TLDR 2026-05-18

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Big Tech & Startups

Andy Jassy Is Rewriting Amazon's Playbook for the AI Age (30 minute read)

Andy Jassy took the role of Amazon's CEO five years ago. He recently placed a series of expensive bets on AI that are audacious even by Silicon Valley standards. In his time, he has killed projects and cut staff, pleasing Wall Street, and now he has to steer the tech giant through its greatest challenge yet. This article tells the story of Jassy's tenure at Amazon.

For SpaceX, the stakes of this week's Starship rocket test flight are sky-high (5 minute read)

SpaceX plans to launch the newest version of its Starship rocket on Tuesday during a launch window that opens at 6:30 PM ET. The flight plan will be similar to previous Starship test launches. The most recent test flight was seven months ago. Starship has undergone major redesigns and is now bigger, more powerful, and a step closer to being fully reusable.

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Science & Futuristic Technology

A revolutionary cancer treatment could transform autoimmune disease (15 minute read)

CAR T cell therapy was originally designed to target and wipe out cancer by reprogramming patients' immune cells. It is now being offered to patients in clinical trials for autoimmune conditions. There's still uncertainty about how well the treatment works for autoimmunity and how any benefits might last, as well as what long-term side effects might arise. Another major challenge is that the therapy can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars after accounting for hospital stays, cell engineering, and other expenses.

Rubin Tracks Skyscraper-Size Asteroids, Failed Supernovas, and Interstellar Visitors (12 minute read)

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is designed to study the universe in greater detail than ever before. It is expected to discover a million asteroids, thousands of comets, and billions of stars and galaxies in its first year alone. The facility has begun collecting preliminary images and astronomers are poring over the initial data. Scientists have already been able to make new discoveries with its first images despite the images still not being as sharp as expected and the observatory still requiring a final tuning.

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Programming, Design & Data Science

Your API Latency Benchmark Is Lying to You (Sponsor)

P50 response time tells you almost nothing about performance. The metric that actually matters has to account for recall, grounding rate, re-query rate, and integration overhead. Fast-and-wrong is slower than you think. Read the full breakdown from You.com

Zero (GitHub Repo)

Zero is a systems programming language for agents that provides small native tools, explicit effects, predictable memory, and structured compiler output. The language is still experimental and not stable yet, but it is in a stage where users can try it out and provide feedback. Practical examples are available for users to learn the language with.

How I use LLMs as a staff engineer in 2026 (11 minute read)

Agents have gotten really good in the last fifteen months. They can now be used for real work with light supervision. AI can now be used for writing code changes, investigating and fixing bugs, research in large code bases, manual testing, and more. It still isn't suitable for writing public communications, unreviewed code, or testing UIs, but its capabilities are improving quickly.

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Miscellaneous

How to enter side doors (17 minute read)

Many people try to gain employment through the front door: they find a job advertisement, send their resume, and hope that someone on the other side notices them. Most people don't realize there are other entrances into the building. Conversations at parties, warm introductions, cold emails, and visible proof of work are viable alternatives. Sometimes, it's about creating a signal that attracts the exact person who needs it.

The Sigmoids Won't Save You (8 minute read)

The idea that all exponentials eventually become sigmoids might not be necessarily true for AI. There are several examples of exponentials that don't end up becoming sigmoids (or haven't yet), for example, the decline in birth rates or solar power deployment. Things that are currently happening are more likely to continue happening than not. AI is unlikely to stop progressing on all fronts anytime soon.

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Quick Links

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Agent Hooks: Deterministic Control for Agent Workflows (18 minute read)

Hooks make agent workflows more dependable by implementing tests, policies, logs, and completion gates as deterministic parts of the workflow.

Git Is Not Fine (13 minute read)

Git has been behind the state of the art for a while now, prompting companies like Meta to develop better in-house systems.

Uber turns on Waymo as it pours $10B+ into owning robotaxi alternatives (5 minute read)

Waymo's rapid scaling to 400,000 rides per week proved that AV operators might not need Uber at all, so Uber is pivoting to asset ownership to avoid being cut out entirely.

Per-user pricing doesn't work for embedded analytics (Sponsor)

The more your product succeeds, the more the invoice hurts? Not anymore. Reveal is the embedded analytics SDK with flat pricing, predictable costs, and AI that drives better engagement. See how

Domain Knowledge Is the Leverage (3 minute read)

It is becoming apparent that understanding the domain and how it connects to the program is valuable, which is why spec-driven development is now in the spotlight.

Native all the way, until you need text (3 minute read)

SwiftUI & Apple's native SDKs are constraints when it comes to building rich text rendering for long-form chats.

I strongly believe there are entire companies right now under heavy AI psychosis (2 minute read)

Changes are happening so fast that nobody is noticing the underlying architecture decaying, and people are denying that this is an issue because they are focusing on the wrong metrics.

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