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GITHUB IS SINKING

With the introduction of Copilot, GitHub is now effectively DDoS-ing itself with slop.

ZIG HAS ONE OF THE MOST STRINGENT ANTI-LLM POLICIES OF ANY MAJOR OPEN SOURCE PROJECT

Zig doesn't allow large language models for issues, pull requests, or comments on the bug tracker.

AMAZON CHIPS NO LONGER JUST A SIDE DISH, THEY'RE A $20B BIZ

Amazon is now one of the top three data center chip businesses in the world.

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MUSK TESTIFIES HE'S SUING OPENAI TO STOP ALTMAN'S ‘LOOTING'

Elon Musk says that OpenAI's pivot from a charity to a for-profit business is wrong and sets a concerning precedent for other philanthropic efforts. He is suing OpenAI and its co-founders, seeking the unwinding of the for-profit restructuring of OpenAI. Musk says he felt that OpenAI's founders took advantage of his money, reputation, and guidance to get the startup off the ground, only to abandon its public-focused principles and capitalize on the project for their own benefit. OpenAI's attorneys say that the lawsuit is primarily an attempt to undermine a top competitor to Musk's own AI company.

OPENAI BRINGS ITS MODELS TO AMAZON'S CLOUD AFTER ENDING EXCLUSIVITY WITH MICROSOFT

OpenAI's models will be available via Amazon Web Services in the next few weeks. AWS customers will be able to experiment with OpenAI's models and its Codex agent through Amazon Bedrock. A new service called Amazon Bedrock Managed Agents powered by OpenAI will enable customers to construct sophisticated, customized agents with memory of previous interactions.

CURIOUS CASES OF FINANCIAL ENGINEERING IN BIOTECH

Finance doesn't really make drug development easier. However, it does make failure more survivable. Financialization is just the process of making implicit economic relationships explicit and tradable. Having more liquid markets for biotech risk is almost certainly better than having fewer. The industry being willing to fund biology that's expensive and likely to fail could result in more discoveries that change the world.

ANTIBIOTICS ARE AN ECONOMIC FAILURE

The discovery of antibiotics enabled many of our modern medical procedures, including many routine surgeries and immunosuppressant treatments such as chemotherapy. Antibiotic resistance is considered to be one of the greatest public health threats to humanity. If a new antibiotic entered the market, it would either be used as a last line of defense, which means few doses would be sold, or it would be widely used until resistance developed again, after which sales would drop. Antibiotics are only used for a few days, so there's little profit potential. These factors mean there's less money in developing and selling antibiotics compared to drugs for chronic diseases.

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LONG-RUNNING AGENTS

Long-running agents can keep making progress over time across many context windows and sandboxes. They can recover from failure, leave structural artifacts behind, and resume where they left off. This post looks at the current state of long-running agents and explains how an engineer can use long-running agents today without writing the whole thing from scratch.

GITHUB ACTIONS IS THE WEAKEST LINK

Almost every open source supply chain incident from the past eighteen months involves GitHub Actions features behaving exactly as documented. Actions is basically a package manager with no lockfile, no integrity hashes, and no transitive visibility. The whole product is a collection of features that are convenient, but very easy to assemble into something dangerous. GitHub plans to add fixes, but the company says that changing the defaults will break existing workflows.

SOFTWARE IS EATING THE WORLD (BUT ACTUALLY THIS TIME)

Software ate distribution, but most of the work was still done by humans. AI changes that - the work is now becoming software. Agents can read, reason, call tools, verify, revise, and perform long-running tasks. As models commoditize, the apps that capture messy operational data will be the ones to improve fastest and defend their position longest.

HOW CHATGPT SERVES ADS

OpenAI's ad platform has two halves. The ChatGPT back end injects structured objects into the conversation while the model is responding. On the merchant side, a tracking SDK runs in the visitor's browser and reports product views back to OpenAI. These two parts are tied together by Fernet-encrypted click tokens. This post explains each part of the distribution loop in detail.

