0:04
SpaceX is gearing up for Starship's 13th test flight later this week
The 13th full‑scale Starship test is set for Thursday evening, with a launch window opening at 5:45 pm CDT.
The main mechanical change is a real payload: twenty Starlink V3 satellites placed in the ship’s deployer.
The deployer’s pulley‑cable system will push each satellite out one‑by‑one through a side hatch, letting engineers attempt brief laser links with other LEO craft.
Those links aren’t for the commercial network, but they’ll confirm the new V3’s ability to communicate with the older Starlink fleet, a needed step before full deployment.
0:21
Over 200 Economists Say 'We Must Act Now' On AI's Economic Impact
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: Hundreds of economists say in an open letter that institutions "must act now" to address how artificial intelligence could transform the economy and could put many people out of work. The statement released Monday was signed by top economists, along with computer scientists and some executives at tech companies including Anthropic, Google and OpenAI.
"AI may become radically more powerful over the next 10 years," says the letter organized by Stanford University's digital economy lab. "This could drive an unprecedented transformation of our economy, larger than the Industrial Revolution, but unfolding over a vastly shorter time frame. It could bring risks, including large-scale job displacement, as well as opportunities such as major gains in living standards."
The letter, which has only four sentences, says leaders must "build the incentives, guardrails, and institutions needed to steer AI in a direction that complements humans and benefits society." The Stanford lab says the letter has so far been signed by more than 200 economists and AI researchers, including 16 winners of a Nobel Prize. "We must be intentional and make collective, democratic choices, rather than letting market forces play out and risking leaving most citizens behind," wrote computer scientist and AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio, who was also among the signatories. He said it "it is highly plausible that AI will drastically transform our economies."
Other signatories include Google CEO Eric Schmidt, LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, and Nobel laureates Joseph Stiglitz, Daron Acemonglu, and Simon Johnson.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
1:07
India’s tech services giant HCL is getting into the AI datacenter business
HCL is plowing ₹3,500 crore into a new AI‑focused datacenter that it says can scale to about 50 MW. It isn’t trying to match the massive hyperscale sites you see elsewhere; instead it’s betting on its own software stack to turn a modest facility into a full‑service AI platform for clients.
The plan leans on HCL’s existing strengths—designing AI‑ready infrastructure, handling DevOps and cloud ops, and wrapping it all in its own software. By doing that, the company hopes to become a key piece of India’s sovereign AI ecosystem, offering secure, managed AI services that sit on top of the hardware they’re building.
In the same quarter, HCL booked $2.4 billion of new contracts, including a deal with a Fortune‑250 semiconductor equipment maker to embed AI across its engineering and manufacturing pipeline, and a partnership with a European Fortune‑50 firm—identified as Mercedes‑Benz—to revamp its digital workplace with AI‑driven tools. Those early wins suggest the datacenter will have committed usage from day one.
1:36
[AINews] Codex usage up >10x in 6 months to 7M users, +1M in the past ~day; did Codex overtake Claude Code??
Codex just blew past the 7 million‑user mark, a jump that’s roughly ten‑fold growth in half a year. The surge lines up with the July 9 launch of GPT‑5.6, and the last 48 hours alone added a million users. Meanwhile, Claude’s code side seems to be shifting toward its Tag product, so its numbers are a bit harder to compare.
Prime Intellect rolled out Verifiers v1, redesigning the RL stack so rollout traces are stored as a message DAG. That change collapses trace growth from quadratic to linear, making long‑horizon, multimodal rollouts practical on a handful of H200 nodes in under two days. The new architecture also feeds exact token IDs to vLLM, cutting tokenization drift.
On the tooling front, harnesses are becoming the real differentiator. Teams are benchmarking cost per task instead of raw token price, and early numbers show that even heavyweight models can be cheaper when they avoid unnecessary edits. Open‑source gains keep pace, with Transformers now running natively in vLLM, slashing the double‑implementation burden for new architectures.
