0:11
Amazon Has Enough Satellites To Launch Its Starlink Competitor
Amazon says its Leo satellite network now has enough spacecraft in orbit to begin limited commercial internet service, with 396 satellites providing "continuous service across initial latitudes." Early performance will likely be uneven, however, and well behind Starlink. "It'll be years before Amazon can boast similar performance numbers as it continues to launch a planned 3,232 Leo satellites," reports The Verge. From the report: SpaceX went live with its "Better than nothing beta" back in 2020 when it had almost 900 satellites operating in low-Earth orbit. It initially served a narrow band of users in the upper US and Canada, who complained about frequent service interruptions and high sensitivity to obstructions, with speeds between 50Mbps and 150Mbps, and latency from 20ms to 40ms. By 2022, the service and coverage areas had already dramatically improved. [...]
SpaceX currently has over 10,000 Starlink satellites in operation, providing robust internet connectivity on land, sea, and air in over 160 countries. Performance varies by the dish, service level paid for, time of day, and location of the user, but we're now talking 200Mbps median download speeds, 10Mbps to 40Mbps uploads, and latency hovering around 25ms.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
1:39
AIEWF Daily Dispatch: The great loops debate and the state of AI engineering
One of the highlights of the final day of the AI Engineer World’s Fair was a debate about loops. It nicely captured an argument running through the whole conference: are autonomous software factories viable now, or is the engineering discipline lagging behind the ambition?
Allie Howe from Keycard was the moderator and she opened by asking, “is there or is there not a delta between the hype behind loops and what actually works in practice?”
The pro-loop case was presented by Geoffrey Huntley, creator of the Ralph Loop, and Keycard CEO Ian Livingstone. Huntley opened by saying loops are already here. “It’s inevitable, it’s here to stay,” adding that “I don’t see myself going back to writing code by hand.”
Livingstone said that verifiability is ultimately what it’s about — and you can achieve that with any code, regardless of how it was produced. He also pointed out that loops have always been a core aspect of software development:
“A loop is at the core of ‘I try something, I learn something, I apply something.’ And all we’re really talking about is how quickly we can expedite that process.”
On the skeptical side were Dex Horthy from HumanLayer and Greg Pstrucha from Subroutine. Horthy began by noting that he wasn’t anti-loops. “The basic take here is not whether loops are good or bad,” he said, noting that “Kubernetes is actually built on loops — built on control loops. But they’re deterministic loops.” Horthy’s issue is that “the hype is outrunning the discipline.”
“I haven’t seen proof that we are at a point where we can just step up an abstraction level,” Horthy said, referring to agents controlling the coding. “I actually think we need to step down an abstraction level, if anything.”
Pstrucha was mainly concerned about the economic viability of agentic loops, which he said wasn’t sustainable. You can’t “orchestrate your problems away by buying more tokens,” he said.
“[We’re] kind of like locomotive engineers now. That’s our job: to keep the locomotive on the rails.”
- Geoffrey Huntley, loops advocate
Huntley then offered this wonderful analogy for loopmaxxing: “[We’re] kind of like locomotive engineers now. That’s our job: to keep the locomotive on the rails.”
The discussion turned to software factories, the metaphor that has really taken hold of the industry. Horthy worries that when everything is automated in a factory-like agent environment, “you never touch the problem.” So instead, he advises to start small and iterate with agent loops — to “build up intuition” and not try to automate end to end from the start.
Even Huntley recognized some of the dangers in loops. He said that software factories represent where we are headed in the future, but cautioned that it’s not yet solved in the market. “This is frontier thinking,” he said.
At the end of the hour-long debate, Howe polled the audience to ask which side ‘won’. Ironically, this resulted in a human failure: the stage lights were too bright for Howe or any of the debate participants to see how many hands were raised. If only an agent was in charge of dimming the lights.
Perhaps one example of a company moving to a software factory model is Anthropic. Mike Krieger, one of the co-founders of Instagram back in Web 2.0 and now Head of Labs at Anthropic, was interviewed by swyx in one of the morning sessions.
Krieger talked about Claude Tag, Anthropic’s internal model which the company announced to the world last week. He described Tag as more delegated, asynchronous and proactive than Claude. It perhaps suggests what an early software factory looks like in practice — not agents replacing a team, but multiple people delegating responsibilities to a system like Claude Tag.
“Most usage is actually much more delegated,” he said regarding his team’s usage of Tag. He gave an example of how they instruct the agents: “Don’t just fix this bug. Now you are responsible for this part of the codebase, and I want you to monitor this feedback channel and proactively take on tasks.”
