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A SHORT STORY ABOUT DEFERRING TECH CHOICES TO THOUGHT LEADERS

Thought leaders put their energy into promoting new stuff, not running it.

AN INTERVIEW WITH FIGMA CEO DYLAN FIELD ABOUT DESIGN AND AI

Figma co-founder and CEO Dylan Field discusses Figma's almost acquisition, its IPO, the company's differentiation discovery process, the nature of creativity versus design, and AI.

NO-ONE ESCAPES THE PERMANENT UNDERCLASS

AI taking over will mean most workers will be replaced and the 'permanent overclass' and government will be disempowered.

COMPANIES COULD SOON STAFF ‘STUBBORNLY LOCAL' JOBS WITH WORKERS 4,000 MILES AWAY

Chinese tech company BuilderX Robotics' technology allows remote operators to control physical machines with a 5G or satellite connection.

LINUX FOUNDATION AND INDUSTRY LEADERS LAUNCH AKRITES TO DEFEND CRITICAL OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE AGAINST AI-ENABLED CYBER THREATS

Akrites provides a single, standardized Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure process built on confidentiality-first principles and the industry's established standards and tooling.

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OPENAI UNVEILS FIRST CHIP AS PART OF BROADCOM DEAL IN EFFORT TO ‘BUILD THE FULL STACK'

OpenAI and Broadcom's Jalapeño chip is designed for inference, the compute-intensive process of serving AI models to users. It took nine months for the companies to design the chips end-to-end. The use of OpenAI's AI models helped accelerate the process. Jalapeño is a major step in OpenAI's plan to build the full-stack behind its models and products.

TESLA, SUNRUN TEAM UP ON 16 GW VIRTUAL POWER PLANT FOR DATA CENTERS

Sunrun, Tesla, and Renew Home have announced an agreement to aggregate more than 16 gigawatts of home batteries and other devices into the largest distributed power plant in the US. The project aims to address the surging electricity demand from data centers. The companies already have more than 300 megawatts of capacity ready for immediate deployment in Virginia. They expect capacity to grow to at least 500 megawatts by 2030 as more home batteries and thermostats come online.

A NEW $500 MILLION FUND IS TRYING TO ELIMINATE THE COMMON COLD

Intercept is a project aimed at making respiratory infections like the common cold and flu a thing of the past. Launched on June 24, it will support research into the adoption of technologies like air filtration to remove pathogens from the air directly. The project has received $500 million in investments from a variety of sources, including Stripe and Anthropic. The funds will be used to back the development of treatments that could protect people from many viruses at once.

THE ROOMBA GUY'S SECOND ACT: A ROBOT YOU'LL WANT TO SNUGGLE

Colin Angle, who led iRobot for nearly three decades, has a new startup called Familiar Machines & Magic that is selling a robot designed to help people monitor their loved ones. The robot, called the Familiar, is an expressive, furry creature that can react to people's actions and feelings in an emotionally intelligent way. It is still in an early prototype stage, so there's no information about price or availability, but videos of the current iteration of the product are available in the article. The Familiar will use local small models to process requests and won't send any data to the cloud.

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WHAT I'M FINDING ABOUT LLM CODE STYLE AND TOKEN COSTS

Large language models will code from scratch unless you explicitly tell them about existing functionalities. They don't know to use existing code unless you tell them to. Letting them know what already exists can result in significant token savings. It can also help remove entire categories of security and reliability issues.

THE CASE FOR LANGUAGE-NATIVE SOFTWARE

Natural language is becoming an interface. Software is beginning to understand instructions in human language. Language-native software will accept intent in the language users already speak, translate it into structured operations, and execute them deterministically. This makes language the interface itself.

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THE CEO OF AWS ON WHY AMAZON IS HIRING 11,000 INTERNS AND JUNIOR EMPLOYEES

Amazon is increasingly in the business of selling software that does white-collar work. However, Matt Garman, the CEO of AWS, says he isn't worried about AI destroying a huge number of jobs. He believes that jobs might change, but they're not going away. This article features highlights from an interview with Garman where he discusses how technology changes work.

ANTHROPIC'S WHITE HOUSE NEGOTIATIONS ARE REPORTEDLY ON TRACK AFTER ‘WEIRDO' DARIO AMODEI WAS REPLACED

Dario Amodei was reportedly weird and hard to deal with during the negotiations between the White House and Anthropic. Talks are now on track now that his role in the discussions has been replaced by Tom Brown, another Anthropic co-founder. Brown's manner is warmer and more traditionally personable. He is working on the talks alongside Sarah Heck, Anthropic's Head of Public Policy, who is quite disciplined and cautious but comes across as enthusiastic and on-message.

STOP PROGRAMMING IN MARKDOWN

People are using LLMs inappropriately in situations where regular code would fare much better.

QUALCOMM LANDS META AS FIRST NAMED CUSTOMER FOR ITS DRAGONFLY DATA CENTRE CHIPS

The Dragonfly C1000 is a general-purpose server processor expected to be available in 2028.

