Month: April 2025

Last week, Nintendo made the unprecedented move of delaying US Switch 2 preorders to "assess" the impact of Donald Trump's massive tariffs on the countries where the console is produced. That move has left many wondering if the company may be mulling a last-minute increase in the Switch 2's $450 asking price to account for those import taxes.

While industry analysts think that kind of immediate price increase is unlikely, they warn that Trump's tariffs could have longer-term impacts on Switch 2 pricing and supplies in the US for years to come.

Already baked in

DFC Intelligence CEO David Cole, for instance, said in a recent analyst note that the company is currently modeling "a 20 percent price increase over the next two years" across all video game hardware thanks to "broader macroeconomic challenges." In the case of the Switch 2, though, Cole clarified that "we believe much of the 20 percent increase was already baked into the $450 price," which Nintendo is "not likely" to raise at this point.

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Die Telekom feiert sich als Marktführer beim Glasfaserausbau. Man habe den Marktanteil des Kupfernetzes auf FTTH übertragen. (Glasfaser, DSL)

Later today, a former Facebook employee, Sarah Wynn-Williams, will testify to Congress that Meta executives "repeatedly" sought to "undermine US national security and betray American values" in "secret" efforts to "win favor with Beijing and build an $18 billion dollar business in China."

In her prepared remarks, which will be delivered at a Senate subcommittee on crime and counterterrorism hearing this afternoon, Wynn-Williams accused Meta of working "hand in glove" with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). That partnership allegedly included efforts to "construct and test custom-built censorship tools that silenced and censored their critics" as well as provide the CCP with "access to Meta user data—including that of Americans."

Wynn-Williams worked as Facebook's Director of Global Public Policy from 2011 to 2017. She left at the height of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, just before Mark Zuckerberg got grilled by Congress over misinformation and election interference on its platform.

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Even the tiniest of living things are capable of some amazing forms of locomotion, and some come with highly sophisticated sensor suites and manage to source their energy from the environment. Attempts to approach this sort of flexibility with robotics have taken two forms. One involves making tiny robots modeled on animal behavior. The other involves converting a living creature into a robot. So far, either approach has involved giving up a lot. You're either only implementing a few of life's features in the robot or shutting off most of life's features when taking over an insect.

But a team of researchers at Harvard has recognized that there are some behaviors that are so instinctual that it's possible to induce animals to act as if they were robotic. Or mostly robotic, at least—the fruit flies the researchers used would occasionally go their own way, despite strong inducements to stay with the program.

Smell the light

The first bit of behavior involved Drosophila's response to moving visual stimuli. If placed in an area where the fly would see a visual pattern that rotates from left to right, the fly will turn to the right in an attempt to keep the pattern stable. This allowed a projector system to "steer" the flies as they walked across an enclosure (despite their names, fruit flies tend to spend a lot of their time walking). By rotating the pattern back and forth, the researchers could steer the flies between two locations in the enclosure with about 94 percent accuracy.

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Even the tiniest of living things are capable of some amazing forms of locomotion, and some come with highly sophisticated sensor suites and manage to source their energy from the environment. Attempts to approach this sort of flexibility with robotics have taken two forms. One involves making tiny robots modeled on animal behavior. The other involves converting a living creature into a robot. So far, either approach has involved giving up a lot. You're either only implementing a few of life's features in the robot or shutting off most of life's features when taking over an insect.

But a team of researchers at Harvard has recognized that there are some behaviors that are so instinctual that it's possible to induce animals to act as if they were robotic. Or mostly robotic, at least—the fruit flies the researchers used would occasionally go their own way, despite strong inducements to stay with the program.

Smell the light

The first bit of behavior involved Drosophila's response to moving visual stimuli. If placed in an area where the fly would see a visual pattern that rotates from left to right, the fly will turn to the right in an attempt to keep the pattern stable. This allowed a projector system to "steer" the flies as they walked across an enclosure (despite their names, fruit flies tend to spend a lot of their time walking). By rotating the pattern back and forth, the researchers could steer the flies between two locations in the enclosure with about 94 percent accuracy.

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Die Telekom ist bereit, mit Partnern zusammen die Cloud in Deutschland stark auszubauen. (Timotheus Höttges, AWS)

Google has unveiled a new AI processor, the seventh generation of its custom TPU architecture. The chip, known as Ironwood, was reportedly designed for the emerging needs of Google's most powerful Gemini models, like simulated reasoning, which Google prefers to call "thinking." The company claims this chip represents a major shift that will unlock more powerful agentic AI capabilities. Google calls this the "age of inference."

Whenever Google talks about the capabilities of a new Gemini version, it notes that the model's capabilities are tied not only to the code but to Google's infrastructure. Its custom AI hardware is a key element of accelerating inference and expanding context windows. With Ironwood, Google says it has its most scalable and powerful TPU yet, which will allow AI to act on behalf of a user to proactively gather data and generate outputs. This is what Google means when it talks about agentic AI.

Ironwood delivers higher throughput compared to previous Google Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), and Google really plans to pack these chips in. Ironwood is designed to operate in clusters of up to 9,216 liquid-cooled chips, which will communicate directly with each other through a newly enhanced Inter-Chip Interconnect (ICI).

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Google has unveiled a new AI processor, the seventh generation of its custom TPU architecture. The chip, known as Ironwood, was reportedly designed for the emerging needs of Google's most powerful Gemini models, like simulated reasoning, which Google prefers to call "thinking." The company claims this chip represents a major shift that will unlock more powerful agentic AI capabilities. Google calls this the "age of inference."

Whenever Google talks about the capabilities of a new Gemini version, it notes that the model's capabilities are tied not only to the code but to Google's infrastructure. Its custom AI hardware is a key element of accelerating inference and expanding context windows. With Ironwood, Google says it has its most scalable and powerful TPU yet, which will allow AI to act on behalf of a user to proactively gather data and generate outputs. This is what Google means when it talks about agentic AI.

Ironwood delivers higher throughput compared to previous Google Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), and Google really plans to pack these chips in. Ironwood is designed to operate in clusters of up to 9,216 liquid-cooled chips, which will communicate directly with each other through a newly enhanced Inter-Chip Interconnect (ICI).

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Mit sofortiger Wirkung löst das US-Justizministerium eine Arbeitsgruppe auf, die zuvor in großen Fällen gegen Kryptounternehmen ermittelt hat. (Kryptowährung, Politik)

A rare spot of good news today: For the second year in a row, US roads got a little safer. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration published its early estimate of road deaths in 2024; 39,345 people lost their lives, which is a 3.8 percent decrease from the 40,901 deaths that occurred on US roads in 2023.

The problem started with the pandemic; although road traffic dried up, the death rate leapt by 20 percent.

There's no single cause, and studies have identified multiple contributing factors: empty roads designed to practically encourage speeding, little to no enforcement of traffic laws by the police, a general sense of fatalism in the face of public health restrictions that few Americans had ever contemplated in recent times, and car companies making big trucks and SUVs with high hoods, which are much more deadly to pedestrians and other vulnerable road users in a crash.

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