“That’s really changed how we operate currently,” he continued. “It’s much more this multiplayer, async, proactive way.”
However, he also indicated there are some negative consequences to becoming more automated. He noted that his team is “bottlenecked on reviews” and on the “human ability to fully conceptualize what we’re doing.”
Back to the current reality for most AI engineers. This morning, Barr Yaron from Amplify presented her annual survey of the industry.
According to Amplify’s data, 95% of respondents now use agents — roughly double last year’s share. Among teams using agents, 89% said those agents could write data, up from 52% the previous year.
“Agents are no longer reading, summarizing, drafting,” Yaron said. “They’re taking actions inside the systems.”
The controls, however, remain comparatively primitive.
6:54
Politician who investigated spyware abuses had his phone hacked with Pegasus spyware
A European lawmaker who was chairing the EU’s probe into spyware firms discovered his own handset had been turned into a target. The intrusion came from NSO Group’s Pegasus tool, the same software his committee was scrutinising.
Investigators traced the breach to a covert, zero‑click exploit that let the malware slip past the phone’s defenses without any user interaction. Once installed, Pegasus opened a backdoor, siphoning messages, emails and call logs straight to the operator’s servers, effectively letting the attacker read his private conversations.
The episode underscores how the very technology meant to expose abuse can be repurposed against the watchdogs themselves, raising fresh questions about oversight and the limits of diplomatic immunity in the digital realm.
7:52
Porting The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess to the 3DS
The thing that caught my eye is how the 3DS’s extra RAM and faster CPU put it almost in the same ballpark as the GameCube and Wii, so the engine doesn’t need a massive rewrite—just a lot of tidy‑up. Tobi grabbed the freshly decompiled Twilight Princess code and got a build running on the handheld, and it’s already surprisingly playable despite the wobble of early‑stage glitches.
What’s neat is that the core rendering pipeline mostly survives; the 3DS can handle the textures and geometry without the kind of massive down‑scaling you’d expect. The biggest hurdles now are cleaning up the visual artifacts and squeezing performance out of the “quick‑and‑sloppy” port.
If those bugs are ironed out, the game could finally get that stereoscopic 3D boost, turning a nostalgic title into something that feels fresh on the little screen. It shows that an official 3DS version was technically within reach, even if it never materialized.
8:57
Failed blockchain project ends with big fine for fibs about it being on track
The attempt by Australia’s Securities Exchange (ASX) to replace its core trading platform with a blockchain-based system has ended with an A$20.5 million fine ($14.2 million/£10.6 million), further humiliation after the project flopped. The ASX runs a platform called the Clearing House Electronic Subregister System (CHESS) to process and track trades on its exchange. In 2017, the ASX decided to replace CHESS, citing difficulties maintaining the application, which the bourse coded in COBOL and ran in OpenVMS on Itanium processors. The ASX is a listed company so its own shares trade on CHESS. The organization decided to replace CHESS with blockchain-based architecture. As explained in its 2019 annual report [PDF], the ASX believed its decision would help it “develop new services that improve the efficiency and standardisation of processes, reduce operational risk, and create new opportunities for growth and innovation.” That optimism was utterly misplaced because the project foundered and missed deadline after deadline. But in February 2022, the ASX issued a statement [PDF] in which it described the project as “progressing well, with the fully integrated industry test environment open and operating successfully.” In the months that followed, the organization issued a string of statements about difficulties with the project and expected deployment delays. The ASX ended up abandoning the project. In 2024, financial regulator the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) sued, alleging that claim all was well with the CHESS replacement was a misleading statement. The regulator argued that as both the market operator, and a listed company itself, any misleading statements from ASX had the potential to undermine confidence in the entire Australian securities market. ASX and ASIC settled the matter in June, and the bourse admitted [PDF] to having misled investors. Australia’s Federal Court today handed down its judgement in the matter, noted that the ASX admitted its errors, but still ordered the bourse pay the A$20.5 million fine, plus ASIC’s A$3 million ($2.1 million/£1.55 million) costs. A parliamentary report [PDF] on the project found three reasons why it failed. One was that the ASX didn’t properly define its objectives. Another was that the company kept adding new requirements but started building the CHESS replacement anyway, meaning the planning and deployment phases of the project overlapped. The report also found “scalability risks were not properly identified and managed; with the result that it was never clear whether the proposed blockchain technology could in fact adequately replace the existing CHESS system.” Those problems weren’t apparent to the outside world, where the Blockchain community regarded the ASX’s decision as a sign distributed ledger technology was suitable for even the mission-critical role of running a stock exchange. The Register offers that assessment based on this account of AWS investigating whether it should get into the blockchain business. The author, a former AWS exec, explains how he was sent to Wall Street to research Blockchain, and often heard the opinion that the ASX’s project meant the technology must have merit. AWS did not become a major blockchain player. And the ASX clearly regrets making the attempt. ®
