TLDR 2025-05-22

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The Tesla Optimus team's latest video demonstration shows the humanoid robot performing a variety of tasks, including household using a broom and vacuum cleaner, tearing a paper towel, stirring a pot of food, opening a cabinet, closing a curtain, and picking up a Model X fore link and placing it on a dolly. The robot completed all these tasks through a single neural network. It learned its actions using data from first-person videos of humans performing similar tasks. The system could pave the way for Optimus to learn and refine new skills quickly and reliably. The video is available in the article.

OpenAI is acquiring Jony Ive's startup, io, in an all-equity deal that values the startup at $6.5 billion. Ive and his design firm, LoveFrom, which will continue to operate independently, will now lead creative and design work at OpenAI. He could help OpenAI directly compete with Apple in the consumer hardware space - Apple has struggled to develop AI features that keep up with the latest technology. io's staff of around 55 engineers, scientists, researchers, physicists, and product development specialists will join OpenAI. They will be tasked with developing AI-powered consumer devices and other projects.

Ryan Williams, a theoretical computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, recently posted a proof online on the relationship between time and memory in computing. The proof, which showed that memory was more powerful than computer scientists had previously believed, established a mathematical procedure for transforming any algorithm, no matter what it does, into a form that uses much less space. It also implies there are calculations that can't be computed in certain amounts of time, offering a new way to attack one of the oldest open problems in computer science.

Robot.com is a Colombian robotic company with a fleet of over 500 robots working in warehouse logistics, advertising displays, security, inspection, and deliveries. The company signed a multi-year partnership with Amazon Web Services last year, catapulting it into the big league of the global service robots market. The steady growth of the company underscores the potential of the robotics industry in Latin America, but it also highlights the challenges of regions with high production costs, limited investor confidence, and minimal public investment.

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Legacy code is full of surprises. Mainframes are chock-full of history, containing wonderful hacks that get around the limitations of systems. This post contains several examples of these hacks within a COBOL system.

LlamaIndex is an ecosystem consisting of more than 650 Python packages, mostly Integrations and Packs. All of these packages share a single GitHub repository, or monorepo. This article discusses LlamaDev, a tool for managing monorepos at scale, and explains the challenges with existing tooling. LlamaDev makes running tests faster and easier, creates clearer logs so contributors know exactly what happened if a check failed, and can be run locally for debugging.

Tesla's head of AI and self-driving, Ashok Elluswamy, recently admitted in an interview that the automaker's autonomous program is lagging a couple of years behind Waymo's. However, Tesla's approach is much cheaper, and its cost advantage will allow the company to scale faster. Tesla produces over a million cars a year, versus Waymo's few hundred units, and it plans to use the same vehicles for its autonomous riding service. The company is still limited to a level 2 advanced driver system, which requires constant supervision from the driver, while Waymo has been providing customers with level 4 autonomous driving rides for years. It plans to start offering level 4 autonomous rides to customers in Austin next month.

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Google is getting back into the smart glasses game. The company has announced a partnership with Warby Parker - they plan to launch a series of smart glasses built on top of Google's Android XR as soon as next year. The rise of generative AI has allowed Google to revisit the idea of Google Glass, a wearable it launched in 2013 that failed partly due to a technology gap. The company has learned many lessons since the failed launch. Other companies, like Meta and Apple, are also reportedly working on smart glasses.

China welcomes foreign companies and competition but creates conditions where local alternatives can thrive alongside them, and its provinces, despite competing against each other like countries in the EU, all have the ultimate goal of developing a Chinese champion that can successfully compete on the global stage.

Google plans to start testing ads in AI mode, a new AI-powered search feature the company just rolled out to the US.

Spotify's iOS subscriptions have significantly increased in the past two weeks, while sales have remained relatively constant on Android.

Shopify's Storefront Web Components lets developers bring Shopify-powered commerce capabilities to any website.

Microsoft says it has been unable to implement linked-out payments because of Apple's anti-steering policies, which restrict Microsoft's communications to users and impose a high economic cost.

The Feiyang Times building in Shenzhen is known as a place for phone sales and repairs - and also a marketplace for stolen devices.