AWS struggles 📉, Nvidia robotaxi 🚕, Swift for Android 👨‍💻

Internal bureaucracy has slowed AWS down at a time when it needs to be nimble. The company's AI efforts have been lackluster ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ 

Sign Up |Advertise|View Online TLDR Together With TLDR 2025-10-27 How do you help prevent AI agents from going rogue? (Sponsor) You want agents to take action - but you don't want to give them too much control. Auth0 for AI Agents gives you control with four core capabilities: User Authentication - to enable a secure login experience Token Vault — to securely connect your AI agents to 3rd-party applications Async Authorization (Human-in-the-Loop) — a necessary safeguard that requires explicit user approval for critical actions Fine-Grained Authorization for RAG — to ensure agents only pull documents and data the specific user is authorized to see, preventing data leakage Auth0 for AI Agents will be generally available soon. Start building today. 📱 Big Tech & Startups Amazon's AWS Shows Signs of Weakness as Competitors Charge Ahead (22 minute read) Internal bureaucracy has slowed AWS down at a time when it needs to be nimble. The company's AI efforts have been lackluster, and its services are becoming less attractive to startups. AWS remains committed to its longtime playbook, and it retains considerable strengths and customer loyalty, but it may be losing its edge by chasing rivals. The cloud market has become more fiercely contested over the past couple of years, creating competitive pressure that AWS didn't have before. Nvidia is reportedly planning a robotaxi project to challenge Tesla, Waymo (4 minute read) Nvidia is reportedly developing an internal robotaxi project. The project will follow a single-stage end-to-end technology route in which one neural network is trained and reinforced through simulation-generated world models. Nvidia plans to invest $3 billion and launch operations in the US. It began developing autonomous driving software in 2015, but it has yet to release a high-level driving system for mass market vehicles. 🚀 Science & Futuristic Technology How China Raced Ahead of the US on Nuclear Power (15 minute read) China nearly has as many reactors under construction as the rest of the world combined. Its nuclear capacity is set to surpass the US by 2030. The country is making breakthroughs in next-generation nuclear technologies that have eluded the West. It is also investing heavily in fusion. If China dominates the nuclear export market, it could expand its global influence, as building nuclear plants creates deep, decades-long relationships between countries. In a first, a data center is using a big battery to get online faster (5 minute read) Aligned Data Centers is installing a 31-megawatt/62-megawatt-hour battery in a new data center in the Pacific Northwest. Having a battery will allow the data center to pull less power from the grid when demand is high, allowing it to come online more quickly. Research has found that today's grid could handle quite a lot more data centers if facilities could dial back their consumption for a couple of hours at a time during moments of maximum demand. Aligned's commitment to paying for the battery itself could serve as a model of socially responsible AI-infrastructure development. 💻 Programming, Design & Data Science Reach millions of tech professionals at scale (Sponsor) Over 6 million tech professionals read TLDR including developers, product managers, marketers, designers and executives. Get in front of your target audience with an ad placement just like this one! Learn more about running a test campaign. Code like a surgeon (4 minute read) Surgeons do the actual work. However, their skills and time are highly leveraged with a support team that handles prep, secondary tasks, and admin. The surgeon focuses on the important stuff they're good at. AI coding tools enable developers to spend all of their time doing the things that matter. There are a lot of secondary tasks that AI agents are now good enough to help out with. Announcing the Swift SDK for Android (2 minute read) The Swift SDK for Android enables developers to port their Swift packages to Android. Over 25% of packages in the Swift Package Index are already built for Android. The SDK is now in preview release. It is bundled with the Windows installer or downloadable separately for use on Linux or macOS. 🎁 Miscellaneous 192 Weeks (17 minute read) Eric Zhang, a software engineer, researcher, and designer, recently left Modal, where he had worked since 2022, to work at Thinking Machines. Zhang joined Modal when it was still tiny and needed to grow a lot. The company recently raised at a $1 billion valuation. In this post, Zhang reflects on the time he spent at the company and details how it grew to a team of 70 people. Tesla at the Crossroads: Why Musk Chose Robotaxi Over Model 2 (11 minute read) Elon Musk overruled members of his key senior staff, with some of them leaving the company, when he decided to choose the Robotaxi over producing a low-budget EV. If Tesla could pull off its promise of the Robotaxi, it would mean outsized profits for Tesla and its investors. The value of having the Robotaxi far outstripped the value of the Model 2 in stock price. Musk uses Tesla's stock to invest in his other businesses - if he had chosen not to go forward with the Robotaxi, and Tesla's stock price collapsed, his entire empire would have gone down. ⚡ Quick Links Coursera Cybersecurity Month Offer: Become a Certified Security Analyst (Sponsor) Looking to boost your cybersecurity skills? Coursera can help you level up your career with self-paced learning programs. See your recommended credentials and start learning today. The AI Wildfire Is Coming. It's Going to Be Very Painful and Incredibly Healthy (30 minute read) Wildfires clear out dense underbrush that chokes out new growth, return nutrients to soil, and create the conditions for the next generation of forest to thrive, making them essential to ecosystem health. React Grab (GitHub Repo) React Grab can access elements on web pages and pass them on to AI assistants to change. iPhone 18 Pro Rumored to Support Full 5G Satellite Internet (2 minute read) The iPhone 18 Pro, iPhone 18 Pro Max, and the long-rumored foldable iPhone will likely be the first models to support full 5G satellite internet, even though there is currently no service that delivers full 5G satellite internet directly to a smartphone. Advice for New Principal Tech ICs (i.e., Notes to Myself) (14 minute read) Distilled advice on what makes an effective principal engineer or scientist. The 'Hands Problem' Holding Back the Humanoid Revolution (6 minute read) Creating the mechanical equivalent of the human hand is a challenge that has stumped researchers for years. Always Be Ranking (3 minute read) Always rank lists so that you do the important things first. 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.