SpaceX and xAI are competing in a secretive new Pentagon contract to
produce voice-controlled autonomous drone swarming
technology


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TLDR

TOGETHER WITH [Wiz] [4]

TLDR 2026-02-17

7 SECURITY BEST PRACTICES FOR MCP (SPONSOR) [4]

Learn what security teams are doing to protect MCP without slowing
innovation.

As MCP (Model Context Protocol) becomes the standard for connecting
LLMs to tools and data, security teams are moving fast to keep these
new services safe.

The _MCP SECURITY BEST PRACTICES CHEAT SHEET_ [4] outlines seven
proven steps teams can put in place right away, including:

* How to lock down MCP servers and supply chains
* Enforcing least-privilege access for tokens and tools
* Adding human-in-the-loop safeguards for critical actions

If you're starting to see MCP show up in your environment, this is a
great place to start.

Get the Cheat Sheet [4]

¨

BIG TECH & STARTUPS

SPACEX TO COMPETE IN PENTAGON CONTEST FOR AUTONOMOUS DRONE TECH (5
MINUTE READ) [5]

SpaceX and its wholly owned subsidiary, xAI, are competing in a
secretive new Pentagon contract to produce voice-controlled autonomous
drone swarming technology. While Elon Musk has been enthusiastic about advancing AI, he has previously argued for a ban on autonomous weapons
that can select and engage their own targets and operate beyond
meaningful human control. OpenAI is also working on the effort by
supporting a successful submission from Applied Intuition. The
company's contribution to the project will be limited solely to the
conversion of voice and other instructions from battlefield commanders
into digital instructions. Its technology won't be used for the
operation of the drone swarm, weapons integration, or target
authority.

APPLE TAKES ON YOUTUBE AND SPOTIFY WITH NEW VIDEO PODCASTING PUSH (4
MINUTE READ) [6]

Apple will be introducing an integrated video podcast experience to
Apple Podcasts in the spring. The update will bring Apple Podcasts
more in line with its competitors, which have increasingly leaned into
video podcasting. There will be a picture-in-picture mode, and users
will be able to download video episodes for offline viewing. The
update will introduce support for HTTP Live Streaming, which features
dynamic video ad insertion.

¨

SCIENCE & FUTURISTIC TECHNOLOGY

BCIS IN 2026: STILL JANKY, STILL DANGEROUS, STILL OVERHYPED (17
MINUTE READ) [7]

The fundamental problems that plagued Brain-Computer Interfaces
(BCIs) a decade ago are still here. While there is genuine, impactful
progress in BCIs, this remains largely confined to severe medical
conditions. These are highly specialized, medically critical
applications, and there are severe engineering challenges that must be
overcome before they can be extrapolated into consumer products. This
article takes a look at the state of the BCI industry to provide a
realistic look at where the technology currently stands and the path
forward.

RARE, DANGEROUS SIDE EFFECTS OF SOME COVID-19 VACCINES EXPLAINED (6
MINUTE READ) [8]

Vaccine-induced immune thrombocytopenia and thrombosis (VITT)
occurred in roughly one out of 200,000 people who received
adenovirus-based COVID-19 vaccines. The condition occurred due to PF4 antibodies binding to rogue antibodies, setting off a dangerous
cascade (PF4 is a protein involved in blood clotting). Researchers
hypothesize that patients who developed VITT had previously been
infected with an adenovirus, which primed their B cells to recognize
an adenovirus protein in the vaccine, which kicked those cells into
action, starting a mutation-generating process that produced a variant
with a negatively charged amino acid, which ultimately led to VITT. In
most parts of the world, between 40% and 60% of the population has the
genetic background that makes people more prone to VITT, but in East
Asia, the prevalence is only 20%.

¨

PROGRAMMING, DESIGN & DATA SCIENCE

PEAK TRAFFIC SHOULDN'T MEAN PEAK ANXIETY (SPONSOR) [9]

Traffic skyrocketing? If you're on Microsoft Azure [10], there's no
reason to panic. When user demand spikes, Azure adjusts capacity in
the background. Performance stays steady with no manual intervention,
no late-night firefighting, and no scrambling to explain why the site
went down during the big launch. Build without limits with Azure [10]

ANTHROPIC TRIES TO HIDE CLAUDE'S AI ACTIONS. DEVS HATE IT (3 MINUTE
READ) [11]

Anthropic has changed Claude Code's progress output to hide the names
of files the tool was reading, writing, or editing. Developers have
pushed back, saying they need to see which files were accessed. The
full details can still be accessed with a keyboard shortcut.
Developers who want more details can also enable verbose mode.

--DANGEROUSLY-SKIP-READING-CODE (3 MINUTE READ) [12]

Large language models generate code much faster than humans can read
it. We can't expect humans to effectively review, understand, and
approve every diff anymore. Humans should focus their efforts on
specifications and tests while agents code. Rework is almost free, so
there should be less effort put into preventing incorrect work from
happening.

¨

MISCELLANEOUS

WHY I DON'T THINK AI IS A BUBBLE (14 MINUTE READ) [13]

People mostly say that AI performance will plateau because they
believe that performance increases have been driven by brute-force
scale, and the trend can't last. However, there are also new
innovations like reasoning and reinforcement learning driving
improvements, so there's no real reason to believe progress will halt.
The data centers being built now will likely be used productively. If
the technology does actually work, it's reasonable to believe the
industry will sort out any 'bubble'.

I GUESS I KINDA GET WHY PEOPLE HATE AI (20 MINUTE READ) [14]

AI will likely become extremely helpful in the future, but right now,
the everyday experience with the technology is awful. It may be
helpful for programmers, but normal people tend to have more negative experiences, and none of the people behind the technology seem to
care. AI continues to lower the barrier to entry for annoying,
low-quality things. This is resulting in things becoming generally
worse and is making the internet and social media and such
increasingly unusable.

¨

QUICK LINKS

ANAM INTRODUCES CARA-3: THE WORLD'S MOST ADVANCED INTERACTIVE AVATAR
MODEL (SPONSOR) [15]

Outperforms competitors up to 60%. Add a face to your product via API
[15] and improve your product's engagement by 44%.

THE COST OF STAYING (6 MINUTE READ) [16]

The shift from execution to judgment is making the cost of staying
and the upside of moving look completely different.

WHEN EVERYTHING GOES TO 0 (9 MINUTE READ) [17]

Trust is a scarce resource and a moat.

GELLMAN AMNESIA (5 MINUTE READ) [18]

When people talk about the jobs that AI will soon automate, they're
always talking about somebody else's job.

10 YEARS BUILDING VERTICAL SOFTWARE: MY PERSPECTIVE ON THE SELLOFF
(17 MINUTE READ) [19]

The market is finally distinguishing between companies that own
something genuinely scarce that is safe from LLM agents.

A DEFECTOR EXPLAINS THE REMOTE-WORK SCAM HELPING NORTH KOREA PAY FOR
NUKES (8 MINUTE READ) [20]

North Korean IT workers, who were generally sent back to Pyongyang
every two or three years for roughly a month of 're-education', would
hand over 90% of their earnings back to the regime.

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Thanks for reading,
Dan Ni [27] & Stephen Flanders [28]

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