TLDR 2019-07-03

Alphabet's self-driving venture, Waymo, has officially been given permission to transport passengers in its robotaxis by the California Public Utilities Commission. The initial pilot program will allow Waymo employees to hail vehicles and bring guests on rides within a specific South Bay territory. Certain restrictions on the permit issued to Waymo include not allowing the company to charge for the rides and a requirement for a safety driver to be behind the wheel. The permit will allow Waymo to hire third-party safety drivers. Waymo has confirmed that all safety drivers will go through a proprietary driver training program.

Tesla announced that it had delivered 95,200 vehicles in the last quarter, making it the best quarter on record for the company. The Model 3 was released in Europe and China halfway through the first quarter, resulting in 77,550 Model 3 deliveries worldwide. A total of 87,048 vehicles were produced in the second quarter. The company is set to increase production and deliveries in the third quarter. Tesla’s sales target for the year is 400,000 vehicles, but it has been cutting prices to reach sales targets, which could result in losses for the company. The federal tax credit available to Tesla customers fell by half at the start of the financial year, which effectively raised the price of the vehicles.

The future of robots is more likely to consist of tiny robot swarms rather than robots like Wall-E. A new ambulatory motor developed at MIT consists of little more than a magnet and a coil with some structural parts, but when combined together with many of the same motors, it can create many different types of machines that can carry out specific tasks. The goal of the project is to find a way to make these motors self assemble into larger structures, resulting in an extremely versatile type of robot.

Norled, a Norwegian ferry company has signed a contract with shipyard Westcon to build two new environmentally-friendly ferries. One ferry will be the world’s first hydrogen-fueled ferry and the other will be a battery-operated ship. The ships will be operational in 2021 and will each carry up to 299 passengers and 80 cars. Hydrogen is a zero-emission fuel that is suited to supplying large amounts of energy to ferry propulsion systems, increasing sailing distance and speed on boats. A second hydrogen-powered vessel will soon operate in France as part of the EU’s Flagships project.

A list showcasing the greatest iOS development tools, including websites, desktop, and mobile apps, and back-end services. A weekly update delivered right to your inbox. Sent once a week, every Friday. No spam, not ever. Unsubscribe at any time.

Sanic is a complete tool for developing, building, and deploying Docker/Kubernetes projects. It focuses on developer experience and aims to make the process as streamlined and as fast as possible. Sanic supports concurrent builds, live-mounting, and templating.

Content marketing agency Fractl created a completely AI-generated blog using an open-source tool called Grover. Grover can easily generate fake news articles, as well as spot articles that were generated by itself and other AI. Fractl created the fake blog to bring attention to the fact that the internet will soon be flooded with AI-generated articles that will be targeted at Google search rankings. In the past, article spinners performed a similar task and Google was able to eventually block these sites from appearing in results, but blocking AI-generated content will be much more difficult. Google did not respond when asked about their plans on detecting AI-generated text.