Apple's newest security feature, Stolen Device Protection, makes it far harder for thieves to hijack Apple IDs and any financial information stored on the device. It will require users to use Face ID or Touch ID and certain changes may take up to an hour to take effect. The feature addresses a key vulnerability where thieves can lock victims out of their Apple IDs by resetting the password using their passcodes. Stolen Device Protection will be included in the iOS 17.3 release expected next week.
2024.01.19·theverge.com·2 min read·TLDR Figure is sending its general-purpose humanoid robots to start real-world work at BMW's manufacturing plant in South Carolina. The deal may be one of the first-ever commercial deals involving humanoid robots. While the two companies have yet to announce exactly what Figure's robots will be doing on the factory floor, training has already begun in the company's labs for the first tasks. The partnership is milestone-based, so Figure will have to prove its robots can do useful work before it scales its operations.
2024.01.19·newatlas.com·4 min read·TLDR Airborne wind energy is a new field that uses kites instead of turbines to generate energy from wind. Kites are nimbler than turbines and can deliver a more constant energy supply. Netherlands-based company Kitepower has developed a system called Hawk that flies out in 'pumping' cycles - it flies out while pulling at a tether, generating electricity on the ground, and when the tether reaches its maximum length, the ground station winches the kite back in, using only a fraction of the energy it produced. The system fits into a standard shipping container and assembly at a new site takes less than 24 hours.
2024.01.19·spectrum.ieee.org·4 min read·TLDR Sponsored
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WhisperSpeech is a text-to-speech system built by inverting Whisper. The models are currently only trained on the English LibreLight dataset, but future releases will target multiple languages. Samples of synthesized voices are available in the repository.
2024.01.19·github.com·GitHub repository·TLDR Most machine learning in production is still not related to large language models or generative AI, which make up less than 10% of the market at most. At their core, machine learning models are algorithms that perform compression on a corpus of data. A lot has changed in leading-edge machine learning applications over the past year as the industry has moved from smaller, business-specific models that perform specific tasks to very large generalist models that complete text. The pendulum is again shifting to smaller models that people are starting to fine-tune and run on their own. The industry still focuses on compression, but it is changing where and how much it is controlled.
2024.01.19·vickiboykis.com·27 min read·TLDR Apple has introduced a new tax on web purchases that prevents developers from offering digital items more cheaply on the web. Epic will contest this plan in District Court. Apple is demanding commission from web sales that occur within 7 days of a user tapping through to the web from its new External Purchase Links entitlement in an app - services that already sell over the web can continue to do so in exactly the same way. Some critics say Apple shouldn't and legally can't comply with its anti-steering injunction this way, but it looks like the company isn't doing anything contrary to the law.
2024.01.19·daringfireball.net·4 min read·TLDR It's no secret that AI models require astronomical amounts of electricity to run. Experts estimate that the industry could soon use as much electricity as an entire country. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is looking for cheaper energy alternatives. Future models will require even more power to the degree that they'll need a whole new power source. Altman has already invested around $375 million in a nuclear fusion company.
2024.01.19·futurism.com·2 min read·TLDR Sponsored
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2024.01.19·brilliant.org·Sponsor·TLDR Search engine results are getting worse as the internet is flooded with low-effort garbage.
2024.01.19·theregister.com·3 min read·TLDR A system is scalable when the cost of adding incremental work is approximately constant.
2024.01.19·brooker.co.za·2 min read·TLDR Amazon is laying off about 30 employees in its Buy with Prime unit, less than 5% of the staff in the division.
An instruction set is a lingua franca between compilers and microarchitecture - the rise of RISC-V as an open base for custom instruction sets has lowered the barrier to entry for people trying to design some or all of an instruction set.
2024.01.19·queue.acm.org·32 min read·TLDR A new radar survey of the Medusae Fossae Formation region on the Martian equator has revealed several kilometers-thick slabs of buried water ice.
2024.01.19·sciencealert.com·3 min read·TLDR While filming your layoff and posting it to social media might feel empowering, critics warn that creators might be acting naive and shortsighted as any company that now googles them will see the video.
