TLDR 2018-11-27

Amazon launched AWS Robomaker at its AWS Re:Invent conference on Monday. Robomaker is a cloud-based platform to speed up consumer robotics development, using the popular open source Robot Operating System project. The official announcement says "AWS RoboMaker automatically provisions the underlying infrastructure and it downloads, compiles, and configures the operating system, development software, and ROS. AWS RoboMaker's robotics simulation makes it easy to set up large-scale and parallel simulations with pre-built worlds, such as indoor rooms, retail stores, and racing tracks, so developers can test their applications on-demand and run multiple simulations in parallel."

President Trump suggested that he might slap a 10% tariff on iPhones and laptops imported from China in an interview on Monday. Trump expects to increase tariffs on $200 billion of Chinese goods to 25 percent. He could also add an additional $267 billion worth of tariffs if China and the US don't reach a trade agreement. Currently Apple products are exempt from Trump's tariffs.

Silicon Drinkabout is a global network of local startup communities. They host meetups in dozens of cities (mostly in Europe, South America, and Canada), so if you're into startups and you live in one of those places you should definitely check it out!

Amazon has opened up the curriculum it uses to train its own engineers and data scientists in machine learning to the public. It has 30 courses with 45 hours of videos and labs targeted at developers, data scientists, data platform engineers, and business professionals.

Somebody actually built a working version of the Tron Legacy sci-fi movie style computer dashboard. It works on all OSes and there's a screenshot in the repo that shows how incredible this looks (I ran this on my Macbook and it works like a charm)!

NASA successfully landed its InSight mission on Mars, after six and a half months of travelling through space, using a supersonic parachute to decelerate from 12,000 miles per hour to just 5 miles per hour on impact. The probe will deploy a seismometer to listen for earthquakes and a drill to dig beneath the Martian surface and explore the Martian interior.

China is planning on building a $160 million deep sea base at the bottom of the South China Sea. Scientists say that due to the immense pressure, this will be even harder than building a space station. The base will be run by AI and will be used to launch missions to explore the ocean floor, which is currently 99% unexplored. China is also planning on building the first manned deep sea station about 2 miles below the surface and 20 floating nuclear power plants to support commercial and military activities starting in 2020. President Xi Jinping is urging Chinese scientists to be daring, saying "There is no road in the deep sea, we do not need to chase after other countries, we are the road." He declared that China is on a "march into the ocean to accelerate the build-up of maritime power".