Gemini tops app store 📱, Nepal's Discord revolution 🎮, Postgres 18 👨‍💻

Gemini for iPhone is the top free app in the US App Store. ChatGPT is in second position, and Threads is third. The Gemini app ranks second in Canada ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ 

Sign Up |Advertise|View Online TLDR TLDR 2025-09-15 📱 Big Tech & Startups Google Gemini is the top free iPhone app (1 minute read) Gemini for iPhone is the top free app in the US App Store. ChatGPT is in second position, and Threads is third. The Gemini app ranks second in Canada and the UK. It has seen more than 23 million new users since its launch. Google's new image editing model has been a viral hit due to how it maintains character likeness and consistency. Elon Musk's Boring Company Completes Vegas Loop Tunnel to Airport (3 minute read) The Boring Company has successfully completed a 2.26-mile tunnel for the Vegas Loop system in Las Vegas. The tunnel, aimed at alleviating surface congestion in one of America's busiest tourist destinations, stretches from a site near Harry Reid International Airport in the south to the Westgate Resort in the north. There will be eight stations along the route, including key stops at Virgin hotels and the Hughes Center. The tunnel is part of a broader plan to create a 68-mile network with over 100 stations to connect major landmarks. 🚀 Science & Futuristic Technology Promising new epilepsy drug delivers 80% reduction in seizures (4 minute read) Rapport Therapeutics' experimental compound, RAP-219, reduced seizures by an average of 77.8% in a Phase 2a study. Almost a quarter of participants remained seizure-free over the two-month treatment period. The study raises hopes for patients who suffer from seizures despite being on multiple medications. Rapport plans to meet with the US Food and Drug Administration and then launch two Phase 3 trials next year. It is also developing a long-acting injectable version to address medication adherence, a frequent challenge in epilepsy. NASA announces discovery of life on Mars with high degree of confidence (7 minute read) An analysis of the Martian Sapphire Canyon mudstone core found minerals and textures that are often linked to microbial activity. While nonbiological chemistry could also explain the signals, the finding is the closest scientists have ever come to discovering life on Mars. More data is needed to rule out nonbiological sources. 💻 Programming, Design & Data Science How End-to-End Observability Breaks Down Silos (Sponsor) When frontend and backend teams operate in silos, they create performance bottlenecks that can lead to user churn. Read this Datadog eBook to learn how unified observability delivers full-stack visibility, reduces MTTR, and ensures every user experience is seamless. Read the eBook → Get Excited About Postgres 18 (9 minute read) Postgres18 adds asynchronous I/O, which means faster reads for many use cases. This is a part of a bigger series of performance improvements planned. Asynchronous I/O allows workers to optimize idle time and improve system throughput by batching reads. It provides a more predictable and better-performing method for batching operations at the database level. Writes will continue to be synchronous as this is needed for ACID compliance. UTF-8 is a Brilliant Design (9 minute read) UTF-8 was designed to represent millions of characters from different languages and scripts and still be backward compatible with ASCII. Every ASCII-encoded file is a valid UTF-8 file, and every UTF-8 encoded file that only has ASCII characters is a valid ASCII file. This post gets into how UTF-8 works. A link to a playground for visualizing and playing around with UTF-8 encoding is available in the post. 🎁 Miscellaneous A.I.'s Prophet of Doom Wants to Shut It All Down (14 minute read) Eliezer Yudkowsky, the founder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), a Berkeley-based nonprofit that studies risks from advanced artificial intelligence, believes that building powerful AI systems is a terrible idea that will end in disaster. He recently released a book co-written with MIRI's president aimed at stopping the development of AI. The book claims that everyone on Earth will die if any company or group anywhere on the planet builds an artificial superintelligence using anything remotely like current techniques. While some may see Yudkowsky as an extremist or a crank, he is a central figure in modern AI history, and his influence on the industry is undeniable. 'More egalitarian': How Nepal's Gen Z used gaming app Discord to pick PM (10 minute read) 14 governments representing three parties have taken turns at governing Nepal since 2008, when the country adopted a new constitution after abolishing its monarchy. After recent protests, the country's citizens used a virtual poll on Discord to elect its new leader. A Gen Z group called Hami Nepal ran a channel where a debate on the country's future was livestreamed. After hours of debate, participants selected former Supreme Court Chief Justice Sushila Karki to lead Nepal. ⚡ Quick Links 🆕 Warp Code adds a visual editor + code review to the #1 coding agent (Sponsor) Warp is already a benchmark-beating agent with proven CLI and MCP tools. Now, you can run it through an editor that brings everything together in one app. Download now We grew from zero to $50M ARR in <2 years, profitably (5 minute read) This post looks at how influencer marketing, investing in brand before performance marketing, user testing, and dogfooding helped Gamma grow from zero to $50 million ARR in under two years. The City Leading China's Charge to Pull Ahead in AI (7 minute read) Hangzhou, China, has become an AI hub at the center of China's global tech ambitions. Our robots are now folding laundry for Tumble Laundry customers in San Francisco (1 minute read) A short video of a robot from Weave Robotics folding laundry. 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. Why you'd issue a branded stablecoin like McDonaldsCoin (5 minute read) Branded stablecoins entitle platforms to more of the issuer rewards for customer deposits, which consequently lets them pay more rewards to customers who choose to store money with them. A word about complexity (4 minute read) One of the barriers that prevents people from modifying open source software is complexity. Becoming the person who does the thing (7 minute read) Our self-identity dictates everything, but it isn't set in stone. Love TLDR? Tell your friends and get rewards! Share your referral link below with friends to get free TLDR swag! https://refer.tldr.tech/7c97ce4b/ Track your referrals here. 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.