TLDR 2026-02-19

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META TO CHALLENGE APPLE WITH ITS FIRST SMARTWATCH — AND IT'S REPORTEDLY LAUNCHING THIS YEAR

Meta plans to release its first smartwatch sometime this year. Code-named Malibu 2, the smartwatch will offer health-tracking tools along with a built-in Meta AI assistant. A Meta smartwatch could theoretically play nicely with both Android and iOS smartphones, unlike the Apple Watch. A smartwatch has the potential to unlock a lot more gesture-based functionality for Meta's glasses.

MARK ZUCKERBERG SAID HE REACHED OUT TO APPLE CEO TIM COOK TO DISCUSS ‘WELLBEING OF TEENS AND KIDS'

Mark Zuckerberg reached out to Tim Cook in 2018 to discuss the wellbeing of teens and kids. He thought there were opportunities that Meta and Apple could be doing and wanted to talk about them. The email exchange was revealed as part of a trial related to alleged harms of certain digital filters promoting cosmetic surgery. It was used to support the claim that Zuckerberg cares about the wellbeing of teens and kids using Meta's services.

MICROSOFT'S NEW 10,000-YEAR DATA STORAGE MEDIUM: GLASS

Microsoft's Project Silica is a working demonstration of a system that can read and write data into small slabs of glass with a density of over a Gigabit per cubic millimeter. The system can write up to 4.84TB in a single slab of glass of 12cm x 12cm x 0.2cm in about 150 hours. The main draws of the technology are that it takes no energy to preserve data and the data can be retrieved rapidly if needed. The glass also offers extreme stability, with experiments suggesting the data would be stable for over 10,000 years at room temperature.

FDA REVERSES SURPRISE REJECTION OF MODERNA'S MRNA FLU VACCINE

The FDA has now agreed to review Moderna's mRNA flu vaccine after the company held a formal meeting with the FDA and proposed a change to the regulatory pathways used in the application. Moderna hopes to make its vaccine available this year, pending FDA approval. The reason for initially refusing to review the application was based on the established flu vaccine Moderna used for comparison in its Phase 3 trial, which the FDA said did not reflect the best-available standard of care, but the agency ultimately signed off on the trial design. Moderna has agreed to add a comparison of high-dose vaccines to some older participants and provide the FDA with additional analysis.

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AUTOMATE REPOSITORY TASKS WITH GITHUB AGENTIC WORKFLOWS

GitHub Agentic Workflows is now in technical preview. It allows developers to build automations using coding agents in GitHub Actions to handle triage, documentation, code quality, and more. Developers describe the outcomes they want in plain Markdown, add it as an automated workflow to their repository, and it executes using a coding agent in GitHub Actions. This makes entirely new categories of repository automation and software engineering possible.

THE MYTHICAL AGENT-MONTH

There is now practically nothing stopping people and their agents from pursuing all avenues that would have previously been cost- or time-prohibitive. The temptation to spend your day prompting is overwhelming. However, building great software was never about how fast code was generated. We still need good design decisions and engineers who say no to most product ideas, maintain conceptual integrity, and know when something is 'done'.

AGAINST TASTE

The taste thesis actually proposes a fundamental demotion of human agency. For most of human history, the concept of taste as we understand it didn't exist - there was patronage, an intimate relationship between capital and artistic labor. The patron commissioned work rather than selected from finished works on a wall. The taste thesis reverses this order and places man at the end of the chain of creation.

THE SOFTWARE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

Before the Industrial Revolution, the average person only owned a few pairs of clothes, usually made by hand. Now, there are very few people who make clothes, but there are thousands of apparel companies for every type of activity. The Software Industrial Revolution will lead to an explosion of bespoke software across every industry and niche. The fact that we'll no longer build software by hand means that we will build and use much more of it. Everything in the economy that touches software is about to fundamentally and radically change.

DEFENSE DEPT. AND ANTHROPIC SQUARE OFF IN DISPUTE OVER AI SAFETY

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says that the Pentagon is close to declaring Anthropic as a supply chain risk, a move that would sever ties between the company and the US military.

POWER IN THE AGE OF INTELLIGENCE

Software businesses will soon become some of the largest businesses in history.

🦞 CRACKING THE CLAW

A look at OpenClaw's cognitive core, Pi, a coding agent built by systematically removing everything its developer didn't personally need.

SOFTWARE IS DEAD — LONG LIVE SOFTWARE

AI will kill a lot of businesses, but it will ultimately expand the software market, especially in vertical categories.

PICKING ROCKETSHIPS IS A BAD CAREER STRATEGY

Choose companies that will help you grow.

EMPIRICISTS VS. EXTRAPOLATORS

The phenomenon of people repeatedly underestimating the pace of AI progress is an example of exponential blindness.