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Section 174 is reversed, mostly

Hi, this is Gergely with a bonus, free issue of the Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter. In every issue, I cover Big Tech and startups through the lens of senior engineers and engineering leaders. Today, we get into one out of four topics from last week’s The Pulse issue, which full subscribers received seven days ago. If you’ve been forwarded this email, you can subscribe here. Since early 2024, a tax change in the US named “Section 174” has been plaguing tech companies in the country. It was introd

RealPage goes from setting rent to collecting it

is a news writer who covers the streaming wars, consumer tech, crypto, social media, and much more. Previously, she was a writer and editor at MUO. RealPage, the algorithmic rent-setting software company, has announced plans to acquire Livble, a service that lets people pay their monthly rent in installments. Livble describes itself as a “flexible” rent payment solution. Renters can split payments into up to four installments throughout the month. The service bills itself as helping tenants “a

In the long run, GPL code becomes irrelevant (2015)

I wrote this in response to a comment thread on hackernews Defending GCC considered futile. There's been a megathread in the last week about whether Emacs should support LLVM, with Richard Stallman and now Eric Raymond joining the frey. Personally, I use a BSD license for all my code and contribute to BSD/Apache licensed software whenever I can. I do it because I think opensource will eventually eat the world anyway, and I think when it does a BSD/Apache implementation of any given piece of sof

WhatsApp should prepare to stop operating in Russia, official says

A Russian lawmaker who regulates the IT industry said WhatsApp should prepare to stop offering its services in the country. Anton Gorelkin, the deputy head of the lower house of parliament's IT committee, said that it's very likely that WhatsApp will be placed on a list of restricted software, as Reuters reports. WhatsApp owner Meta is designated as an extremist organisation in Russia, which has banned Facebook and Instagram since 2022. This week, President Vladimir Putin issued a directive for

The AI Replaces Services Myth

During college, my class was instructed to study Schopenhauer in political philosophy. Complete bummer, pessimist, the guy just makes you want to kill yourself. There was one quote about him though that really opened my eyes. Schopenhauer's philosophy is the mirror of his own nature... What he saw was not the world, but himself writ large." Nietzsche Schopenhauer basically talked about himself. Not the world. His prior conclusions on how the world works influenced his work. However, you and

Transit software startup Via confidentially files for an IPO

Via, the transit software startup that garnered attention for its consumer-facing on-demand shuttle service, said it has filed confidentially for an initial public offering. Via has been batting around plans for an IPO for years. The company filed confidentially for an IPO in 2021, but never took the next official and regulatory steps to enter the public markets. Now, the company says it’s ready. Its status as a confidential filing, however, leaves lots of missing details, including the number

M5 iPad Pro could finally deliver something we’ve all been asking for

Apple’s M5 iPad Pro is launching this fall, and thanks to the huge upgrades coming in iPadOS 26, it’s set to deliver something users have long asked for: new hardware that’s truly pushed to the limits by it software. M5 iPad Pro set to reverse the software shortcoming of every prior launch I’ve been an iPad Pro user for nearly a decade, and an iPad user even longer. One trademark of the iPad Pro era in particular is that hardware has outpaced software. If you revisit iPad Pro reviews from th

Great, Grok is in cars now too

Just a day after the xAI team issued a comprehensive apology and explanation about why its chatbot was spreading antisemitic rhetoric, Tesla updated its software for its cars to include the supposedly fixed Grok. According to Tesla, all new vehicles delivered on or after July 12 will have Grok available in-car. There's no additional subscription cost, but Tesla is limiting Grok's availability to models in the US for now. For older models to run Grok, it requires a Tesla with an AMD processor, t

Telefónica DE shifts VMware support to Spinnaker due to cost

The German arm of telecoms biz Telefónica has shifted support for its VMware installed base to Spinnaker after Broadcom quoted it a renewal figure five times the size of what it was previously paying. Telefónica Germany made the switch to Spinnaker at the start of the year when its existing support with VMware, now a subsidiary of silicon-and-software giant Broadcom, expired. VMware must support crucial Dutch govt agency as it migrates off the platform, judge rules READ MORE The telco was run

