Amazon's subscription-based Alexa+ looks highly capable—and questionable (6 minute read)
Amazon will start rolling out its more capable and conversational version of Alexa to US Prime members for free in the next few weeks. Alexa+ will be available to non-Prime subscribers for $20 a month. Amazon has not specified a release date but noted that availability will start with the Echo Show 8, 10, 15, and 21 smart displays. Alexa+ will be compatible with tens of thousands of other devices and services at launch - Amazon trained it to use partner APIs and it has agentic abilities for apps that don't have a full set of external APIs.
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Instagram may launch separate Reels app to take on TikTok (1 minute read)
Instagram is reportedly considering launching a separate Reels app focused on short-form video. TikTok's future remains uncertain in the US. President Trump has granted an extension to comply with the law that requires a sale or ban of the platform and floated the possibility of a joint venture between the US and ByteDance, but there are few details on how that might work. The law was enacted due to arguments that TikTok could be used by China as a tool for spying and political manipulation.
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Science & Futuristic Technology
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Reinforcement Learning Triples Spot's Running Speed (7 minute read)
The research version of Boston Dynamics' Spot quadruped robot comes with a low-level application programming interface that allows direct control of Spot's joints - it also unlocks some significant performance improvements, including a much faster running speed. The Robotics and AI Institute has been applying reality-grounded reinforcement learning techniques to enable much higher performance from Spot. This article looks at the improvements these techniques have made and also a brand-new hardware platform - an autonomous bicycle that can jump.
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Intuitive Machines' Athena Lander Launches on Journey to the Moon (5 minute read)
Intuitive Machines' Athena lander, launched yesterday on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, is now on an arcing path to the moon. It will attempt to land in a region about 100 miles from the Moon's south pole on March 6. The main payload on Athena is a drill designed to dig and pull up lunar soil about four inches at a time, dropping it on a pile on the surface to be analyzed. Athena is also carrying three robotic rovers and a small flying 'hopper'. More details about Athena's payloads are available in the article.
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Programming, Design & Data Science
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Semaphore (GitHub Repo)
Semaphore is a CI/CD platform that can be self-hosted or run on a cloud provider. It futures blazing-fast CI/CD and supports YAML-based configuration, parallel execution, and more. Semaphore can scale from a solo developer to massive engineering teams and is built for the modern cloud. It works seamlessly with containers, Kubernetes, and multi-cloud environments.
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Chicory (GitHub Repo)
Chicory allows developers to run WebAssembly (Wasm) programs with zero native dependencies or JNI. It can run Wasm anywhere the JVM can go. Chicory aims to be able to run even in very restrictive environments.
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Automattic's “nuclear war” over WordPress access sparks potential class action (4 minute read)
Automattic and its founder Matt Mullenweg may face a potential class action lawsuit claiming that they deliberately abused their power and control over the WordPress ecosystem to purposefully and repeatedly disrupt contracts. The class would include all persons in the US who had ongoing active WPE WordPress Web Hosting plans on or before September 24, 2024, through to December 10, 2024. The lawsuit warns that the entire internet as a whole could be harmed due to Automattic withholding access to open source software anytime a company doesn't cave into payment demands.
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Nvidia's AI Boom Brings Riches to Partners Like Dell, at a Cost (6 minute read)
Dell's $5 billion deal to supply servers to xAI is an immense win for the computer seller, but the deal only has a narrow margin of profitability. People familiar with the deal say that the deal is expected to yield gross margins only in the mid-single-digits percentage. Nvidia has expanded its product range, reducing opportunities for companies like Dell to bundle higher-margin items. The company's massive leverage is likely to continue at least until rival chipmakers launch competing products.
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I Went To SQL Injection Court (18 minute read)
The 104th Illinois General Assembly is considering a bill that will stop public bodies in Illinois from hiding information from Freedom of Information requests by keeping that information in databases.
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vscli (GitHub Repo)
vscli is a CLI/TUI that makes it easy to launch dev containers for IDEs like VSCode and Cursor
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