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Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/05/vast-space-seeks-to-diversify-by-building-satellites-as-well-as-space-stations/

As part of its plan to develop a private space station, Vast Space built and then launched a small demonstration spacecraft in early November. This vehicle then completed dozens of test objectives with flying colors before making a successful de-orbit three months later.

The mission, which tested power, propulsion, tracking, and a multitude of other technologies needed for Vast's Haven-1 space station, was evidently so successful that the company is ready to use its spaceflight capabilities for other purposes. The Long Beach, California-based company announced Tuesday that it plans to begin selling high-powered satellite buses.

"Every single successful space company is diversified in its products," said Max Haot, chief executive of Vast Space, in an interview. "So for us it really was a question of when, not if."

The company's first offering is a 15 kW-class satellite bus capable of supporting a variety of demanding missions. Each satellite is about 3 meters long and 4 meters tall, with a mass of 700 kg and payload capacity of at least 350 kg. They will have a design lifetime of five years and be intended to operate in areas ranging from low-Earth orbit out to lunar orbit. Vast aims to serve a variety of customers, from telecommunications to observation to data services. Haot added that Vast also plans to offer an NVIDIA Space-1 Vera Rubin Module to support orbital data center inferencing needs.

The Vast satellite bus—essentially a backbone providing power, propulsion, and navigation for various payoads—will be based largely on technology ported over from the company's Haven-1 space station, which is due to launch for the first time next year as the world's first private space station. However there will be some new elements needed for the satellite, and Haot said Vast is already moving forward with in-house development of electric propulsion and a deployable solar array for the satellite.

Vast has already signed a customer for four satellites, with an option to purchase up to 200 additional satellites. Haot said the company is targeting a launch of at least 10 Vast Satellites in the fourth quarter of 2027.

With this new product line, Vast is entering an increasingly crowded market. Historically, in the United States, a handful of large companies such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Maxar, and Sierra Space have manufactured medium and large satellites. Typically these were costly and often bespoke designs that cost tens to often hundreds of millions of dollars.

But a few trends have changed the landscape in recent years. The US government's Space Development Agency has signaled that it prefers proliferated constellations—many satellites spread out present less of a concentrated target than a few larger and more expensive satellites. With the Falcon 9 rocket's increased cadence, as well as rideshare missions, it became easier and sometimes cheaper to get smaller and medium-size satellites into orbit.

This has led to an influx of venture capital to back a new generation of companies seeking to build less expensive, more modular satellites that could fill a variety of purposes. There are several prominent, relatively new entrants in this area including K2 Space, Rocket Lab, True Anomaly, Blue Canyon, and Millennium Space Systems.

Haot said most of these companies are still emerging, with products that are not yet mature. In other words, he believes that if Vast Space can execute, it could become a market leader, especially with applications that are power-hungry. Vast has already invested $1 billion in facilities for spacecraft manufacturing, including clean rooms, which can be used for space stations as well as satellites, he said.

The number of satellites in space has exploded in recent years, largely due to the rapid expansion of SpaceX's Starlink constellation. For decades the total number of satellites orbiting Earth numbered about 4,000, but in the last five years that number has grown to about 14,000.

This is just the beginning. By some estimates, in another decade, there will be approximately 500,000 satellites in orbit for the purpose of communications, Earth observation, orbital data centers, and other applications.

Haot expects that about 90 percent of these will be satellites built by SpaceX, Amazon, Blue Origin, or other major players. But even 10 percent of that number, if available to commercial satellite bus manufacturers, would represent 50,000 satellites for Vast and other companies to compete for.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

'Star Wars' used to be the ultimate theatrical experience, but have years of Disney+ spin-offs dulled its multiplex appeal?

Remember "Meet Joe Black", Brad Pitt's remake of '30s drama "Death Takes a Holiday"? What about Bruce Willis's military drama "The Siege"? Or even Adam Sandler's American football comedy "The Waterboy"? They're rarely talked about now, but for a brief period in fall 1998, these three movies — along with Pixar's "A Bug's Life" — came to unexpected prominence in the lives of "Star Wars" fans.