Let me pay for Firefox

Hi Mozilla community, I’m a long time Mozilla supporter, I’ve published free (as in freedom) and open-source software, and I desperately want Mozilla to charge for Firefox. If that sounds like a contradiction, please keep reading. I first became involved with the Mozilla community around 2006. I was active in the Spread Firefox project, where I ran a contest that encouraged others to promote Firefox in the most creative ways they could imagine. In hindsight, I guess it could have been called a

The upcoming GPT-3 moment for RL

The upcoming GPT-3 moment for RL Matthew Barnett, Tamay Besiroglu, Ege Erdil Jun 20, 2025 GPT-3 showed that simply scaling up language models unlocks powerful, task-agnostic, few-shot performance, often outperforming carefully fine-tuned models. Before GPT-3, achieving state-of-the-art performance meant first pre-training models on large generic text corpora, then fine-tuning them on specific tasks. Today’s reinforcement learning is stuck in a similar pre-GPT-3 paradigm. We first pre-train l

Let Me Pay for Firefox

Hi Mozilla community, I’m a long time Mozilla supporter, I’ve published free (as in freedom) and open-source software, and I desperately want Mozilla to charge for Firefox. If that sounds like a contradiction, please keep reading. I first became involved with the Mozilla community around 2006. I was active in the Spread Firefox project, where I ran a contest that encouraged others to promote Firefox in the most creative ways they could imagine. In hindsight, I guess it could have been called a

Employee AI agent adoption: Maximizing gains while navigating challenges

While agentic AI definitely marks a turning point in human-computer interaction, moving from tool use to collaboration, the next step is integrating these agents and actually deriving value. At VentureBeat’s Transform 2025, Matthew Kropp, managing director and senior partner at BCG, offered a game plan for workflow evolution, employee adoption, and organizational change. “The companies that are at the top of this curve — what we call future built, the ones that are most mature — are seeing subs

Knox lands $6.5M to compete with Palantir in the federal compliance market

While highly sought after, federal software contracts frequently come with a hidden cost: Achieving government SaaS security compliance, known as FedRAMP, can take years and require substantial resources. Achieving this certification typically takes up to three years and costs more than $3 million, covering everything from security operations engineer salaries to security audits, according to Irina Denisenko, CEO of Knox. Denisenko (pictured above, second from left) launched Knox, a federal ma

Desktop Publishing Tools That Didn't Make It (2022)

Today in Tedium: It’s easy to forget now, but desktop publishing was an immensely innovative thing when it emerged within the computing industry in the early ’80s. While at its heart a mishmash of hardware and software cleverly combined for a single goal, it was an empire builder, one that helped create new businesses and improve the status and positioning of existing ones. And with the decline of print as a medium, it can feel kind of old hat, but lots of stuff still gets typeset every single d

Desktop Publishing Tools That Didn't Make It

Today in Tedium: It’s easy to forget now, but desktop publishing was an immensely innovative thing when it emerged within the computing industry in the early ’80s. While at its heart a mishmash of hardware and software cleverly combined for a single goal, it was an empire builder, one that helped create new businesses and improve the status and positioning of existing ones. And with the decline of print as a medium, it can feel kind of old hat, but lots of stuff still gets typeset every single d

Biomni: A General-Purpose Biomedical AI Agent

Biomni: A General-Purpose Biomedical AI Agent Overview Biomni is a general-purpose biomedical AI agent designed to autonomously execute a wide range of research tasks across diverse biomedical subfields. By integrating cutting-edge large language model (LLM) reasoning with retrieval-augmented planning and code-based execution, Biomni helps scientists dramatically enhance research productivity and generate testable hypotheses. Quick Start Installation Our software environment is massive and

