The Daily Index — Wednesday, March 19, 2025 · TLDR Index

Across today’s newsletters

Today’s Index

TLDR

NVIDIA ANNOUNCES BLACKWELL ULTRA AND RUBIN AI CHIPS

Nvidia has announced new chips for building and deploying artificial intelligence models. Blackwell Ultra will allow cloud providers to make as much as 50 times the revenue as chips from the Hopper generation - it will ship in the second half of this year. Vera Rubin, which is expected to ship in the second half of 2026, is a system with two main components: a CPU called Vera and a new GPU design called Rubin. The custom Vera design will be twice as fast as the CPU used in last year's Grace Blackwell chips - it will enable Rubin to manage 50 petaflops while doing inference, more than double the capacity of the company's current Blackwell chips.

cnbc.com · 7 min

TLDR AI

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together.ai

TLDR Web Dev

HOW NETFLIX STORES 140 MILLION HOURS OF VIEWING DATA PER DAY

Netflix tackled the challenge of storing massive amounts of viewing data by evolving its time-series data storage system. Initially relying on Apache Cassandra, its team faced scalability issues with increasing data volume from video previews and global expansion. They redesigned its architecture by categorizing data into Full Title Plays, Video Previews, and Language Preferences, and sharding data by type and age.

blog.bytebytego.com · 16 min

TLDR InfoSec

NEW RAT MALWARE USED FOR CRYPTO THEFT, RECONNAISSANCE

Microsoft Incident Response researchers report on a new RAT, StilachiRAT. This RAT can steal crypto wallet data, clipboard credentials, and Google Chrome local state files. It also features enhanced persistence, anti-forensics, and C2 command execution capabilities.

bleepingcomputer.com · 3 min

TLDR Crypto

CRYPTO.COM FORCES THROUGH CONTROVERSIAL VOTE TO RE-MINT 70 BILLION CRO

Crypto.com controversially approved a vote to re-mint $70 billion worth of CRO tokens, with its validators (who hold a majority of CRO) playing a decisive role in swaying the vote. This move has sparked debate over concerns about token dilution and the implications of concentrated validator influence on governance.

unchainedcrypto.com · 2 min

TLDR

HERE'S WHY GOOGLE PITCHED ITS $32B WIZ ACQUISITION AS ‘MULTICLOUD'

Google is acquiring Wiz for $32 billion. Wiz will continue to be positioned as a multicloud offering. The acquisition brings a massive customer list to Google, so the companies need to ensure existing customers don't start shopping around for another security provider. Many customers chose Wiz due to its ability to support multiple cloud platforms - cutting off that ability risks alienating those users. Google Cloud trails significantly behind its competitors with a 12% share of the global cloud market.

techcrunch.com · 4 min

TLDR

NVIDIA AND GOOGLE DEEPMIND WILL HELP POWER DISNEY'S CUTE ROBOTS

Nvidia and Google DeepMind's Newton is a physics engine that can simulate robotic movements in real-world settings. It will be used by Disney to power its next-generation entertainment robots - a video of one of these robots is available in the article. Newton helps robots be more expressive and learn how to handle complex tasks with precision. It is highly customizable - developers can use it to program robotic interactions with a range of deformable objects. Newton will be compatible with Google DeepMind's ecosystem of robotic development tools.

techcrunch.com · 2 min

TLDR

HERE'S THE SECRET TO HOW FIREFLY WAS ABLE TO NAIL ITS FIRST LUNAR LANDING

Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lander, part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, has accomplished a lot on the Moon in the last two weeks. It has drilled into the Moon's surface, tested an extraterrestrial vacuum cleaner, demonstrated that GPS can be used to navigate on the lunar surface, and sent daily imagery back to Earth. All of the mission objectives for the Blue Ghost mission have been met. This article details how Firefly managed to secure the first fully successful commercial lunar landing, the challenges Firefly's engineers have had to overcome, some of the discoveries that Blue Ghost has made so far, and the progress of other missions in the CLPS program.

arstechnica.com · 22 min

TLDR

BREAKING UP WITH ON-CALL

On-call, in its current state in Big Tech, is flawed. AI is already changing the scope of on-call and the responsibility of the engineer in the loop. Some on-call will always be unavoidable, but it should be the exception rather than the norm. This will give engineers time to concentrate on meaningful tasks, which will make customers happier.

archive.md · 9 min