The focus for the next Starship mission will be to control the reentry of the rocket's Super Heavy booster and Starship upper stage - both vehicles broke apart during their descent on the last flight. The company aims to make the Super Heavy booster make a controlled pinpoint splash down in the Gulf of Mexico as the Starship upper stage attempts to survive its reentry back into Earth's atmosphere. The test will be a repeat of the previous test without the propellant transfer, without the Pez door open, and without the other items that SpaceX was working to demonstrate. NASA's main interest in the test will be seeing that SpaceX replicates the good engine performance it demonstrated on the last two flights. SpaceX is not planning to attempt a Raptor engine restart during the test.
Data from a small clinical trial shows that a zap of electricity from well-placed electrodes on the back of the tech can help patients with tetraplegia regain modest yet potentially life-changing functioning off their hands and arms. The non-invasive procedure offers an accessible and more affordable means for those living with paralysis to regain some meaningful function. The therapy's potential remains limited as it is not yet fully understood why it works. A startup working to make the therapy commercially available has submitted a device to the Food and Drug Administration for review.
Stripe's codebase is mostly written in Ruby and lives in a single large monorepo. It supports a number of services that share code extensively. The company's tooling was built and is maintained by a succession of teams and individuals, with the needs of the environment changing as the team and codebase grew and evolved. This article discusses the features of Stripe's developer environment and explains the reasoning behind the choices made during its development. Maintaining developer productivity as an engineering organization grows is difficult - it is almost inevitable that per-engineer productivity drops as companies and codebases grow.
GitHub Copilot Extensions enables developers to build and deploy to the cloud in their natural language with their preferred tools and services without leaving the IDE or GitHub.com. It helps developers stay in the flow longer, uplevel their skills, and innovate faster. Extensions can be found on the GitHub Marketplace. Organizations can create private Copilot Extensions for their homegrown developer tooling.
Braindump allows developers to build top-down/2.5D games or interactive worlds by simply typing prompts. It generates 3D models, game data, and scripts to make prompts come to life. This article shares learnings from Braindump's development. Challenges in its development include designing a UX for prompting and a game API for large language models. The game API has opened up interesting UX flows like generated macros. While Braindump is pretty good at executing commands, its team wants to expand it to handle more vague and bigger tasks. Braindump will open up for alpha testing in the coming weeks.
Anthropic recently published a public research paper explaining why its AI chatbot chooses to generate content about certain subjects over others. Its researchers deciphered what parts of the chatbot's neural network mapped to specific concepts using a process known as 'dictionary learning'. The research showed how neurons associated with a topic fired together when the model was thinking about something associated with the topic - similar sets of neurons firing can evoke adjacent subjects. A link to the paper is available at the end of the article.
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The StreamSaver bundle, which cuts more than 30 percent off the separate price of certain tiers of each service, will be rolled out on May 29 in the US.
Shoichiro Irimajiri, who was chairman and CEO of Sega, led Sega to invest $5 million into Nvidia, which the GPU manufacturer desperately needed - Sega later sold its Nvidia stock for about $15 million.
Microsoft recently spent an entire day pitting its new hardware against the MacBook Air. Its new Surface devices, equipped with Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite chips, pulled ahead in tests against Apple's category-leading laptop. Microsoft's Copilot Plus PCs feature an improved emulator that can emulate apps twice as fast as the previous generation of Windows on Arm devices. They are equipped with a neural processing unit that can perform more AI task operations per watt than the MacBook Air M3 and Nvidia's RTX 4060. Microsoft's Copilot Plus PCs will hit the market this summer.
The US Food and Drug Administration has given the green light for Neuralink to implant its brain chip in a second person. Most of the threads implanted in the first participant have come loose and are no longer reading the electrical signals needed to translate his thoughts into cursor movements. While software changes have helped him regain many of the device's capabilities, only around 15% of the threads inserted in his brain remain in place. Neuralink's proposed fix for the problem that occurred in the first test participant involves embedding some of the device's ultrathin wires deeper into the brain.
The Federal Aviation Administration is kicking off a new environmental review of SpaceX's plan to launch Starships from Florida. The US Space Force is overseeing a similar Environmental Impact Statement review for SpaceX's proposal to take over a launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. While the reviews can take a while and may delay SpaceX's plans, they show that SpaceX is finally cementing its plans to launch Starship from Florida.
Researchers found that the area of the brain where the intention to speak gets translated into control over the vocal tract produces consistent signals for both English and Spanish, allowing systems trained on English phrases to improve on their recognition of Spanish. The process of detecting these signals is complex, and it can result in high error rates. Piping the output through a large language model resulted in lower error rates. The study showed that the parts of the brain that control the muscles needed to speak aren't picky about which language they're handling.
