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A FATHER, A SON, AND THEIR $108 BILLION PUSH FOR MEDIA MOGULDOM

Larry and David Ellison bought Paramount this summer, and now they are targeting Warner Bros. Discovery with a $108 billion hostile bid. Larry Ellison personally guaranteed $40.4 billion for the offer. If the deal works out, it could have enormous consequences for the news and entertainment industries. This article takes a look at the Ellison family, their past business dealings, and their relationship with each other throughout the years.

STARLINK PASSES 9 MILLION ACTIVE CUSTOMERS JUST WEEKS AFTER HITTING 8 MILLION

SpaceX's Starlink satellite service has surpassed 9 million active customers and is adding over 20,000 new users per day. Serving in over 155 countries, territories, and markets, the Starlink satellite constellation now has more than 9,000 low-Earth-orbit satellites. The growth rate reflects the rising demand for broadband in underserved regions. SpaceX may be positioning itself for an initial public offering as soon as next year, and Elon Musk has suggested in the past that Starlink could have its own IPO in the future.

THE VIRTUAL CELL WILL BE MORE LIKE GWAS THAN ALPHAFOLD

A virtual cell is a model that lets researchers model diseases and treatments. Tied with the push for virtual cells are efforts to build a foundational model, similar to AlphaFold. Researchers will need to create their own datasets to answer specific questions to be successful in the field. This will require models that have the ability to explicitly identify, isolate, and subtract confounding noise.

VIBIUM

Vibium is a browser automation infrastructure built for AI agents. It uses a single binary to drive a browser using AI, with zero setup. The tool handles browser management, proxies, MCP servers, and more. It works across Linux, macOS, and Windows, with no manual browser setup required.

PACKAGE MANAGERS KEEP USING GIT AS A DATABASE, IT NEVER WORKS OUT

Git was designed to be a distributed collaboration tool for source code. It wasn't designed to be used as a database for package registries. Package managers who use git as an index all had to build workarounds as they grew, causing pain for users and maintainers. Package registries need fast point queries for metadata.

RANDOM END OF YEAR SHOWER MUSINGS ON THE STATE OF THE STABLECOIN ECONOMY AND ITS PARTICIPANTS

Most new financial services companies will be built on stablecoin rails in the next decade. Stablecoin rails unlock programmable money, access to internet capital markets where genuinely new financial primitives are being built every day, and the ability to let agents manage funds with real guarantees. This is an opportunity to rethink what financial services should actually look like. Most of the industry is still running on the 2015 fintech playbook on new rails.

OPENAI HAS STARTED MOCKING UP WHAT ADS IN CHATGPT COULD LOOK LIKE

OpenAI employees have reportedly started discussions on different ways to prioritize sponsored information in ChatGPT. The company is considering giving priority placement to sponsored results when users are clearly talking about buying a product, showing ads based on user information, or a sponsored sidebar that shows ads relevant to the conversation. OpenAI is wary about turning off users, as they might not trust a chatbot that injects ads into sensitive conversations. The pressure to increase revenue is building on OpenAI, which signed a flurry of massive deals this year that it will have to pay for.

AVOID MINI-FRAMEWORKS

Mini-frameworks are custom frameworks that small teams develop on top of shared stacks.

NOBODY KNOWS HOW LARGE SOFTWARE PRODUCTS WORK

Large software systems are often very poorly understood, even by people most in a position to understand them, so the ability to accurately answer questions about large software systems is extremely valuable.

AST SPACEMOBILE LAUNCHES ITS MOST POWERFUL DIRECT-TO-CELL SATELLITE YET

AST's BlueBird 6 has a massive antenna and processing that will allow it to support more than 2,000 cells per satellite, with 120Mbps of bandwidth per cell, to unmodified phones on the ground.

MY 2026 OPEN SOCIAL WEB PREDICTIONS

This post shines a spotlight on trends and well-deserved projects.

MODEL.YAML

model.yaml is an open description standard for defining cross-platform, multi-format AI models.

SATURATION: WAYMO EDITION

A recent power outage in San Francisco caused Waymo robotaxis to get stuck.

MORAVEC'S PARADOX AND THE ROBOT OLYMPICS

Many of the things we struggle to program into computers can be learned from data, but only when that data is available. If we can't learn from data, we are forced to program it in at lower performance. Computers can learn any skill, but only with enough data, and we don't want to have to need huge amounts of data for every single task. As models get better, they will need less data to learn new tasks, and when this happens, we'll finally be able to build truly general methods that combine physical understanding and cognition.

MICROSOFT WANTS TO REPLACE ITS ENTIRE C AND C++ CODEBASE, PERHAPS BY 2030

Microsoft is hiring staff to translate its codebase from C and C++ to Rust. It plans to combine AI and algorithms to rewrite its biggest code bases. The engineer will be expected to work on the tools Microsoft is building to complete the project. The candidate will have to work three days a week in Microsoft's Redmond office. The role pays between $139,900 and $274,700 a year.

