Inside SpaceX's finances 🚀, Twitter Community Notes deep dive 💡, email design gotchas 👨‍💻

Sign Up|Jobs|Advertise|View Online TLDR Together With TLDR 2023-08-18 The SaaS Trap: Is Your Engineering Team Overdependent on SaaS? (Sponsor) With inventory management, HR, accounting, and more, teams manage 40-60 apps on average. This has implications. Download this new guide from Agile Dream Team to determine whether you’ve become overdependent on SaaS, and what to do about it: 🔴 The hidden risks of SaaS sprawl, and why license prices keep rising 💰 Understanding the long-term implications of not owning your own IP 🔒 Strategies to avoid vendor lock-in and regain autonomy 👷‍♀️ Building software in-house with the power of flexible and agile on-demand teams. Download the free ebook to break free ↗️ 📱 Big Tech & Startups A Rare Look Into the Finances of Elon Musk’s Secretive SpaceX (6 minute read) SpaceX made a small profit in the first three months this year after making losses for two years in a row. It generated $55 million in profit on $1.5 billion in revenue in the first quarter of 2023. The company was valued at roughly $150 billion during a recent employee stock sale. It is privately owned and keeps most details about its finances under wraps. iPhone 15 rumored to support faster charging speeds with up to 35W (3 minute read) The iPhone 15 will have USB-C and faster charging speeds. The new models will be able to be recharged with up to 35W. They will be able to take full advantage of the 35W Dual USB-C chargers Apple introduced last year. It is unclear whether 35W charging will be available for only the iPhone 15 Pro models or whether it will work for the entire lineup. Some reports say that the faster charging speed will only be supported on certified cables. The new iPhones may support Thunderbolt through the USB-C port. 🚀 Science & Futuristic Technology Using the Oceans to Help Capture Carbon (8 minute read) Equatic is a company that aims to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by sucking it out of the seas. The oceans absorb a quarter of global CO2 emissions - removing the gas from the oceans would make room for them to soak up more. Equatic aims to have a 10-tonne-per-day CO2 removal unit running in Singapore by 2025 and remove millions of tonnes of CO2 annually by 2028. It says that it will cost around $100 per tonne of carbon removed from the oceans. Mice sleep 6 hours less via brain cell tweak, feel alert next day (2 minute read) Researchers have discovered that activating astrocyte cells in mice can cause them to stay awake for six hours longer than usual with no noticeable sleep debt. Astrocytes are star-shaped brain cells that were thought for many years to be little more than a kind of biological glue holding the brain together. The cells actually play a role in sleep, regulating the sense of time, mediating exercise's effects on the brain, and controlling inflammation in the brain. The new findings could lead to techniques for boosting the productivity, safety, and health of people who keep unusual hours. 💻 Programming, Design & Data Science 😘 Kiss bugs goodbye with 80% automated end-to-end test coverage (Sponsor) QA Wolf offers a cost-effective approach to getting 80% test coverage in just 4 months — even for the most complex web apps. Skeptical? Send them your most complicated user flow and, if they can't test it, they’ll give you a pair of AirPods Max 🎧. Plus, QA Wolf includes unlimited parallel runs on their testing infrastructure + 24-hour maintenance and triage. Schedule a demo to learn more. PS: QA Wolf currently has a 4.8/5 ⭐ rating on G2 as reviewed by companies with 51-1000+ employees. Turmoil (GitHub Repo) Turmoil is a testing framework for distributed systems. It can run multiple concurrent hosts within a single thread to provide deterministic execution. Turmoil introduces hardship into a system by changing a simulated network either through manual control or with a seeded ring. Why Does Email Development Have to Suck? (11 minute read) Email development is often messy and tough to make sense of. This article explains why this is and gives some useful advice on how to make it easier. Emails are essentially just HTML documents, except they are visualized in an email client. While both browsers and email clients are capable of rendering, web standards for email clients are less developed. This means that some of the most terrible practices in web development are actually the best practices in email development. 🎁 Miscellaneous What do I think about Community Notes? (24 minute read) This article contains Vitalik Buterin's thoughts on X's Community Notes. Community Notes is a fact-checking tool that attaches context notes to tweets. These notes appear frequently on tweets that get a very large audience on X. Buterin sees them as informative and valuable. He says that the feature is surprisingly close to satisfying the ideal of credible neutrality, which means that it is possible to easily verify that it doesn't discriminate between people and treats people fairly. Tech firms slow lay-offs but hold off on new hires even as AI creates demand for new skills (1 minute read) There has been no ramp-up in hiring in tech despite the surge of interest in AI. However, job cuts have appeared to slow down. There have been over 340,000 job cuts in the tech industry so far this year, well ahead of the around 240,000 for all of 2022. US job openings fell in June to their lowest level since April 2021. ⚡ Quick Links Major U.S. energy org targeted in QR code phishing attack (3 minute read) The name of the company targeted in this campaign was kept confidential - this is the first time that researchers have caught phishers using QR codes in an attack of this scale. Tesla wants to launch an in-house rental service (2 minute read) Tesla's Rental Program will begin its pilot at collision centers in Texas. NASA’s buildings are even older than its graying workforce (5 minute read) NASA's budget for maintenance and construction is wholly underfunded and its infrastructure is in an increasing state of decline. Google A.I. researcher says he left to build a startup after encountering ‘big company-itis’ (4 minute read) Llion Jones, a co-author of Google's pivotal Transformers paper, has left Google to start Sakana AI, a generative AI research lab that will investigate nature-inspired methods of doing things. Towards HTTPS by default (4 minute read) Chrome will soon automatically upgrade all http navigations to https - it will fall back to http if https isn't available. Spotify reportedly has a $38 million white noise problem (2 minute read) White noise podcasts accounted for 3 million daily consumption hours on Spotify as of January 2023. Want more TLDR? We also write newsletters for founders, AI, cybersecurity, crypto, and web dev! TLDR Talent is our exclusive community where we help world-class tech talent and get intros to companies of their choice, along with a number of exciting startups and tech companies curated by TLDR. We give you full control of the process, you can specify if you’re actively searching or passively interested only if something amazing comes along. Set your preferred compensation, seniority/title/role, specific companies (or types of companies) you’d like to work for and more. Click here to apply. 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