The tech behind Rivian’s 2026 Quad Motor truck and SUV — and that kick turn

As Rivian starts accepting orders for its 2026 Quad Motor pickup truck and SUV, customers may initially be enticed by the power and tricks the four motors in these rebooted EVs can unleash. After all, four motors delivering a combined 1,025 horsepower and 1,198 pound-feet of torque — and the ability to accelerate from a standstill to 60 miles per hour in less than 2.5 seconds — is hard to ignore. But they should also pay attention to the software. “The Quad is really the pinnacle of everythin

Operators, Not Users and Programmers

This post is part 0 of a multi-part series called “the computer of the next 200 years”. the modern distinction between “programmers” and “users” is evil and destroys agency. consider how the spreadsheets grow🔗 spreadsheets are hugely successful. Felienne Hermans, who has spent her career studying spreadsheets, attributes this success to "their immediate feedback system and their continuous deployment model": the spreadsheet shows you its result as soon as you open it, and it requires no steps

Local-first software (2019)

Martin Kleppmann, Adam Wiggins, Peter van Hardenberg, and Mark McGranaghan. Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud. 2019 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software (Onward!), October 2019, pages 154–178. doi:10.1145/3359591.3359737 This article has also been published in PDF format in the proceedings of the Onward! 2019 conference . Please cite it as: We share some of our findings from developing local-fi

Local-first software: You own your data, in spite of the cloud

Martin Kleppmann, Adam Wiggins, Peter van Hardenberg, and Mark McGranaghan. Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud. 2019 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software (Onward!), October 2019, pages 154–178. doi:10.1145/3359591.3359737 This article has also been published in PDF format in the proceedings of the Onward! 2019 conference . Please cite it as: We share some of our findings from developing local-fi

Is there a no-AI audience?

Published on July 2nd, 2025 how about no I recently saw a post on mastodon which said that someone was actively looking for a code editor that had absolutely no "AI" features. It did not strike me as a wishlist for nostalia's sake. It made me realize that in the rush to integrate artificial intelligence into every aspect of our digital lives, a growing number of companies have diminished the concept of opt-in by choice, it is now being turned into opt-in by default. I see a growing sentiment

Israeli quantum startup Qedma just raised $26M, with IBM joining in

Despite their imposing presence, quantum computers are delicate beasts, and their errors are among the main bottlenecks that the quantum computing community is actively working to address. Failing this, promising applications in finance, drug discovery, and materials science may never become real. That’s the reason why Google touted the error-correction capacities of its latest quantum computing chip, Willow. And IBM is both working on delivering its own “fault-tolerant” quantum computer by 202

Israeli quantum startup Qedma just raised $26 million, with IBM joining in

Despite their imposing presence, quantum computers are delicate beasts, and their errors are among the main bottlenecks that the quantum computing community is actively working to address. Failing this, promising applications in finance, drug discovery, and materials science may never become real. That’s the reason why Google touted the error correction capacities of its latest quantum computing chip, Willow. And IBM is both working on delivering its own “fault-tolerant” quantum computer by 202

U.S. lifts chip software curbs on China in sign of trade truce

The U.S. government has rescinded its export restrictions on chip-design software to China, three of the largest players in the space announced on Thursday. In separate statements, semiconductor software designers Siemens AG, Synopsys, and Cadence all said they received letters from the U.S. Department of Commerce informing them that the controls had been lifted. While Siemens is based in Germany, its chip design software subsidiary, Siemens EDA, is based in Oregon, U.S. As a result of export

U.S. lifts chip software curbs on China amid trade truce

The U.S. government has rescinded its export restrictions on chip-design software to China, semiconductor software companies Synopsys and Cadence announced Thursday. "Synopsys is working to restore access to the recently restricted products in China," the California-based software maker said in a statement. Its rival, Cadence, confirmed with CNBC that the U.S. Bureau of Industry and Security, which falls under the Department of Commerce, had reversed the export restrictions. "We are in the pr