SpaceX vs Blue Origin 🚀, Android always-on apps 📱, design tokens 🎨

SpaceX has pitched NASA a 'simplified mission' to put astronauts back on the moon following criticisms over delays. The company is behind schedule ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ 

Sign Up |Advertise|View Online TLDR Together With TLDR 2025-10-31 How to Fix the #1 Problem with Vibe Coding (Sponsor) Vibe coding makes building fast—but hides what's really happening. All of the logic, architecture, and security live in hundreds of lines of code. Even to a trained engineer, the sheer volume can make it impractical to parse. Vibe code without the black box. Xano lets you build with AI and see your entire backend logic visually, so you can ship faster and stay in control. No black boxes. Just visibility, flexibility, and a production-ready backend that powers any app. Xano gives you everything you need—logic, data, server, and auth—and works with any frontend, including projects built with Lovable, WeWeb, and more. Get started for free. 📱 Big Tech & Startups Android 17 Will Put Full-Screen Apps on Your Always-On Display (3 minute read) Google plans to add a new capability called Min Mode to Android's Always-On Display (AOD) in Android 17. Min Mode will use the same low-power technology as AOD to display full-screen interfaces from apps. Developers must register a 'MinModeActivity' component in their apps for them to work with the feature. Min Mode has the potential to reshape the definition of an 'idle' phone. Tim Cook says more AIs are coming to Apple Intelligence (3 minute read) Apple plans to embed more third-party AI tools into its operating systems. The company is on track to release an AI-upgraded Siri next year. It is open to pursuing mergers and acquisitions if it thinks it will advance its roadmap. The company recently released fourth quarter earnings results that showed it raked in a record $102.5 billion over the past few months, an 8% increase compared to the same period last year. 🚀 Science & Futuristic Technology SpaceX and Blue Origin both submitted plans to get astronauts back to the moon faster, NASA says (4 minute read) SpaceX has pitched NASA a 'simplified mission' to put astronauts back on the moon following criticisms over delays. The company is behind schedule on building its lunar landing system for NASA's Artemis III mission, which caused NASA to reopen the landing contract for the mission. Blue Origin also submitted a plan. It has been developing a lunar lander for NASA and plans to launch a smaller-scale version of it, known as the Blue Moon Mark 1. World's first underwater habitat in decades to unlock secrets of 95% of oceans (5 minute read) DEEP, a UK-based subsea engineering firm, has unveiled a prototype of an underwater habitat designed to allow scientists to live and carry out research beneath the sea's surface for days at a time. The Vanguard pilot human habitat is part of an ambitious effort to make long-term underwater living possible. The prototype can support up to four crew members for up to a week. Currently, most expeditions can only allow scientists to stay submerged for a few hours at a time. 💻 Programming, Design & Data Science Protecting Modern Apps in the Age of AI (Sponsor) The intersection of AI and security can feel like a confusing traffic circle. So to help yourself navigate, join Harness for the DevSecOps summit on November 12th. Security leaders from Wiz, Glean, and Credit Karma will discuss how to safeguard modern applications and infrastructure in the era of AI. → Save your spot (it's free). ML Kit's Prompt API: Unlock Custom On-Device Gemini Nano Experiences (3 minute read) AI is making it easier to create personalized app experiences. The ML Kit GenAI Prompt API for Android enables developers to send natural language and multimodal requests to Gemini Nano to support custom, app-specific GenAI use cases. It allows developers to create unique features with complex data transformation. The API uses Gemini Nano on-device to process data locally, enabling offline capability and improved user privacy. Scale design decisions across teams and products (Website) The Design Tokens W3C Community Group (DTCG) is a community of designers, developers, and tooling vendors that aims to standardize how design tokens are defined and exchanged. It stewards the Design Tokens specification so that teams can share visual language reliability across design tools, code bases, and platforms. The first stable version of the DTCG JSON format is now available. The format unlocks interoperability and theming between tools. 🎁 Miscellaneous Humans Need Entropy (4 minute read) As people get older, they tend to repeat the same patterns. The solution to preventing this is to find sources of entropy. When we were kids, everything was entropy because everything was new. As adults, we need to constantly seek out the new to maximize the entropy in our lives. Taking Money off the Table (7 minute read) Employees who get compensated with shares sometimes have the opportunity to sell a portion of them, but it can be difficult to choose whether to sell or to roll the dice and risk it longer. They should take the money while it's available. The amount will likely be a life-changing amount of money, and there's never a guarantee that their startup will succeed, even if it is looking good right now. The money you take today can be invested in more steady growth. ⚡ Quick Links TLDR readers get 40% off a Coursera Plus subscription (Sponsor) Advance your tech career with structured learning paths and certifications. Choose from thousands of courses offered by 350+ leading universities and companies such as Google, Stanford, and Microsoft. Claim your offer The real problem with AI coding (5 minute read) The problem with AI coding is comprehension debt - the more AI-generated code there is in a codebase, the harder it is for human engineers to review and truly understand it. What Palantir Sees (58 minute read) An interview with Shyam Sankar, the chief technology officer of Palantir, a company building a more efficient surveillance state. 'It's culture': Amazon CEO says massive corporate layoffs were about agility — not AI or cost-cutting (3 minute read) The recent layoffs weren't triggered by financial strain or artificial intelligence replacing workers - Amazon executives believed that the company had gotten too big and layered. Craving more AI in your inbox? (Sponsor) TLDR AI is your daily fix of LLMs, GenAI, and deep learning goodness. Same TLDR format. Still free. Subscribe now. The AGI race is an all‑pay auction. That's why "over‑investment" is rational (13 minute read) The imagined prize with AGI is monopoly-like profits across software, science, society, and the whole fabric of human civilization. Most of What We Call Progress (15 minute read) Most progress in software is just motion, not real development. Beyond IP lists: a registry format for bots and agents (4 minute read) Cloudflare's new registry format for bots and agents ensures customers have control over the traffic they want to allow while fostering an open curation ecosystem that doesn't lock in customers or small origins. Want to advertise in TLDR? 📰 If your company is interested in reaching an audience of tech executives, decision-makers and engineers, you may want to advertise with us. Want to work at TLDR? 💼 Apply here or send a friend's resume to jobs@tldr.tech and get $1k if we hire them! If you have any comments or feedback, just respond to this email! Thanks for reading, Dan Ni & Stephen Flanders Manage your subscriptions to our other newsletters on tech, startups, and programming. Or if TLDR isn't for you, please unsubscribe.