Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket successfully took off from West Texas on Tuesday morning. Its booster and crew capsule safely separated mid-flight, with both landing back on Earth. The mission carried 33 payloads to space, more than half from NASA. It was originally scheduled for December 18 but was delayed due to cold temperatures and ground issues. A replay of the livestream is available in the article.
Google will pay $700 million as part of a settlement with the US attorney general for a lawsuit over the Google Play Store. It has also agreed to implement third-party app stores, side-loading, and alternative billing on Android. Google will not be able to enter deals with phone makers to have Google Play as an exclusive app store on devices for at least five years. More details about the settlement agreement are available in the article.
Unitree's H1 features a powertrain that provides it with the highest level of speed, power, maneuverability, and flexibility of any humanoid robot in the world. The robot can run across demanding terrains and intricate environments while dealing with disruptions. Unitree plans to initiate deliveries of the robot in the first quarter of 2024 with a price of approximately $150,000 per unit. A video of the robot dealing with disruptions, such as being kicked or pushed/pulled, is available in the article.
NASA recently shared a video detailing its plan to launch a commercial delivery service to the moon. It is currently working with 14 companies to deliver science and technology to the lunar surface. NASA has a long-term plan to build a permanent moon base. A commercial delivery service to the moon would radically increase the amount of science that can be achieved. It could pave the way for a similar service to other destinations like Mars.
Quint is a specification language particularly useful for distributed systems. It combines the robust theoretical basis of the Temporal Logic of Actions (TLA) with state-of-the-art type checking and development tooling. Quint features a simple and familiar syntax, an expressive type system, a novel effect system, a simulator, a symbolic model checker, and more.
Technical debt is a metaphor about the accumulated consequences of past decisions and shortcuts. This article examines this metaphor to see how technical debt has less to do with code and more to do with the choices and compromises that emerge from the challenges within software development. It looks at emergent technical debt, which arises from evolving system requirements, and deliberate technical debt, a strategic choice to prioritize rapid development over code quality. The article aims to refine understanding of technical debt and identify effective strategies for managing it.
2023 signaled the start of a new era and 2023 is an opportunity to shape the world's next chapter for the better. The year gave us a glimpse of how AI will shape the future. The technology will be used to help improve many aspects of our lives and reduce inequities around the world. While these are still challenging times, the future remains bright as the speed of innovation has never been faster.
Researchers have devised an attack with the potential to undermine cryptographic SSH protections. Terrapin is a man-in-the-middle attack that affects SSH connections secured by ChaCha20-Poly1305 or CBC with Encrypt-then-MAC. Around 57% of servers list these encryption modes as their preferred choice. Anyone using SSH should check whether they are vulnerable to the attack and make the appropriate updates. The attack invalidates proofs published in 2016 concluding that such attacks weren't possible. Details about the attack and how it works are available in the article.
The fediverse, an interconnected set of social media apps that no company or platform controls that can all read and write the same content, will allow developers to choose specific features of social apps and try to do better, resulting in an explosion of better social products.
It's impossible to finish a personal project you're doing just for yourself because it's impossible to really know what you want and separate it from what you want to want, and it's impossible to start something and not have it grow and evolve into something else entirely given enough time and input.
Solid Queue is a DB-based queuing backend for Active Job that supports delayed jobs, concurrency controls, pausing queues, numeric priorities per job, and priorities by queue order.
An FAQ on exiting the cloud written by a company that was able to quickly complete a cloud exit without customers noticing anything and save a projected $7 million over five years.
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