With anticipation for "The Phantom Menace", George Lucas's first big-screen excursion to the Star Wars galaxy in 16 years, comfortably exceeding fever pitch, these films provided an unlikely route back to a galaxy far, far away. Knowing that the first "Episode I" teaser was attached to prints across the States, many "Star Wars" fans bought tickets to these Earth-bound movies, watched a certain red-hot trailer, and then walked out before the feature presentation had even begun.

[...] Yes, it's fair to say that the generations of moviegoers who'd queued around the block to watch the original trilogy in theaters or on VHS — as well as embracing the Special Edition theatrical re-releases in 1997 — were kind of excited about Darth Vader: The Early Years.

How Disney and Lucasfilm must be hoping they can recapture similar excitement ahead of "The Mandalorian and Grogu"'s multiplex debut this month. It may be easier said than done, however, especially with a report in Deadline suggesting that the movie is tracking for the worst opening weekend in "Star Wars" history.

[...] As Disney and Lucasfilm dragged their heels over a new movie, the streamer subsequently became the place to go for new "Star Wars" "content, with "The Book of Boba Fett", "Obi-Wan Kenobi", "Andor", "Ahsoka", "The Acolyte" and "Skeleton Crew" all following in "The Mandalorian"'s footsteps, to varying degrees of success. In the last six-and-a-half years, there have been more hours of live-action "Star Wars" TV than 11 movies had generated in the previous four decades.

kolie writes:

On May 19, 2026 -- Google I/O day -- Google pushed a mandatory, silent auto-update to all users of Antigravity, its six-month-old AI coding platform. When developers returned to their machines, their Integrated Development Environment (IDE) had been replaced with a standalone agent chat interface. No code editor. No file browser. No terminal. No extensions.

Antigravity launched in November 2025 as a free, Visual Studio Code-based IDE with a deeply integrated AI agent. It supported Remote Secure Shell (SSH), Development Containers, Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), and the full VS Code extension ecosystem. Google's own launch announcement described it as offering "a state-of-the-art, AI-powered IDE equipped with tab completions and inline commands for the synchronous workflow you already know" alongside its agent capabilities. The 2.0 update replaced that product with a multi-agent orchestration interface.

The installer bug. The 2.0 installer deposited its files into the same directory as the existing IDE. Electron applications load resources/app.asar before resources/app/ regardless of which executable is launched. By dropping its app.asar next to the IDE's existing files, the 2.0 installer caused both Antigravity.exe and Antigravity IDE.exe to silently launch the agent chat interface. An independent technical analysis on Hacker News diagnosed it:

Not an Electron bug. Location-based loading is documented behavior. This is a packaging mistake in Google's 2.0 installer assuming two separate Electron products can share an install directory.

Data loss. Google split the application's data directories without migrating user data or issuing any notice. Chat histories, session context, extensions, and workspace settings stored in %AppData%\Roaming\Antigravity were invisible to the new app, which reads only from %AppData%\Roaming\Antigravity IDE. piunikaweb.com documented the directory split. Recovery required eight manual steps: killing processes, backing up AppData folders, completely uninstalling both applications, downloading the IDE from a link buried at the bottom of the download page, and copying data between the two directories.

What is missing from the 2.0 standalone app. The new application does not include a code editor, file browser, integrated terminal, or extension support. Remote SSH is absent. Dev container support is not present. WSL support is broken: the required server binary, Antigravity-reh.tar.gz, was not published to Google's Content Delivery Network (CDN) at launch. Reddit user u/MarcSB1 documented the failed download URLs; u/ScythDreame confirmed: "Antigravity IDE 2.0.1 didn't publish the server binary for Remote-WSL -- 404 on the Google CDN. It is a bug on Google's side." The Google AI Developers Forum independently corroborated this.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.theregister.com/public-sector/2026/05/20/ai-sackings-reach-new-zealand-which-will-use-it-to-eject-14-percent-of-government-staff/5243076

The wave of layoffs attributable to the adoption of AI has washed up on the shores of New Zealand, which has announced an overhaul of its public service that will see the technology become a "basic expectation" for government agencies and help to make it possible to sack 9,000 staff - about 14 percent of current headcount.