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This post discusses how to write a good commit message that focuses on information. It's important to consider the audience when writing a commit message, as many people might read them for lots of different reasons. The post covers what to include in a commit message and other places to post messages. It also covers typography, but attempts to keep the topic to a bare minimum.
importx is a unified tool for importing TypeScript modules at runtime. It makes it easy to switch between different loaders. The library aims to swallow the complexity of the underlying implementations so developers can focus on the feature sets they need.
This article contains an interview with Google CEO Sundar Pichai conducted the day after the Google I/O developer conference last week. Google is building AI into virtually all of its products. The company is currently rolling out AI Overviews in Search, a move that will change the internet ecosystem as we know it. Pichai says that injecting AI into Search is about creating value for users and that users are clicking on links at higher rates in the AI previews. There is a deep tension between Google's vision for the future and the very real fears and anxieties creators and website owners are feeling about how search has changed and how AI might change the internet forever.
Startup founders in the US imagine the range of possible scenarios and pitch the top one percent outcome. This approach matches what venture Capitalists are looking for - it's an industry based on outlier returns. While most investments will fail completely, some will make a modest return, and a small percentage will be worth a thousand times what was paid initially - these successes easily pay for all of the other failures. The downside of early-stage investing is losing 1x your money, but the upside is that you make 1,000x - this is where you should focus your attention.
This article rounds up all of the major announcements Microsoft just made, including a new lineup of Copilot Plus PCs and generative AI-powered features like Recall, which helps users find apps, files, and other content they have viewed in the past.
There's a lot to NASA's Artemis' technical design - it goes beyond complex, with none of the puzzle pieces seeming to come from the same box and half of the breakthroughs the program requires making the other half unnecessary.
It's a better investment of time to study fundamentals, rather than specifics - once you have some foundation knowledge, you can apply it in many circumstances.
Adding '&udm=14' to the end of the Google URL will set 'Web' as the default search mode - this strips away all GenAI results, Featured Snippets, and most ads/sponsored posts.
Apple is unveiling new generative AI features at its Worldwide Developers Conference on June 10. While the company will still rely on the on-device approach, it's also planning to deliver services via the cloud. Apple will improve Siri's voice capabilities and add features like auto-summarizing notifications to help users with their day-to-day lives. Apple's generative AI technology isn't advanced enough for it to release its own chatbot, so it's teaming up with OpenAI to add the functionality to iOS 18.
Blue Origin has resumed crewed flights for the first time in two years. The company recently successfully brought six tourist crew members to the edge of space and back on its New Shepard rocket and crew capsule. Blue Origin had paused launches after a mission experienced an anomaly that caused it to abort after liftoff in August 2022. The company has flown a total number of 37 human passengers to space so far.
The Duke Human Vaccine Institute has developed an HIV vaccine candidate that triggers low levels of a type of broadly neutralizing HIV antibodies within weeks. It targets an area of the HIV-1 outer envelope that remains stable even as the virus mutates. Antibodies against this region can block infection by many different circulating strains of HIV. More work still needs to be done to create a more robust response - a successful HIV vaccine will likely have at least three components all aimed at distinct regions of the virus.
Scientists from China have found a way to thaw human brain tissue without damaging it. The scientists grew brain organoids from human embryonic stem cells and then tested various chemical compounds to determine which combinations could help keep frozen human brain tissue alive and enable growth after thawing. The most successful combination consisted of methylcellulose, ethylene glycol, DMSO, and Y27632. The researchers suspect it somehow interferes with a pathway that would otherwise initiate cell death, allowing for the issue to freeze and be thawed without incident.
Bugs sneak out when less than 80% of user flows are tested before shipping. But getting that kind of coverage — and staying there — is hard and pricey for any sized team.
System tests are supposed to offer greater confidence that a machine is working as it ought to. Developers automate testing to get quick feedback on changes, to catch regressions, and to become confident that a system works. System testing isn't the best way to fulfill all of these goals - sometimes it's better to embrace the human element and drop the automation. Not only will this allow you to know that the system works, it also lets you know whether the user interface 'feels right'.
This article walks readers through Google's code review process. It covers Google's internal code review tools, the different levels of mandatory approvals, Google's culture around code review, and more. Google's code reviews are more thorough and thoughtful than industry standard. Changes take multiple days and countless rounds of feedback before they can be merged.
Most of the interesting conversations in tech now happen in private group chats. This thread looks at what makes a group chat good. The best groups are small, have good moderators, and share rituals, jokes, and routines. New ideas, combined with a sense of humor, is what makes great group chats work - boredom breaks them.
Microsoft is releasing the next Call of Duty to its Game Pass subscription service. Players will still have the option to purchase the game outright. While this plan may mean people could end up paying Microsoft less to play the new game, the company hopes that it will draw new users to Game Pass who will end up paying more over the long term. Starfield, which was released on Game Pass at launch last year, drove a record number of new subscriptions in a single day.
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A provision in OpenAI's off-boarding papers states that employees risk losing all vested equity they earned during their time at the company if they don't sign a nondisclosure and non-disparagement agreement when they leave.