Tesla teased screenshots of its ride-hailing feature along with the release of its Q1 2024 financial results. The feature allows people to summon self-driving Teslas for rides. Riders can adjust the temperature and music inside the vehicle from their phones. The feature will be integrated into the existing Tesla app. Tesla has yet to achieve unsupervised self-driving, so it is unknown when the ride-hailing feature will be available. The screenshots are available in the article.
Apple reportedly has ambitious plans to design its own artificial intelligence server processor using TSMC's 3nm node. TSMC's 3nm technology is one of the most advanced semiconductor processes available. A specialist AI server processor would allow Apple to tailor hardware specifically to its software needs, potentially leading to more powerful and efficient technologies. While Apple is rumored to be prioritizing on-device processing for many of its upcoming AI tools, some operations will inevitably have to occur in the cloud.
UMaine's experimental 3D-printed dwelling, BioHome3D, is the result of a two-and-a-half-year effort to create a technology for building homes faster, more efficiently, and less expensively than conventional construction. BioHome3D is made from logging and sawmill wood waste. It has an open-concept living/kitchen/dining room, one bedroom, and one bath. The dwelling has two mini-split heat pumps and roughly 30 sensors that measure temperature, humidity, wind, and other weather factors. Pictures of the dwelling are available in the article.
RISC-V is an instruction set architecture freely available for commercial purposes. The open source chip design is helping to drive innovation in custom hardware. RISC-V competitors may eventually emerge to challenge AMD and Intel. The combined resources working to develop faster and more efficient RISC-V chips may one day outpace that of major players in the CPU space.
Elektrobit's EB corbos Linux for Safety Applications is a new Linux distro designed to comply with the automotive industry's functional safety requirements. It was developed with Canonical, who will help with keeping the system compliant with safety requirements over time. The operating system uses an external safety monitor to intercept and validate kernel actions. This allows its developers to keep up to speed with the developer community.
Hashquery is a framework for defining and querying BI models in data warehouses. Its expressions are defined in Python, compiled into SQL, and run directly against a data warehouse. It is capable of expressing complex, multi-layered data queries. Hashquery natively integrates with upstream semantic layers and can be used together with Hashboard as a headless BI interface.
California Forever announced plans in August 2023 to build a new city of up to 400,000 people in Solano County, forty miles northeast of San Francisco. The company purchased 50,000 acres of land for an estimated $900 million in 2017. Most of the land is zoned for agricultural use and is subject to slow-growth laws. This may change after a vote in November. The project may be the most ambitious new development built in California in over 50 years. This article features an interview with Jan Sramek, the founder and CEO of California Forever, where he discusses the project.
The Senate has passed a bill for a foreign aid package that includes a measure that will force China-based ByteDance to sell TikTok or have it banned from the US. The bill will now head to President Joe Biden, who has already committed to signing the legislation. Once signed into law, ByteDance will have up to a year to complete a sale of TikTok. Enforcement of the law may be delayed by legal challenges. The bill is aimed at preventing foreign adversaries from conducting espionage, surveillance, maligned operations, and otherwise harming vulnerable Americans, rather than a punishment against ByteDance or any other individual company.
The Federal Trade Commission has voted to ban nearly all noncompete agreements - existing noncompetes for senior executives have been excluded from the ban as these agreements are more likely to have been negotiated.
Apple's closed model may have been successful in the mobile market, but closed models don't always win - Meta is betting the open model will win with virtual and mixed reality headsets.