Finance Minister Nicola Willis announced the job cuts yesterday, in a speech that saw her bemoan the fact that New Zealand's government comprises 39 departments and ministries, and compared that to the 16 in Australia and 24 in the UK.

She characterized the nation's public service as "scared of AI, slow to move to the cloud" and said it operates a "complex and fragmented set of overlapping IT solutions."

"Our government is as frustrated as you are by the fragmentation and silos, the complexity, the status-quo thinking and the dangerously slow take up of digital and AI technologies," she added.

Aotearoa's answer is to task its Chief Digital Officer "to embed AI deployment as a basic expectation for all public entities."

Minister Willis mentioned a "recent trial of an AI scribe tool in hospital emergency rooms which has reduced the amount of time clinicians have to spend on file notes and increased the time they spend with patients" as an example of the sort of thing she hopes to replicate.

She said the planned overhaul will therefore "reduce the number of government departments, increase the use of AI and other digital tools, and deliver significant savings."

The government plans to cap departmental budgets and says that combined with redundancies it will save NZ$2.4 billion ($1.4 billion) over four years – less than one percent of all core government spending.

Plenty of tech companies have made substantial redundancies that they justify as necessary to create an appropriate workforce for the age of AI, an explanation we've seen deployed to explain deep cuts at Cisco, Cloudflare, Atlassian, Meta, and Arctic Wolf.

Few governments have done likewise, but one early high-profile effort – the Elon-Musk-led "Department of Government Efficiency" – hoped to use AI to improve government operations but left behind little evidence it had succeeded.

New Zealand is blessed with many resources and extraordinary natural beauty, but has a modest tax base – yet residents expect a high level of government services. Minister Willis's plan is therefore a very big bet on AI.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

FreeBSD isn't Linux, but if you didn't know any better, you'd swear it was.

I'm not gonna lie: I don't give FreeBSD (or any of the BSDs) the attention they deserve. The reason for that is simple: I'm a Linux guy.

[...] FreeBSD is a Unix-like operating system that is descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution. The first version of FreeBSD was released in 1993 and was developed from 386BSD, one of the first fully functional and free Unix clones on affordable hardware. Since its inception, FreeBSD has been the most widely used BSD-derived operating system.

FreeBSD maintains a complete system: kernel, device drivers, userland utilities, and documentation. This is in contrast to Linux, which only provides a kernel and drivers while relying on third parties for system software.

Think of FreeBSD as a more challenging version of Linux. This operating system doesn't hold your hand, so you might learn a thing or two as you install it and the software you require.

Even for a seasoned Linux veteran like me, FreeBSD can often be a head-scratcher.

There's an old adage that goes something like this:

BSD is what you get when a bunch of Unix hackers sit down to try to port a Unix system to the PC. Linux is what you get when a bunch of PC hackers sit down and try to write a Unix system for the PC.

Essentially, FreeBSD is Unix, where Linux is based on Unix. To that end, FreeBSD (and most of the BSDs) make for amazing server operating systems. If you were to ask any long-in-the-tooth geeks about server operating systems, they'd likely say that BSD is what you want. There really isn't a more stable operating system on the planet.

And that's one of the big draws to FreeBSD: it is as rock-solid as they come.

To frame it better... [Ed. note: requisite car analogy follows]

Imagine two companies that make cars. One outsources all of its components from other manufacturers and assembles them in its warehouse. The second builds all of its components and also assembles them in its warehouse.

As you might assume, the second manufacturer's cars most likely work and perform better than the first because it knows every part that goes into creating the car and can make all sorts of adjustments to improve every aspect of it. The first manufacturer, on the other hand, doesn't have nearly the control over how those components are built.

