TLDR 2026-09-23

Books and banking* belong together (Sponsor)

Your books and your banking* have always lived in separate places. Another platform to log into, another set of data to translate across systems. The result: books that reflect last quarter's reality, not today's.

Until now. Mercury Books is intelligent accounting, built directly into your banking.* Transactions are categorized and reconciled automatically as they happen, erasing the manual work from the month-end close, and giving you a real-time view of your financial position.

Sync thousands of external platforms like Stripe, PayPal, and Gusto, and invite your bookkeeper or accountant at no extra cost.

Explore Mercury Books

*Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group and Column N.A., Members FDIC.

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Big Tech & Startups

Claude Opus 5.5, GPT-6 Sol, GPT-6 Luna, and a new price war (6 minute read)

Anthropic and OpenAI both released new models within an hour of each other. OpenAI's GPT-6 Sol and Luna are half the price of the promotional pricing for GPT-5.6 equivalents. Opus 5.5 is cheaper per token than Opus 5.0 and has the intelligence of Fable 5.1. It is very token efficient and works across every effort level.

Apple Developing New Fitness Tracker Aimed at Rivaling Whoop (5 minute read)

Apple is developing a screenless health and fitness tracker as part of an effort to rethink its smartwatch lineup and add new wearable technologies. The project is still in a preliminary phase and likely won't debut before 2028. Apple is working on a major update to its smartwatch lineup for release as early as late 2027.

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Science & Futuristic Technology

Alzheimer's Is No Longer an Untreatable Disease, Major Report Concludes. Here's Why (7 minute read)

There are currently hundreds of clinical trials worldwide investigating possible medicines, new diagnostic options, and lifestyle interventions to identify, treat, or delay cognitive decline. The possibility of a cure is still far away, but it now seems more possible than ever before. Alzheimer's disease is being increasingly viewed as a condition for which earlier diagnosis, better understanding of disease biology, and a wider range of interventions may collectively improve outcomes. There is now a genuine case for optimism.

Intrinsic open sources key parts of its platform for easier development (9 minute read)

Intrinsic Core is an open source set of Robot Operating System-compatible capabilities for building robotic applications. The capabilities act like the building blocks of robot behavior. The release allows users to quickly and easily combine capabilities to achieve adaptive AI systems. The capabilities are ROS-compatible.

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Programming, Design & Data Science

Tech professionals have trained themselves to ignore ads. TLDR is the exception. (Sponsor)

Your buyers scroll past product pitches on social all day and have learned to tune most of them out. In TLDR, your ad is written in the newsletter's voice and appears alongside the stories they came to read. Learn more about sponsorship opportunities.

LiteParse (GitHub Repo)

LiteParse is a standalone OSS PDF parsing tool. Focused exclusively on fast and light parsing, it provides high-quality spatial text parsing with bounding boxes, without proprietary LLM features or cloud dependencies. It runs everything locally. A cloud-based version of the tool is available.

Bug blindness (35 minute read)

Some bugs give normal users such a bad experience that they tell their friends about it. Developers and advanced users can be blind to these bugs because they're used to performing the non-intuitive workarounds required to get around them. Humans have a high ability to ignore the negatives in things they like. Being open to criticism can help developers notice more flaws in their work.

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Miscellaneous

Defensive Driving For Your Career (10 minute read)

To have a positive career, you need to be appropriately recognized and rewarded for your work. Take public credit in a way that isn't obnoxious or wasteful. Don't let anyone lie about you, and beware of people who think you got lucky. Maintain leverage at all times - leverage mainly comes from your ability to walk a valuable asset (your labor) out the door.

The plunging price of thought (54 minute read)

The cost of a given level of AI performance has fallen an average of around 47% per quarter over the past three years. AI spending can still remain high despite falling prices. Lower prices allow for more agents to be run. Also, AI's ability keeps rising, and the price of harder tasks is higher.

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Quick Links

Automate your team's office lunch routine (Sponsor)

DoorDash's automated meal calendar handles everything in the background – it picks restaurants, sends reminders, and checks out orders – so everyone gets what they want and you get time back.

See how it works

Shuffling the deck chairs: Xbox continues its “reset” with dramatic restructuring (3 minute read)

Xbox has announced a radical restructuring of its internal studios designed to reduce the independence of some of its teams.

It's Raining Boxes: Amazon Drones Overwhelm a Texas Suburb (9 minute read)

Those living closest to the Amazon flight paths are hearing constant noise from the drones.

Mysteries Of AI Generalization (15 minute read)

We still don't understand what's going on with AI generalization.

The Mundanity of Excellence, Small Wins, and Why You Should Fix Bugs Before Writing New Features (8 minute read)

If you don't fix your bugs, your code will be built on an unstable foundation.

AI will worsen our estimates of GDP (22 minute read)

AI will make GDP estimation difficult because it is hard to measure quality.

Analyzing Jev, a new AI model (7 minute read)

Jev is a close relative of LLMs, but it is actually more similar to the BERT series of models, which are used for classification, not generation.

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Thanks for reading,
Dan Ni & Stephen Flanders

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Opus 5.5 + GPT-6 🤖, Apple fitness tracker ⌚, bug blindness 👨‍💻