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GOOGLE ROLLS OUT GEMINI DEEP THINK AI, A REASONING MODEL THAT TESTS MULTIPLE IDEAS IN PARALLEL

Google Ultra subscribers will gain access to Gemini 2.5 Deep Think, Google's most advanced AI reasoning model, in the Gemini app on Friday.

FULL-BREADTH DEVELOPERS

Developers with both technical and product capabilities stand to gain as clear winners in the age of AI.

THE BEST ADVICE I GOT AT PAGERDUTY

Seven bits of advice gained over seven years.

HIDING SECRET CODES IN LIGHT PROTECTS AGAINST FAKE VIDEOS

Researchers at Cornell have developed a way to watermark light in videos, making it possible to detect if a video is fake or has been manipulated.

BING IS GROWING WITH THE HELP OF AI AS GOOGLE SLIGHTLY SHRINKS

Bing is the search backend for some AI agents, such as ChatGPT and Meta AI, giving its numbers a bit of a boost.

ELON MUSK IS BRINGING BACK VINE'S ARCHIVES THAT WERE THOUGHT TO BE LOST MEDIA

Twitter bought Vine almost a decade ago.

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COINBASE SAYS IT'S LAUNCHING TOKENIZED STOCKS, PREDICTIONS MARKETS FOR U.S. USERS IN COMING MONTHS

Coinbase plans to expand its core trading app to include tokenized real-world assets, stocks, derivatives, prediction markets, and early-stage token sales. These new offers will roll out first to US users in the next few months, followed by a gradual international rollout based on jurisdictional approvals. The expansion puts the exchange in even closer competition with Robinhood, Gemini, and Kraken. The Securities and Exchange Commission recently introduced an initiative to modernize securities rules and regulations to allow for crypto-based trading activity.

FIGMA MORE THAN TRIPLES IN NYSE DEBUT AFTER SELLING SHARES AT $33

Figma's shares more than tripled in its New York Stock Exchange debut yesterday. The company sold shares at $33 in its initial public offering - FIG closed at $115.50. Figma ended the day with a market cap of almost $68 billion. Adobe had agreed to acquire Figma for $20 billion in 2022, but the deal fell apart after UK regulators said it would likely harm competition.

MOON'S FIRST-EVER RADIO TELESCOPE READY FOR THE DARK SIDE

The Lunar Surface Electromagnetics Experiment (LuSEE-Night) is a radio telescope that will be deployed on the far side of the Moon. The moon will act as a shield against the radio interference coming from Earth. LuSEE-Night is scheduled to launch as part of Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost 2 lunar lander mission late this year or early next. It is designed to detect the signals that are key to unlocking the secrets of the Cosmic Dark Ages, the period after the cosmic microwave background formed 380,000 years after the Big Bang and before the formation of the first stars and galaxies.

GOOGLE'S GEOTHERMAL EXPERIMENTS ARE ENGINEERING TEMPLATES FOR THE ENERGY TRANSITION

Data centers are under pressure to run denser, hotter, and longer, and traditional air cooling is approaching its limit. Meeting demand now requires rethinking the entire power-thermal integration stack. Google is integrating geothermal systems directly into its next-generation data centers. If successful, the systems could help Google meet its power needs with near-constant carbon-free energy.

ENGINEERING BUY-IN

The best way to convince those around you to take on a project idea is to individually talk about it with many relevant people before finally pitching it to a decision-making group. Your odds of success dramatically increase if you've talked to the decision-makers in advance and have addressed their issues or incorporated their additions. Leaders need to create buy-in from their teams to maintain team morale. Getting everyone to buy in encourages autonomous collaboration and helps iteration happen quickly, but it could also lead to groupthink, exclude oppositional peers, and cause teams to misrepresent reality.

