Amazon stablecoin 🪙, founder reacquires 23andMe 🧬, ageism in tech 👨💻
TLDR 2025-06-16
📱Big Tech & Startups
Walmart and Amazon Are Exploring Issuing Their Own Stablecoins (4 minute read)
Several multinational giants, including Walmart and Amazon, are discussing potential efforts to issue stablecoins. Whether these initiatives will go ahead depends on a bill still yet to clear the Senate and House called the Genius Act, which establishes a regulatory framework for stablecoins. Stablecoins could allow merchants to bypass traditional payment rails, which cost them billions of dollars in fees each year. A regulatory framework for stablecoins would enable an alternative payment type for merchants that could significantly lower their expenses and create competition against Visa and Mastercard.
Anne Wojcicki Wins Bidding for 23andMe (3 minute read)
Anne Wojcicki, co-founder and former CEO of 23andMe, has been named as the new buyer for the company's assets. Biotech company Regeneron won the bidding last month during a bankruptcy auction but bidding reopened earlier this month after Wojcicki's nonprofit, TTAM Research Institute, made an unsolicited offer. Regeneron declined to submit a higher bid based on its assessment of the company's value. If the sale goes through, 23andMe's equity holders could recover some of their investment in the company, a relative rarity in bankruptcy.
🚀Science & Futuristic Technology
Solar Orbiter gets world-first views of the Sun's poles (11 minute read)
The European Space Agency-led Solar Orbiter spacecraft has imaged the Sun's poles from outside the ecliptic plane. The spacecraft's unique viewing angle will help scientists better understand the Sun's magnetic field, the solar cycle, and the workings of space weather. The complete dataset from Solar Orbiter's first full pole-to-pole flight past the Sun is expected to arrive on Earth by October 2025. A video of the Sun from an angle of 17 degrees below the solar equator - enough to deficiently see the Sun's south pole - is available in the article.
Once-a-week pill for schizophrenia shows promise in clinical trials (6 minute read)
Lyndra Therapeutics has created a once-a-week pill for treating the symptoms of schizophrenia. The pill contains a widely used medication for managing the disease. A phase 3 clinical trial conducted by Lyndra Therapeutics showed that the patients who took the once-a-week pill maintained consistent levels of the medication just as well as daily doses of the drug. Making the drug easier to administer makes it easier to ensure that patients are receiving their medication.
💻Programming, Design & Data Science
Agent Rules (GitHub Repo)
This repository contains a collection of reusable rules and knowledge documents for AI coding assistants like Claude Code and Cursor. Categories include development workflows, code quality and analysis, problem solving and implementation, documentation and visualization, and project setup. The repository uses the Markdown with Configuration (.mdc) format, which provides a unified approach that works with both Claude Code and Cursor without modification.
Software Engineering Talent is Gold Right Now (5 minute read)
The software engineering job market is currently in a pretty bad place. Despite this, software engineers have the unique ability to provide extraordinary leverage and productivity with the right attitude. It's now easier than ever to automate tedious and formulaic tasks. Anyone with software engineering skills can now take an annoying problem, write a prompt, then let AI create a solution.
🎁Miscellaneous
I Convinced HP's Board to Buy Palm for $1.2B. Then I Watched Them Kill It in 49 Days (17 minute read)
Phil McKinney convinced HP's board to acquire Palm for $1.2 billion in early 2010 by demonstrating to the board how Palm's WebOS represented a breakthrough platform technology that could differentiate HP in the emerging mobile computing market. A few months after the acquisition, HP's CEO was replaced and McKinney faced a medical emergency that required immediate surgery and an eight-week recovery period confined to bed. During his time in recovery, McKinney was unable to participate in meetings or provide strategic input, resulting in the entire mobile computing landscape at HP unraveling as the new CEO brought a completely different strategic vision. HP ended up discontinuing all WebOS devices just 49 days after it launched the TouchPad.
Ask HN: Is ageism in tech still a problem? (Hacker News Thread)
Ageism has been a problem in tech for many years, and it doesn't look like that has changed. While age brings many positive qualities in terms of skill set, companies may be reluctant to hire older workers as their salary demands are higher and they have stronger work boundaries. Their seniority and directness can also intimidate younger managers and other workers. Younger workers are more likely to be flexible and build whatever without question, which is valuable for business owners.
⚡Quick Links
OK, I'm sold on multi-agent LLM systems now (5 minute read)
This post breaks down Anthropic's recent post on how it created its multi-agent research system and shows how running multiple different prompts in parallel can be more effective than running a single prompt against a frontier model.
A meta-analysis of three different notions of software complexity (22 minute read)
Having a good shared definition for software complexity is essential to moving beyond a simplistic view of 'complexity bad, simplicity good'.
Google tests Audio Overviews for Search queries (2 minute read)
Google Search Audio Overviews is available now in Labs.
Writing Toy Software Is A Joy (12 minute read)
Reinventing the wheel will teach you more about how they work than reading a thousand books on them.
The Tech Job Meltdown (17 minute read)
An amendment to Section 174 of the Internal Revenue Code made building tech companies in the US suddenly not economically viable.
The Army's Newest Recruits: Tech Execs From Meta, OpenAI, and More (4 minute read)
The chief technology officers from Palantir and Meta will join representatives from OpenAI to form a new Army innovation corps to bring some badly needed tech upgrades to the Army - they will be sworn in as uniformed officers with the rank of lieutenant colonel.