2:07
Governments to enterprises: Improve your router security hygiene
I’ve been thinking about that advisory on router hygiene and it’s the mechanics that keep tripping me up. The attackers are still using the old SNMP trick—pinging devices still on SNMPv1 or v2, grabbing the default community strings, and then telling the router to dump its config to a file they pull onto a VPS they control. It’s the same simple scan‑and‑copy method that’s been working for years, and they’re chaining it with old Cisco CVEs that let them run code or take the device down.
What makes it stick is how many enterprises treat routers like “set‑it‑and‑forget‑it” gear. The hardware sits there, often unsupported, and nobody’s really tracking it the way they do endpoints. That ambiguity between security and network teams just hands the attackers a clear path.
The fix is pretty straightforward: kill SNMPv1/v2, roll out SNMPv3 with full auth‑priv encryption, lock down community strings with unique passwords, and shut off Cisco’s Smart Install once the initial setup is done. Pair that with regular firmware updates, MFA on local accounts, and a bit of micro‑segmentation to limit any single router’s blast radius. If you can get those basics in place, the attack surface shrinks dramatically.
2:40
Can’t Find That ISA Sound Card? No Worries!
I just read this thing about the Beavis Ultrasound, and it's actually a clone of the Gravis Ultrasound from back in the day. It's a sound card, which is surprisingly still sought after, especially in retrocomputing circles. The interesting part is that it's not just a simple clone - it's actually built around an AMD AM78C201, which is a relatively rare chip. But if you can get your hands on one, the rest of the card is pretty straightforward: analogue circuitry, some glue logic, a ROM for samples, and a GAL for driving the IDE CD-ROM interface. It's actually pretty cool to see people still building these kinds of things from scratch.
2:58
EU paves way for banning social media for children
I was reading about this and it's wild - the EU's executive arm is pushing for a ban on social media for kids across all 27 member states. They're trying to protect young people from the potential harms of excessive online time. The ban would essentially be a hard limit, not just a guideline, and it's not just about age restrictions or parental controls - it's a full-on ban. They're framing it as a way to safeguard kids' mental health and well-being.
3:12
EU paves way for social media for children
I just read this thing that caught my eye - the EU's making a big push to limit social media access for kids. They're essentially paving the way for a ban across all 27 member states, which is a huge deal. The thing that's got me thinking is how they're framing this as a protection mechanism, not just a restriction. They're talking about the dangers of excessive online time, but I wonder if they're also considering the potential benefits of social media for kids - like access to information, community, and learning opportunities.
It's interesting that they're taking a top-down approach, with the EU president, Ursula von der Leyen, leading the charge. This suggests that they're treating social media as a systemic issue that requires a coordinated response. I'm curious to see how this will play out, especially in terms of how they'll balance protection with access.
One thing that's not clear to me is how they'll define "children" - are we talking about kids under 13, or is it more nuanced than that? And what about kids who are already online, using social media to connect with friends and family? Will they be grandfathered in, or will there be some kind of transition period?
I'm also wondering about the potential implications for education and digital literacy. If social media is restricted for kids, how will they learn about online safety, digital citizenship, and critical thinking? It's not just about banning social media, but also about finding alternative ways for kids to engage with the online world.
3:53
The loudest warning about AI and jobs yet
This is a column about AI. My fiancé works at Anthropic. See my full ethics disclosure here.
One of my main preoccupations this year has been the extent to which artificial intelligence threatens jobs, either now or in the future. Our Platformer podcast miniseries took the question to seven experts with a variety of perspectives, and the debate ended mostly in optimism — with most guests casting doubt on the idea of mass long-term unemployment, even as they acknowledged that AI will likely cause most jobs to change dramatically.
Conversations around AI and jobs can often feel slippery in part because the data we have on the subject is mediocre. Jobs are rarely destroyed for any one reason; corporations often have an incentive to lie about why they’ve eliminated a job; and much of the data we’ve seen this year can seem contradictory.
