TikTok sold for $14B 💰, next-gen gene editing 🧬, becoming a research engineer 👨‍💻

Donald Trump signed an executive order yesterday approving a proposal that could keep TikTok alive in the US. China has yet to approve the terms ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ 

Sign Up |Advertise|View Online TLDR Together With TLDR 2025-09-26 Warp Code Officially Launches, Saving Developers 1–2 Hours Daily (Sponsor) 🆕 This month Warp launched Warp Code, Early usage shows it's already saving developers 1-2 hours each day. Why Warp: 66% of developers report being frustrated by AI code that's almost-but-not-quite correct. Warp closes the gap between "almost there" and "actually useful" with a powerful codebase-aware agent that delivers more accurate code + a unified UI to review agent code. ✅ Benchmark-beating: Warp tops Terminal-bench and SWE-bench Verified. ✅ Built-in code review and lightweight editing: Quickly spot issues, hand-edit, or reprompt without leaving Warp. ✅ 97% acceptance rate: Out of 250M+ lines generated weekly by new users. Reclaim your two daily hours → use code TLDR for a month of Warp Pro for just $1. 📱 Big Tech & Startups Trump approves TikTok deal through executive order, Vance says business valued at $14 billion (4 minute read) President Donald Trump signed an executive order yesterday approving a proposal that could keep TikTok alive in the US. The deal would involve creating a new joint-venture company that will oversee TikTok's US business. China has yet to approve the terms. No representatives from ByteDance were present at the signing, and the company has not acknowledged that a transaction is taking place. There is no indication that the Chinese government has made changes to laws that would be necessary for a deal to take place. SpaceX Wants to Fly Its Gigantic Starship Directly Over Florida (4 minute read) SpaceX has proposed a flight path for its Starship rocket that would see it fly across Florida skies. The route would seriously disrupt air traffic and raise the risk of debris falling onto populated areas. Starship's test flights have so far only taken the megarocket on suborbital trajectories. SpaceX is preparing the rocket to reach low Earth orbit and complete a full trip around the planet before returning for a landing attempt. 🚀 Science & Futuristic Technology World's first 'behavior transplant' between species achieved (5 minute read) Researchers from Nagoya University transferred the courtship behavior from one species of fruit fly to another by manipulating a single gene to create new neural connections. While both species of fly belong to the same family, they have distinct neural circuits that drive very different mating behaviors. The achievement was the culmination of nearly a decade's work by several members of the Japanese team. It is the first-ever example of humans manipulating a single gene to transfer foreign behavior to another species. The reason gene editing hasn't transformed human health is that current gene editing technologies like CRISPR are very limited (2 minute read) Scientists at the Arc Institute have developed a new DNA editing technology that can seamlessly write massive changes into the right place in the human genome. Bridge RNAs in bacterial 'jumping genes' allowed the scientists to make safe and arbitrary changes to every nucleotide within (up to) a 1 million base pair sequence in human DNA. They can be used to correct disease-causing DNA repeats in Friedreich's ataxia, Huntington's, and other repeat expansion disorders. 💻 Programming, Design & Data Science 6 Proven Templates for a Secure AI Rollout (Sponsor) Nearly 1 in 3 employees use AI tools without approval, creating data leak risks and compliance violations. The Enterprise AI Governance Kit by you.com provides 6 ready-to-use templates: security checklists, usage policies, and governance frameworks built from real enterprise deployments handling 1B+ monthly queries. Download the free templates PostgreSQL 18 Released! (5 minute read) PostgreSQL has a new I/O subsystem that improves performance for workloads of all sizes. Other features include virtual generated columns, a database-friendly uuidv7() function, and easier integration with single-sign-on systems. The release makes major-version upgrades less disruptive. Details about the new features are available in the article. Introducing Perplexity Search API (3 minute read) The Perplexity Search API provides access to the same global-scale infrastructure that powers Perplexity's public answer engine. It allows developers to tap into information across the internet with one simple yet powerful interface. Unlike other API offers, it provides rich structured responses that are ready for use in AI and traditional applications alike. Perplexity has released an SDK, an open-source evaluation framework, and a deep dive into how its research team designed, optimized, and evaluated the API. 🎁 Miscellaneous Becoming a Research Engineer at a Big LLM Lab - 18 Months of Strategic Job Hunting (41 minute read) Max Mynter signed as a research engineer with Mistral earlier this week. The road to getting there was not an accident - Mynter had strategically worked towards this outcome for an extended period. This account of his personal experiences shares a few things that worked out for him. Mynter's main tactic was to try to get an information advantage and then act on this information to be prepared when it matters. The preparation can involve strategic high-effort projects or tactical quick-win initiatives. There Are More Robots Working in China Than the Rest of the World Combined (8 minute read) China has five times as many robots working in its factories as the US. Until last year, China installed more imported robots in its factories than domestically made ones - last year, nearly three-fifths of the robots installed in the country were made locally. While Chinese companies still lag behind foreign competitors in their ability to manufacture some key components, China has a large number of skilled electricians and specialized computer programmers who can install robots, as well as an artificial intelligence industry that is strongly focused on tracking and improving every aspect of factory equipment performance. ⚡ Quick Links Electric: All-in-1: Device management, permissions, and security (Sponsor) If you're a 100-1000 employee company, you need to manage IT - easily and without breaking the bank. See Electric: Book a demo and claim a $200 gift Anthropic CPO Admits They Rarely Hire Fresh Grads as AI Takes Over Entry-Level Tasks (6 minute read) Anthropic won't hire fresh graduates because they lack experience, but entry-level jobs that used to give them that experience are increasingly being automated. Google DeepMind unveils its first "thinking" robotics AI (6 minute read) Google DeepMind's Gemini Robotic project has announced a pair of new models that work together to create the first robots that 'think' before acting. Meta introduces Vibes feed for AI-generated content (1 minute read) Meta's Vibes feature gives users the ability to create and share short-form AI-generated videos. Stability or agility in payments infrastructure? Marqeta proves you can have both (Sponsor) From optimizing spend and cash flow to building seamless, rewards-driven customer experiences, the world's biggest brands rely on Marqeta. Find out why Announcing Cloudflare Email Service's private beta (4 minute read) Cloudflare's Email Sending capability allows users to send transactional emails directly from Cloudflare Workers. Snappy (2 minute read) Snappy is a compression/decompression library widely used inside Google. OpenAI says GPT-5 stacks up to humans in a wide range of jobs (6 minute read) OpenAI's GDPval covers a very limited number of tasks people do in their real jobs, but the company claims that testing on the evaluation shows that GPT-5 is approaching the quality of work produced by industry experts. 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.