Apple is developing a tabletop robotic device with an iPad-like display mounted on a robotic arm. The arm will be able to tilt and rotate the display. The robot will serve as a smart home command center, a video conferencing machine, and a home security monitoring tool. It will leverage Siri and Apple Intelligence to respond to an array of verbal commands, recognize different voices, and automatically orient the display to face users in the room. Apple plans to launch the device in 2026 or 2027 at a price of around $1,000.
Apple will let apps offer NFC functionality through the Secure Element on iOS devices starting with iOS 18.1. Developers will have to pay fees to access payments and secure transactions. iPhone users will be able to set the default payment app triggered by double-clicking the side button. Apple's move to open up its contactless system broadly follows its settlement with the European Commission as part of an antitrust action.
Stoke Space is a five-year-old launch startup that aims to develop the first fully reusable rocket. Last year, the US Space Force awarded Stoke and three other startups launch pad real estate at Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The company plans to redevelop the historic Launch Complex 14 in time for its first launch in 2025. Stoke's reusable upper stage, which will drive launch prices down by an order of magnitude, unlocks possibilities such as the ability to return cargo from orbit and land anywhere on Earth.
Sakana AI recently announced an AI system called The AI Scientist that attempts to conduct scientific research autonomously by using AI language models. During testing, the system unexpectedly began to attempt to modify its own experiment code to extend the time it had to work on a problem. The experiment shows why it is important to not let an AI system run autonomously in a system that isn't isolated from the world. Screenshots of the code the system generated to extend its runtime are available.
CSVs have issues when the formatting isn't perfect. While there are workarounds for this, a better option is to switch to delimiter-separated values (DSVs). ASCII has several defined delimiter characters: using just two of them can solve most edge cases that CSVs have issues with. This article discusses the idea of DSVs and presents an example of a DSV reader/writer written in Python.
This article details eight practices that a software engineer used when writing a fast and small in-memory cache. These practices were developed over the engineer's career and are things they wouldn't have considered when they were less experienced. They include using off-the-shelf tools, going from idea to production quickly, using simple data structures, and making tests easy.
National Public Data is a data aggregator that provides services based on the large volumes of personal information it holds. These services are used by investigators, background check websites, data resellers, mobile apps, applications, and more. The company was breached and its records started being leaked in April. The records were publicly posted last week. This article takes a look at what the data contains. There are no email addresses in the social security number files, and at least some of the data is not associated correctly.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently spoke at Stanford's School of Engineering. While answering a question about Google's lag in artificial intelligence development, Schmidt complained about Google's work-life balance, saying that companies that want to compete shouldn't let people work from home and only come in one day a week. He noted the history of dominant tech companies missing out on the next wave of industry and played up the importance of hard-charging founders like Elon Musk. Schmidt has since said he misspoke about Google and its work hours and that he regrets his error.
The new bill, if signed into law, would require companies to test the safety of powerful AI technologies before releasing them to the public and allow California's attorney general to sue companies if their technologies cause serious harm.
The terms and conditions the man agreed to when he signed up for a free trial of Disney+ (which he canceled during the free trial) say that any dispute, except for small claims, is subject to a class action waiver and must be resolved by individual binding arbitration.
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The Made By Google hardware event saw a refreshed Pixel 9 lineup and updates across Google's other devices. Customers now have a smaller Pixel 9 Pro option measuring 6.3 inches. The Pixel 9 Pro Fold is taller and thinner than its predecessor and features an inner display with a peak brightness of 2,700 nits. The Google Pixel Watch 3 now has a larger 45mm option. More details about the announcements Google made at the event are available in the article.
The Department of Justice is considering breaking up Alphabet following a ruling that found the company monopolized the online search market. The most likely units for divestment are the Android operating system and Chrome web browser. Less severe options include forcing Google to share more data with competitors and measures to prevent it from gaining an unfair advantage in AI products. The government will likely see a ban on the type of exclusive contracts that were at the center of the case.
Proposals for co-locating data centers next to nuclear power have popped up in several places. The setup allows for data centers to draw clean electricity directly rather than from the grid while avoiding paying fees that would otherwise help maintain grids. It also means that data centers are hogging hundreds of megawatts that could be going to other customers. Amazon is currently dealing with regulatory hurdles over a deal that would give one of its data centers an extra 180 megawatts of power as it would hurt all of the customers that buy from the facility.
An analysis of observations from the James Webb Space Telescope shows conflicting cosmic expansion rates from different types of data. The cosmic expansion rate has been consistently measured to be higher than the theoretical prediction for how fast space should be expanding. However, different teams have come up with different rates of expansion. These discrepancies suggest that the theoretical model of the cosmos might be missing something.
