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Cory Doctorow: "centaurs" and "reverse-centaurs"

Science fiction’s superpower isn’t thinking up new technologies – it’s thinking up new social arrangements for technology. What the gadget does is nowhere near as important as who the gadget does it for and who it does it to. Your car can use a cutting-edge computer vision system to alert you when you’re drifting out of your lane – or it can use that same system to narc you out to your insurer so they can raise your premiums by $10 that month to punish you for inattentive driving. Same gadget, d

Topics: ai fact lists summer use

Show HN: Daffodil – Open-Source Ecommerce Framework to connect to any platform

Daffodil - Storefront that can connect to any ecommerce backend. Daffodil is an ecommerce development framework for building high-quality storefronts that can connect to any ecommerce backend. daff.io | demo.daff.io Demo Wanna see what we're trying to do? Check out the demo. Quickstart From a new Angular app, simply run npx ng add @daffodil/commerce Documentation Get started with Daffodil, learn the fundamentals and explore advanced topics on our documentation website. Contributing

When You Read the Fine Print, Humanoid Robots Are Going Absolutely Nowhere

We tend to get fixated on realizing certain contraptions from science fiction, no matter how impractical. Flying cars. Jet packs. And now, humanoid robots. It's only the latter, however, that's anticipated to one day be a multitrillion dollar market, with big firms like Tesla leading the charge. In March, Tesla CEO Elon Musk boasted that his automaker would build 5,000 Optimus robots by the end of this year. Responding to Musk's claim, so did the Shanghai-based startup Agibot. Norwegian robot m

NASA closing its original repository for Columbia artifacts to tours

NASA is changing the way that its employees come in contact with, and remember, one of its worst tragedies. In the wake of the 2003 loss of the space shuttle Columbia and its STS-107 crew, NASA created a program to use the orbiter's debris for research and education at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Agency employees were invited to see what remained of the space shuttle as a powerful reminder as to why they had to be diligent in their work. Access to the Columbia Research and Preservation Off

The US and China might finally have a TikTok deal

is a news writer who covers the streaming wars, consumer tech, crypto, social media, and much more. Previously, she was a writer and editor at MUO. The US and China have reached a “framework” deal to divest TikTok from its Chinese parent company, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told reporters during trade talks in Madrid on Monday. As noted by Reuters, Bessent confirmed that “the framework is for a switch to a U.S.-controlled ownership.” He said Trump will confirm the deal with Chinese Preside

Spotify Free now lets you play a specific track on demand

Spotify Free comes with enough limitations that the company hopes it will persuade you to upgrade to a premium subscription. But one of the four limits is being removed from today … Unlike Apple Music, which offers paid subscriptions only (aside from a limited free trial), Spotify offers the choice of free and premium subscriptions. Spotify Free has so far had four major drawbacks: Interruptions from ads Lower audio quality Limited ability to skip unwanted tracks Shuffle-only playback on m

US, China reach ‘framework’ deal for TikTok

In Brief The U.S. has reached a “framework” deal with China for social media platform TikTok, CNBC reported, citing Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. “It’s between two private parties, but the commercial terms have been agreed upon,” CNBC quoted Bessent as saying on the sidelines of a meeting between the two countries in Madrid on Monday. The news comes barely an hour after U.S. President Donald Trump hinted on his social media platform Truth Social that a deal for the short-video app had bee

Bessent says 'framework' of U.S.-China TikTok deal has been reached, will be finalized Friday

The U.S. and China have a reached a 'framework' deal for social media platform TikTok, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Monday. "It's between two private parties, but the commercial terms have been agreed upon," he said from Madrid. Both President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping will meet Friday to discuss the terms. On Monday, Trump said in a Truth Social post Monday that a deal was reached "on a 'certain' company that young people in our Country very much wanted to save" a

Celestia – Real-time 3D visualization of space

Interactive Planetarium Celestia serves as a planetarium – for an observer on any celestial object. You can easily navigate to any world and land on its surface. When used as a planetarium, Celestia shows accurate positions of solar system objects in the sky. You can switch labels and other supporting features on and off with hotkeys, or zoom in and out on an object of interest, for example Jupiter’s system of moons.

OpenAI Ramps Up Robotics Work in Race Toward AGI

OpenAI appears to be ramping up its efforts in robotics, hiring researchers who work on humanoid systems as it explores new ways to advance artificial intelligence. The company has recently recruited a number of researchers with expertise in developing AI algorithms for controlling humanoid and other types of robots. Job listings show that the company is putting together a team capable of creating systems that can be trained through teleoperation and simulation. Sources with knowledge of the c

Is the humanoid robot industry ready for its ChatGPT moment?