OUR FIRST OUTAGE FROM LLM-WRITTEN CODE

Sketch experienced a series of mini-outages on July 15. An LLM had made a small but critical change during a refactor that was missed by a human reviewer. When humans refactor code, they select the original text, cut it, move it to the new file, paste it, and then make intentional changes. LLMs write two patches, a deletion and an insertion, leaving room for transcription errors. Sketch added clipboard support to its agent environment to try to prevent further issues in transcription.

FIGMA: A RANDOM WALK IN PALO ALTO (2025)

Figma just went public in one of the largest IPOs in Silicon Valley history. This article tells the story of Figma and its founder, Dylan Field. Field's journey was a true Silicon Valley story. It seems likely that in the near future, more and more applications will be built by designers using Figma.

RAMBLINGS

Remote teams of two to 10 people could benefit from adding a personal 'ramblings' channel for each teammate. These channels let everyone share what's on their mind without cluttering group channels. They can be a great source for ideas, prototypes, or creative solutions to long-standing problems. They're also a great way to keep the human connection going within the company.

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I KNOW WHEN YOU'RE VIBE CODING

Developers should care about quality, consistency, and the long-term effects of their work and build software, not productionize prototypes.

YOUR PUBLIC CHATGPT QUERIES ARE GETTING INDEXED BY GOOGLE AND OTHER SEARCH ENGINES

OpenAI has removed the feature from ChatGPT that previously allowed users to make their public conversations discoverable by search engines - the company says it was a short-lived experiment.

GOOGLE LOSES APP STORE ANTITRUST APPEAL, MUST MAKE SWEEPING CHANGES TO PLAY STORE

A jury found that Google abused its market position in smartphones to block competition from Epic and others in 2023.

I TRIED SERVO, THE UNDERCOVER WEB BROWSER ENGINE MADE WITH RUST

Servo is a web rendering engine written in Rust built around multi-threaded operations and memory safety.

MCP-USE

MCP-Use is an open source package that connects any large language model to any MCP server.

50 THINGS I KNOW

A list of 50 life lessons spanning many topics.

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TIKTOK INTRODUCES COMMUNITY NOTES IN THE FORM OF FOOTNOTES, A NEW FACT-CHECKING TOOL

TikTok's Footnotes is officially rolling out in the US for users in the pilot program. There are around 80,000 users contributing to TikTok's version of Community Notes - all of them have had active TikTok accounts for at least six months, live in the US, haven't had community guidelines violations in the past six months, and are at least 18 years old. Footnotes will be moderated with a combination of automated moderation and human moderation. Users can report footnotes they think are untrue or break TikTok's rules.

TESLA TAKES FIRST STEP IN SUNSETTING MODEL S AND X WITH DRASTIC MOVE

Tesla could be sunsetting the Model S and Model X as it has ended international orders. The two oldest cars in the company's lineup, the vehicles account for a very small portion of overall sales. Tesla doesn't make enough of the Model S or Model X units to justify the expensive logistics process of shipping custom orders overseas. It is possible the company may build a bunch of random configurations, send them overseas every few months, and let them sell before replenishing inventory.

THE SCIENCE BEHIND REGROWING MISSING TEETH

Clinical trials for a drug that could eventually help people regrow missing or damaged teeth have begun in Japan. While humans typically grow two sets of teeth in their lifetime, the buds necessary to grow a third set still exist. The drug blocks a protein that limits tooth growth. The researchers hope to roll the drug out to the wider public by 2030.

HELION BREAKS GROUND ON WHAT COULD BE THE WORLD'S FIRST FUSION PLANT DESPITE SIGNIFICANT UNCERTAINTY

Helion Energy has started site work on its commercial fusion power plant. The company's first facility is scheduled to start operating in 2028. It is building a 50 megawatt reactor to power Microsoft's data centers in the region. The entire tech sector is scrambling for new clean energy sources to power the servers that support artificial intelligence. Helion has spent 12 years on research and development and building prototypes in preparation for this deployment.

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FAST

Fast software changes behavior. Fast eliminates cognitive friction and signals simplicity, which is rare in the world where code and content are commodities. Making software fast often requires stripping away non-essential features - the ultimate expression of respect in a world obsessed with adding rather than refining. It means the developer has thought deeply about what matters and eliminated everything else.