FreeBSD is the manufacturer that builds everything in-house.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

FBI will pay vendors to help it track and search for vehicles nationwide:

The Federal Bureau of Investigation announced plans to buy nationwide access to a network of license plate readers, saying it will award contracts to one or more vendors that can offer "near real time" information from cameras across the US. The proposed contract is for the FBI Directorate of Intelligence.

"To evaluate and manage threats to personal safety, property, and law enforcement, the FBI requires professional service firms that can provide License Plate Readers (LPRs) for tracking subjects on roads and highways over the US and its territories," the FBI said in a Request for Proposals (RFP) published on May 14. The FBI said the winning bidder or bidders "must provide law enforcement and/or commercial license plate reader data provided through the Contractor's existing platform." The system must cover 75 percent of locations, the FBI said.

The system must offer the ability to search for license plate information "and other descriptive data such as vehicle description information, time/date criteria, and geo-location criteria," the FBI said. "Additionally, the system must provide search result notifications. The Contractor system must have the ability to access and/or query cameras across the United States and its territories. The Contractor system must be capable of providing this data in near real time."

Contractors have to be able "to share/create maps depicting camera coverage (i.e. heat mapping)," and "provide the FBI the source of information (i.e. red-light cameras, repossession vendors, speed cameras, etc.)," the FBI said. The FBI said it needs to be able to search the database for partial or full plate numbers, plate states, addresses, locations where a plate was scanned, and vehicle makes and models.

The RFP divides the proposal into six regions covering the continental US, Hawaii, Alaska, Puerto Rico, and territories such as Guam and the US Virgin Islands. The FBI said it may award contracts to one or two vendors in each region. The deals can be for up to five years, with all deals combined potentially worth $36 million. The FBI said a contractor's system has to be available to FBI users via a website.

Flock and Motorola Solutions are well-positioned to bid on the contract, as 404 Media noted yesterday. Both companies could win part of the job, as the FBI said it may award contracts to multiple vendors to achieve its desired level of access.

Flock's Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs) are sold to local police departments. The company boasts of having deals with "over 12,000 public safety customers including cities, towns, counties, and business partners." Motorola Solutions sells license plate reader cameras that can be installed on busy roadways or mounted on police cars.

License plate reader cameras have raised concerns about privacy, data security, and errors in plate number recognition systems leading to wrongful arrests. 404 Media reported last year that local police departments performed searches of the Flock license plate reader system for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), "giving federal law enforcement side-door access to a tool that it currently does not have a formal contract for."

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Greek mountaintop ground station aims infrared beams at CubeSats in ESA-backed optical networking trial:

Europe's hunt for secure, high-capacity satellite communications infrastructure has produced a laser-equipped mountaintop ground station in northern Greece.

Lithuanian space and defense biz Astrolight says that it has commissioned a new optical ground station in Greece that will support ESA-backed CubeSat missions testing laser-based communications between satellites and Earth.

The Holomondas Optical Ground Station was built through the PeakSat project, led by the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki with backing from the European Space Agency and Greece's Ministry of Digital Governance. Its job is to receive data from satellites via infrared laser links rather than the radio systems that space operators have relied on for decades.

PeakSat and ERMIS-3, two Greek CubeSats launched in March under ESA's wider Greek IOD/IOV mission program, both carry Astrolight's ATLAS-1 optical communication terminal. Astrolight also built the ground segment, giving the project a fully integrated end-to-end optical communications setup.

Astrolight CEO Laurynas Mačiulis told The Register that the company originally pursued laser communications after concluding it "would need to tap into the optical spectrum," as demand for satellite bandwidth continues to grow. He described optical connectivity as "one of the enabling technologies for further expansion into space."

The company says the station uses an 808-nanometer laser beacon and an optical C-band receiver capable of receiving data at up to 2.5 Gbps. Unlike traditional RF systems, optical links use tightly focused infrared beams that are harder to intercept or jam while also supporting significantly higher throughput.

The engineering problem, however, is slightly more complicated than pointing a laser pointer at the sky and hoping for the best.