In this article TSLA Follow your favorite stocks CREATE FREE ACCOUNT Two humanoid robots are on display at the China Mobile booth at the Mobile World Conference in Shanghai on June 19, 2025. Nurphoto | Nurphoto | Getty Images Humanoid robots, which have made significant technological advances this year, may be at the precipice of a ChatGPT-like spike in investment and popularity — or at least, that's what many in the industry believe. So-called humanoid robots are artificial intelligence-power

Celestia – real-time 3D visualization of space

Interactive Planetarium Celestia serves as a planetarium – for an observer on any celestial object. You can easily navigate to any world and land on its surface. When used as a planetarium, Celestia shows accurate positions of solar system objects in the sky. You can switch labels and other supporting features on and off with hotkeys, or zoom in and out on an object of interest, for example Jupiter’s system of moons.

Which NPM package has the largest version number?

Which npm package has the largest version number? I spent way too much time on this I was recently working on a project that uses the AWS SDK for JavaScript. When updating the dependencies in said project, I noticed that the version of that dependency was v3.888.0 . Eight hundred eighty eight. That’s a big number as far as versions go. That got me thinking: I wonder what package in the npm registry has the largest number in its version. It could be a major, minor, or patch version, and it doe

'How to Train Your Dragon' Remake: Release Date and Time on Peacock

Need a live-action Night Fury in your life? The recent How to Train Your Dragon remake is hitting Peacock, so animated film fans can spend more time with the franchise's Vikings and dragons. The new version from Universal Pictures stars Mason Thames as the misfit Viking teen Hiccup, and Gerard Butler as Hiccup's dragon-loathing dad, Stoick the Vast (Butler also voices the character in the animated movie). Nico Parker plays Astrid, the tough girl Hiccup has a crush on, and Nick Frost plays the v

Scientists Working on "Smart Dust" That Can Spy on a Room While Drifting Throught the Air

In his 1963 scifi story "The Invincible," the Polish writer Stanisław Lem imagined an artificial species of free-floating nanobots which roamed the atmosphere of a far-off planet. Like tiny bugs, the microscopic beings were powerless alone, but together they could form cooperative swarms to gather energy, reproduce, and ultimately defend their territory from predators with deadly force. Unlike the story’s human protagonists, the "black cloud" of bots was incapable of reasoning beyond the simple

Everyone Thinks Elon Musk is Going to Build a SpaceX Mobile Network

SpaceX’s has been partnering with mobile carriers like T-Mobile to offer its satellite internet service Starlink to extend the reach of cell networks. But, according to a report from the Washington Post, the company has ambitions to be more than just a partner. Following a major purchase of wireless spectrum earlier this week, it appears everyone is expecting Elon Musk’s company to get into the wireless network business for itself. On Monday, it was reported that SpaceX was finalizing a deal wi

Karen Hao on the Empire of AI, AGI evangelists, and the cost of belief

At the center of every empire is an ideology, a belief system that propels the system forward and justifies expansion – even if the cost of that expansion directly defies the ideology’s stated mission. For European colonial powers, it was Christianity and the promise of saving souls while extracting resources. For today’s AI empire, it’s artificial general intelligence to “benefit all humanity.” And OpenAI is its chief evangelist, spreading zeal across the industry in a way that has reframed ho

YouTube Premium’s main shortcoming is stopping me from subscribing

Joe Maring / Android Authority Not a day goes by without YouTube urging me to subscribe to Premium. Whether barraging me with endless ads or taunting me with the lack of free downloads and background play support, Google believes it has a compelling case of pay-to-play. I’m not so sure. Even though a Premium subscription would save me a lot of headaches and allow me access to other features, there are no plans that fit my living situation, and this is likely a problem for many others as well.

The Quest to Find the Longest-Running Simple Computer Program

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Imagine that someone gives you a list of five numbers: 1, 6, 21, 107 and—wait for it—47,176,870. Can you guess what comes next? If you’re stumped, you’re not alone. These are the first five busy beaver numbers. They form a sequence that’s intimately tied to one of the most notoriously difficult questions in theoretical computer science. Determining the values of busy beaver numbers is a daunting challenge that has attracted a cult

A Trick for Backpropagation of Linear Transformations

Linear transformations such as sums, matrix products, dot products, Hadamard products, and many more can often be represented using an einsum (short for Einstein summation). This post explains a simple trick to backpropagate through any einsum, regardless of what operations it represents. Example Einsum For example, an einsum for matrix multiplication can be written like so: import numpy as np A = np.arange(2 * 3).reshape(2, 3) # A = [ # [0, 1, 2], # [3, 4, 5] # ] B = np.arange(3 * 4).reshap

Topics: einsum ik jnp np uses

Indie App Spotlight: ‘SUMRY’ turns your Apple Watch activity into workout stories