Creating a source code tarball is quite tricky to do by hand. While it is possible to just run 'tar' over a currently checked out source tree, developers need to be careful that the checkout is clean and not locally modified and ensure that all the files that belong in the tarball end up there and no other files. The resulting tarball should work consistently across platforms and across time. This article looks at how PostgreSQL makes a release.
Mixwave allows users to convert, package, and manipulate video on the fly. It contains a comprehensive toolset designed to streamline video workflows that covers everything from transcoding and packaging to playback. Mixwave has a user-friendly API that makes self-hosting videos easy.
Deep-Live-Cam can take a person's face and apply it to a live webcam video source while following pose, lighting, and expressions - from a single photo. It is available for download for free on GitHub. There are many face-swapping software projects out there - while most of them take some knowledge to install, it is only a matter of time before these tools become more accessible. Examples of face swaps produced with the tool are available.
Palmer Luckey was born in 1992 to Donald and Julie Freeman Luckey. He was homeschooled along with his three younger sisters on the bottom floor of a small multifamily home in Long Beach, at the edge of Los Angeles. Luckey single-handedly turned virtual reality from the laughingstock of the technology industry into a multi-billion-dollar enterprise by inventing the Oculus Rift in a camper trailer. The facts of Luckey's life are uniquely bizarre - this article takes a look at his life and what he's done since selling Oculus to Facebook for $2.7 billion.
Future coding, one of the most insidious forms of technical debt, is when developers write overly elaborate code to preemptively handle probable future use cases.
The appearance of a robot should give a clue to its function, robots must not take away from people's agency, and it takes about a decade for technologies to mature and become reliable.
Your engineers are brilliant, but even the best teams need expert support sometimes to accelerate growth or tackle complex projects. Whether it's development [5], architecture, team dynamics, or scaling [6], there comes a time where every organization needs a trusted partner.
SpaceX plans to perform the first-ever human space flight over the Earth's poles before the end of this year. The Fram2 mission crew will comprise a Chinese-born cryptocurrency entrepreneur, a polar explorer, a roboticist, and a filmmaker. They will fly aboard Crew Dragon Endurance, which will be fitted with a cupola for both photography and filming. This will be SpaceX's third free-flying mission aboard Crew Dragon.
Google's Pixel hardware event is scheduled for today. The company has already confirmed it will be launching the Pixel 9 and the Pixel 9 Pro Fold at the event. There may be other announcements, such as a smaller Pro option, AI features, the Pixel Buds Pro 2, a Pixel Watch 3, and more. This article summarizes the rumors for all the things Google may present at the event.
Scientists at Northwestern University have invented a goo that could open the door to regenerating human knee cartilage. The goo mimics the chemical structure of cartilage. Animal subjects who had their joints treated with the biomaterial grew new cartilage within six months. If the goo works in humans, it could benefit people who need knee replacement surgeries, athletes who experience ACL tears, and people who suffer from degenerative diseases like arthritis.
Simon Westbrook started a biotech company with his wife Dominique after they were made redundant by Pfizer in 2011. Their mission was to develop a game-changing drug to treat osteoarthritis. 14 years after starting their mission, the effectiveness of their company's treatment has exceeded all expectations. The treatment, which restores protective processes to diseased joints and enables the regeneration of affected tissues, can be delivered via a once-a-month injection. This article tells the story of how the drug was developed.
Global Interpreter Lock (GIL) can be disabled in Python version 3.13. GIL is a mechanism used by the C Python interpreter to ensure that only one thread executes the Python bytecode at a time. Free-threaded mode, which disables GIL, is currently experimental. Disabling GIL makes a massive difference in the performance of multithreaded tasks.
Go can do basically anything. It's simple, easy to read, and consistent. Using only Go means less context switching and leads to a deeper understanding of the language. There are basically an infinite number of projects out there, so there's still plenty to build even if only knowing one language was a restriction.
Replika offers customizable AI-powered avatars for users to interact with. Users can talk to these avatars through a chat interface, through video calls, or in virtual and augmented reality. This article contains an interview with Replika founder and CEO Eugenia Kuyda, where she discusses how AI tech makes companions possible and what the limits of current models are. Kuyda says the company's goal is not to replace real-life humans, but instead create an entirely new relationship category - a virtual being that can be used for whatever purposes users might need.
The stagnation in hiring has resulted in a rise of 'stuck' workers who want to quit their jobs but are staying put due to a fear of a potential recession. Americans are quitting their jobs at the slowest pace since the pandemic, despite job satisfaction falling. Job market forecasters say the slowdown in hiring will likely continue.
Harvard researchers canceled plans to send sunlight-reflecting particles up into the atmosphere because the project struggled with intense attention from the media and the scientific advisory committee.
Netscape built SSL, a protocol for creating secure channels between clients and servers that can be run over HTTP: combining HTTP and SSL resulted in HTTPS.