"You have two moving objects that try to establish a laser link, which means trying to point a very, very narrow laser pointer at your object, which is potentially tens of thousands of kilometers away, moving at eight kilometers per second," Mačiulis said.

ESA and its partners are pitching optical comms partly as an answer to an increasingly crowded radio spectrum, but the tech is also drawing attention from defense and dual-use operators interested in more resilient communications systems.

"There is a need for networking in space, both for connectivity and tactical reasons, and dual-use defense applications," Mačiulis said, adding that future satellite constellations "will inevitably rely on optical links, because that gives information superiority and security and resistance to jamming electronic warfare."

He added "there's also sovereignty aspects, which means that there will never be a single player – there cannot be just Starlink."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

The EU has chosen Swedish investment giant EQT to run a new €5bn fund aimed at keeping Europe's most promising deep tech companies on home soil:

The EU has chosen Swedish investment giant EQT to run a new €5bn fund aimed at keeping Europe's most promising deep tech companies on home soil.

The European Innovation Council (EIC) has selected Stockholm-headquartered EQT as fund manager for the Scale-up Europe Fund, following a competitive selection process that drew expressions of interest from December 2025 to February 2026.

The fund is the largest of its kind ever launched in Europe and will direct growth capital at high-potential companies across a range of strategic sectors, including artificial intelligence, quantum computing, clean energy, space technology, biotech and medical innovation.

The core goal of the fund is to close a persistent late-stage financing gap that has long pushed European scale-ups to raise capital elsewhere and, in many cases, to relocate abroad altogether.

The new multibillion-euro fund was initially announced back in October 2025, and is designed to build on the ‘choose Europe to start and scale’ strategy launched earlier last year.

With an initial goal of €5bn, the Commission eventually hopes to raise €25bn for the scale-up fund, a spokesperson said at the time.

Sweden’s EQT is one of Europe’s most established global investment firms, and was chosen by the EIC board, it said, on the basis of its track record in growth equity, fundraising capability and commitment to housing a dedicated investment team within the EU.

The firm brings a broad, pan-European presence and a strong institutional infrastructure that the EIC said was well-suited to the scale and ambition of the mandate.

owl writes:

https://obsoletesony.substack.com/p/the-coolest-record-player-ever-made

Back in 1983, portable music was changing fast. Cassette tapes were at their peak, compact discs were the shiny new thing, and vinyl records, once the heart of hi-fi, were fading out. Sony, the company that made music personal with the Walkman, had a wild idea: a turntable you could carry, stand upright, or even mount on a wall. They called it the Flamingo, a name inspired by the idea of balancing on one leg, much like the bird. The PS-F5 and PS-F9 didn't fly off the shelves, but their clever design still turns heads today. This is the story of a record player that did its own thing and earned a quiet spot in tech history.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Multiple researchers using the same tools to find the same bugs are creating 'unnecessary pain and pointless work':

Linux kernel boss Linus Torvalds has declared the project's security mailing list has become "almost entirely unmanageable" due to multiple researchers using AI to find bugs and then filling the list with duplicate reports.

Torvalds used his weekly state of the kernel post to deliver release candidate four for Linux 7.1 and report "fairly normal" progress towards a full release.

He then pointed kernelistas to the project's documentation, which he wrote "might be worth highlighting" as "the continued flood of AI reports has basically made the security list almost entirely unmanageable, with enormous duplication due to different people finding the same things with the same tools."

"People spend all their time just forwarding things to the right people or saying 'that was already fixed a week/month ago' and pointing to the public discussion," Torvalds complained.

The Penguin Emperor believes that kind of chatter is "all entirely pointless churn" and isn't productive because "AI detected bugs are pretty much by definition not secret, and treating them on some private list is a waste of time for everybody involved – and only makes that duplication worse because the reporters can't even see each other's reports."

He then offered an opinion on how best to use AI to improve software security.

