TLDR 2025-06-20

How much time (and money) are you wasting on frustrating IT tasks?

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• Slash employee onboarding time from 8 hours to 7 minutes
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• Access to critical apps is automatically granted/removed
• Secure employee exits with no loose ends
• Your business stays protected and compliant

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Mark Zuckerberg's AI hiring spree has now turned to Daniel Gross, the CEO of Ilya Sutskever's startup Safe Superintelligence, and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman. Meta tried to acquire Safe Superintelligence earlier this year, but its efforts were rebuffed. Zuckerberg started negotiating with Gross soon after those talks ended. Both Gross and Friedman will join Meta and work on products under Alexandr Wang. Meta will get a stake in NFDG, a venture capital firm run by Gross and Friedman.

X users will soon be able to make investments and trades on the social media platform. The company is also exploring the introduction of an X credit or debit card. Elon Musk aims to change X into an 'everything app' - a one-stop shop for messaging, payments, and shopping. X Money, a digital wallet and peer-to-peer payment service, is launching later this year. The push into financial services will open X up to regulatory challenges, such as compliance with licensing and money laundering regulations.

A SpaceX Starship rocket exploded during a ground test late Wednesday. The explosion destroyed the upper stage that was slated to launch on the next Starship test flight. Preliminary data suggests that the incident was caused by the failure of a high-pressure nitrogen tank inside Starship's payload bay. SpaceX had set June 29 as a tentative launch date for the next Starship test flight, but that won't happen now. The extent of the damage at the site is unclear, so it is unknown how long the test site will be out of commission. Videos of the explosion are available in the article.

The US Food and Drug Administration has approved a new HIV-prevention medication called Yeztugo. The drug nearly eliminated the spread of HIV in clinical trials. It is the first in a new class of antiretrovirals that block HIV from infecting and making new copies of itself inside the immune cells it targets. It costs $14,109 per injection, so health insurers will likely decline to cover the treatment in favor of other forms of PrEP, which can cost as little as $30 per month.

Delve ran 4 ads across 2 TLDR newsletters and brought in 66 leads, with a meaningful chunk from enterprise. The result: $1M in attributed pipeline and a 52x ROI.

This case study breaks down their strategy, results, and example ads.

Read the Delve case study.

Software development tools are getting killed off and replaced by agentic coding. The typical agentic coding workflow doesn't involve using traditional IDEs - it is console-based. This lets developers work faster, be more ambitious, and have more fun. Developers should start learning how to use these tools or start thinking about other career options.

Kubernetes is a massive force multiplier, but it has a steep learning curve. A decade after its release, there is still a lot of churn inside the ecosystem and people stepping on well-documented landmines. This post looks at what can be added to Kubernetes to make the great tool even more applicable to more people and problems.

There's an increasingly sharp distinction between corporate use of open source software and people's cooperative use of it. While open source licenses allow corporate use of open source software, it is qualitatively different than the personal cooperative sphere of open source. This means that the social rules are different. Existing open source licenses, practices, and culture don't draw this distinction. The current system for corporate use of open source is an increasingly bad deal for the open source people involved.

DARPA is enlisting researchers to find out ways to conduct high-level mathematics research with an AI 'co-author'. It has created a grant-making program called Exponentiating Mathematics to speed up to pace of progress in pure math. Pure math is a domain where visionary theoreticians make audacious observations about how the world works. Progress in the field can take decades or centuries to solve.

We also write TLDR AI. Same format, all about LLMs, GenAI, and deep learning. Delivered every weekday. Subscribe for free.

OpenAI Codex has merged 345,000 PRs on GitHub in the last 35 days.

AI agents can be used to measure code quality.

The Base Commerce Protocol offers a glimpse into a new payment architecture that is transparent, programmable, and structurally more efficient than what we've relied on for decades.

Google has relied on Samsung's foundry for its Tensor chips since the Pixel 6, but this year Google decided to switch to TSMC.

OpenAI has changed the pricing structure of the business version of ChatGPT to include a credits system that clients can use to upgrade to more advanced tools and add more features.

The best engineering organizations are the ones where normal software engineers can consistently make progress, deliver value to users, and move the business forward.