TLDR 2025-02-18

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xAI has released Grok 3 and unveiled new capabilities for the Grok iOS and web apps. The company used an enormous data center in Memphis that contained around 200,000 GPUs to train Grok 3. Grok 3 is a family of models: Grok 3 mini responds to questions more quickly but at the cost of some accuracy; Grok 3, which beats GPT-4o on some benchmarks; Grok 3 Reasoning, which surpasses the best investigation of o3-mini on several popular benchmarks; and Grok 3 mini Reasoning. Subscribers to X's Premium+ tier will be first to get access to Grok 3.

A new leak claims that the iPhone 17 Air will have its cameras arranged in a horizontal bar. The iPhone 17 Pro models will use a larger but still horizontal bar. Along with the new camera layout, it's been reported that the iPhone 17 Pro will return to having curved sides. It is unclear how reliable or accurate the rumors are, but the leaker has been accurate about camera details before.

Construction has begun on the first phase of the Line, Saudi Arabia's planned 170-kilometer-long megacity in the desert. The first phase, which will stretch 2.5 kilometers, will be named Hidden Marina. It will be made up of three individual modular segments measuring 21 million square meters. Hidden Marina will host an initial population of around 200,000 residents. It will have 80,000 residential units, 9,000 hotel rooms, commercial and retail spaces, fire stations, schools, police and security services, and other amenities. Residents will have access to all daily essentials within a five-minute walk and high-speed rail will provide transit around the metropolis.

Several teams around the world are working on AI systems to help humans understand animals. A group at the University of the West of England Bristol and Scotland's Rural College have developed a system called Intellipig that examines photos of pigs' faces and notifies farmers if there are signs of pain, sickness, or emotional distress, and a team at the University of Haifa is training AI to identify signs of discomfort in dogs' faces. These systems still rely on humans to do the initial work of identifying the meanings of different behaviors.

Learn how to validate market demand for your next SaaS idea before investing resources blindly. In this guide, we'll show you how to capture intent and keep interested parties engaged as you build towards your launch.

WebAssembly allows server-side frameworks to run locally, blurring the boundaries of classic web development and opening up exciting new possibilities. This post walks readers through how to create a Rails application that runs fully in your browser. It covers how to bring Rails into the browser in 15 minutes, the behind-the-scenes of Rails wasmification, and the future of Rails and Wasm.

This article discusses how to debug an app with anti-debugging protections that blocked debuggers from being attached, caused an exit when any code was injected, and crashed the whole phone when run with jailbreak on. It walks through the steps of how to attach a debugger, bypass jailbreak detection, and inject code. The article is detailed and contains a lot of screenshots, logs, and code.

Murat Demirbas, a principal research scientist at MongoDB Research, spent a year at MIT's Computer Science department as a postdoc twenty years ago. This post details his experience working with Professor Nancy Lynch. Demirbas was young and he felt like he didn't make as much of the experience as he could have. The post includes lessons learned from the experience.

Grok 3 has an around state-of-the-art thinking model that is able to solve some advanced questions. It is likely somewhere around o1-pro in terms of capability and ahead of DeepSeek-R1. DeepSearch can produce high quality responses to various research- or lookup-type questions, but it can still hallucinate information - even URLs. Overall, Grok 3 + Thinking feels somewhere around the state-of-the-art territory of OpenAI's strongest models, and slightly better than DeepSeek-R1 and Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking.

TLDR is hiring part time curators to launch our TLDR Data newsletter.

The ideal candidate would have deep experience working directly with data warehouses, data pipelines, data lakes, and other modern cloud infrastructure.

Time commitment is ~2-3 hours/week paid at a rate of $100/hr. To apply please send your LinkedIn or resume to jobs@tldr.tech along with a couple sentences on why you'd be a good fit!

Watch QA Wolf AI generate a Playwright test for Figma's prototyper in just 6 minutes compared to 29 minutes without AI.

fixi.js is an experimental minimalist implementation of generalized hypermedia controls.

It is still unclear whether reasoning models are really as big of a game changer for software development tasks as they are made out to be.

searchcode.com's SQLite database is 6.4 gigabytes - this post discusses how the project got to that size, the technologies it uses, and why it uses SQLite.

Open Table Formats enable a kind of virtualization - they allow for a headless architecture where different platforms can bring their own compute to the same data.

The New York Times is still in a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft as the tech companies allegedly violated copyright law by training generative AI on the publisher's content.

Jailbreaking your Kindle will give you access to custom screensavers, custom fonts, and more apps, but there are risks, such as potentially voiding the Kindle's warranty and permanently breaking the device.