TLDR 2026-03-27

Plaid adds $382k in pipeline with TLDR campaign (Sponsor)

Plaid achieved their best-performing direct buy to date, adding $382k in pipeline, earning 70 leads, and achieving 20.1x ROI. This case study breaks down their strategy, results, and example ads. Read the Plaid case study.

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Big Tech & Startups

Apple Plans to Open Up Siri to Rival AI Assistants in iOS 27 Update (5 minute read)

Apple will let Siri use AI services other than ChatGPT as part of the iOS 27 update. The approach will help Apple generate more revenue from third-party subscriptions through the App Store. It will mean Apple can add more external AI services without entering business discussions. The change is separate from Apple's work with Google to rebuild Siri using Gemini models.

The SpaceX IPO Will Be Just as Unconventional as Musk Himself (5 minute read)

SpaceX is preparing for an initial public offering aimed at mid-June, just before Elon Musk's birthday. Musk wants investors to visit SpaceX's manufacturing facilities and possibly witness rocket launches. He is betting that fund managers and analysts will leave with the desire to put in big orders for the IPO, which is expected to raise between $40 billion and $80 billion. The filing for the IPO is expected to be done in the coming days.

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Science & Futuristic Technology

Here is NASA's plan for nuking Gateway and sending it to Mars (9 minute read)

NASA announced on Tuesday that it will pause work on a lunar space station and focus instead on building a surface base on the Moon. The agency has spent close to $4.5 billion on developing technology for the Gateway program since its beginning in 2019. There are pieces of the space station undergoing construction and testing in factories around the world. NASA plans to repurpose the core of Gateway, the Power and Propulsion Element, into a nuclear propulsion demo. It will use the nuclear engine in the interplanetary SR-1 mission scheduled before the end of 2028.

What happens when you clone mice for 20 years straight? (6 minute read)

Two scientists conducted a study over 20 years where they cloned generations of mice to see what would happen. The researchers created a total of 58 generations before the project ended - the mouse cells just wouldn't make clones. This took 30,947 individual attempts due to the low efficiency of cloning technology. There was a steady accumulation of mutations over the generations, and an entire X chromosome was lost at some point between generations 25 and 45, and never regained. The various other chromosomal deletions, inversions, and translocations added to the reasons why the cloning process failed after 58 generations.

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Programming, Design & Data Science

Stop stitching databases for AI agents (Sponsor)

Oracle AI Database acts as a unified memory core for agents. Vector search, relational, JSON, and graph data live together so agents can reason over live enterprise data without extra vector stores, pipelines, or synchronization jobs.
See how developers build agent memory →

Stripe Projects: provision a production-ready dev stack from your terminal (5 minute read)

Stripe Projects is a new tool in the Stripe CLI that lets users provision real services from the terminal, keep resources in their provider accounts, sync agent-ready credentials safely, and upgrade to paid tiers when needed, without rebuilding their stacks or leaving the terminal. It is designed to make setups repeatable across machines and teammates, and deterministic enough for agents to operate safely. Projects can handle payment without re-entering payment details across provider dashboards for paid tiers. Developers can use it to go from a local repository to a working stack backed by provider accounts they own.

What's in a codebase? (8 minute read)

Humans collectively can do incredible things, but much of it is illegible tribal knowledge passed down orally through generations of apprentices, and through the capabilities of machines that fabricate the next generation of machines. A lot has been done to refine human knowledge, extract its essence, and compile it into a form that can help future generations reach new heights. So far, this has proved to be a uniquely human capability. Diagnosing, fixing, and then figuring out how to test the real fix is hard enough as a human. Reproducing these system failures in an agent-testable way is inevitably going to be expensive and impractical.

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Miscellaneous

Read TIME's Full Interview with SpaceX's Gwynne Shotwell (20 minute read)

This article contains a transcript of an interview with SpaceX's President and COO, Gwynne Shotwell. The interview covers the xAI/SpaceX merger, SpaceX's upcoming IPO, data centers in space, Starlink in war zones, orbital traffic, and more. Shotwell also discusses her personal relationship with Elon Musk. She also talks about her experience as a woman in an industry where more than 75% of the leadership is male.

The White Collar Revolution is Here (9 minute read)

Software developers get rewarded for adopting new technologies fast, but white-collar workers get penalized as stability and risk mitigation are major parts of the value they provide to clients. Companies need to pair subject matter experts with cutting-edge researchers to take full advantage of the AI era. This business model encourages practitioners to hand off tasks to be automated instead of clinging to old ways of working. The winning businesses build the machines that build the machines.

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Quick Links

Now Shipping: Microsoft Build 2026, June 2-3, San Francisco (#MicrosoftPartner) (Sponsor)

Devs & Builders Only: Access cutting‑edge models, agent capabilities, data, and compute—then leave ready to apply the latest AI workflows in your projects. Stay at the forefront of AI innovation. Learn more.

What about juniors? (6 minute read)

The new junior path involved getting engaged much earlier with the essence of engineering.

The Handoff Problem (5 minute read)

Tesla's Full Self-Driving has always depended on handing off to the human, and this has resulted in Tesla's robotaxi service with 'safety monitors' crashing six times as often as human-driven taxis.

Jensen Manifesting The Future (21 minute read)

Jensen Huang discussed a future of AI factories that manufacture tokens during his 2.5-hour-long keynote at Nvidia's multi-day GTC 2026 developer conference.

Apple discontinues the Mac Pro with no plans for future hardware (2 minute read)

The Mac Pro has been removed from Apple's website, and Apple has no plans to offer future Mac Pro hardware.

Apple Gives iPhone Designers Bonuses Up to $400K to Counter OpenAI Poaching (1 minute read)

The bonuses are in the form of restricted stock units that vest over a four-year period.

We need better stories about the future (13 minute read)

The headlines reaching mainstream audiences about AI range from depressing to doomsday.

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Dan Ni & Stephen Flanders

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SpaceX IPO playbook 🚀, Apple allows AI assistants 🤖, Stripe Projects 🧑‍💻