12:37
Failed blockchain project ends with fine for fibs about it going fine
The attempt by Australia’s Securities Exchange (ASX) to replace its core trading platform with a blockchain-based system has ended with an A$20.5 million fine ($14.2 million/£10.6 million), further humiliation after the project flopped. The ASX runs a platform called the Clearing House Electronic Subregister System (CHESS) to process and track trades on its exchange. In 2017, the ASX decided to replace CHESS, citing difficulties maintaining the application, which the bourse coded in COBOL and ran in OpenVMS on Itanium processors. The ASX is a listed company so its own shares trade on CHESS. The organization decided to replace CHESS with blockchain-based architecture. As explained in its 2019 annual report [PDF], the ASX believed its decision would help it “develop new services that improve the efficiency and standardisation of processes, reduce operational risk, and create new opportunities for growth and innovation.” That optimism was utterly misplaced because the project foundered and missed deadline after deadline. But in February 2022, the ASX issued a statement [PDF] in which it described the project as “progressing well, with the fully integrated industry test environment open and operating successfully.” In the months that followed, the organization issued a string of statements about difficulties with the project and expected deployment delays. The ASX ended up abandoning the project. In 2024, financial regulator the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) sued, alleging that claim all was well with the CHESS replacement was a misleading statement. The regulator argued that as both the market operator, and a listed company itself, any misleading statements from ASX had the potential to undermine confidence in the entire Australian securities market. ASX and ASIC settled the matter in June, and the bourse admitted [PDF] to having misled investors. Australia’s Federal Court today handed down its judgement in the matter, noted that the ASX admitted its errors, but still ordered the bourse pay the A$20.5 million fine, plus ASIC’s A$3 million ($2.1 million/£1.55 million) costs. A parliamentary report [PDF] on the project found three reasons why it failed. One was that the ASX didn’t properly define its objectives. Another was that the company kept adding new requirements but started building the CHESS replacement anyway, meaning the planning and deployment phases of the project overlapped. The report also found “scalability risks were not properly identified and managed; with the result that it was never clear whether the proposed blockchain technology could in fact adequately replace the existing CHESS system.” Those problems weren’t apparent to the outside world, where the Blockchain community regarded the ASX’s decision as a sign distributed ledger technology was suitable for even the mission-critical role of running a stock exchange. The Register offers that assessment based on this account of AWS investigating whether it should get into the blockchain business. The author, a former AWS exec, explains how he was sent to Wall Street to research Blockchain, and often heard the opinion that the ASX’s project meant the technology must have merit. AWS did not become a major blockchain player. And the ASX clearly regrets making the attempt. ®
16:16
The Messy Middle - Pt 2
It was a tough day today.
It’s just the first week since you took a leap of faith and jumped ship from your corporate job to your own independent practice.
However, what you are keeping only to yourself is the struggle you face in getting things done and the constant blame you direct at yourself.
Am I lazier now?
Have I lost my drive?
You haven’t lost it. No, you are still the driven and disciplined individual who won many awards before.
What you are experiencing has happened before in 2004 when David Chang left fine dining to open a tiny noodle bar that everyone expected to fail.
For many years, Chang had lived in the rigid structure of the elite kitchens at Craft, then at Cafe Boulud. Everything was defined; your station, your role, the menu, and exactly how to execute every plate.
Chang, for the first time, discovered that the rigid structure in fine dining was eliminating friction and now, it had vanished. There was no playbook, brigade, or boss to guide him.
However, he figured out several strategies to eliminate this friction and lived through the messy middle. Eventually, his tiny noodle bar became Momofuku.
We have a name for what’s happening to you and what to do about it. It’s not another series on career transitions.
Instead, we inhabit the messy middle transient phase where you are no longer who you were and aren’t who you want to be.
We create an operating system to help you remain sane and functional in this phase so that you can transition to your new identity .
We name six main friction sources that make everything so difficult to get done in this period and hand you the fix beside each.
This way, you will be empowered to live in the messy middle and successfully transition into your new identity.
Today, we share the full workbook so that you can get started practicing immediately.
