TikTok buyers revealed 📱, Jack Ma returns 👋, measuring AI dev impact 👨‍💻

US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping are set to discuss a deal where TikTok's US operations would be acquired by a consortium ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ 

Sign Up |Advertise|View Online TLDR Together With TLDR 2025-09-17 Last chance to join big investors on this "unlisted" stock (Sponsor) When the former Zillow exec who sold his first company for $120m starts a new venture, people notice. Thousands of people. In fact, 12,000+ regular investors have already joined the early investors behind Uber, eBay, and Venmo as early-stage Pacaso investors. Disrupting the real estate industry once again, Pacaso's streamlined platform offers co-ownership of premier properties, revamping a $1.3T market. And it works. Pacaso has already made $110M+ in gross profits in less than 5 years. They even recently reserved the Nasdaq ticker PCSO. And you can become a Pacaso shareholder right now. Just hurry. Invest before this opportunity ends on Thursday night. This is a paid advertisement for Pacaso's Regulation A offering. Please read the offering circular at invest.pacaso.com. Reserving the ticker symbol is not a guarantee that the company will go public. Listing on the Nasdaq is subject to approvals. 📱 Big Tech & Startups TikTok Buyers to Include Oracle, Silver Lake, and Andreessen (7 minute read) US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping are set to discuss a deal where TikTok's US operations would be acquired by a consortium that includes Oracle, Andreessen Horowitz, and Silver Lake. The framework would create a US-based version of the app. ByteDance will license the technology behind its recommendation algorithms. Trump has postponed the deadline for ByteDance to divest TikTok's US operations until December 16 to buy time for the transaction to be completed. SpaceX Is Working With Chip Makers for Starlink Cell Service (3 minute read) SpaceX is working with microchip manufacturers to add support for Starlink's satellite-to-cell service into devices. The company plans to launch new satellites that support its direct-to-device business in the next two years. It will conduct mobile phone tests late next year. 🚀 Science & Futuristic Technology Daily weight loss pill can help cut body weight by a fifth, trial shows (4 minute read) Eli Lilly's weight loss pill, orforglipron, can help people reduce their body weight by as much as a fifth. The drug targets the same GLP-1 receptors as weight loss injections such as Mounjaro and Wegovy. While the weight loss seen in people taking the tablet is not as stark as that seen in those taking injectable forms of the drug, the tablet is significantly more accessible and convenient. Eli Lilly expects substantial demand when the new pill is launched. How SpaceX turned a Texas marsh into the world's most watched spaceport (9 minute read) SpaceX's Starbase, a massive rocket development site and the home of Starship, started as little more than an impossible stretch of empty land along the South Texas coast. The degree of difficulty of transforming the site did not deter Elon Musk, so the company tackled its issues one by one. This article looks at how the company transformed the land into Starbase and the challenges that it overcame along the way. 💻 Programming, Design & Data Science Basecamp — Simple project management that actually works (Sponsor) Most tools are bloated, chaotic, or force you into their way of working. Basecamp cuts the noise: chat, Kanban, docs, and schedules — all in one calm, straightforward space. No hype, no chaos. Just the features you need to get stuff done. 👉 Try Basecamp free How tech companies measure the impact of AI on software development (48 minute read) 85% of software engineers are using AI coding tools at work, but things like tokens aren't exactly cheap, so companies need to know how to measure whether or not they are worth the money. This article looks at how some tech companies measure AI impact to uncover insights on how to get started in this tricky field. Solid foundations matter. Have an experimental mindset when measuring AI impact. If all the world were a monorepo (10 minute read) R's central package manager, CRAN, builds each package before publication, testing against a variety of R versions and operating systems. Even if a package passes tests against the full matrix of R versions and platforms, CRAN still reruns the tests for all of the packages that depend on that package. This means some packages can be blocked until dependent packages are upgraded. This approach, which clearly puts a burden on package developers, results in an excellent workflow for R's central user base, who want to spend as much time as possible on the details of data analysis, not stuck in transitive dependency hell. 🎁 Miscellaneous Jack Ma Returns With a Vengeance to 'Make Alibaba Great Again' (11 minute read) Jack Ma is now back on Alibaba's campuses and is more directly involved than he's been in half a decade. He had resigned as chairman in 2019 and retreated from the public eye after a speech he made in 2020. The company has been run by two of Ma's longest-serving lieutenants, Joe Tsai and Eddie Wu, since 2023. Signs of Ma's influence can be seen in the company's pivot to artificial intelligence and its declaration of war on e-commerce foes JD and Meituan. Mods react as Reddit kicks some of them out again: "This will break the site" (8 minute read) Reddit is rolling out new rules that mean that users will not be able to moderate more than five subreddits with 100,000 monthly visitors. A small number of moderators will be required to leave their posts due to the new rules. Reddit says the change will help enable diverse perspectives and experiences. Moderators will be able to seek exemptions. ⚡ Quick Links Last Chance to Join the Pre-IPO Backers of Uber and eBay (Sponsor) Pacaso has made $110M+ in gross profit in less than 5 years disrupting a $1.3T market. The early backers of Uber, eBay, and Venmo invested. So did 10k+ regular people. Don't miss your chance. Disclaimer: This is a paid advertisement for Pacaso's Regulation A offering. Please read the offering circular at invest.pacaso.com. Reserving the ticker symbol is not a guarantee that the company will go public. Listing on the Nasdaq is subject to approvals. Chronon (GitHub Repo) Chronon is a data platform for serving AI/ML applications that abstracts away the complexity of data computation, allowing users to utilize all of the data within their organizations. You Want Technology With Warts (3 minute read) Every wart used to be a reasonable feature that someone relied on, a testament to the care the maintainers put into backward compatibility. The 14kb Problem (4 minute read) The first burst of data allowed in a TCP connection is about 14 KB of data, so fitting sites within that cap means they can be delivered in a single round trip. 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. Google's new open protocol secures AI agent transactions - and 60 companies already support it (4 minute read) Google's Agent Payments Protocol helps companies carry out agent-led payments securely. Java 25/JDK 25: General Availability (2 minute read) JDK 25 is now Generally Available and ready for production use. The Creator Advantage (14 minute read) Nobody can take away what you build when you build an audience. 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.