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Forget JPEG, How Would a Person Compress a Picture?

Cars That Think

We live in an age in which it's cheap to take photos but will eventually be costly to store them en masse, as backup services set limits and begin charging for overages. But, as engineers, we are trained to ask if we can do better. Why would I bother to do that, you ask? That, however, isn't really true.

Personal 101
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Just Calm Down About GPT-4 Already

Cars That Think

Brooks, who is now working on his third robotics startup, Robust.AI , has written hundreds of articles and half a dozen books and was featured in the motion picture Fast, Cheap & Out of Control. We see a person do something, and we know what else they can do, and we can make a judgement quickly. And we’re really good at that.

Personal 145
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Necrobotics: Dead Spiders Reincarnated as Robot Grippers

Cars That Think

Astonishingly mobile, amazingly efficient, super robust, and in some cases, literally dirt cheap. I’ll let you Google whip scorpion on your own because they kind of freak me out, but here’s a picture of a patu digua, with a body measuring about a quarter of a millimeter: Squee! You know what’s even easier than that, though?

Cheap 116
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Who Really Invented the Thumb Drive?

Cars That Think

Personal computers in the late 1980s began incorporating CD-ROM drives, but initially these could read only from prerecorded disks and could not store user-generated data. Computer users badly needed a cheap, high-capacity, reliable, portable storage device. Flash memory became cheap and robust enough for consumer use by 1995.

Singapore 145
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Opinion: The Bentley Crash in New York is Scrambling Brains

The Truth About Cars

What caught my eye was Krok highlighting this bit: “Why would an automaker manufacture a car with so much engine power that it requires an eight-speed transmission?” It’s all about keeping your engine in the right rev range the situation, and having more gears helps do that, which can allow for better performance and fuel economy.

Bentley 111
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What Robotics Experts Think of Tesla’s Optimus Robot

Cars That Think

After a year of speculation based on little more than a person in a robot suit combined with some optimistic assertions made by Tesla CEO Elon Musk , many roboticists tuned in to the event livestream (or attended in person) to see what Tesla’s approach to humanoid robotics would turn out to be. Roboticist, Google Brain.

Boston 145
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The Top 10 Semiconductor Stories of 2023

Cars That Think

But you’re also a discerning and forward-looking person. In 2022, a schism in the chip design world and at Google erupted into the open. At issue was a reinforcement-learning AI system that Google uses to do a key step in laying out chunks of logic and memory for its AI accelerator chips, or TPUs. nanometers.

Google 131