SINGLE INJECTION TRANSFORMS THE IMMUNE SYSTEM INTO A CANCER-KILLING MACHINE

An Australian team has discovered a way to transform normal T cells into supersoldiers in the body. The treatment helped four people with stubborn blood cancer go into remission for up to five months. The trial marks a step towards the next revolution in CAR T therapy. CAR T cells are usually made outside the body, and making them is costly for both the body and wallet. The durability of the new therapy, its longevity, and immune side effects still need to be studied, but the trials highlight the promise of a one-and-done therapy for deadly blood cancers.

THE ML DRUG DISCOVERY STARTUP TRYING REALLY, REALLY HARD TO NOT CHEAT (LEASH BIO)

Leash Bio is a Utah-based startup that aims to build big datasets of small-molecules x protein interactions and train a model on it, then use the trained model to design a drug. The startup has a nearly pathological design to make sure its models are learning the correct thing. The startup has produced a lot of interesting artifacts from its line of research. This post looks at a few of the discoveries the startup has made.

INTERVIEWING FOR ML/AI ENGINEERS

The ML Systems Design interview, as an interview type, is very easy to do badly. Some companies run a parody of the Big Tech interview process, while others clearly have thought deeply about what they want, but they still don't conduct effective interviews. The interview process should be robust enough to avoid being fooled by people who are good at talking, but still accurate enough to calibrate the candidate's level as well as willingness to push out-of-band offers. The best pitch for a candidate is to present to them a slate of talented and thoughtful interviewers who could be their future co-workers, and an interview process rigorous enough to assure them that their co-workers have been thoroughly examined.

ON FRIDAY DEPLOYS: SOMETIMES THAT PUPPY NEEDS MURDERING

Deploy freezes are a workaround, not a virtue. It's possible to evade the high-stakes peril of locks and freezes and terrifying recoveries by freezing merges and letting people work on other things, and also not freezing deploys unless your goal is to test deploy freezes. We often forget about the outages and instability we trigger with our inaction. Just run the deploy process as usual, but don't ship new code out.

STEAM, STEEL, AND INFINITE MINDS

Every technological shift requires people to stop seeing the world through the past and start imagining a new one. We are still trying to build chatbots onto workflows designed for humans. What we should do instead is to imagine what knowledge work could look like when the busywork is delegated to minds that never sleep. The knowledge economy is about to undergo a significant transformation.

WHAT JOBS ARE MADE OF

Early-career roles are traditionally more execution-heavy. Over time, contribution tends to shift toward judgment and agency. AI systems are making faster progress on execution than on defining problems, choosing what to work on, and navigating ambiguity. This disproportionately affects entry-level hiring as the execution layer becomes cheaper and thinner.

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CODEX IS A SLYTHERIN, CLAUDE IS A HUFFLEPUFF

If AI models were in Hogwarts houses, Gemini would be Gryffindor, Mistral would be Ravenclaw, Codex would be Slytherin, and Claud would be Hufflepuff.

THE COORDINATION TAX

Some judgment is genuinely irreplaceable, but most organizations contain far less of that judgment than their headcount suggests.

CHINA JUST CARRIED OUT ITS SECOND REUSABLE LAUNCH ATTEMPT IN THREE WEEKS

The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation is conducting further analysis and investigation to determine why the first stage failed to be recovered.

MICROQUICKJS

MicroQuickJS is a JavaScript engine targeted at embedded systems that compiles and runs JavaScript programs with as low as 10 kB of RAM.

WHERE THE HORSES WENT

The core problems in robotics are far from solved, but most of the substantial blockers to robotics deployments now seem solvable at a technical level.

NEOEN BEGINS CONSTRUCTION OF ANOTHER BIG BATTERY, FIRST IN WORLD TO DEPLOY TESLA MEGABLOCK TECHNOLOGY

Neoen's big battery project in South Australia will be the first project in the world to deploy the new Tesla Megablock product.

INSTAGRAM'S ADAM MOSSERI ON HOW TO BEAT TIKTOK — ON YOUR PHONE AND IN YOUR LIVING ROOM

Adam Mosseri, Head of Instagram, still wasn't sure how people would use Instagram's TV app on Amazon Fire the day before the integration rolled out. The team knew they would get things wrong, but they were ready to learn and iterate quickly. Instagram is likely to change dramatically in the next few years. The platform plans to let users proactively shape content on their feeds in a way that will feel fundamentally different.

IT SURE SEEMS LIKE THE FOLDABLE IPHONE WILL BE A WIDE BOI

Apple's Foldable iPhone is rumored to have an aspect ratio similar to that of Apple's largest iPads when viewed in landscape mode. It is expected to arrive in the fall of 2026 along with the iPhone 18 Pro. A wider foldable could help distinguish the device from Android book-style foldables. Samsung is apparently planning to release its own foldable with a wide aspect ratio in Q3 2026 to compete with the foldable iPhone.

