TLDR 2024-12-31

Nvidia will be leaning more heavily into robotics in 2025. It will launch a new generation of compact computers for humanoid robots called Jetson Thor in the first half of next year. Nvidia aims to provide robot makers with an underlying OEM as its largest customers work to lessen their dependence on the company's AI chips by developing their own.

Blue Origin successfully performed a hotfire of its New Glenn rocket on December 27, the same day it was issued a commercial space launch license from the US Federal Aviation Administration. The company remains tightlipped about when it will launch its rocket, but it had claimed earlier in the year to be targeting a launch before the end of the year. New Glenn was designed to be partly reusable. Its first stage, which is designed to be good for a minimum of 25 missions, will land on a downrange sea-based platform.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems has announced plans to build the world's first nuclear fusion power plant. The plant will be located in Chesterfield County, Virginia. If successful, the plant will infuse 400 megawatts power into the state's electrical grid starting in the early 2030s. Fusion technology still hasn't been proven to be viable - previous attempts by well-financed tech companies have failed.

China plans to start building a demonstration thorium-based molten-salt reactor in the Gobi Desert next year. The 10-megawatt reactor project is scheduled to be operational by 2030. Thorium-232 is more abundant on Earth than uranium-235, but it isn't directly fissile, so it must first be transformed into fissile uranium-233, which is technically feasible, but it is unknown whether that is economical and practical. If feasible, thorium, which is waste product of China's huge rare earth mining industry, could reduce dependence on uranium.

SQLite is the most deployed and used database. It is likely used more than all other databases combined. SQLite is only maintained by three people who don't allow outside contributions. This blog post lists 24 facts about the database.

A dependency consists of a checksum, a location, a name, and a version. The checksum is a cryptographic hash of the contents of the dependency. The location tells systems how to acquire the dependency. The name tells when two different dependencies correspond to different versions of the same thing. The version is a specific rule about dependency substitutability.

Gene drives are a clever genetic trick that forces a particular gene to be inherited by nearly all offspring rather than the usual 50-50 chance in normal inheritance. They can propagate a desired mutation through an entire population theoretically with only a few mating events. Some iterations of gene drives have been demonstrated to work in fruit flies, but mosquitoes are much more complicated and we don't fully understand them yet. This technology is also being developed in countries where malaria is not endemic - the countries that have problems with mosquitoes may not want to deal with the potential ecological issues that may result from the use of gene drives.

The modern web is incredibly complex. WebAssembly made web technology the core of the future of computing. We are already using the browser as a replacement for operating systems' graphics toolkits. Simplifying the web won't fix many of the widespread problems. There are a lot of smaller networks currently available that provide a look into what an alternative to the web might look like.

Run:ai offers GPU orchestration software that organizes groups of GPUs more efficiently.

Founders are always selling - sales is a skill that anyone can get good at.

Passkeys were supposed to fix the problems with passwords, but their inconsistent implementation has made them less practical than password managers.

A look over a year of writing by Anu Atluru, a founder and writer from NYC.

People with high salaries and net worth tend to live longer lives due to access to better healthcare, nutrition, and safer environments.

Researchers from Johns Hopkins University and Stanford University have trained robots to manipulate needles, tie knots, and suture wounds using video recordings of human-controlled robotic arms performing surgical tasks.