BEFORE GITHUB

Open source was a much smaller world before GitHub, and projects had to run their own infrastructure.

GHOSTTY IS LEAVING GITHUB

GitHub outages have gotten so common that they are negatively impacting developers' ability to work.

WARP

The new open-source Warp repository is funded by OpenAI, and the new agentic management workflows are powered by GPT models.

BECOME A CURATOR FOR TLDR AI (3-5 HRS/WEEK)

TLDR is looking for an engineer/researcher at a major AI lab or startup to help write for 1M+ subscribers. Our curators have been invited to Google I/O and OpenAI DevDay, scouted for Tier 1 VCs, and get early access to unreleased TLDR products. Learn more [20].

AI REWARDS STRICT APIS

AI agents struggle with ambiguity, so strict APIs are an important advantage.

A NEW TYPE OF NEUROPLASTICITY REWIRES THE BRAIN AFTER A SINGLE EXPERIENCE

Behavioral timescale synaptic plasticity is a type of learning in the hippocampus that may help the brain learn in a single attempt.

ARE PREDICTION MARKETS GOOD FOR ANYTHING?

Despite their founders calling them 'truth machines', prediction markets are overwhelmingly in service to their traders, not the seekers of truth.

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OPENAI IS MAKING ITS OWN PHONE TO COMPETE WITH THE IPHONE

OpenAI plans to launch its first phone in 2028. The company is working with MediaTek and Qualcomm to develop smartphone processors. Mass production is expected to start in 2028. Specifications and suppliers are expected to be finalized by late 2026 or Q1 2027. The phone will likely heavily utilize AI agents, making it work and feel very different from current smartphones.

APPLE PLANNING TO LAUNCH TWO NEW 'ULTRA' PRODUCTS IN THE NEXT YEAR

Apple plans to release the iPhone Ultra and the MacBook Ultra in the next year. The iPhone Ultra will be a foldable iPhone that will likely be released alongside the iPhone 17 Pro, despite not being part of the iPhone 18 lineup. The MacBook Ultra will feature an OLED panel and a touch screen. Its release may be pushed back by several months due to memory supply chain shortages. An AirPods Ultra could also be on the way.

META PLATFORMS ENTERS SOLAR-POWER PACT

Meta has agreed to purchase up to a gigawatt of solar power from Overview Energy, a startup that aims to deploy satellites capable of providing power to customers on Earth. Overview is working toward an in-space demonstration in 2028. It will target commercial service two years after that. The company is currently developing the satellites along with the production lines to manufacture them.

THE WORLD'S MOST COMPLEX MACHINE

Advanced semiconductors are the most important technology in the world. However, everyone who hopes to manufacture semiconductors is dependent on ASML, a relatively obscure Dutch company. ASML makes the only machines in the world capable of stenciling the transistors onto a chip with the precision necessary to fit billions on a 30-centimeter wafer. This article tells the story of how ASML overtook its competition to become the sole supplier of these machines.

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TESLA FILES TO DELIVER ELON MUSK'S $56 BILLION PAY PACKAGE – ENDING THE SAGA

Tesla has filed an S-8 registration statement with the SEC to register 303,960,630 shares of common stock for CEO Elon Musk under his 2018 pay package. The award was contingent on Tesla hitting 12 escalating market cap and operational milestones. It granted Musk options to buy 304 million shares (split-adjusted) at $23.34 per share. Musk must remain CEO or a product development executive at Tesla through to at least 2028 for the shares to vest, and he's required to hold them for five years.

SYMPHONY

Symphony allows teams to manage work instead of supervising coding agents. It turns project work into isolated, autonomous implementation runs. The agents complete tasks and provide Proof-of-Work, allowing engineers to work at a higher level. Symphony works best in codebases that have adopted harness engineering.

