The world's first regenerative cell therapy for treating spinal injuries has been granted approval for a registrational Phase I clinical trial. Chinese biotechnology company XellSmart's allogeneic induced pluripotent stem cells regenerative therapy aims to repair injuries and provide the foundation to regrow all the cells needed to return function to the damaged region. It doesn't require harvesting cells from a patient and is a 'one size fits all' treatment that will work with anyone who has a spinal cord injury. If it passes through the trial phases, the treatment will be easy to manufacture and scale for broad access.
Amazon Aurora DSQL is a serverless, distributed relational database service optimized for transactional workloads. The goal of its design was to break up the database into bite-sized chunks with clear interfaces and explicit contracts. Each component would do one thing and do it well but work together to offer all of the features users expect from a database. DSQL was written in Rust, which gave the team the control they needed to avoid tail latency in the core parts of the system, the flexibility to integrate with a C code base like Postgres, and the high-level productivity the team needed to stand up its control plane.
A monorepo is a powerful tool for institutional consistency. They are used to enforce engineering culture and organization standards and build a culture of code sharing. Achieving a productive monorepo is a continuous process as organizations continue to scale and tools begin to break, but it can be worth it if organizations are willing to commit to it. This post looks at some of the tools needed to set up a monorepo and discusses implementation strategies for them to paint a clear picture of what it is like to walk the monorepo path.
Elon Musk had approached Apple with an offer in 2022 after hearing the company was planning to announce a satellite feature with the iPhone 14. His offer was for SpaceX to provide exclusive satellite connectivity to iPhones for 18 months if Apple would pay $5 billion upfront. Musk had also threatened to announce his own satellite feature that would work on iPhones if Apple couldn't come to terms with SpaceX. Apple rejected the offer and Musk made good on his threat - SpaceX announced a partnership with T-Mobile to provide satellite services for users in areas with no reception. The company's satellite efforts will likely remain very limited moving forward as it could trigger the US government to regulate it as a telecommunications carrier.
Shiny new technologies emerge every few years promising to make software developers obsolete. However, what actually happens isn't replacement, it's transformation. These technologies that promised to eliminate the need for technical expertise ended up creating entirely new specializations, often at higher salary points than before. The same pattern is playing out in AI-assisted development. The most valuable skill in software isn't writing code, it's architecting systems, and that's one skill AI isn't close to replacing.
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Apple plans to introduce a design overhaul for all of its operating systems at WWDC. The updated interface, codenamed 'Solarium', will give the operating systems a more slick and modern appearance. It borrows a lot of elements from visionOS. The UI overhaul will be the biggest for iPhones since iOS 7 in 2013 and for Macs since macOS Big Sur in 2020.
SpaceX has been moving more employees into Starship roles in recent months. The space company has also been making big investments in its complex in Texas for the vehicle and has similar plans for Florida. It is behind schedule on a variant of Starship for a NASA mission to the moon currently set for 2027. SpaceX has been struggling this year, with back-to-back Starship flight tests that ended in explosions.
The number of diseases that the GLP-1 category of drugs seems to be effective in treating is expanding rapidly. The drug could be beneficial to a third to a majority of adults. Many of the proven and potential benefits of the drugs cascade from their effect on obesity, but some are independent of weight loss, possibly from the anti-inflammatory effects of the drugs.
TSMC is working with startup Avicena to produce microLED-based interconnects. The technology is designed to meet the high needs of communication among an increasing number of GPUs in a low-cost, energy-efficient way. AI clusters are facing unprecedented requirements - sooner or later, the copper wires that connect processors and memory within a single AI data rack will have to be replaced with optics. Avicena's approach is very unorthodox, but it is ideal for these short-distance applications.
Delve ran 4 placements across 2 TLDR newsletters and brought in 66 leads, with a meaningful chunk from enterprise. The result: $1M in attributed pipeline and a 52x ROI.
While some engineers can't seem to stop raving about how much of a superpower large language models are for coding, others find it to be an extremely finicky process that requires an extreme amount of coddling to get average results at best. This could be because of the type of work the engineers are doing - AI seems to be productive for greenfield work, but it is pretty useless when it comes to maintaining existing systems, adding more complicated features, or needing to know business domain details. Some engineers find it much quicker and easier to just write code themselves as they always do a better job in the end.
Nix was designed to solve the lack of true reproducibility in software development. While it has been around for two decades, Nix has largely flown under the radar of mainstream development. This is likely due to its steep learning curve. However, the tooling around Nix has matured significantly, so it's now worth giving it a try.