"AI tools are great, but only if they actually help, rather than cause unnecessary pain and pointless make-believe work," he wrote. "Feel free to use them, but use them in a way that is productive and makes for a better experience."

"The documentation may be a bit less blunt than I am," he added, "but that's the core gist of it."

"So just to make it really clear: If you found a bug using AI tools, the chances are somebody else found it too. If you actually want to add value, read the documentation, create a patch too, and add some real value on *top* of what the AI did. Don't be the drive-by 'send a random report with no real understanding' kind of person. OK?"

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

AI will indeed eat the world – if your world involves software-size margins:

The future of AI is unwritten, but the writing is on the wall – your margin is my opportunity.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos said as much more than a decade ago in support of the e-souk's low-price, low-margin sales strategy.

That opportunity exists in the AI training and inference business. But perhaps not for long.

Two leading American AI companies, Anthropic and OpenAI, are not actually profitable at this point, but their pitch to investors is something along the lines of "just hang in there a few more years and keep sending cash."

Given reports that Claude Code subscribers paying $200 a month can potentially consume $5,000 worth of tokens and that OpenAI is also losing money on subscriptions, it starts to become a bit clear why Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft have already started pushing customers toward metered usage pricing. AI revenue needs to go up for frontier model makers to survive. And then AI adoption needs to grow.

Government agencies and large corporations that don't keep a close eye on fees may be terrified enough of AI-enabled exploitation to pay a premium for models like Anthropic's Mythos and OpenAI's GPT-5.5.

But more price-sensitive folk may shop for cheaper tokens. And they're likely to find them.

[...] Open weight models like GLM-5.1, Kimi K2.6, DeepSeek V4-Pro, and Qwen3-Coder-Next are already adequate for less demanding software development work and some, like Qwen3.6-27B, run quite well on suitably provisioned local hardware. 

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Chip startup NextSilicon's high-performance-computing-focused accelerators get Sandia National Lab's stamp of approval:

Of the world's most powerful supercomputers, nine of the top 10 are powered by GPUs, but that might not be the case for much longer. 

As chipmakers like Nvidia prioritize AI FLOPS over the ultra-precise floating point calculations used in scientific computing, US National Labs are turning to new chip architectures to get their FP64 fix.

Among the candidates is NextSilicon's Maverick-2, a dataflow processor designed explicitly with the 64-bit floating point mathematics that dominate the Department of Energy's most important simulations.

Despite its name, the Department of Energy is concerned with far more than the US' power grid. It operates some of the largest publicly known supercomputers in the world, which are responsible for everything from simulating the physics of nuclear weapons at the moment of criticality and bioweapons defense to public health and safety.

Since the Titan Supercomputer made its debut in 2012, a growing number of these supercomputers have been powered by GPUs from Nvidia, and more recently AMD.

But that's not the case for Sandia National Laboratory's new Spectra supercomputer, which was built in collaboration with Penguin Solutions and NextSilicon.

Compared to exascale systems like Frontier or El Capitan, Spectra is tiny. The machine counts 64 nodes and 128 of NextSilicon's "runtime-configurable" accelerators.

But scale isn't the point. Spectra is a test bed for NextSilicon's Maverick-2. This week, Sandia gave the chips the thumbs up, announcing that the big iron had met all of its system acceptance requirements, opening the door for the chips to be deployed in larger systems in the future.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

The 24 Megawatt subsea AI facility houses 2,000 servers and uses ocean water for passive cooling:

Cooling has become a major bottleneck for modern AI data centers, where dense GPU racks can consume hundreds of kilowatts, converting nearly all of that energy into heat. The underwater design uses surrounding seawater as a passive heat sink, sharply reducing cooling power requirements.

Chinese media reports claim the facility achieves a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) below 1.15, placing it among the most energy-efficient large-scale data centers in operation. Traditional enterprise data centers often operate closer to 1.5 or higher, meaning a significantly larger portion of their total electricity consumption goes toward cooling and supporting infrastructure rather than computation itself.