CHOOSE BORING TECHNOLOGY, REVISITED

Choose novel technology when trying to learn something new and use boring technology when trying to solve a problem. Boring technologies have known failure modes, well-understood capabilities, and proven operational reliability. The advent of large language models and agent AI coding tools has made this principle even more critical. Developers who use technologies unknown to them have no way of verifying whether AI is leading them down the wrong path.

PERSONAL SUPERINTELLIGENCE

Mark Zuckerberg says that the development of superintelligence is now in sight. He is extremely optimistic that superintelligence will help humans accelerate their pace of progress and begin a new era of personal empowerment where people will have greater agency to improve the world in the directions they choose. Meta's vision is to bring personal superintelligence to everyone to help them achieve goals, create what they want to see in the world, experience any adventure, and grow to become the person they aspire to be. It believes that the benefits of superintelligence should be shared with the world as broadly as possible.

WHY I BELIEVE IN AGI (AGAIN)

ChatGPT now seems to understand what it reads. The use of reasoning models shows that ChatGPT can be creative. It can summarize texts extremely well, a robust measure of intelligence. AI products now pay for AGI research, which means that AI has reached early stages of the long-awaited self-improvement loop.

AGENTIC CODING THINGS THAT DIDN'T WORK

The big hidden risk with automation through large language models is that it encourages mental disengagement, resulting in engineers overestimating agents' capabilities.

THE MATH IS HAUNTED

Lean is a programming language that lets mathematicians treat mathematics as code.

META & STANFORD'S THIN HOLOGRAPHIC DISPLAY BRINGS "VR GLASSES" CLOSER TO REALITY

Meta and Stanford recently released a paper describing a prototype pair of VR glasses with a total optical stack thickness of less than 3 millimeters.

VIBE CODE IS LEGACY CODE

Vibe coding is perfect for prototypes and throwaway projects because the code doesn't have to be maintained - anything more serious needs a more careful approach.

A DIVE INTO OPEN CHAT PROTOCOLS

A look at the current ecosystem of chat protocols, the problems that exist, and possible solutions to make a better open chat protocol.

A SHORT POST ON SHORT TRAINS

The single biggest cost for any metro system is the stations - a system that uses smaller trains would result in smaller stations and huge cost savings.

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MICROSOFT NEARS OPENAI AGREEMENT FOR ONGOING TECH ACCESS

Microsoft and OpenAI are in advanced talks over an agreement that would remove a major obstacle to OpenAI's efforts to become a for-profit enterprise. The new terms would let Microsoft use OpenAI's latest technology even if the startup decides it has reached its goal of building artificial general intelligence. The deal has still not been finalized and could change.

SPACEX UNVEILS NEW VERSION OF MARS-BOUND STARSHIP

OVER-THE-AIR LASERS AIM TO SOLVE THE INTERNET'S “MIDDLE MILE”

Startup Taara has a simple alternative to fiber-optic cables for crossing cities and tough terrain: free-space optical lasers. Its technology can reliably deliver 20-gigabit-per-second bandwidth across distances up to 20 kilometers. The company is planning to create a smaller version that can point, track, send, and receive signals at tens of gigabits per second indoors at 60 meters, as well as outdoors at 1 kilometer. Its biggest challenge is weather, but the technology will usually work as long as the other side is visible.

A PILL FOR SLEEP APNEA COULD BE ON THE HORIZON

Apnimed achieved positive results for its first oral pill for treating sleep apnea in a Phase 3 clinical trial. The pill is taken just before bedtime to help keep a person's airway open. It could be a game-changer for those with sleep apnea - the current treatment involves putting on a face mask connected to a Continuous Positive Airway Pressure (CPAP) machine, which keeps airways open by forcing air into them. The machines are effective, but they are noisy and can be uncomfortable, so many end up abandoning them, leaving them feeling exhausted, irritable, and unfocused during the day.