The Rabbit R1 is a "custom-built consumer AI device running on a revolutionary natural-language operating system" that "can infer and model human actions on computer interfaces by learning users' intention and behavior when they use specific apps, and then mimic and perform them both reliably and quickly". Going by the 25-min demo video, you use it like you'd use Alexa/Siri/Google Assistant, but with a screen. You configure it on the web, pre-authenticate it with your favourite apps (Spotify, Uber, Google Maps, etc) and talk to it to get it to do stuff. Does anyone actually want to use a computer this way? The examples are ridiculous - would you really trust an AI to plan and book a holiday? Fuck no. I don't even trust a voice assistant to order a pizza like they did in the demo. That said, the Rabbit seems way more useful than the Humane AI-pin and it isn't chained to an ongoing subscription (for now at least) so whatever, it's better these freaks are employed doing this than whatever cryptocurrency ponzi scheme they were into before.
NASA's Artemis mission to return Americans to the Moon has been delayed by a year. They were aiming for the first crewed flight in the Orion spacecraft by November 2024, but it'll be September 2025 instead for a crewed flight around the Moon (Artemis II), then September 2026 for two astronauts to go on the lunar surface (Artemis III). Artemis II's delay is primary around pieces of Orion's heat-shield that were unexpectedly "liberated" and Artemis III's delay is NASA's concern around SpaceX's inability to demonstrate that Spaceship is safe. At this rate China will probably have humans on the Moon before the USA does and you know what? Good. The USA feeling embarrassed by the Russians with Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin is how we got space race 1.0, maybe we will get space race 2.0 if the Chinese achieve lunar dominance.
Juniper now belongs to Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. They spent US$14b to buy up all the shares and assimilate one of the great pioneering networking companies into the meandering bubble of HPE. As Sizzle guest writer Joel said on Mastodon, "this is, what, the 4th major networking line that HP(E) now has? There was the ProCurve stuff they did themselves (which mostly sucked), the 3Com stuff they bought (which sucked), the Aruba acquisition (which was great stuff and killed off ProCurve and H3C), and now Juniper so they can have a high-end routing product line because they didn't get one of those with Aruba?". Even reading the press release you get the feeling HPE got Juniper because they just wanted to pad out their networking range and this is easier than using existing assets to do something in-house, and Juniper simply got an offer too good to refuse so fuck it, time to cash out.
Patent No. 7693663. 2010. Earthquake detector. Invented in 1956 as a storage device, the disk drive might one day save millions of lives, thanks to its unusual sensitivity to movement. That capability sparked a patent for microvibration sensors in drives that calculate earth tremors. Now geologists can measure—and soon possibly even predict—the most unpredictable phenomena in nature. (IBM Research / Flickr)
📻 Myxomatosis - Radiohead
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