TLDR 2026-03-09

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CURSOR GOES TO WAR FOR AI CODING DOMINANCE

Until recently, Cursor seemed nearly unstoppable. Then, Anthropic's Claude Code crossed $1 billion in annualized revenue within six months and hit $2.5 billion last month, surpassing Cursor, and OpenAI's Codex coding agent was downloaded over a million times in its first week. Perceived momentum can appear or evaporate overnight in the fast-moving world of AI. In response, Cursor is building a research powerhouse to outmaneuver Anthropic and OpenAI, and prioritizing contracts with large enterprises, which can be more stable than consumer subscriptions.

APPLE ‘ULTRA' PRODUCTS EXPANSION IS UP NEXT AFTER MACBOOK NEO LAUNCH

Apple plans to release several higher-end products, including a foldable iPhone, new AirPods, and a MacBook Pro with a touch-enabled OLED display. Other product lines will likely expand to a superpremium tier, including the iPad and iMac. The approach is typical of CEO Tim Cook's playbook of taking proven products and stretching them across multiple price points to capture as much market share as possible. It wouldn't be surprising if the MacBook Neo eventually expanded into multiple variants, even a larger-screen model.

STEM CELL TREATMENTS FOR PARKINSON'S AND HEART FAILURE APPROVED IN WORLD FIRST

Japanese pharmaceutical company Sumitomo Pharma has received a conditional and time-limited approval for the manufacture and sale of Amchepry, a Parkinson's disease treatment. The treatment involves transplanting stem cells developed into the precursors of dopamine-producing brain cells into a patient's brain. Medical startup Cuorips has also received approval from Japan's health ministry to manufacture and sell ReHeart, heart muscle sheets that can help form new blood vessels and restore heart function. The treatments could be on the market and rolled out to patients in Japan as early as this summer.

ASTEROID DEFENSE MISSION SHIFTED THE ORBIT OF MORE THAN ITS TARGET

The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) operation in September 2022 changed the trajectory of the entire Didymos binary system and altered its orbit around the Sun. The vending-machine-sized probe crashed into the smaller asteroid at over 22,000 kilometers per hour, decreasing the along-track velocity of the entire system by roughly 11.7 micrometers per second. Some of the rock and dust created by the impact gave the asteroids a push roughly equal to the initial impact of the spacecraft itself, further changing the asteroids' orbits. The final verification of the DART mission's consequences will come in late 2026 when the ESA's Hera spacecraft arrives at the Didymos system.

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I DON'T KNOW IF MY JOB WILL STILL EXIST IN TEN YEARS

It is unclear if the software engineering industry will survive another decade. If it does, it will certainly change more than it did in the last two decades. Software allows for the automation of jobs, which is why it is such a lucrative profession. There aren't any genuinely new capabilities that AI agents need in order to automate software engineering, they just have to get better and more reliable at doing the things they can already do. It's hard to believe that AI will cause demand for software engineers to increase rather than decrease.

THE LINUX KERNEL WILL SOON BE MIT-LICENSED AND COPYLEFT WILL BE DEAD WITHIN 5 YEARS

A disagreement in a project licensed under the GPL resulted in a developer reimplementing the project with AI from start to finish. The AI generated a complete clean room implementation with just 1.3% in common code. This scenario signals the end of copyleft. Companies that want to use GPL software will likely rather spend a week reimplementing projects with AI assistance than dealing with the headaches of licensing.

STABLECOIN FIRMS BET BIG ON AI AGENT PAYMENTS THAT BARELY EXIST

Circle and Stripe are racing to build a payments system for a world where autonomous AI agents transact millions of times a day using stablecoins. Circle's Arc is a blockchain for stablecoin payments that allows autonomous agents to hold a balance and spend across networks with transaction costs of only fractions of a penny. Stripe's Tempo is a blockchain with a $5 billion valuation designed specifically for stablecoin payments. While fast and cheap, stablecoin transactions lack the fraud protection, dispute resolution, and credit extension that cards bundle into every payment. A potential path forward may be virtual cards that settle on the back end via stablecoins, which allows card networks and stablecoin rails to coexist rather than compete.

FOR OPENAI AND ANTHROPIC, THE COMPETITION IS DEEPLY PERSONAL

OpenAI created the fastest-growing consumer app in tech history. However, Anthropic managed to add thousands of big businesses as customers in just a few months and expects to see $19 billion in revenue this year. The recent controversy with the Pentagon has helped Anthropic, and its app has soared to the number one spot on Apple's App Store. The situation is just the latest round in a long-running and deeply personal feud between the two companies, whose executives have differing views on how AI should be created.

A MODEL OF HOW SIMPLICITY GETS REWARDED

You can reward simplicity, you just have to do it indirectly.

BUNDLE OF HUMAN NEURONS HOOKED TO SILICON LEARNS TO STUMBLE THROUGH DOOM

Roughly 200,000 living human neurons grown on a microelectrode array gradually learned to play Doom in response to feedback, a form of reinforcement learning.

TESLA OPENS ITS FIRST MEGACHARGER STATION TO SEMI CUSTOMERS IN CALIFORNIA

The Megacharger station at 4265 E Guasti Road in Ontario, California, is now live and available to Semi fleet customers.

DO AI-ENABLED COMPANIES NEED FEWER PEOPLE?

Claims that companies can get by with way fewer people in the age of AI appear to be true.

GNU AND THE AI REIMPLEMENTATIONS

AI reimplementations are a fair process, but developers should at least put some effort into trying to evolve the work when replicating it.

THE NEW APPLE FINALLY BEGINS TO EMERGE

Apple has added two designers, Steve Lemay and Molly Anderson, to its executive leadership page, which, when combined with the company's recent MacBook Neo launch, signals a turning point for the company.