The Daily Index — Wednesday, June 5, 2024 · TLDR Index

Across today’s newsletters

Today’s Index

TLDR

IT'S NOT JUST YOU: GOOGLE SEEMINGLY SCALED BACK AI OVERVIEWS AFTER ITS ROCKY LAUNCH

Google has scaled back AI Overviews. The AI-generated answers are now appearing in around 11 percent of queries, down from around 27 percent when the feature was launched last month. The company is still in the process of refining the feature. AI Overviews are appearing most in health-focused searches, despite the company highlighting the tool's use for shopping, restaurant recommendations, and travel in its marketing.

androidpolice.com · 3 min

TLDR AI

A RIGHT TO WARN ABOUT ADVANCED AI

A group of current and former AI employees is calling for advanced AI companies to commit to principles that ensure transparency and protection for employees who raise risk-related concerns. They highlight the need for companies to avoid enforcing non-disparagement agreements, facilitate anonymous reporting processes, support open criticism, and prevent retaliation against whistleblowers.

righttowarn.ai · 3 min

TLDR Web Dev

FLAKY TESTS OVERHAUL AT UBER

Uber developed Testopedia, a centralized system for managing flaky tests in its CI pipelines, to address the issue of flaky tests in its legacy system. Testopedia focuses on tracking test entities identified by Fully Qualified Names (FQNs). It uses a finite state machine model to capture their states. Testopedia supports scalable data ingestion, flexible partitioning for efficient cone queries, and customizable analyzers and ticketing systems.

uber.com · 17 min

TLDR InfoSec

COX FIXED AN API AUTH BYPASS EXPOSING MILLIONS OF MODEMS TO ATTACKS

Bug bounty hunter Sam Curry discovered an API authentication bypass in Cox Communications' systems that could give attackers the same permissions as a tech support agent for the ISP. Attackers could use the bypass to obtain the PII of customers, reset modems, or gather WiFi information. Cox took the 700 exposed API endpoints down within hours of the report and fixed the issue the following day. It has found no evidence of exploitation.

bleepingcomputer.com · 2 min

TLDR Crypto

TETHER CONCERNED ABOUT MICA REQUIREMENTS

Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino is concerned about the EU's MiCA regulation for stablecoins. He asserts that the new requirements complicate stablecoin operations and increase their vulnerability and risk. In other news, Binance has announced plans to restrict "unauthorized" stablecoins in Europe to comply with MiCA, potentially affecting other exchanges and the accessibility of stablecoins like USDT.

theblock.co · 4 min

TLDR

NVIDIA EMAILS: ELON MUSK DIVERTING TESLA GPUS TO HIS OTHER COMPANIES

Elon Musk redirected 12,000 H100 GPUs ordered by Tesla to X. He had told investors in April that Tesla had spent $1 billion on GPUs in the three months of the year. Tesla has been developing its own in-house supercomputer for AI, but Musk has previously said that it would be redundant if the company could source more H100s. X's order of 12,000 H100s will be redirected to Tesla.

arstechnica.com · 3 min

TLDR

FLAWED, SCANDALOUS TRIALS TANK FDA EXPERT SUPPORT FOR MDMA THERAPY

Advisors for the Food and Drug Administration have voted overwhelmingly against approving MDMA as part of a therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder. While results from clinical trials showed positive results, a deeper look at the data uncovered a large number of trial flaws that threw the validity of the positive results into serious question. The FDA is conducting an investigation into accusations of possible data manipulation during the trials. There were claims that some of the trial participants were discouraged from reporting negative responses to the therapy.

arstechnica.com · 4 min

TLDR

‘EXTREMELY IMPRESSIVE': MELANOMA JAB TRIAL RESULTS EXCITE DOCTORS

A mRNA cancer vaccine for melanoma halves the risk of patients dying or the disease returning after three years. The vaccine is custom-built for each patient and specific to each patient's tumor. The average risk of recurrence for the type of advanced cancer the study focused on is 50%, but the vaccine brought the risk of recurrence down to 25%. The data from the study suggests that levels of cancer relapse did not increase in people with high-risk, advanced-stage melanoma.

theguardian.com · 3 min

TLDR

SKIP SDKS IN SIMPLE INTEGRATIONS

SDKs are not always beneficial and can complicate the development process. They often organize API interactions differently to how developers want them, have hidden complexities, use outdated dependencies, and have learning overhead. Using direct API calls allows for offline development, custom typing information, and easier swapping of vendors. SDKs can still be useful for deep integration with a service, but for simple API integrations, they introduce too much unnecessary bloat and cognitive overhead.

epicweb.dev · 4 min