SCIENTISTS FIND A WAY TO 'REBOOT' VISION IN ADULTS WITH LAZY EYE

Lazy eye, or amblyopia, can occur when one eye is deprived of vision early in life. The lack of input disrupts synapse formation in the brain's primary visual cortex, weakening vision in that eye. A new mouse study has found that briefly and reversibly anesthetizing the retina of an amblyopic eye for just a few days can restore the brain's visual responses to that eye. While it is clear that the treatment seems to reset the way the brain engages with specific neurons, scientists still haven't figured out exactly why this is happening.

YOUR LAPTOP ISN'T READY FOR LLMS. THAT'S ABOUT TO CHANGE

Laptop designs need to be upgraded to make running AI models locally possible. The average laptop is underpowered for large language models. The most obvious way to boost a PC's AI performance is to place a powerful NPU alongside the CPU. Another upgrade required for PCs to run AI models is a unified memory architecture that provides all system resources to the same pool of memory over a fast, interconnected memory bus.

A YEAR OF VIBES

2025 was the year of agents. The year saw huge developments with large language models and tool execution. Developers can now build a lot of their own tools rather than depending on services. However, this has surfaced some problems, like a lot more unreviewed AI slop in pull requests.

AI SDK 6

Vercel's AI SDK is the leading TypeScript toolkit for building AI applications. It provides a unified API that allows developers to integrate with any AI provider. The SDK enables developers to build everything from chatbots to complex background agents. Version 6 introduces agents, tool execution approval, DevTools, full MCP support, reranking, image editing, and more.

TRAINING THE IDEA MUSCLE

Riley Walz is known for his many creative projects. He always has over 50 ideas in his backlog at any point, so there's always something for him to do. Walz only works on ideas he thinks are fun. If you reject your own ideas, the part of the brain that comes up with ideas is going to stop. Making your ideas a reality again and again is the only way to generate better ones over time. There's no such thing as an impossible idea.

12 PREDICTIONS FOR 2026

This post contains 12 predictions for 2026 from a venture capitalist. 2026 will be the year enterprises productionize AI. It will be a record year for liquidity, though AI budgets will receive scrutiny for the first time. Labs will stop competing on every frontier as Google distances itself from competitors. Cloudflare will become the gatekeeper for agentic payments.

PARAMOUNT RENEWS BID FOR WARNER BROS, ENSURING $40B LARRY ELLISON BACKING

Larry Ellison has agreed to provide an irrevocable personal guarantee of $40.4 billion of the equity financing for the offer and any damages claims against Paramount.

CLAUDE CODE SEES LIKE A SOFTWARE ARCHITECT

Claude Code shipped native Language Server Protocol support last week, enabling the IDE to actually understand code.

NVIDIA'S BIGGEST SOUTHEAST ASIAN PARTNER DOGGED BY CHINA CHIP SMUGGLING QUESTIONS

Singapore-based AI firm Megaspeed has evolved into the single largest Southeast Asian buyer of Nvidia's chips in less than three years.

THE REVOLUTION OF RISING EXPECTATIONS

The combination of Rising Expectations and the perception of Rising Requirements has left an entire generation defining 'success' as something almost no one achieves, while also treating 'success' as something one needs in order to start a family.

ALPHABET TO BUY INTERSECT FOR $4.75 BILLION AS AI-INVESTMENT PLANS GROW

The deal will help address the near-insatiable demand for energy to power the AI expansion.

THE IPV4 ADDRESS SWAMP: THE NEW NORMAL

The instability in address/reputation pairing has implications for how well security threat mitigation services can perform.

SAM ALTMAN ON OPENAI'S PLAN TO WIN, AI PERSONALIZATION, INFRASTRUCTURE MATH, AND THE INEVITABLE IPO

Sam Altman recently appeared on Big Technology Podcast to discuss OpenAI's strategy to win, where the product lineup is going in the coming year, how OpenAI's over $1 trillion in AI infrastructure commitments make sense, and the company's future plans for AI devices and AI cloud. The strategy to keep OpenAI ahead involves getting people to use its products, keeping them there with the best models, serving the use cases they want with reliable compute, then expanding into areas like enterprise and hardware. The full conversation, along with links to the audio, is available in the article.

TESLA WINS FINAL COURT FIGHT OVER ELON MUSK'S PAY PACKAGE

Tesla won its fight over Elon Musk's record-breaking pay package approved by shareholders in 2018. The Delaware Supreme Court said the lower court's ruling would have deprived Musk of compensation for several years of work, so he should get the full pay package. Musk's 2018 stock options have grown in value to $139 billion. It was initially valued at more than $2.3 billion, already shattering previous compensation records.