The project also reflects China’s broader push to integrate renewable energy directly into digital infrastructure. The underwater data center is connected to nearby offshore wind farms, allowing a substantial portion of its electricity demand to be supplied directly from renewable generation sources. As AI expansion drives explosive growth in electricity consumption worldwide, countries and hyperscalers are increasingly exploring unconventional infrastructure approaches to address both energy availability and thermal management constraints.

However, underwater data centers also introduce substantial engineering and operational challenges. Saltwater corrosion, long-term pressure sealing, subsea cable reliability, and maintenance accessibility remain major concerns. Replacing failed hardware is considerably more complex than in conventional facilities, where technicians can physically access racks within minutes. Operators therefore rely heavily on sealed modular designs, remote monitoring systems, and highly redundant infrastructure intended to minimize the need for physical intervention.

The Shanghai project follows earlier experimental efforts such as Microsoft’s Project Natick, which tested submerged data center capsules off the coasts of Scotland and California. Microsoft ultimately discontinued the program commercially, but the trials demonstrated that underwater deployments could achieve lower hardware failure rates.

Offshore-powered, ocean-cooled data center projects are continuing to emerge worldwide as AI infrastructure power and cooling demands continue to soar. Last month, we reported on a Peter Thiel-backed startup, Panthalassa, which is developing wave-powered floating data centers designed to operate far offshore using ocean water for passive cooling while drawing electricity from onboard renewable energy systems.

Original Submission

looorg writes:

Humanoid looking robots sorting parcels is the new cat video that the Internet can't stop watching? Still not everyone is convinced that it's real or if it is fake, or somewhere in between. Why after all would the robots touch their faces if not for the VR people removing their goggles etc?

Figure AI streamed humanoid robots sorting packages for 8 hours straight — and not everyone is convinced it was fully real

The livestream is certainly quite hypnotic to watch — and it's also a hit, with 10 million views on the original video, prompting one Redditor to quip that the bots are "stealing jobs from warehouse workers AND streamers".

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/05/the-internet-cant-stop-watching-figure-ais-humanoid-robots-handling-packages/
https://www.techradar.com/ai-platforms-assistants/figure-ai-streamed-humanoid-robots-sorting-packages-for-8-hours-straight-and-not-everyone-is-convinced-it-was-fully-real

Original Submission

Snotnose writes:

What if you posted a famous painting and told people it was AI generated?

A poster wrought some moderate havoc this week when they shared a cropped image of a real Monet painting while claiming it was an AI fake, unleashing a flood of ill-informed reactions and muddled discourse. So, you know, it was just another day online.

"I just generated an image in the style of a Monet painting using AI," read the original post, published to X-formerly-Twitter yesterday by an anonymous conceptual artist who goes by the pseudonym "SHL0MS."

"Please describe, in as much detail as possible," he continued, "what makes this inferior to a real Monet painting."

Commenters were quick to jump in to explain why, in their view, the alleged AI image was worse than the real work of the French impressionist master. According to one, the image was an "incoherent muddle of inconsistently saturated greens." Another lamented that there was no "coherent composition," while someone else shared that the painting seemed "busy, artificial, nature in turmoil, polluted." Another commenter said that the allegedly AI-generated image seemed as if it was "trying too hard" to resemble Monet's later paintings, which he created when he was close to blindness. Others shared that the image was "obvious" AI slop.

[...] As is to be expected, other commenters were quick to dunk on the posters who'd insulted the fake-AI-fake-Monet. Many interpreted the harsh yet ill-informed reaction to the image as an example of "knee-jerk" AI distaste and foolish "AI hysteria."

[...] More than ever before, a lot of the web is fake — a reality that makes it shockingly easy to manipulate actual truth. And in an online world chock full of millions of post-happy armchair experts, insight from genuine experts is perhaps more valuable than ever. Now more than ever: think before you post! Better yet, do a little research before sounding off, or seek insights from informed specialists.

"I think this experiment," commented designer Paul Macgregor, "probably says more about Twitter than it does about AI and art."

Original Submission