TLDR 2025-05-05

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WELCOME TO STARBASE: TEXAS HAS A NEW CITY HOME TO ELON MUSK'S SPACEX

A vote to decide whether to turn part of south Texas into a new city centered around Elon Musk's SpaceX passed with broad support, paving the way for a newly incorporated city made up almost exclusively of SpaceX employees and people connected to the company. The brand-new city, Starbase, covers about one and a half square miles at the southern tip of Texas in a coastal spot nestled against the Mexico border. It is home to SpaceX headquarters and where the company builds its boosters and engines and launches its Starship rocket on test flights. Having greater municipal control of the area could ease some of the bureaucracy and restrictions around SpaceX's tests and rocket launches.

ERIC SCHMIDT APPARENTLY BOUGHT RELATIVITY SPACE TO PUT DATA CENTERS IN ORBIT

Eric Schmidt acquired Relativity Space to have the capability to launch a significant amount of computing infrastructure into space. Schmidt appeared before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce during a hearing in April and spoke about the need for more electricity to power data centers to facilitate the computing needs for AI development and applications. Space-based data centers would be powered by solar panels and be able to radiate heat into the vacuum of space. Relativity's Terran R will be capable of launching 33.5 metric tons to low-Earth orbit in expendable mode and 23.5 tons with a reusable first stage.

WORLD FIRST: JAPAN CLAIMS NEW DRONE CAN INDUCE LIGHTNING STRIKES

Japan's Nippon Telegraph and Telephone group claims to have created a drone that can induce and guide lightning strikes. The technology could theoretically be used to protect cities and infrastructure from lightning damage. A wire is attached to the drone - when a switch is flicked, a surge of electrical energy runs through the wire, grounding the drone electrically. This allegedly increases the strength of the drone's surrounding electric field, triggering and attracting a lightning strike. A video that explains how the technology works is available in the article.

AFTER 856 'SNAKE BITES', MAN'S BLOOD COULD UNLOCK UNIVERSAL ANTIVENOM

Venom expert Tim Friede has voluntarily injected himself with snake venom 856 times across 18 years. This has led to the creation of the most widely effective snake antivenom on record. The antivenom protected mice from the venom of 19 different snake species in lab experiments. Rigorous clinical testing is required before the antivenom will be made available to humans. The researchers plan to conduct field trials of the antivenom to treat snake-bitten dogs in Australia.

APPLE AND ANTHROPIC REPORTEDLY PARTNER TO BUILD AN AI CODING PLATFORM

Apple and Anthropic have partnered to build a new version of Xcode that will use Anthropic's Claude Sonnet model to write, edit, and test code. Apple plans to roll out the software internally and hasn't decided if it will launch it publicly. The latest Claude models have been particularly popular for coding tasks.

PIPASK

pipask is a drop-in replacement for pip that performs security checks before installing a package. It relies on metadata from PyPI whenever possible. pipask asks for consent first if third-party code execution is necessary. It uses pip to handle the actual installation if the installation is approved.

WE FINALLY KNOW A LITTLE MORE ABOUT AMAZON'S SUPER-SECRET SATELLITES

Amazon finally launched the first production satellites for its Kuiper broadband network last week. The company has been secretive about the project since it was unveiled in 2019. The designs of the satellites remain unknown, but a fuzzy video released by Amazon on Friday revealed enough to make out their trapezoidal shape. The mass of each Kuiper satellite is estimated to be somewhere between 1,185 and 1,259 pounds.

FUTUREHOUSE RELEASES AI TOOLS IT CLAIMS CAN ACCELERATE SCIENCE

FutureHouse has launched four AI tools (Crow, Falcon, Owl, and Phoenix) designed to support scientific work. Crow can search scientific literature and answer questions about it, Falcon can conduct deeper literature searches, Owl looks for previous work in a given subject area, and Phoenix uses tools to help plan chemistry experiments. The Eric Schmidt-backed nonprofit aims to build an 'AI scientist' within the next decade. Its tools still make mistakes, which may make scientists wary of endorsing them for serious work.

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20TH-ANNIVERSARY IPHONE WILL REPORTEDLY FEATURE AN ALL-SCREEN DESIGN

At least one of the new iPhone models launching in 2027 will have a truly edge-to-edge display.

ANEMLL

ANEMLL is a project that aims to accelerate the porting of large language models to tensor processors.

SETTLING THE FILE STRUCTURE DEBATE

Type-based grouping is great for tech-focused tasks, consistent naming, and large sweeping changes, while context/process-based grouping shines for domain clarity, team ownership, debugging, and mapping business problems directly to code.

NVIDIA IS WORKING ON CHINA-TAILORED CHIPS AGAIN AFTER U.S. EXPORT BAN

Samples of the new chips will be available as soon as June.

WHAT I LEARNED DURING THE LICENSE SWITCH

Licensing isn't just about what you can do and can't do - the degree to which a given license is understood, tested, and adopted matters.

WHAT I'VE LEARNED FROM JJ

Jujutsu is a version control system that treats everything as a unique but flexible 'change'.