For these reasons, I took note this morning of “We Must Act Now,” a statement signed by more than 200 economists, AI researchers, and Nobel laureates. Other signers included executives from Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI. The statement is short enough that I can reproduce it here in full:
AI may become radically more powerful over the next 10 years.
This could drive an unprecedented transformation of our economy, larger than the Industrial Revolution, but unfolding over a vastly shorter time frame. It could bring risks, including large-scale job displacement, as well as opportunities such as major gains in living standards.
Economists, policymakers and technology leaders must act now to understand the economics of transformative AI and to build the incentives, guardrails, and institutions needed to steer AI in a direction that complements humans and benefits society.
Like most statements that 200 people are willing to sign, this one can read as fairly anodyne. But as Ben Casselman notes in the New York Times, among other things it represents a cohering view among economists that the risks of large-scale disruption are growing:
Notably, the list of signatories includes some people who have in the past been prominent A.I. skeptics, including Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who won the Nobel in economics in 2024.
“There’s been a notable change in the profession,” said Erik Brynjolfsson, a Stanford economist who helped organize the statement. He said his goal was to get economists and policymakers to take the disruptive potential of A.I. more seriously.
“I still see a big gap there, a big mismatch, and I’m kind of worried that we’re not going to be ready for the tsunami that’s coming,” he said.
The new statement comes a month after a Wall Street Journal survey of 16 leading economists found that half said AI would lead to no net change in jobs; five said it would lead to net losses, and just three said it would lead to net growth. Notably, China last week opted not to set a numerical target for the number of urban jobs it would create in the next five years — the first time it had not set a target since the 1990s.
At times like this I find it helpful to slow down and ask what we know for sure, what’s disputed, and what we might do about it.
Start with what we know. One, there is no jobs crisis to date. “The occupational mix is not yet changing in ways that clearly align with the introduction of AI into the workforce” the Yale Budget Lab, a nonpartisan policy research center, reported in June. “Measures of AI usage show no connection to changes in employment or unemployment.”
Two, there’s growing evidence that AI is beginning to erode work — in particular, entry-level work. This month, Stanford’s Canaries Dashboard — another Brynjolfsson project — offered two relevant data points. (The data comes from ADP, a large provider of payroll services.)
The first is that jobs that are considered the most “exposed” to AI shrank 0.5 percent, while the least exposed grew 0.2 percent. The second is that early-career jobs shrank 2.7 percent this year, while jobs for mid-career workers (ages 35-40) grew 1.6 percent.
Those are small effect sizes, obviously — but directionally interesting. And they also help me make sense of the apparently contradictory data we sometimes see on jobs.
Take, for example, a seemingly happy story about AI and jobs from last week: US job postings related to software development are up 15 percent since the launch of Claude Code in February 2025. Among those postings, 71 percent of the increase is for senior-level roles.
The implication is clear, and worrisome: employers are increasingly turning to AI systems to do the entry-level work that their junior workers once did. For the moment, that seems to be creating jobs for more senior workers. But what will happen should AI systems be able to do those tasks, too?
Job losses often have multiple causes, and economists have cited interest-rate hikes, overhiring during the pandemic, and remote work as reasons that hiring is slow in some parts of the economy.
6:02
launch day
I was struck by how the whole thing boiled down to a name swap. After five years of building with fifty‑plus founders, Dan realized “ReGen” was colliding with everything from Leonardo DiCaprio’s fund to regenerative agriculture buzz, so they rebranded to Onto—a word that hints at being, growth, and the early stage of a larger organism. The shift isn’t just branding; it’s a signal that they’re moving beyond a niche label toward a broader ambition of abundance.
He reminded me of those sleepless nights in 2019, working from a bedroom, a café, even the front seat of a van parked on the beach, chasing a vision his daughter and wife inspired. The first term sheet landed on a sunset walk in 2021, and the team has been heads‑down ever since.
Now, with the new name, they’re positioning themselves to partner with the most consequential companies they can find, still driven by that same nervous‑energy and the belief that what they’re building feels a little like magic.