OpenAI has announced its first partnership with a higher education institution, Arizona State University, which will gain full access to ChatGPT Enterprise for coursework, tutoring, research, and more, including building a personalized AI tutor and creative AI avatars for students.
2024.01.19·cnbc.com·2 min read·TLDR AI Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's CEO, is entering the race to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI), aiming to enhance Meta's apps and user experience. He emphasizes the need for AI talent and computing power and is considering an open-source approach to AI development, contrasting with the more closed methods of other companies.
2024.01.19·theverge.com·5 min read·TLDR AI This massive document outlines essentially everything one would need to know about the state of the vector retrieval field. It is a valuable resource that will take some time to dig through.
Apple has released a great paper on pretraining image models with an autoregressive loss. It measures scaling behavior and finds that like in language, these large unsupervised image models have very predictable behavior.
2024.01.19·github.com·12 min read·TLDR AI This paper improves how images are edited using natural language instructions by tackling challenges like unclear instructions and identifying specific parts of the image to edit.
2024.01.19·arxiv.org·15 min read·TLDR AI Sponsored
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2024.01.19·wiremock.io·Sponsor·TLDR AI 2024.01.19·mockgpt.wiremock.io·TLDR AI Compose and Conquer introduces a conditional diffusion model that excels in placing objects in three-dimensional space within generated images.
2024.01.19·github.com·GitHub repository·TLDR AI Vlogger is an advanced AI system capable of generating minute-long video blogs (vlogs) from user descriptions. Vlogger operates in four stages - Script, Actor, ShowMaker, and Voicer, each representing a specific aspect of vlog creation.
2024.01.19·github.com·GitHub repository·TLDR AI This project evaluates the generalization capabilities of deep learning models for instance segmentation to novel objects.
2024.01.19·github.com·GitHub repository·TLDR AI A quantization-aware attention alternative that speeds up inference substantially over some state-of-the-art implementations. Its creators also claim 700 TFLOPs on MI-300X. The details are sparse, but it would be quite an achievement if so.
2024.01.19·blog.hippoml.com·4 min read·TLDR AI Dolphin is widely considered to be one of the strongest uncensored open models available. It is mainly built on Mixtral. This 120B model was made by merging two smaller Dolphin models together. It has been found, with Goliath 120B, that this merging process can improve overall model performance.
2024.01.19·huggingface.co·4 min read·TLDR AI TACO is a new benchmark for assessing a system’s ability to generate code. It is substantially larger than existing datasets and contains more challenging problems. On easy problems, GPT-4 gets 30% correct, while it only achieves 2% on the hardest subset of questions.
2024.01.19·github.com·GitHub repository·TLDR AI Microsoft has launched Reading Coach, an AI-powered tool designed to provide personalized reading practice available at no cost for anyone with a Microsoft account.
2024.01.19·techcrunch.com·1 min read·TLDR AI A handy trick to quickly lower your AI cost.
2024.01.19·twitter.com·2 min read·TLDR AI Twitter’s former CTO and interim CEO Parag Agrawal has launched his own AI startups. These startups have received funding from some big-name VCs like Khosla Ventures.
2024.01.19·msn.com·1 min read·TLDR AI The SEC has postponed its decision on Fidelity's proposed Ethereum ETF. Originally, the agency had to approve or reject the ETF by January 20, but a provision allowed the regulator to extend the deadline to March 5. While this deadline is only for Fidelity’s ETF application, analysts predict that the SEC will make decisions concerning all Ethereum ETFs by late May.
The EU has agreed on provisional measures to tackle money laundering via cryptocurrencies. The Anti-Money Laundering Regulation enforces due diligence requirements for crypto firms for transactions over 1,000 euros. The regulation targets potential sanction evasion and money laundering risks and also oversees transactions involving "self-hosted" wallets. The measures are not intended to ban privacy-enhancing crypto. The agreement is now awaiting formal approval.
Conflux Network is building an EVM-compatible solution for interoperability with Bitcoin, enabling transfers of bitcoin and inscriptions between Conflux and Bitcoin. The testnet is set to debut in March, while the mainnet is due in May. The new solution will interact with Bitcoin by using bitcoin for gas fees while supporting Ethereum-based contracts.
