Month: August 2024

Enlarge / This is the Figure 02, a new humanoid robot that recently tried its hand(s) at assembling BMW chassis in South Carolina. (credit: BMW)

Robots have been working in car factories for decades now, starting with machines performing some welds on a General Motors production line back in 1961. Now, robots work alongside people on production lines, excelling at tasks like manipulating parts too heavy for humans to easily lift or welding or bonding with more precision than we can manage.

Those robots mostly look like big multi-axis arms, but a new breed of two-armed, two-legged robots is being tested in car factories. BMW is the latest automaker to try them at its factory in Spartanburg, South Carolina.

Unlike Tesla, which hopes to develop its own bipedal 'bot to work on its production line sometime next year, BMW has brought in a robot from Figure AI. The Figure 02 robot has hands with sixteen degrees of freedom and human-equivalent strength.

Enlarge (credit: MirageC | Moment)

Doesn't CrowdStrike have more important things to do right now than try to take down a parody site?

That's what IT consultant David Senk wondered when CrowdStrike sent a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notice targeting his parody site ClownStrike.

Senk created ClownStrike in the aftermath of the largest IT outage the world has ever seen—which CrowdStrike blamed on a buggy security update that shut down systems and incited prolonged chaos in airports, hospitals, and businesses worldwide.

Enlarge / It's.a tale as old as, well, time. (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Google's story over the last two decades has been a tale as old as time: enshittification for growth. The once-beloved startup—with its unofficial "Don't Be Evil" motto—has instead become a major Internet monopolist, as a federal judge ruled on Monday, dominating the market for online search. Google is also well-known for its data-harvesting practices, for constantly killing off products, and for facilitating the rise of brain-cell-destroying YouTubers who make me Fear for Today's Youth. (Maybe that last one is just me?)

Google's rapid rise from "scrappy search engine with doodles" to "dystopic mega-corporation" has been remarkable in many ways, especially when you consider just how much goodwill the company squandered so quickly. Along the way, though, Google has achieved one unexpected result: In a divided America, it offers just about everyone something to hate.

Here are just a few of the players hating Google today.

Enlarge / With or without the "AI," AMD's new laptop processors are pretty good. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

For all the noise about neural processing units (NPUs) and the generative AI capabilities of new and upcoming chips, NPUs don't yet do all that much in terms of day-to-day, bread-and-butter computing.

So when I'm evaluating new processors that make a big deal about their AI processing capabilities, my unofficial rule of thumb has been to mostly ignore the AI stuff and focus on more traditional metrics: If the AI bubble popped tomorrow and the hype wave dissipated, would these still be worthwhile chips? Qualcomm's Snapdragon X SoCs were launched alongside a pile of AI-related software announcements, but they're impressive mostly because they're very good at basic computer-y things: They feel fast, and they enable good battery life.

Despite the "AI" that AMD has added to the name, I'm looking at the new Ryzen AI 300-series pretty much the same way. The test system AMD provided—a 16-inch Asus ZenBook UM5606W with a Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 and an integrated Radeon 890M GPU in it—shows that the chip is a small but significant bump over the older Ryzen 7000- and 8000-series laptop CPUs. For various reasons, those chips were already a bit easier to recommend than Intel's 13th-generation Core processors and both Ultra and non-Ultra Intel Core CPUs, and the Ryzen AI upgrade provides solid boosts to CPU performance and graphics while still maintaining good power efficiency and battery life.

Enlarge / Lamborghini has added a plug-in hybrid powertrain to the Urus SUV. (credit: Lamborghini)

Lamborghini has now launched its second plug-in hybrid. The first was the V-12-powered Revuelto, a $600,000 supercar with 1,001 hp (746 kW), all-wheel drive, and three electric motors, which debuted last year. It can hit 60 mph (98 km/h) in about two seconds and can achieve a top speed of 217 mph (350 km/h). But if we’re relying on Lamborghini’s hybridization to save the planet from melting, we’re burying our heads in oil-soaked sand. True, its newest hybrid, the Urus SE, can travel 37 miles (60 km) on EV power alone, and hybridizing it cuts emissions by 80 percent. Since the non-hybrid Urus V8 gets a combined 16 mpg (14.7 L/100 km), this shouldn’t be considered a major triumph.

A far bigger deal would be if brands like Lamborghini could crack the code on passion—making what they already do but with electric vehicles, somehow without sanding away the sex appeal.

Lamborghini has committed to having at least two EVs on the road by 2030, and it has already shown the Lanzador EV concept, a kind of hypercar crossover. But Lamborghini Chief Technology Officer Rouven Mohr, who sat down with us to discuss the Urus SE, says that technically, there’s still an issue with EVs retaining the bombast that makes the Italian super sports car brand what it is. Counterintuitively, Mohr argued that AI might enable this next leap.