TLDR 2025-09-25

Ship MCP Auth the right way with WorkOS Connect.

TRUMP EXPECTED TO SIGN A TIKTOK DEAL THURSDAY

President Donald Trump is expected to sign a deal today to facilitate the sale of TikTok from ByteDance to a group of American investors. ByteDance will hold less than 20% of the stock in the new company. Data from users will be stored in the US and overseen by cloud computing company Oracle. Oracle's co-founder Larry Ellison, CEO of Dell Technologies Michael Dell, and the Murdoch family will play a role in the deal.

GOOGLE AND QUALCOMM EXECS CONFIRM ANDROID FOR PC IS COMING: 'I'VE SEEN IT, IT IS INCREDIBLE'

Google wants to bring all of its Android AI features and apps to the PC ecosystem. It appears that Android laptops will soon be a reality. Google had confirmed plans to merge ChromeOS and Android into one thing earlier this year. A recent on-stage conversation between Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon and Google's head of platforms and devices Rick Osterloh at a Qualcomm event (video available in the article) further expanded on those plans.

NASA CONFIRMS FIRST CREWED MISSION TO ORBIT THE MOON IN 50+ YEARS SET FOR 2026

NASA is on track to send astronauts to orbit the Moon in early 2026, its first mission to do so in more than half a century. The manned mission, dubbed Artemis 2, has experienced multiple setbacks but is now scheduled for April 2026 at the latest. The crew will comprise three US and one Canadian astronaut. A video that introduces the Artemis 2 crew is available in the article.

HUNTINGTON'S DISEASE SUCCESSFULLY TREATED FOR FIRST TIME

Doctors have treated Huntington's disease successfully for the first time. A genetic disease, Huntington's relentlessly kills brain cells. It resembles a combination of dementia, Parkinson's, and motor neuron disease. The new treatment is a type of gene therapy given during 12 to 19 hours of delicate brain surgery. It will likely be very expensive, but it is considered safe. The data shows that, three years after surgery, there was an average 75% slowing of the disease.

HIRING ONLY SENIOR ENGINEERS IS KILLING COMPANIES

There is currently a huge pool of exceptional junior engineers that most companies won't even consider. Smart companies can get a significant advantage by not fighting over seniors and hiring these juniors instead. Shopify recently hired 25 interns and is aiming for 1,000 more by the end of the year because interns bring energy, drive, and intensity, which pushes the whole team forward. While it is safer to hire someone with years of experience who can contribute from day one, the most critical factors - motivation, ambition, character, and brains - have little to do with experience.

HOW AWS S3 SERVES 1 PETABYTE PER SECOND ON TOP OF SLOW HDDS

AWS S3 is a scalable multi-tenant storage service with APIs to store and retrieve objects. It offers extremely high availability and durability at a relatively low cost. What started as a service optimized for backups and media storage for e-commerce websites has grown into the main storage system used for analytics and machine learning on massive data lakes. The growing trend now for entire data infrastructure projects to be based on S3, which gives them the benefit of stateless nodes while outsourcing difficult durability, replication, and load-balancing problems to S3 - this reduces cloud costs.

YOU ARE NOT LATE

While it would've been amazing to be an entrepreneur during the dot-com boom, right now is the best time to start something on the internet. There has never been a time to invent something. People in the future will look back at right now and think it was a great period to start, just as we look back to the past and think they had it great, too. Today is truly a wide-open frontier.

SOME LOOSELY ORGANIZED THOUGHTS ON THE CURRENT ZEITGEIST - TERENCE TAO

The systems, incentives, and technologies in the modern world have managed to slightly empower the individual while massively empowering large organizations, at the significant expense of small organizations. The imbalanced system provides significant material comforts and some limited feeling of agency, but it has led to individuals feeling disconnected, alienated, lonely, and cynical or pessimistic about the ability to influence future events or meet major challenges. Much of the current debate on societal issues is framed as conflicts between large organizations, conflicts between large organizations and average individuals, or a yearning for a return to a more traditional era.

Y COMBINATOR LAUNCHES ‘EARLY DECISION' FOR STUDENTS WHO WANT TO GRADUATE FIRST, BUILD LATER

Y Combinator's new Early Decision application track allows students to apply while still in school and get accepted and funded immediately, with participation deferred until after they graduate.

OPENAI LOOKS TO BUILD IN-HOUSE AD INFRASTRUCTURE

CHATGPT AND THE GREAT BUNDLING

OpenAI released a paper last week showing that ChatGPT is being used as an all-in-one assistant across personal and work tasks.

LIBGHOSTTY IS COMING

libghostty is a zero-dependency library with an API for parsing terminal sequences and maintaining terminal state.

AI AND THE FDA

AI holds a lot of promise for more effective, better-targeted drugs, but only if the FDA adapts.

FIVE YEARS AFTER APPLE BROKE UP WITH INTEL, INTEL IS BEGGING FOR MONEY

Intel and Apple are in early discussions about how to work more closely together.