The Daily Index — Monday, September 2, 2024 · TLDR Index

Across today’s newsletters

Today’s Index

TLDR

AMAZON TO LAUNCH NEW AI-POWERED ALEXA USING ANTHROPIC'S CLAUDE

Amazon will release a revamped version of its Alexa voice assistant in October. It will be powered by AI models from Anthropic's Claude rather than Amazon's own in-house AI technology, as Amazon's internal software reportedly struggled with performance issues during initial testing. The new Alexa will enable users to engage in more complex, context-aware conversations with the assistant. Amazon plans to offer the upgraded Alexa as a paid subscription service, separate from existing Prime memberships, with pricing likely to be between $5 to $10 per month.

macrumors.com · 3 min

TLDR AI

COHERE COMMAND R UPDATE

Command R and Command R+ received an upgrade on essentially all tasks. They are now better at recall, speed, math, and reasoning.

cohere.com · 12 min

TLDR Web Dev

THE WEB'S CLIPBOARD, AND HOW IT STORES DATA OF DIFFERENT TYPES

The Clipboard API restricts the data types that can be written to the clipboard. While the Clipboard Events API allows for arbitrary data types, it can only be used in user-triggered events. This article goes into the creative solutions employed by web applications like Google Docs and Figma to overcome these limitations, such as by using custom data types and base64 encoding for transmitting information.

alexharri.com · 20 min

TLDR InfoSec

NGATE ANDROID MALWARE RELAYS NFC TRAFFIC TO STEAL CASH

A threat actor operating in Czechia evolved from utilizing PWAs and WebAPKs to utilizing the NGate malware to attack Android users of major Czech banks. The NGate malware is delivered via smishing, where attackers alert users to either an issue in their banking app or a way to get tax returns faster. The malware then utilizes NFCGate to relay any NFC payments from the device, which allows the attackers to duplicate the cards and withdraw money from an ATM. This attack does not require the victim's device to be rooted.

welivesecurity.com · 19 min

TLDR Crypto

TRUMP CAMPAIGN CRYPTO DONATIONS OUTPACING ALL OTHER CORPORATE DONATIONS

During Trump's discussion with BTC Inc. CEO David Bailey, he was promised $100 million in donations and 5 million re-election votes for promoting pro-crypto policy. Since then, $25 million has been raised. 48% of all corporate money raised this cycle is from crypto. Pro-crypto money has led to 85% win rates for candidates. More than $4 million in crypto like USDC, ETH, and BTC has been directly donated. Ripple and Coinbase have been the biggest backers of pro-crypto PACs.

threadreaderapp.com · 2 min

TLDR

NVIDIA'S FUTURE RELIES ON CHIPS THAT PUSH TECHNOLOGY'S LIMITS

Nvidia's Blackwell chips are about twice as big as its predecessors, housing 2.6 times the number of transistors. Instead of one big piece of silicon, Blackwell consists of two advanced processors and numerous memory components joined in a single, delicate mesh of silicon, metal, and plastic. The manufacturing of each chip has to be close to perfect, presenting engineering challenges that have a sizable impact on the bottom line, with each defect rendering a $40,000 chip useless. This article looks at some of the challenges Nvidia had to overcome to produce the chip.

links.tldrnewsletter.com · 8 min

TLDR

OZEMPIC COULD DELAY AGEING, RESEARCHERS SUGGEST

Semaglutide could be used to slow down the process of aging. A study tracking people aged 45 or older who were overweight and had cardiovascular disease but not diabetes found that those who took the drug died at a lower rate from all causes. It also improved heart failure symptoms and cut levels of inflammation regardless of whether or not people lost weight. The study reinforces the theory that being overweight increases the risk of death due to many etiologies.

bbc.com · 3 min

TLDR

VALKEY IS A DIFFERENT KIND OF FORK

Valkey is a high-performance key/value datastore forked from Redis. It has gained a lot of support, with two-thirds of former top Redis maintainers and developers switching over to the project. Valkey 8.0 introduces serious speed improvements and new futures that Redis users have wanted for some time, including improved debugging tools, enhanced documentation, and new command-line utilities for easier management and monitoring. It maintains full API and CLI compatibility with Redis and compatibility with the Redis Serialization Protocol, making migrating from Redis to Valkey easy.

thenewstack.io · 5 min

TLDR

OK, HERE IS MY BEST GUESS ON THE STATE OF LLMS

Making a jump similar to the 100x jump going from GPT-3 to GPT-4 is going to be very hard. It will require a lot more training data and larger data centers. It is difficult to see whether efforts to improve models will bear any fruit. Policies like SB 1047 threaten to further slow down progress.

threadreaderapp.com · 1 min