All posts
- Good Luck Building a PC Right Now: RTX 3080s and Ryzen 5000s Are Ghosts
Nvidia's RTX 3080/3090 and AMD's Ryzen 9 5900X/5950X are effectively unbuyable, and AMD says the chip crunch could last into mid-2021.
- Money Is Pouring Into No-Code, and It's Not Slowing Down
Unqork, Starburst, and OneTrust all landed huge rounds this month as VCs bet big on tools that let non-engineers build software.
- China Just Launched a Rocket From the Moon
Chang'e 5's ascent vehicle lifted off from the lunar surface with soil samples aboard, a first for China's space program.
- Snapdragon 888 Lands as Samsung Starts Pushing Android 11 to the S20
Qualcomm's new flagship chip lines up 2021's Android phones while Samsung begins rolling One UI 3.0 out to the Galaxy S20.
- Salesforce Buys Slack for $27.7 Billion — And the Cloud Wars Get Real
Salesforce announced a $27.7 billion deal to acquire Slack, one of the biggest software acquisitions ever, right as AWS wrapped re:Invent.
- Arecibo Falls Silent the Same Day China Lands on the Moon
Arecibo Observatory's dish platform collapsed today, ending 57 years of service, hours after Chang'e 5 touched down at Mons Rümker.
- AWS re:Invent 2020 Kicks Off as a Three-Week Virtual Marathon
AWS re:Invent 2020 opened today as a free, three-week online conference, with Andy Jassy's keynote unveiling GA EC2 Mac instances and new ECS/EKS Anywhere tooling.
- Chang'e 5 Closes In on the Moon Ahead of a High-Stakes Sample Return
China's Chang'e 5 spacecraft is en route to the Moon, aiming for the first fresh lunar sample return in 44 years.
- How a Year Stuck at Home Turbocharged Cloud-Native and DevOps
The pandemic pushed enterprises toward containers, CI/CD, and Kubernetes faster than any roadmap would have, right as AWS re:Invent looms.
- Black Friday 2020: PS5s and RTX GPUs Are Gone Before You Finish Your Coffee
PS5, Xbox Series X, and RTX 3080/3070 restocks vanished within minutes on Black Friday, stretching 2020's hardware shortage into the holidays.
- China's Chang'e 5 Is Chasing Down the First Fresh Moon Rocks in 44 Years
China launched Chang'e 5 on a Long March 5 to grab about 2 kg of lunar samples, the first attempted Moon sample return since Luna 24 in 1976.
- Black Friday in a Shortage Year: What to Actually Expect
With PS5, Xbox Series X, and RTX 30-series still scarce, this Black Friday is about restocks, not doorbusters.
- Meet GPT-3: the New York Times brings OpenAI's language model to the mainstream
Cade Metz's NYT feature introduces GPT-3 to a mass audience, reigniting debate over AI that writes and codes.
- SpaceX Doubles Up: Another Starlink Batch and the Sentinel-6 Ocean Satellite
SpaceX flew two missions in two days last week, launching more Starlink satellites and then the Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich sea-level satellite.
- Holiday Hardware Shortage: Consoles and GPUs Vanish Before Black Friday
PS5, Xbox Series X, and RTX 30-series cards remain sold out at major US retailers days ahead of Black Friday, squeezed by pandemic demand and chip supply limits.
- Does GPT-3 Understand Anything, or Just Sound Like It Does?
As more developers get API access, GPT-3's fluent code and prose reignite the debate over pattern-matching versus real reasoning.
- NSF Pulls the Plug on Arecibo's Iconic Radio Telescope
The NSF announced it will decommission Arecibo Observatory's 900-ton receiver platform after two cable failures made repairs too dangerous.
- PS5 Goes Global: Sony's Console Finally Lands Everywhere
PlayStation 5 rolled out today to Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and remaining markets, a week after its US debut.
- Crew Dragon Resilience Docks with the ISS
SpaceX's Crew Dragon 'Resilience' autonomously docked with the ISS, delivering the four Crew-1 astronauts for a roughly six-month stay.
- PS5 vs Xbox Series X: the next-gen console race begins
Both next-gen consoles are finally out and impossible to buy, so here's what the early reviews actually tell us.
- GitHub Reinstates youtube-dl After RIAA's DMCA Takedown Backfires
GitHub restored youtube-dl and launched a $1M developer defense fund after the EFF pushed back on RIAA's Section 1201 takedown claim.
- Crew-1 Lifts Off: Commercial Spaceflight Just Got Boring (In the Best Way)
SpaceX launched NASA's Crew-1 mission tonight, the first fully certified operational commercial crew flight to the ISS.
- Porting Apps to Apple Silicon: What Rosetta 2 Actually Feels Like
Developers are putting Rosetta 2 and universal binaries through their paces days after Big Sur and the M1 Macs shipped.
- iPhone 12 mini and 12 Pro Max complete Apple's 5G lineup
Apple's smallest and largest iPhone 12 models go on sale today, rounding out the first 5G iPhone family.
- A Bright Kilonova May Be Hinting at a Freshly Born Magnetar
An unusually luminous kilonova has researchers arguing that a neutron-star merger produced a magnetar rather than collapsing straight to a black hole.
- .NET 5.0 Arrives and Finally Merges Framework With Core
Microsoft ships .NET 5.0, C# 9, F# 5, ASP.NET Core, and EF Core, unifying .NET Framework and .NET Core into one cross-platform runtime.
- Apple Says Goodbye to Intel, Microsoft Ships New Boxes
Apple's M1 chip debuts in redesigned Macs, ending 14 years of Intel inside, the same day Xbox Series X and S launch worldwide.
- Apple's 'One More Thing' Event: What to Expect From Its First Mac Chip
Apple's Nov 10 virtual event is expected to unveil the first custom Arm-based Mac chip, kicking off its two-year Intel transition.
- Foldable Phones Go Mainstream: Galaxy Z Flip 5G Lands in Japan
Samsung's Galaxy Z Flip 5G launched in Japan on Nov 4, expanding its foldable lineup alongside the Galaxy Z Fold2.
- A Second Cable Snaps at Arecibo, and the Whole Dish Is Now on the Clock
A thicker auxiliary cable broke at Arecibo Observatory on Nov 6, gouging the dish and putting the 900-ton platform at serious risk of collapse.