Alphabet's AI drug trials 💊, Jack Dorsey's WhatsApp competitor 💬, copyleft vs permissive licenses 👨‍💻

TLDR 2025-07-08

Jul 08, 2025

Alphabet's Isomorphic Labs has grand ambitions to ‘solve all diseases' with AI. Now, it's gearing up for its first human trials (3 minute read)

Isomorphic Labs, Alphabet's secretive drug discovery arm, is preparing to launch human trials of AI-designed drugs. The company was born from one of DeepMind's most celebrated breakthroughs, AlphaFold, an AI system capable of predicting protein structures and interactions with a high level of accuracy. The system has helped researchers design medicines faster and more precisely.

Jack Dorsey launches a WhatsApp messaging rival built on Bluetooth (3 minute read)

Bitchat is a decentralized, peer-to-peer messaging app that works entirely over Bluetooth mesh networks - no internet, central servers, phone numbers, or emails required. It enables ephemeral, encrypted communication - nearby devices form clusters and pass messages from device to device, allowing them to reach peers beyond standard range, even without Wi-Fi or cell service. Messages are stored only on-device, disappear by default, and never touch centralized infrastructure. A beta version of Bitchat is currently live on TestFlight.

🚀Science & Futuristic Technology

Creating therapeutic abundance (22 minute read)

The invention of new medicines is limited by our knowledge of cells and molecules that can be manipulated to treat disease. The cost of discovering new medicines is increasing. New technologies have the potential to unlock an era of target abundance and reverse the long decline in research and development productivity. This could be one of AI's most important impacts.

Nuclear reactors smaller than a semi truck to be tested in Idaho (4 minute read)

The US Department of Energy (DoE) has conditionally selected Westinghouse's trailer-sized eVinci test reactor and Radiant's Kaleidos unit to conduct the first fueled microreactor experiments at its Demonstration of Microreactor Experiments (DOME) facility at Idaho National Laboratory. The DOME project considers anything under 50 MW of power to be a microreactor - the eVinci is designed to produce 5 megawatts, and the Kaleidos can output 1.2 megawatts. The DoE hopes that microreactors can be used to power small, remote sites. DOME is designed to be up and running by early 2026. It will operate one experiment at a time for six months.

💻Programming, Design & Data Science

Handling unique indexes on large data in PostgreSQL (10 minute read)

PostgreSQL has a limitation on unique index entries larger than 1/3 of a buffer page. The 1/3 page size limit exists to ensure efficient page splitting. To overcome the restriction, introduce a new field that stores a hash of the large field. This allows you to store really large data inside databases, even with unique constraints.

Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists (5 minute read)

Soundslice is a service that scans sheet music from photographs so users can listen, edit, and practice. Over the past few months, the team at Soundslice started noticing that their error logs were full of ASCII tablature, a way of notating music for guitar that the service didn't support. The team discovered that ChatGPT was hallucinating instructions to users and telling them to go to Soundslice and use a feature that didn't exist. Instead of posting a notice telling users that ChatGPT was incorrect, the team decided to build the feature instead.

🎁Miscellaneous

Why I used to prefer permissive licenses and now favor copyleft (10 minute read)

Free open source software is usually published under one of two major categories of copyright licenses: permissive licenses, which freely share with everyone, or copyleft licenses, which freely share only with those who are also willing to freely share. Copyleft creates a large pool of code that developers can only legally use if they are willing to share the source code of anything they build on it, making it a very broad-based and neutral way of incentivizing more diffusion. It does not favor specific actors nor create roles for active parameter setting by central planners.

The Broken Microsoft Pact: Layoffs and Performance Management (9 minute read)

There are stories of people who have been with Microsoft for 20 years, who grew up with the company, and who never had to worry about sudden changes. While the performance management system had its quirks, there was an understanding that if you did solid work, you'd have a place. Workers at Microsoft received below-market-rate pay in exchange for stability, a reasonable work-life balance, and the promise of no layoffs - this is no longer the case. This shift was almost expected: Microsoft's performance management challenges made layoffs a more attractive option than addressing individual performance issues systematically.

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