The biggest banks in the US are in discussions about whether to team up and issue a joint stablecoin. The talks are in early stages and any final decision would depend on how stablecoins will be legislated. Banks have been bracing for the possibility that stablecoins could become widely adopted under President Trump. Stablecoins could speed up more routine transactions, but there is still some skepticism about the security of the technology and the regulatory implications of getting involved with digital assets.
Kodgem built its business around a device that helped people with their posture. Despite the company's growth to $1 million in revenue, there was zero profit for its founders due to several mistakes, including inventory planning disasters, no real financial management, and failed marketplace partnerships. The founders never paid themselves, causing them to almost burn out completely multiple times. They had gotten caught up in the growth story and forgotten the most basic rule of business: you need to make more money than you spend.
People use data to make decisions because they think that data is the truest form of objectivity, but bias isn't something that can be easily removed - it's important to remember that data isn't any more objective than we are.
We're building a world where curiosity gets lobotomized at the door - the industry is going to be filled with people who think they're good because of their bots, while people who put in the effort will get chewed up by a system that doesn't value understanding anymore.
This article discusses an approach to lossless video compression that involves repurposing Bloom filters and requires no external data for decompression.
Authentication isn't just login. It's building secure flows, managing sessions, handling tokens, supporting SSO, and protecting user data. AuthKit [5] provides a fully hosted, customizable UI for sign-up, password resets, MFA, and seamless SSO — production-ready from day one.
Demis Hassabis, the chief executive of Google DeepMind, has been dreaming of artificial general intelligence (AGI) for years. He was already taking the possibility of AGI seriously when Google acquired DeepMind in 2014. Today, he is among a growing number of tech leaders racing to build AGI. Hassabis and a colleague received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry last year for their work on AlphaFold, an AI system capable of predicting the three-dimensional structures of proteins. This article contains a transcript of an interview with Hassabis about his views on AGI and the future that follows its arrival.
Nvidia's DGX Cloud Lepton is a new service designed to link artificial intelligence developers with Nvidia's network of cloud providers, including CoreWeave, Lambda, and Crusoe. It provides access to Nvidia's graphics processing units, making those chips more widely accessible to all developers. The platform will have a marketplace of GPU cloud vendors that developers can pick from to train and use their AI models. Developers can choose which cloud provider to work with and even work with multiple cloud providers.
Autonomous robots aren't being used to operate on people yet, but the technology is almost capable of such a feat and more autonomy is on the way. The technology could help hospitals meet the high demand for safety and consistency during surgeries, manage routine tasks, and prevent mistakes. Future robots will use AI to autonomously manage movements and decision-making during surgical tasks, reducing the need for constant human input. With the number of surgeons around the world declining while the number of people who need surgery continues to increase, the need for the technology is clear.
Starfish Neuroscience, a brain-computer interface startup incorporated by Valve co-founder and CEO Gabe Newell, plans to produce its very first brain chip later this year. The company is currently seeking collaborators to open up avenues for the technology. Starfish's goal is to create a smaller and less invasive implant than the competition that can enable simultaneous access to multiple brain regions. Details from the chip's current spec sheet are available in the article. The article also links to a video of a talk from Valve that explains how the technology could enhance gaming.
Will Larson worked at Carta as its CTO for the past two years. This post contains the most important lessons Larson learned in his time at the company, covering topics such as engineering strategy, large language model adoption, multi-dimensional tradeoffs, creating software quality, and more.
Bohan Zhang, a member of OpenAI's Infrastructure team, recently shared the company's best practices with PostgreSQL at the PGConf.dev 2025 Global Developer Conference. The talk offers a glimpse into the database usage of one of the most prominent unicorn companies and demonstrates how PostgreSQL can scale gracefully under massive read loads. OpenAI utilizes managed databases on Azure, employing a classic PostgreSQL primary-replication architecture without sharding. This article covers the content of Zhang's talk along with comments and includes some more details about OpenAI's infrastructure.
As AI spreads through the labor force, many white-collar workers say their work is becoming more routine, less thoughtful, and much faster-paced. Companies seem to be persuaded that AI can increase productivity. Teams are getting smaller, but they're being expected to output the same amount of work by using AI. Managers say that AI can relieve employees of tedious tasks and enable them to perform more interesting work, but for inexperienced workers, the change resembles the shift from artisanal work to factory work in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Large language models are becoming commodities. Many people use them, but few people are developing them from scratch. Developing large language models involves a lot of hardcore computer science and math - people can use them without having to know any of the internals. While it might be helpful to understand some of the internals and math, it's probably best to stick to learning how to get good at using these models and integrating what they do into agentic systems.
MCP could inspire a new generation of developers to push for the web to go back towards its natural architecture, programmable through janky specs that everybody adopted for the sheer joy of something fun to hack on.