TLDR 2025-05-28

Spencer Rascoff co-founded Zillow. His new venture is Pacaso — a tech-enabled marketplace for luxury vacation homes that's already generated $110M+ in gross profits, facilitated $1.1bn+ transactions, and grown to over 2,000 homeowners.

And while Zillow went straight to IPO, Pacaso is offering retail investors a rare opportunity to buy in at $2.80/share. The company has launched a public fundraise to support further global expansion into markets like Europe and the Caribbean.

→ Backed by SoftBank, Greycroft, Maveron

→ Nasdaq ticker "PCSO" already reserved

→ $1.3tn market opportunity

Lock in the $2.80/share price by TOMORROW before it changes

Apple is expected to launch a gaming app alongside the next version of iOS this September. The app will apparently replace Apple's Game Center. It will feature editorial content and let users access games available on the App Store. The app will work similarly to the Xbox app for iPhone. The macOS version of the app will let users access games from outside the App Store.

OpenAI is exploring ways for users to sign into third-party apps using their ChatGPT accounts. ChatGPT currently has roughly 600 million monthly active users. Adding a 'Sign in with ChatGPT' feature could help OpenAI compete with other massive technology companies that help people with a range of online services. OpenAI appears to be interested in integrating the sign-in service with a broad array of companies.

SpaceX's Starship successfully reached orbit last night, but it later began spinning and made an uncontrolled re-entry into the Indian Ocean. It was the smoothest Starship test of the year - the previous two tests ended in explosions. Last night's launch was the first to use a flight-proven Super Heavy booster. The booster had launched and returned during Starship's seventh test flight.

The world's first regenerative cell therapy for treating spinal injuries has been granted approval for a registrational Phase I clinical trial. Chinese biotechnology company XellSmart's allogeneic induced pluripotent stem cells regenerative therapy aims to repair injuries and provide the foundation to regrow all the cells needed to return function to the damaged region. It doesn't require harvesting cells from a patient and is a 'one size fits all' treatment that will work with anyone who has a spinal cord injury. If it passes through the trial phases, the treatment will be easy to manufacture and scale for broad access.

A monorepo is a powerful tool for institutional consistency. They are used to enforce engineering culture and organization standards and build a culture of code sharing. Achieving a productive monorepo is a continuous process as organizations continue to scale and tools begin to break, but it can be worth it if organizations are willing to commit to it. This post looks at some of the tools needed to set up a monorepo and discusses implementation strategies for them to paint a clear picture of what it is like to walk the monorepo path.

Amazon Aurora DSQL is a serverless, distributed relational database service optimized for transactional workloads. The goal of its design was to break up the database into bite-sized chunks with clear interfaces and explicit contracts. Each component would do one thing and do it well but work together to offer all of the features users expect from a database. DSQL was written in Rust, which gave the team the control they needed to avoid tail latency in the core parts of the system, the flexibility to integrate with a C code base like Postgres, and the high-level productivity the team needed to stand up its control plane.

Shiny new technologies emerge every few years promising to make software developers obsolete. However, what actually happens isn't replacement, it's transformation. These technologies that promised to eliminate the need for technical expertise ended up creating entirely new specializations, often at higher salary points than before. The same pattern is playing out in AI-assisted development. The most valuable skill in software isn't writing code, it's architecting systems, and that's one skill AI isn't close to replacing.

Elon Musk had approached Apple with an offer in 2022 after hearing the company was planning to announce a satellite feature with the iPhone 14. His offer was for SpaceX to provide exclusive satellite connectivity to iPhones for 18 months if Apple would pay $5 billion upfront. Musk had also threatened to announce his own satellite feature that would work on iPhones if Apple couldn't come to terms with SpaceX. Apple rejected the offer and Musk made good on his threat - SpaceX announced a partnership with T-Mobile to provide satellite services for users in areas with no reception. The company's satellite efforts will likely remain very limited moving forward as it could trigger the US government to regulate it as a telecommunications carrier.

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LiveStore is a fully-featured, client-centric data layer with a reactive embedded SQLite database powered by real-time sync.

Cline approaches codebases the same way a senior engineer would - with curiosity, systemic exploration, and the right tools.

The FTC's case will be hard to win because it seeks to unwind mergers from years ago that regulators had approved at the time.

DuckLake is an open Lakehouse format that stores metadata in a catalog database and stores data in Parquet files.

Developers can now grant large language models access to any tool that they can represent as a Python function.

While users own the hardware, the software that's needed to run it is subject to a license agreement that can be revoked.