TLDR 2026-10-23

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Big Tech & Startups

The Signal Chats That Cost OpenAI Researchers Their Jobs (13 minute read)

Three OpenAI safety researchers were fired after security officers discovered Signal chats with disappearing messages turned on on their personal devices. OpenAI claimed the researchers were fired for violating clear policies for handling sensitive information and not for raising safety concerns or speaking out. The researchers had spent recent months at the company pushing for more industry collaboration on safety. They claim their firings will serve as an excuse for OpenAI to close a channel to independent third-party insight.

Amazon's New Tablet Is a Credible iPad Rival for Much Less Money (11 minute read)

The Alexa Tablet lineup offers a more open approach to software than Amazon's previous Fire brand that lets consumers use the devices like any other Android tablet. Users can download apps from the Google Play Store and access popular services like Gmail and YouTube. Amazon previously restricted access to its own app marketplace. The 12-inch Alexa Tablet Pro is well constructed and has a smooth 12-hertz display, making it competitive with Apple's iPads.

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Science & Futuristic Technology

SpaceX in Talks to Access 80,000 Cell Sites for New Network (4 minute read)

SpaceX is in talks with Crown Castle Inc., one of the largest owners of cellular towers in the US, as part of its plans to secure a minimum of 80,000 cell sites across the country. Crown Castle is likely also in talks with Amazon and other satellite-based telecom providers regarding leasing deals. Elon Musk has openly discussed creating a standalone wireless carrier from scratch. SpaceX recently acquired low-band spectrum and has received approval to launch 15,000 satellites to provide mobile service directly to phones.

Moderna and Merck say their mRNA cancer vaccine cut death, recurrence by 42% (3 minute read)

Moderna and Merck's personalized mRNA vaccines against melanoma demonstrate how mRNA technology has the potential to fundamentally challenge how cancer is treated. The vaccine's success offers a new paradigm for cancer therapies. The companies are already engaging with regulatory authorities to get the vaccine approved.

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Programming, Design & Data Science

Your prompts deserve more context than you'll ever type (Sponsor)

More context, better output from Cursor, Claude or ChatGPT. Wispr Flow lets you say it instead: explain the bug and the edge cases out loud, and it types clean, formatted text in any app. 4x faster than typing, on Mac, Windows, iPhone and Android. Try Wispr Flow free

LLMs are making formal software verification feasible at a much larger scale (23 minute read)

We need ways to prove that code is free from bugs. Formal software verification, which could provide this guarantee, has always required years of expert effort, but LLMs can now produce formal proofs at large scale. This enables new software development workflows that include proven security guarantees. Formal verification will likely become an essential part of secure software development as model capabilities continue to improve.

Anthropic builds its own source control system (15 minute read)

Anthropic employs around 3,500 staff, but its coding output is closer to that of a company with 35,000 to 70,000 staff. Big tech companies like Google and Meta moved off Git a long time ago because it did not scale for them. Both built their own custom solutions, just like Anthropic did with Scion. This post provides some details about how Anthropic's custom source control system works.

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Miscellaneous

‘If Anything Happens to This Guy … Everyone Is Screwed' (13 minute read)

Ondřej Surý is one of the volunteers who helps maintain and automate patches for PHP. He alone is responsible for most of the world's distribution of PHP. His work, along with just a handful of others, has allowed countless websites and organizations to fix the recently revealed PHP vulnerabilities quickly. He's become arguably the unsung hero of the entire internet, despite the fact that the only compensation he receives for his work is from donations. This article features an interview with Surý where he discusses the unfolding AI-cybersecurity crisis, how the internet's infrastructure is maintained by small crews of volunteers, and how it feels to save the web.

An artist's take on AI in math (9 minute read)

Mathematics seems to be a field where the outputs are celebrated less as examples of subjective expression and more as advancements in knowledge and understanding. A mathematician's work may be informed by their experience, but that's not what gives their contributions value. Mathematical knowledge remains objectively true whether it is observed by humans or sea sponges or computer programs.

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Quick Links

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Software is slow because of bad design, not slow languages (7 minute read)

Most programs can't be meaningfully sped up by rewriting them in C or Rust.

JPEG XL, Welcome to the Web! (5 minute read)

JPEG XL is the end-game universal image format because it has excellent compression efficiency, a universal feature set, wide color depth, gamut, and native HDR, lossless JPEG transcoding, high-speed parallel software encoding and decoding, and an open-source, permissive license.

Warhound raises $200M to engineer war dogs and arm them with Anduril gear (4 minute read)

The US has become increasingly reliant on foreign nations for dogs that play an important role in the US military and law enforcement.

Switching AI meeting notetakers? Your next 12 months could be free (Sponsor)

If your plan qualifies, Wispr Flow covers the time left on it with credit, plus 3 bonus months. Meeting notes and dictation, one subscription. Claim your free months

Supervisory Engineering Work (17 minute read)

Supervisory engineering work is a different job from software engineering and so requires a different system around it.

Finance in the intelligence era (15 minute read)

Finance companies in the AI era need to be built around continuous decisions, portable assets, and delegated distribution.

I'm not doing 996 (18 minute read)

We are the ones who get to decide what to do with all of the productivity that AI creates.

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Dan Ni & Di Wu

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OpenAI Signal leaks 💬, Alexa Tablet 💻, formal software verification 👨‍💻