Welcome to Indie App Spotlight. This is a weekly 9to5Mac series where we showcase the latest apps in the indie app world. If you’re a developer and would like your app featured, get in contact. If you’re an avid Apple Watch fan (or use another fitness tracker that syncs to Apple Health), you’ll find SUMRY incredibly useful. It allows you to pull multiple Apple Health workouts together, and it creates comprehensive summaries that tell a story about your activity. Top features SUMRY works with

CEOs Are Obsessed With AI, But Their Pushes to Use It Keep Ending in Disaster

There may be nobody else on Earth more excited about AI than CEOs. Driven by a compulsion to cut overhead costs — and avoid the wrath of similarly AI-fixated shareholders — executive teams across the US can’t wait to force AI onto their workforces, consequences be damned. Corporate executives have become giddy at the thought of automating their workforces, boasting about supposed productivity gains as they lay off human workers, who now face one of the worst job markets in recent history. Even

Tether Taps Trump’s Former Crypto Advisor to Lead US Operations

In an effort to solidify itself as the go-to company in the cryptocurrency space for stablecoins, Tether is tapping Bo Hines, the former Executive Director of Donald Trump’s White House Crypto Council to lead its operations in the United States, including efforts to launch a new stablecoin called USAT that will comply with new, Trump-backed regulations, according to CNBC. Tether is best known for its USDT stablecoin, which is pegged to the US Dollar and has become the most commonly used token f

Trump Clears the Way for a Dystopian Air Taxi Future

Donald Trump, who was backed by a bunch of tech billionaires during this past presidential election, is busy transforming America into a corporate dystopia straight out of the 1980s science fiction films that those billionaires have long admired for all the wrong reasons. For one thing, Trump has fully embraced AI—helping to cut what little regulation existed under the Biden administration, in an effort to further liberate the already blossoming and disruptive new industry. He also recently pave

60 years after Gemini, newly processed images reveal incredible details

Six decades have now passed since some of the most iconic Project Gemini spaceflights. The 60th anniversary of Gemini 4, when Ed White conducted the first US spacewalk, came in June. The next mission, Gemini 5, ended just two weeks ago, in 1965. These missions are now forgotten by most Americans, as most of the people alive during that time are now deceased. However, during these early years of spaceflight, NASA engineers and astronauts cut their teeth on a variety of spaceflight firsts, flying

Resizing images in Rust, now with EXIF orientation support

Resizing images in Rust, now with EXIF orientation support Resizing an image is one of those programming tasks that seems simple, but has some rough edges. One common mistake is forgetting to handle the EXIF orientation, which can make resized images look very different from the original. Last year I wrote a create_thumbnail tool to resize images, and today I released a small update. Now it’s aware of EXIF orientation, and it no longer mangles these images. This is possible thanks to a new ver

Show HN: wcwidth-o1 – Find Unicode text cell width in no time for JavaScript/TS

A TypeScript/JavaScript port of Markus Kuhn’s wcwidth and wcswidth implementations, optimized to O(1). These functions are defined in IEEE Std 1003.1 (POSIX). Superior Performance ⚡️ Instant O(1) lookup time 🌏 Full Unicode 15.1 coverage Getting Started Install Wcwidth-O1 via npm: npm i wcwidth-o1 Usage JavaScript / TypeScript: import wcwidth from 'wcwidth-o1' ; const example1 = wcwidth ( 'a' ) ; // 1 const example2 = wcwidth ( '好' ) ; // 2 const example3 = wcwidth ( '😊' ) ; // 2 or i

Tucker Carlson asks Sam Altman if an OpenAI employee was murdered ‘on your orders’

Carlson: “…he was definitely murdered, I think… there were signs of a struggle, of course. The surveillance camera, the wires had been cut. He had just ordered take-out food, come back from a vacation with his friends on Catalina Island. No indication at all that he was suicidal. No note and no behavior. He had just spoken to a family member on the phone. And then he’s found dead with blood in multiple rooms. So that’s impossible. Seems really obvious he was murdered. Have you talked to the aut

Sharing Your YouTube Premium Plan? Your Service Could Be Paused

That popular workaround for sharing a YouTube Premium family plan with friends and relatives in different homes is now squarely in Google's crosshairs. A new wave of enforcement has begun, with subscribers reporting they've received emails warning that their account access will be suspended. The ultimatum is clear: confirm all members live at the same address within 15 days, or lose your premium perks. And now that's something you should watch out for, whether you plan to stream videos or listen

How Prehistoric Humans Survived a Supervolcano So Big We Probably Should Have Gone Extinct

If you were lucky 74,000 years ago, you would have survived the Toba supereruption, one of the largest catastrophic events that Earth has seen in the past 2.5 million years. While the volcano is located in what’s now Indonesia, living organisms across the entire globe were potentially affected. As an archaeologist who specializes in studying volcanic eruptions of the past, I often think about how incredible it is that humans survived this extinction-level event that was over 10,000 times larger