August 2020
- GPT-3's Private Beta Has Developers Buzzing
OpenAI's invite-only API for GPT-3 is flooding Twitter with demos of code, poetry, and chatbots generated from plain-English prompts.
- Crew Dragon Comes Home: Demo-2 Ends With a Splash
SpaceX's Crew Dragon Endeavour splashed down off Pensacola with Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, the first crewed splashdown since Apollo-Soyuz.
- Google's Pixel 4a Just Made $349 Phones Interesting Again
Google unveils the $349 Pixel 4a with a Snapdragon 730G, 5.81-inch OLED display, and a camera reviewers already call the best under $400.
- Which Remote-Work Habits Will Outlast the Pandemic for Dev Teams
Zoom, Slack, and GitHub usage keeps climbing as engineering teams go fully remote — here's what's likely to stick around.
- NEOWISE Is Fading Fast — Catch It Now or Wait 6,800 Years
Comet NEOWISE has dimmed from a naked-eye spectacle to a binoculars-only target, and the window to see it is closing.
- Samsung's Virtual Unpacked Drops Five New Galaxy Devices
Samsung's first fully virtual Unpacked event unveiled the Note20, Note20 Ultra, Z Fold2, Watch3, Buds Live, and Tab S7 lineup.
- SpaceX Notches Its 13th Falcon 9 Launch of the Year
SpaceX flew its 13th Falcon 9 mission of 2020, sending up Starlink satellites on a five-time-flown booster.
- Snapdragon 865+ Arrives to Power a New Wave of Gaming Phones
Qualcomm's 865+ chip bumps clock speeds and GPU performance for the next round of Android gaming phones.
- Low-Code and No-Code Tools Are Quietly Eating Enterprise Software
Business teams are building their own internal apps and automations without a dev team, and it's changing what enterprise software even means.
- Get Ready: The Perseid Meteor Shower Peaks This Week
The Perseids peak overnight August 11-12, with dark skies offering up to 75 meteors an hour — here's how to watch.
- Nvidia's Ampere Leaks Have PC Gamers Counting Down to September
Leaked details on RTX 3080 and 3070 point to a big generational leap for Nvidia's Ampere GPUs, with AMD's RDNA2 waiting in the wings.
- GitHub Codespaces and the Case for Ditching Your Local Dev Setup
GitHub's new Codespaces beta spins up a full cloud VS Code from any repo, and it's part of a bigger 2020 push toward ephemeral dev environments.
- Epic Games Declares War on the App Store Model
Epic slipped a direct-payment hotfix into Fortnite, got booted from both app stores within hours, and immediately sued Apple and Google.
- The Solution to Ceres' Bright Spot Mystery: Salty Ghosts of an Ancient Ocean
New studies using Dawn orbiter data show Ceres' famous bright patches are salt deposits from brine welling up from a reservoir 40km down.
- WebAssembly Is Quietly Becoming a Big Deal
Figma, Autodesk, and the WASI standard are turning Wasm from a curiosity into a serious complement to JavaScript.
- AMD Teases Zen 3 and 'Big Navi' Ahead of a Busy Fall
AMD keeps dropping hints about Zen 3 CPUs and RDNA2's 'Big Navi' GPU, both pointing toward October launches.
- Perseverance Is a Few Weeks Into Its Long Cruise to Mars
NASA's Perseverance rover is now weeks into its 213-day journey to Mars, with trajectory corrections and instrument checkouts underway.
- Why Systems Programmers Keep Reaching for Rust
Rust's memory safety without a garbage collector keeps pulling engineers away from C and C++ for performance-critical code.
- Inside the Galaxy Watch3: ECG and Fall Detection Go Mainstream
Samsung's Galaxy Watch3 brings ECG and automatic fall detection to the Android side, signaling a broader race for clinical-grade wearable sensors.
- TypeScript 4.0 Lands, and Variadic Tuple Types Are the Star
TypeScript 4.0 ships with variadic tuple types and labeled tuple elements, unlocking sharper typing for function arguments and array structures.
- Note20 Hits Shelves as the Android Launch Rush Keeps Rolling
Samsung's Note20 and Note20 Ultra go on sale a day after the Pixel 4a, closing out a packed two weeks of Android phone launches.
- 'GPT-3, Bloviator': the backlash to AI hype begins
Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis argue in MIT Technology Review that GPT-3's fluent prose masks a total absence of understanding.
- Hubble Says Betelgeuse's Great Dimming Was a Sneeze, Not a Death Rattle
New Hubble UV spectra suggest Betelgeuse's dramatic dimming was caused by an ejected plasma cloud that cooled into dust, not an imminent supernova.
- Get Ready to Pay More: Next-Gen Games Are Heading to $70
Take-Two's $69.99 NBA 2K21 and comments from Sony's CEO suggest $70 could become the new standard price for next-gen games.
- Firefox 80 Ships With the Option to Make Its PDF Viewer Your System Default
Firefox 80 lets its built-in PDF reader take over as the OS default, alongside a blocklist refresh and WebRTC congestion-control gains.
- Arctic Sea Ice Is Tracking Toward Its Second-Lowest Summer on Record
Satellite data through August 2020 shows Arctic sea ice extent on pace to rank behind only 2012 in the 1979-present record.
- AMD's Ryzen 4000 Laptops Are Finally Making Intel Sweat
AMD's 7nm Ryzen 4000 mobile chips are showing up in more thin-and-light laptops, and reviewers keep picking them over Intel's 10th-gen parts.
- Neuralink's Pig Livestream: A Coin-Sized Implant Reading Snout Signals in Real Time
Elon Musk livestreamed pigs with Neuralink implants, showing real-time neural activity and an FDA Breakthrough Device designation.
- SpaceX Is on Pace for Its Busiest Launch Year Yet
SpaceX has already blown past its old cadence in 2020, and reusable boosters flying six times are the reason why.
- PS5 and Xbox Series X Pricing Speculation Reaches a Fever Pitch
With launch two months away, Sony and Microsoft still won't say what their consoles cost, and the internet is losing its mind trying to guess.
- What August's AI Debates Tell Us About the Hype Cycle
GPT-3 went from miracle to bloviator in a single month, and that whiplash says more about us than about the model.