AMAZON SELLER REVEALS RARE GLIMPSE OF SHADOW BRIBERY MARKET

Middlemen on messaging apps like Telegram, WeChat, and WhatsApp are offering access to people inside Amazon who can get things done for a price.

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WRITING LOOPS, NOT PROMPTS, EXPLAINED

Automate the parts of prompting that you keep repeating, and keep judgment close to the parts that matter.

STOP BUILDING CHATBOTS. BUILD AGENTS THAT OPEN PRS

PRs are an artifact that can be reviewed or rejected by a human.

I WROTE A 70X FASTER SQL PARSER WHILE BARELY LOOKING AT THE CODE

Lessons learned when rewriting PostHog's SQL parser using multiple Claude Code sessions running in parallel.

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ANTHROPIC WANTS CLAUDE TO BE YOUR NEW SLACK COWORKER

Claude Tag is a new feature that lets users create a chatbot that interacts on their behalf on Slack. It can be used to monitor Slack activity, send alerts about important posts, drop comments in conversations, and fix issues with code. Claude Tag will replace the existing Claude Slack app. It is being rolled out to Anthropic's enterprise and team subscription users.

MARK ZUCKERBERG DIRECTED META TO CREATE A PREDICTION MARKETS APP

Mark Zuckerberg recently dispatched a small team at Meta to create a smartphone app similar to Polymarket and Kalshi. The app uses a points system rather than real money, but Meta has not ruled out the eventual use of real money betting. Internally referred to as 'Arena', the app will function independently from Meta's other apps. The effort is part of a broader purchase at the company to create new types of apps based on emerging social behavior online.

WITH STARFALL, SPACEX EYES AN EDGE IN GLOBAL CARGO DELIVERY FROM ORBIT

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off yesterday with a new saucer-shaped reentry pod called Starfall. The secretive mission's purpose is reportedly to support the transport and delivery of goods through space. Most of what is known about Starfall comes from the FAA's environmental assessment, which says that Starfall will enable point-to-point delivery of critical cargo through space on rapid timelines and provide access to space for commercial in-space manufacturing. Starfall is designed exclusively for cargo and is smaller than SpaceX's human-rated Crew Dragon spacecraft.

WAR BY OTHER MEANS

The use of robots in war will only increase. All signs point towards governments relying on a much smaller pool of human capital for labor and war. The use of unmanned munitions drives down costs and lessens the need for humans on the battlefield without weakening deterrence. This means that a fundamental source of political power has begun to shift from the people towards the firms that make the machines.

THE COMING LOOP

Agent loops are enabling teams to build at astonishing speeds. However, their use reduces developers to the role of merely a messenger. Looping is powerful, but it removes responsibility and encourages people to give in to the machine. While agent loops are likely going to be the future, it's important for developers to retain good judgment and ensure the rules of good engineering are kept.

THE PROBLEM IS PROMPT DEBT

Treating natural language as a specification language for engineering quietly caps what you can build. Prompt debt increases as additional guidance is added to instructions to nudge models into line. These prompts, full of edge cases and threats to the AI, become impossible to comprehend for teams. Prompt debt locks developers into older models, possibly making them miss potentially cheaper, faster, and better models.

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NSA LOST ACCESS TO POWERFUL AI MODEL AMID ANTHROPIC DISPUTE

NSA cybersecurity analysts were testing versions of Anthropic's tools when export controls were imposed on the company. The tests found that Mythos was able to identify cybersecurity flaws within the NSA's classified network quickly. Analysts were impressed with Mythos' capabilities in controlled test settings. There is an effort to push forward a classified contract between Anthropic and the NSA that would allow the agency to use the company's AI technology for a variety of purposes, but that contract has not been finalized.

DEAD PLAYERS

Founders used to aim for the stars. iPhones, social networks, large language models, and cryptocurrency are the sort of non-linear increments that were either created by accident or in the process of trying to do the impossible or unprecedented. The non-linear option is now more impersonal and lower-risk than ever. This means people who have no personal reason to take risks and pursue a moonshot are more likely to try anyway.

decisions and meaningful ROI. Time to eliminate AI blind spots

THE TRUTH ABOUT BEING A MANAGER

Management is a challenging and often lonely journey.

PLEASE KEEP CODE DESCRIPTIONS SIMPLE

Commit messages, merge request descriptions, and code comments should be kept clear, to the point, and on a need-to-know basis.

LESS IS MORE, MORE OR LESS

More things being made doesn't mean better things are being made.

VULNERABILITY REPORTS ARE NOT SPECIAL ANYMORE

The bottleneck now is assessing which issues are real.

META ANNOUNCES NEW SMART GLASSES STARTING AT $299, AS ZUCKERBERG KEEPS PUSHING WEARABLES

The Meta Glasses come with new designs built in partnership with EssilorLuxottica.

APPLE AND DISNEY HAD CONVERSATIONS ABOUT MERGING, SAYS BOB IGER

The talks never went anywhere because Apple didn't show that much interest.

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