP REDESIGN LETS WOMEN AUTOMATE CONVERSATION STARTERS

Bumble's updated app introduces the "Opening Move" feature, designed to help women initiate conversations quickly with prewritten prompts or custom messages that the app sends to all matches. The refresh includes "dating intention" badges and profile enhancements, which aim to foster better match insights.

theverge.com · 1 min

TLDR

TESLA TO LAY OFF EVERYONE WORKING ON SUPERCHARGERS, NEW VEHICLES

Tesla is laying off its director of EV charging Rebecca Tinucci, the head of new vehicle development Daniel Ho, as well as the teams that operated under the two executives. These layoffs are part of a larger effort by CEO Elon Musk to reduce costs and headcount within the company. Tesla plans to continue building out some new Supercharger locations and finish those currently under construction. Musk is also dissolving the company's public policy team in this latest cull.

arstechnica.com · 3 min

TLDR

ENZYMES OPEN NEW PATH TO UNIVERSAL DONOR BLOOD

Researchers have discovered enzymes that are able to remove specific sugars that make up the A and B antigens in the human ABO blood groups when mixed with medicine blood cells. The researchers are close to being able to produce universal blood from group B donors, but there is still more work to be done to convert the more complex group A blood type. There is now a higher need for donor blood due to a larger proportion of the population being elderly and more patients undergoing blood-intensive medical procedures. Successfully converting A or B blood types into universal donor blood would markedly reduce the logistics and costs currently associated with storing four different blood types and increase the supply of donor blood by reducing waste.

dtu.dk · 5 min

TLDR

PORTAL SPACE SYSTEMS UNVEILS SUPERNOVA, AN ULTRA-MOBILE SPACECRAFT

Portal Space Systems' ultra-mobile Supernova satellite bus could propel transfers from low Earth orbit to geostationary orbit in a matter of hours. The 500 kg vehicle is designed to be payload agnostic and survive in orbit for at least five years while being continuously maneuvered. It uses a solar-thermal propulsion system that produces a delta-V of 6 kilometers per second. Portal aims to conduct an in-flight demonstration in late 2025 or early 2026. It is looking to scale up its team and grow manufacturing to support the production of multiple spacecraft per year.

techcrunch.com · 4 min

TLDR

"RUN0" AS A SUDO REPLACEMENT

run0 is a sudo replacement that will be part of the upcoming systemd 256 release. It avoids the use of setuid permissions entirely. Using setuid permissions results in an execution context for privileged code that is half under the control of unprivileged code and needs careful manual cleanup. This page contains the Mastodon stream that discusses replacing sudo with run0.

lwn.net · 30 min