TLDR 2026-11-04

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Big Tech & Startups

OpenAI: ChatGPT Search Is About 20% of Google's, 250 Million People Speak With ChatGPT, and Chat Is Merging With Work (4 minute read)

OpenAI added 200 million users over just the past two months. Its growth is accelerating. ChatGPT's search volume is approximately 20% of Google's, and its users create 1.5 billion images with it per week. This post contains an edited transcript of an interview with ChatGPT consumer product lead Adam Fry, where he discusses OpenAI's plans to merge ChatGPT's Chat and Work modes, image generation, interactive interfaces, advertising, education, and public unease about AI.

Siri AI is now open to all developers (4 minute read)

Developers can now enable their apps to bring content and actions directly into Siri AI by using App Intents. Skills are available for more complex requests that require Siri to combine several actions into a single experience. Siri AI can now surface any entity in the Spotlight semantic index. Submissions to the App Store for apps with the new capabilities will open up in the spring.

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Science & Futuristic Technology

Neuralink's China Rival Targets Obesity With ‘Electronic' GLP-1 (2 minute read)

BrainCo, a Chinese neurotech company, is developing a wearable device that suppresses appetite by stimulating the brain. It aims to bring the device to market within the next two to three years. The device will launch first in China before potentially expanding to the US. BrainCo currently markets brain-computer interface-enabled headsets to address neurological disorders such as autism, ADHD, and insomnia. Its devices can collect, decode, and stimulate neural signals.

The State of Longevity (18 minute read)

The fringe movement of biohackers and people taking a more hands-on approach to longevity has moved into the mainstream thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic and AI chatbots. More and more people are now taking their health into their own hands and spending time, money, and energy on health and longevity. This post looks at how people view health and explores how the people at the cutting edge of health and technology approach their own health. Some of the biggest opportunities in longevity will go to the companies that help people take action and manage their health over time.

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Programming, Design & Data Science

Meeting notes that get the details right (Sponsor)

Wispr Flow Notetaker uses your dictionary and calendar to catch uncommon names and industry jargon, then pulls out decisions and next steps. Ask anything across your meetings and get linked to the source. Free on Mac and Windows. Try Notetaker free

How software engineering is changing: a tale of two eras (32 minute read)

AI-native startups can ship even faster than fast-moving pre-AI startups because they risk nothing by moving too fast. The old constraints of software engineering have disappeared, allowing startups to move faster, but also break things. The new constraints are too much context switching, losing shared context, tougher pacing, less focus on design, and AI plan limits. Many existing technologies and processes will crack under the change.

Interpolative Software (5 minute read)

Interpolative software is code that is solidly within the training distribution of models. It can often be specified with just a few sentences of prompting. Novel software is something that has fundamentally not existed before. Writing novel software with agents is challenging, as they are not trained on the task. Not a lot of software is novel, which is fine, as there is still a ton of value in the interpolative stuff.

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Miscellaneous

Google Will Turn Off Search for Schools That Reject AI (7 minute read)

Google will turn off AI tools in its software for K-12 students unless school administrators explicitly choose to make them available. However, schools that choose to restrict AI entirely will also lose access to Google search. Google had earlier turned on AI features as the default option and is claiming that the reversal is in response to feedback from educators and parents. The company's decision to use this strategy shows how much power it has over the US education system.

The Death of the Angel Investor (6 minute read)

The economics of angel investing have shifted. Many investors have realized it's potentially more profitable to raise a fund instead of using their own money. Technology startups now move much faster, and running around grabbing small checks from angels is less palatable than grabbing a pre-seed fund to fund a whole initial round. Also, when angels try to fund a round, they are often pushed out by the valuation game.

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Quick Links

Reach 8 million tech professionals reading TLDR (Sponsor)

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The SaaS apocalypse started in October (5 minute read)

Revenue at the median SaaS company grew 0.20% in September, then shrank 0.41% the month after.

British fintech Revolut slashes AI coding costs 10x by cutting out Claude and going self-hosted (6 minute read)

Revolut runs GLM-5.3 on 56 Nvidia B200 GPUs.

Mac at any scale (14 minute read)

This post looks at how Namespace builds custom Mac racks, how it starts macOS instances from scratch in seconds, and how to deliver new Xcode versions mere hours after Apple releases them.

Your meeting history, inside Claude and ChatGPT (Sponsor)

Wispr Flow Notetaker connects to Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini and any tool that speaks MCP. No copy-paste required. Free on Mac and Windows. Get Notetaker free

How much do tokens really cost? (7 minute read)

It appears that the cost of running servers is significantly cheaper than what providers are charging, assuming high capacity.

Introducing Adaptive Dark Mode (6 minute read)

Adaptive Dark Mode in Safari adapts light websites and presents them as dark.

A Family Tree of Software Job Titles (7 minute read)

A look at how jobs in software have evolved from the 1940s to now.

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Dan Ni & Di Wu

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Siri AI dev preview 📱, ChatGPT races Google 📈, engineering is changing 👨‍💻