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- One Year of Foldables: Are They Still a Gimmick?
A year after the redesigned Galaxy Fold shipped, foldables are more real but still a small, pricey niche.
- Starlink's Growing Megaconstellation Has Astronomers Worried
With over 700 Starlink satellites in orbit, astronomers are pushing SpaceX for fixes as bright streaks threaten sky surveys.
- .NET 5 Nears Launch: Microsoft's Plan to Unify .NET
With Preview 8 out and GA set for November 10, .NET 5 aims to merge .NET Framework, .NET Core, and Xamarin into one platform.
- What We Know About Nvidia's Incoming RTX 30 Series
Nvidia's Ampere-based RTX 30 series promises double the performance-per-watt of Turing, with the $699 RTX 3080 leading the charge on September 17.
- SpaceX Ships Another 60 Starlink Satellites While Starship SN6 Hops Again in Texas
SpaceX launched 60 more Starlink satellites and stuck the booster landing today, while the Starship SN6 prototype completed its second short test hop in Boca Chica.
- Inside the GPT-3 API Gold Rush
OpenAI's invite-only GPT-3 API is quietly fueling a summer of wild demos, from code generators to chatbots to AI Dungeon.
- ZTE's Axon 20 5G Hides Its Selfie Camera Under the Screen
ZTE launched the Axon 20 5G in China, billed as the first 5G phone with a true under-display selfie camera.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- '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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.