TLDR 2024-07-23

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ELON MUSK'S XAI ACTIVATES “MOST POWERFUL AI TRAINING CLUSTER IN THE WORLD” WITH 100K NVIDIA H100 GPUS

xAI has activated a supercomputer cluster comprised of 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs in Memphis, Tennessee. It is effectively the most powerful AI training cluster in the market today. The supercomputer is expected to be used to train Grok, the company's large language model. xAI is estimated to have spent about $3 billion to $4 billion on the project. xAI also recently announced that it is hiring to increase its human talent advantage.

ALEXA IS IN MILLIONS OF HOUSEHOLDS—AND AMAZON IS LOSING BILLIONS

While hundreds of millions of customers own Alexa-enabled devices, Amazon's bet that people would spend meaningful amounts of money to buy goods on its platform by talking to the voice assistant hasn't paid off. Customers mostly use Alexa to set alarms and check the weather. Amazon has lost tens of billions of dollars on its devices business. The company will launch a paid tier for Alexa as soon as this month as part of the plan to reverse these losses.

CHINA UNVEILS WORLD'S 1ST MELTDOWN-PROOF NUCLEAR REACTOR WITH 105 MW CAPACITY

Researchers at Tsinghua University in China have successfully demonstrated a meltdown-proof nuclear fission reactor. The twin reactor design can generate 105 MW of power each. It can cool itself down without an external power source, reaching stable temperatures around 35 hours after shutdown. Construction of the facility started in 2016, with commercial operations beginning only in December last year. One drawback of the technology is that it can't be retrofitted onto existing nuclear reactors.

WE'RE BUILDING NUCLEAR SPACESHIPS AGAIN—THIS TIME FOR REAL

Powering spaceships using compact reactors could cut down Mars transit times by more than half. The technology also has military applications, with DARPA requesting a nuclear rocket demonstrator in June 2020. The Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations (DRACO) project aims to create space-based assets that can move quickly within space to deter strategic attacks by adversaries. This article discusses the DRACO project and the technologies that make it possible.

MAESTRO

Maestro is a general-purpose workflow orchestrator that can schedule millions of jobs every day and operate with a strict SLO even when there are spikes in traffic. It is highly scalable and extensible and provides a fully managed workflow-as-a-service. Maestro serves thousands of data platform users at Netflix for various use cases.

JIFF

Jiff is a datetime library for Rust. It provides high level datetime primitives with reasonable performance that are difficult to misuse. Jiff supports automatic and seamless integration with the Time Zone Database, DST aware arithmetic and rounding, formatting and parsing zone aware datetimes losslessly, opt-in Serde support, and more. Its minimum supported rustc version is 1.70.0.

ETHEREUM ETFS APPROVED BY SEC, BRINGING POPULAR FUNDS TO SECOND-LARGEST CRYPTOCURRENCY

US regulators have approved spot exchange-traded funds that hold Ethereum. Bitcoin ETFs, which were approved in January, have attracted tens of billions of dollars of investment. Some analysts predict that inflows into ETH ETFs won't be nearly as high as for BTC ETFs. Ethereum doesn't have the first-mover advantage that Bitcoin had and it lacks a strong narrative.

WHY TECHNICAL COFOUNDERS REJECT YOU

There are many reasons technical cofounders will reject a startup. This article discusses some of these factors, such as unrealistic expectations from founders, putting too much value on an idea, or a lack of understanding of the market. Building a compelling case for a technical cofounder to want to join a founder involves providing proof that the idea or product will work and that the founder is able to bring the idea to life. Founders need to prove that they will be successful and that the train is departing.

TESLA OPTIMUS PRODUCTION IS ESTIMATED TO START IN 2025

Elon Musk says that Tesla will have genuinely useful robots in low production for internal use next year.

NO MORE BLUE FRIDAYS

Software updates in the future will be effectively run in a sandbox that rejects unsafe code.

GOOGLE CHROME IS NO LONGER ‘DEPRECATING THIRD-PARTY COOKIES'

Google is introducing additional privacy controls into Chrome such as IP Protection in Incognito mode.

A GENTLE INTRODUCTION TO SAML

SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language) defines a flexible set of rules for exchanging security-related messages in XML.

HOW FAST CAN A HUMAN POSSIBLY RUN 100 METERS?

With the ideal anatomy and conditions: 6.97 seconds.

TINKERBIRD

TinkerBird is a Chrome-native vector database with a query engine written in TypeScript designed for efficient storage and retrieval of embeddings.