The Daily Index — Wednesday, May 22, 2024 · TLDR Index

Across today’s newsletters

Today’s Index

TLDR

SPACEX DEMOS CELLULAR STARLINK TECH POWERING VIDEO CALL BETWEEN PHONES

While SpaceX's Starlink system for cell phones is still in its testing phase, the technology is already good enough to power a video call. SpaceX recently posted a video that showed a video call being completed through Starlink Direct to Cell satellites from unmodified mobile phones. The company has increased the number of cellular Starlink satellites from six to 38. Starlink tech can deliver download speeds as high as 17Mbps to unmodified Android phones.

links.tldrnewsletter.com · 2 min

TLDR AI

SCALE AI RAISES $1B

The monstrous series F comes from Accel and previous investors. Demand for the services provided is enormous and Scale is uniquely positioned to continue powering the modern AI data wave.

scale.com · 6 min

TLDR Web Dev

HOW SLACK BUILT A DISTRIBUTED CRON EXECUTION SYSTEM FOR SCALE

Slack initially relied on cron jobs for its notification system but found it hard to scale. To address this, its team developed a new cron execution service using Go and Kubernetes for scalability and a leader-follower architecture for simplified synchronization and rapid failover. This service offloads resource-intensive tasks to a job queue, using Kafka for durability and Redis for efficient dispatch to worker nodes, and tracks job execution with a Vitess table for deduplication and monitoring.

open.substack.com · 8 min

TLDR InfoSec

CRITICAL BUG ALLOWS DOS, RCE, DATA LEAKS IN ALL MAJOR CLOUD PLATFORMS

Researchers have discovered a severe memory corruption vulnerability dubbed "Linguistic Lumberjack" in Fluent Bit, an open-source cloud logging utility with over 3 billion downloads widely used by major organizations and cloud providers like AWS, Microsoft, and Google Cloud. The vulnerability potentially allows denial of service, data leakage, and remote code execution in cloud environments.

darkreading.com · 3 min

TLDR Crypto

TRUMP NOW ACCEPTS BITCOIN DONATIONS, MAKING GOOD ON CRYPTO PROMISE

Donald Trump, aiming for a second term as U.S. President, has announced that his campaign will now accept cryptocurrency donations, marking a significant shift from traditional campaign financing. Supported by Coinbase, his platform now accepts a wide array of cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, and various meme coins, positioning him as the first major party Presidential nominee to embrace such a diverse range of digital assets for campaign contributions.

decrypt.co · 3 min

TLDR

GOOGLE'S AI SEARCH RESULTS ARE ALREADY GETTING ADS

Google will soon start testing search and shopping ads within AI Overviews for users in the US. The company says it will display ads in AI Overviews when they're relevant to both the query and the information in the AI Overview. Advertisers already running certain campaigns through Google will automatically become eligible to appear in AI Overviews. It is unclear when exactly the change will roll out.

theverge.com · 1 min

TLDR

SURVIVING REENTRY IS THE KEY GOAL FOR SPACEX'S FOURTH STARSHIP TEST FLIGHT

The focus for the next Starship mission will be to control the reentry of the rocket's Super Heavy booster and Starship upper stage - both vehicles broke apart during their descent on the last flight. The company aims to make the Super Heavy booster make a controlled pinpoint splash down in the Gulf of Mexico as the Starship upper stage attempts to survive its reentry back into Earth's atmosphere. The test will be a repeat of the previous test without the propellant transfer, without the Pez door open, and without the other items that SpaceX was working to demonstrate. NASA's main interest in the test will be seeing that SpaceX replicates the good engine performance it demonstrated on the last two flights. SpaceX is not planning to attempt a Raptor engine restart during the test.

arstechnica.com · 6 min

TLDR

NON-INVASIVE ZAPS TO THE SPINAL CORD CAN TREAT PARALYSIS—BUT NO ONE KNOWS WHY

Data from a small clinical trial shows that a zap of electricity from well-placed electrodes on the back of the tech can help patients with tetraplegia regain modest yet potentially life-changing functioning off their hands and arms. The non-invasive procedure offers an accessible and more affordable means for those living with paralysis to regain some meaningful function. The therapy's potential remains limited as it is not yet fully understood why it works. A startup working to make the therapy commercially available has submitted a device to the Food and Drug Administration for review.

arstechnica.com · 5 min

TLDR

STRIPE'S MONOREPO DEVELOPER ENVIRONMENT

Stripe's codebase is mostly written in Ruby and lives in a single large monorepo. It supports a number of services that share code extensively. The company's tooling was built and is maintained by a succession of teams and individuals, with the needs of the environment changing as the team and codebase grew and evolved. This article discusses the features of Stripe's developer environment and explains the reasoning behind the choices made during its development. Maintaining developer productivity as an engineering organization grows is difficult - it is almost inevitable that per-engineer productivity drops as companies and codebases grow.

blog.nelhage.com · 22 min