AGENT MEMORY PATTERNS

This article discusses how to add memory to agents. The three most common types of mutable memory are Files, Memory Blocks, and Skills. Files are for data and knowledge, Memory Blocks are a flat key-value store, and Skills are indexed files that contain data or instructions that are only needed in certain circumstances. Editable memory makes agents extremely powerful.

OPENAI AND MICROSOFT REACH DEAL TO GIVE STARTUP NEW FREEDOM

OpenAI and Microsoft have forged a new deal that gives OpenAI the freedom to partner with anyone, caps the revenue OpenAI must share with Microsoft through 2030, and removes a clause that allowed OpenAI to limit Microsoft's access to its future technology when systems reach the AGI threshold. The relationship between the two companies was strained last year in part because of the control Microsoft had over OpenAI's intellectual property and exclusivity agreements. The revised deal offers greater predictability for the companies.

OPENAI MISSES KEY REVENUE, USER TARGETS IN HIGH-STAKES SPRINT TOWARD IPO

OpenAI's Chief Financial Officer is worried the company might not be able to pay for future computing contracts if revenue doesn't grow fast enough.

CHINA BLOCKS META'S $2 BILLION TAKEOVER OF AI STARTUP MANUS

China's state planner has told Meta to unwind its $2 billion acquisition of Manus as the sale did not comply with laws and regulations concerning export controls, technology import and exports, and overseas investment.

PRODUCTS DO LABS (AND LABS DO PRODUCTS)

Product companies can do faster, less formal, more product-driven experimentation and research, while labs build products that push and inspire companies to build better, more curated services for consumers.

BECOME A CURATOR FOR TLDR AI (3-5 HRS/WEEK)

TLDR is looking for an engineer/researcher at a major AI lab or startup to help write for 1M+ subscribers. Our curators have been invited to Google I/O and OpenAI DevDay, scouted for Tier 1 VCs, and get early access to unreleased TLDR products. Learn more [24].

THE TASK IS NOT THE JOB

The argument that AI will remove the need for entry-level white-collar workers confuses task automation with the extinction of jobs.

MICROSOFT CLAWS AWAY 'THE CLAUSE' AS OPENAI CLAWS BACK SOME INDEPENDENCE

Microsoft and OpenAI have announced an amended agreement to simplify their partnership and the way they work together.

MICROSOFT FINALLY AGREES WINDOWS 11 HAS PROBLEMS, AND K2 IS ITS PLAN TO FIX THEM, CLAIMS REPORT

The Windows K2 plan involves a marathon of updates introduced over time to fix problems in Windows.

THE MOAT OR THE COMMONS

Open weight models are commoditizing the capability that the American capital-financed AI monopoly was supposed to protect.

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APPLE'S COOK GIVES TERNUS A PIPELINE OF 10 MAJOR NEW PRODUCT CATEGORIES

John Ternus will officially begin his tenure as Apple's new CEO on September 1. He will reveal Apple's biggest new product in a decade, the first foldable iPhone, less than two weeks later. Ternus oversaw the engineering and product development of the device, which makes him the perfect person to be the face of the new era of the iPhone. The launch will give the new CEO a tailwind in both buzz and revenue while letting Ternus tout a product that reflects his style.

MUSK VIES TO TURN X INTO SUPER APP WITH BANKING TOOL NEAR LAUNCH

X Money is expected to launch to the public before the end of this month. The banking and payments platform will provide free peer-to-peer transfers, a personalized metal Visa debit card, and an AI concierge that tracks spending and sorts through past transactions. It has some competitive perks, including 3% cash back on eligible purchases and a 6% interest rate on cash savings. X Money still lacks payment licenses in several states.

TESLA CONFIRMS CYBERCAB WITH NO STEERING WHEEL ENTERS PRODUCTION

Tesla's Cybercab has officially entered production at the company's Giga Texas production facility outside of Austin. The Cybercab has no steering wheel or pedals. It relies fully on Tesla's advanced vision-only Full Self-Driving system. The start of Cybercab production is a signal that Tesla trusts its progress on Full Self-Driving and that autonomy is near.