TLDR 2025-03-21

If you're looking to reach a highly technical (and notoriously difficult) audience, consider advertising in TLDR. TLDR has helped marketers like Forrest reach over 5 million tech professionals - including developers, product managers, and founders that aren't active on social media. Learn more about running your first campaign.

Former Apple Vision Pro head Mike Rockwell is now in charge of Siri. While Rockwell's experience doesn't make him a natural choice, it shows that Apple has decided that Siri deserves attention from a top-tier Apple leader. Rockwell has developed and launched major hardware and software platforms for Apple. The new leadership represents a big shift in how much the company is valuing and prioritizing Siri.

OpenAI is clearly one of the defining companies of this era. Its founder, Sam Altman, recently appeared on a podcast interview that covered his background, the OpenAI origin story, and the genesis of ChatGPT. He also gave some hints about what's coming next, answered some philosophical questions about AI, and provided advice for seniors graduating from high school. A link to the audio for the podcast is available.

Boston Dynamics has released a new video (available in the article) that shows its Atlas robot running, cartwheeling, and breakdancing. Atlas' walking now resembles walking rather than taking a bunch of steps - its other movements are starting to look less forced too. The current explosion in humanoid robotics is still at a very early stage, but it is looking clearer than ever that humans and androids will soon be interacting regularly in daily life. Chinese company Unitree has also been doing incredible work with its lightweight G1 humanoid, which has a starting price tag of $16,000.

Jed McCaleb, the serial entrepreneur who founded Mt. Gox and Ripple, has a new company, Vast, that is on track to launch a commercial space station into orbit by May 2026. Vast is building its spacecraft with components developed by SpaceX. If it succeeds, it will be better positioned to win a lucrative contract from NASA to replace the International Space Station - if it fails, McCaleb could see $1 billion wiped from his net worth. Vast is competing with Axiom Space, Voyager Space Holdings, Lockheed Martin, and Blue Origin to win the NASA contract.

Airbnb recently completed its first large-scale large language model-driven code migration. It updated nearly 3,500 React component test files from Enzyme to use React Testing Library instead. This was estimated to take 1.5 years of engineering to do by hand, but Airbnb managed to finish the entire migration in just six weeks using a combination of frontier models and robust automation. This blog post looks at the challenges the Airbnb team faced during the migration, how large language models helped solve this particular type of challenge, and how the team structured its tooling to run an AI-driven migration at scale.

There are several things you can do when working with Postgres databases that can make the experience much more pleasant. These include using UUID primary keys, naming tables singularly, and representing statuses as logs. This post presents a list of tips for working with Postgres. Each tip is backed up by a reason for why it is helpful and code examples.

Perplexity AI is ramping up its rivalry with Google on multiple fronts. It has expanded its research options for businesses, created tools to look up financial data, expanded a partnership with SoftBank for its sales team to resell Perplexity's premium products, and made a long-shot bid to merge with TikTok. Perplexity's CEO, Aravind Srinivas, envisions a world where Perplexity serves as a central hub for more sophisticated and affordable AI tools that can generally act as a personal assistant for users. This article contains an interview with Srinivas where he discusses how he's growing Perplexity's enterprise business, why he's bullish on DeepSeek, and the thinking behind his TikTok bid.

The Apple TV+ streaming service is losing more than $1 billion annually. The service's subscriber count reached around 45 million in 2024. Apple TV+ typically spends over $5 billion annually on content, but it cut its budget by about $500 million last year. It is reportedly the only part of Apple's services business that is not turning a profit. While its library boasts prestige, its viewership is scant, hindering its ability to make money.

Anubis is a tool that tests connections using a sha256 proof-of-work challenge to protect upstream resources from scraper bots.

MCP is an open protocol that allows systems to provide context to AI models in a manner that's generalizable across integrations.

OpenAI will not be making its new transcription models openly available, unlike Whisper.

Fetcher MCP is a model context protocol that fetches web page content using Playwright.

Paid Claude users in the US can now access web search in preview - support for free users and additional countries is coming soon.

AI models will soon find utility as assistants for many mathematicians, but the extent to which this will increase the rate of true math breakthroughs is unknown.