Delphi Labs and Astroport have introduced Asteroids, a new open-source protocol for the Cosmos Hub. This advancement allows any user to include content directly on the Hub and create a new form of tokens known as Cosmos Fungible Tokens or CFT-20s. By design, the Hub doesn’t have native support for tokens or NFTs, but Asteroids changes that using inscriptions, a method of writing data to the chain popularized by Ordinals on Bitcoin.
2024.01.19·members.delphidigital.io·10 min read·TLDR Crypto Pudgy Penguins, one of the most storied NFT collections on Ethereum, has been on a tear over the past year. It recently eclipsed a $40k floor price and is closing in on the Bored Ape Yacht Club’s floor. This thread lays out how the collection resonates in different ways among crypto enthusiasts, art appreciators, community builders, trendsetters, creatives, and meme lovers. From the start, Pudgy Penguins has garnered a diverse audience of holders from crypto OGs to pro poker players to famous athletes like Steph Curry. The collection did this by having a natural broad appeal outside of crypto, fostering an incredible meme culture that has resulted in billions of Giphy views, and building a strong brand on social media and with its physical toys.
SatoshiVM is a recently launched decentralized Bitcoin EVM-compatible L2. This thread lays out a strategy guide for attempting to qualify for a potential airdrop for the chain. The project allows users in the Bitcoin ecosystem to leverage assets and liquidity to build apps. As the Bitcoin narrative has been gaining traction lately, many in the crypto ecosystem were excited at the announcement of the SatoshiVM testnet and what that could mean as far as a future airdrop.
Tether, the issuer of the third-largest cryptocurrency, USDT, has added more Bitcoin to its treasury, which now totals over $2.8 billion. While the company primarily backs USDT with the safest investment instruments possible, like US Treasuries, it uses a small portion of its profits to purchase and subsequently hold Bitcoin. Despite past criticism for a lack of transparency and the conclusion of a two-year investigation by the New York Attorney General, Tether continues to lead the space in market share and even has recently been given the seal of approval by traditional finance institutions like Cantor Fitzgerald.
Restaking, the use of an Ethereum stake to secure multiple networks, has potential benefits such as increased yields, but it also introduces several risks. The extra layer of risk could lead to increased slashing penalties and risks on the restaking layer. Further complications arise from the additional development of primitives, increasing complexity and risk. The new risk vectors opened up by this method have raised concerns within the Ethereum developer community about their potential impact on the Ethereum consensus.
Solana Mobile's new device, "Chapter 2", surpassed its 7-day sales goal in 24 hours, achieving 30,000 preorders in 30 hours, easily eclipsing its predecessor Saga's sales.
After less than a week of trading, Bitcoin ETFs have surpassed silver ETFs in asset size in the US, becoming the second-largest single commodity ETF class by assets under management.
Cryptocurrency crime declined in 2023, with illicit address inflows dropping to $24.2 billion. Scams and hacking revenues decreased, while ransomware and darknet markets revenues rose.
The Donald Trump NFT collection announced it would be releasing Ordinals on Bitcoin to up to 200 users that buy 100 of the $99 Trump “mugshot edition” NFTs that launched on Polygon in December.
Samsung introduced new AI features to its Galaxy S24 series to improve the user experience. The Circle to Search feature lets users circle anything on the screen to trigger a search. Instant translation is now available in messaging, as are more contextual response suggestions. Smarter segmentation and grouping options will make it easier for users to organize their notes. Audio recordings can be seamlessly converted into structured text with the option of creating summaries.
Recraft, an AI graphic design generator, has secured a $12 million Series A funding round. Recraft focuses on providing professionals with foundational design elements, including vector images, style control, and brand consistency, unlike other AI design tools. It aims to empower professionals to create high-quality, consistent visuals for branding, marketing, and advertising.
Remedy and Rockstar Games are locked in a trademark dispute over the similarity of the 'R' in their logos. Rockstar claims they are too alike, while many believe the logos are distinct, leading to online speculation. Interestingly, despite the legal dispute, the two companies are collaborating on remastered Max Payne games.