Apple Aiming to Launch Tabletop Robotic Home Device as Soon as 2026 With Pricing Around $1,000 (1 minute read)
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.
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Apple will let other digital wallets into Apple Pay, and even be the default (2 minute read)
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.
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Science & Futuristic Technology
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Stoke Space's initial launch plans at Cape Canaveral take shape (5 minute read)
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.
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Research AI model unexpectedly modified its own code to extend runtime (7 minute read)
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.
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Programming, Design & Data Science
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CSVs Are Kinda Bad. DSVs Are Kinda Good (10 minute read)
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.
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Practices of Reliable Software Design (8 minute read)
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.
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Inside the "3 Billion People" National Public Data Breach (15 minute read)
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.
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Former Google CEO does damage control over remote work comments (3 minute read)
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.
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