18:17
Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to stop accepting new customers – and not even AI can save it
Amazon Web Services will stop accepting new customers for its Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing service, and not even AI can save it. Mechanical Turk is a crowdsourcing marketplace that allows users to post gigs, and workers to bid for the chance to do them. The service's name references an 18th-century machine that its inventor claimed could play chess - but which was actually operated remotely by a human. AWS launched Mechanical Turk in November 2005 – a time when the cloudy concern focused on giving developers access to the functions of Amazon’s retail operations. The outfit’s now-mainstream infrastructure-as-a-service offerings debuted in 2006. Amazon quickly claimed Mechanical Turk was a hit. The platform was arguably a pioneer as it pre-dated other crowdsourcing services like Freelancer and Fiverr. In 2018, AWS suggested a new reason to use the service: having humans review and annotate data used to train neural networks as part of its SageMaker service. Earlier this week, AWS added the Amazon SageMaker AI – Mechanical Turk service to its list of “Services in Maintenance” – AWS-speak for services it will soon retire. The Mechanical Turk website also added a warning that it will “be closed to new customers, effective July 30, 2026. Existing users will not be impacted by this change.” We checked with Amazon, and the cloud colossus told us that notice means Mechanical Turk will stop accepting jobs for SageMaker and all other tasks. The end of the OG crowdsourcing platform is therefore in sight. Amazon hasn’t explained why it’s decided to retire the Turk, although as is often the case it has developed competing services like SageMaker GroundTruth. AWS also allows integration with third party crowdsourcing services. On a subreddit dedicated to Mechanical Turk, posters suggest the service’s best days are a long way in the past, and that Amazon has been closing workers’ accounts on short notice and without offering detailed explanation for the decision. Shrinking the crowd of crowdsourced workers seems like a fine way to make Mechanical Turk useless for even its most dedicated customers. ®
20:40
Prosser denies conspiring to steal Apple secrets in lawsuit response, blames Ramacciotti
What’s odd is that Prosser’s filing doesn’t just deny the accusations – it reshapes the whole story about how the Liquid Glass details got out. He says the information never came from any insider leak, but from his own research and public sources, and that Apple’s narrative about a “secret” pipeline is a misreading of his routine reporting.
He also points a finger at his former colleague Ramacciotti, claiming that any “confidential” material was actually passed to him by that source, not by any Apple employee. Prosser insists the documents he posted were already circulating in the tech community, and that his role was simply to aggregate and comment, not to pilfer.
The response adds a layer of procedural nuance, noting that the original complaint was filed without proper service, which gave him the chance to file this answer. He argues that the lawsuit’s claims are built on shaky procedural ground as much as on alleged wrongdoing.
In short, Prosser is trying to reframe the dispute as a matter of miscommunication and procedural error, rather than a deliberate theft of proprietary data. He’s asking the court to toss the case on those grounds.
22:03
Apple Responds to Lawsuit Filed by Three YouTube Channels
In a class action lawsuit filed with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in April, the owners of the YouTube channels h3h3Productions, MrShortGame Golf, and Golfholics allege that Apple "deliberately circumvented" YouTube's protections against video scraping and "profited substantially" by doing so.
Apple's actions were "not only unlawful, but an unconscionable attack on the community of content creators whose content is used to fuel the multi-trillion-dollar generative AI industry without any compensation," the complaint alleged.
h3h3Productions is a well-known YouTube channel created by Ethan Klein and Hila Klein, and they later created the H3 Podcast. Their channels have millions of followers, while MrShortGame Golf and Golfholics have hundreds of thousands of followers. The channels filed equivalent lawsuits against Meta, Nvidia, ByteDance, and Snap.
Apple responded to the lawsuit this week, according to a court document viewed by MacRumors. In short, Apple said the plaintiffs made the videos publicly available on YouTube and that it was permitted to access the videos under the DMCA. Apple said YouTube's Terms of Service likewise permitted the company to access the videos.
"Plaintiffs allege that they posted audiovisual works to YouTube, and that any member of the public can see them there," reads Apple's response. "No password. No payment. No lock. No key. Allegedly, YouTube employs technological measures to prevent unauthorized downloading. But because YouTube provides public access to the videos, the alleged technological measures do not control access to the works, as § 1201(a) requires."
Apple said the plaintiffs have ultimately failed to state a claim, and it requested that the court dismiss the lawsuit as a result.
Tags: Apple Lawsuits, YouTube
This article, "Apple Responds to Lawsuit Filed by Three YouTube Channels" first appeared on MacRumors.com
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