TLDR 2025-11-04

How US Consumers Think About Fintech – and How to Use It to Your Advantage (Sponsor)

For years, Plaid has collaborated with The Harris Poll to track and analyze evolving consumer behaviors and expectations around fintech. Their research has consistently shed light on which targeted innovations are most likely to lead to fintech ROI.

This year is no exception–The Fintech Effect 2025 uncovers challenges and opportunities that will define the industry in 2026. For example:

56% of consumers expect fintech to use AI
61% trust apps more when they use AI to prevent fraud
77% insist their bank be able to connect to their chosen apps

See the full data and analysis

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Big Tech & Startups

OpenAI, Amazon Sign $38 Billion Cloud Deal (3 minute read)

OpenAI will pay Amazon $38 billion for computing power in a multiyear deal. Amazon expects all of the computing capacity negotiated as part of the agreement to be available by the end of the year. It wasn't able to sell its cloud services to OpenAI for years because OpenAI had an exclusive cloud-computing partnership with Microsoft. OpenAI is set to generate $13 billion in revenue this year. It will have to continue expanding sales at an exponential rate to pay for its computing needs. Sam Altman claims that OpenAI is facing severe computing shortages and that revenue will grow even faster as more capacity becomes available.

Facebook Dating Is a Surprise Hit for the Social Network (5 minute read)

Facebook Dating debuted in 2019. The feature lets people create a free dating profile and swipe and match with other users. It has more than 21 million daily users, making it one of the most popular online dating services. Facebook Dating shows how social networking is evolving into two broad categories: content and services.

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Science & Futuristic Technology

A commercial space station startup now has a foothold in space (4 minute read)

Vast's Haven Demo mission launched into orbit on Sunday on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. After being released from the rocket, the Haven Demo spacecraft stabilized itself and extended its power-generating solar array. A link to a 4K video of the solar array deployment is available in the article. The Haven Demo will be followed by a single-module human-rated habitat called Haven-1, and then a multi-module space station complex named Haven-2.

Alphabet is increasingly launching 'moonshot' projects as independent companies — here's why (6 minute read)

Alphabet's X Moonshot factory is increasingly spinning out its ambitious technology projects to market as independent companies rather than keeping them within the Alphabet corporate structure, because while some moonshots benefit from Alphabet's resources and scale, others can go faster and won't really benefit from being part of the company because they're too different. It uses a dedicated venture fund called Series X Capital to invest in its spinouts. The moonshot factory has a culture that celebrates killing off promising ideas. It actively looks for reasons to shut down its projects, resulting in a brutal 2% hit rate - this makes it necessary to have a fund that deeply understands its goals.

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Programming, Design & Data Science

The AWS + Datadog Guide to Monitoring Containerized Applications (Sponsor)

This ebook looks at the changing state of containers in the cloud and why orchestration technologies are essential for managing containerized workloads. Learn to track containerized AWS applications at scale, monitor Amazon's ECS and EKS, and gain comprehensive oversight across AWS container environments. Get the ebook.

Rmlx (5 minute read)

Rmlx is an R interface to Apple's MLX framework, which enables high-performance GPU computing on Apple Silicon. It enables R on the Mac to use the GPU, which is great for performing matrix operations commonly seen in statistics. The package was vibe-coded with Claude/OpenAI Codex in a week.

The fetch()ening (14 minute read)

htmx 4.0 contains three major simplifying changes: fetch() will replace XMLHttpRequest as the core ajax infrastructure, attribute inheritance will be explicit rather than implicit, and history support will no longer snapshot to the DOM and keep it locally. Most things will stay the same - except for adding an :inherited modifier on a few attributes, most htmx projects will be compatible with htmx 4.0. htmx 2.0 will remain supported in perpetuity.

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Miscellaneous

The Great Decoupling of Labor and Capital (12 minute read)

Today's megacap tech companies' growth is pretty much decoupled from their headcount. This was evident even before Generative AI arrived on the scene. AI taking over people's jobs might be a gradual thing rather than a moment in time. Even if we don't reach 'AGI', the actual difference of reaching it or not may prove to be minimal in a couple of decades.

The Startup Winter Is Always Coming (5 minute read)

Market cycles keep repeating. Founders who internalize this pattern are never surprised and can adapt to changing conditions. A startup is a long trek through changing climates. Founders who ignore cycles risk being caught off guard, but those who obsess over cycles risk paralysis. The balance is to expect the inevitable and prepare for it without being fearful of it.

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Quick Links

Craving more AI in your inbox? (Sponsor)

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An individual can change an organization (2 minute read)

Individuals can change organizations regardless of seniority by being persistent and willing to debate.

rm -rf remains (5 minute read)

This post looks at what happens to a system after performing 'rm -rf'.

Introducing Generalized Consensus: An Alternate Approach to Distributed Durability (4 minute read)

This series discusses consensus algorithms and proposes a conceptual framework that makes systems more approachable, adaptable, and flexible.

Chrome can now autofill driver's license, vehicle info, and more (1 minute read)

Chrome's new 'Enhanced autofill' option lets the browser understand forms better and autofill them faster with more information for users.

Is it worrying that 95% of AI enterprise projects fail? (9 minute read)

95% of organizations are getting zero return from their AI projects, but around 95% of hard enterprise IT projects fail anyway - AI projects failing at that rate is nothing special.

AI's Dial-Up Era (20 minute read)

The Internet in the dial-up era was slow and untrusted, and people called it a fad and bubble - this is where AI is at now.

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Dan Ni & Stephen Flanders

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