Toggle light / dark theme

Get the latest international news and world events from around the world.

Log in for authorized contributors

D2D Satellite Connectivity: The 16-Point Performance Gap Buyers Are Ignoring

A global survey of 600 IoT decision-makers found that 91% plan to adopt direct-to-device (D2D) satellite connectivity within 18 months. But organizations already blending satellite and cellular report increased progress at a rate 16 points higher than terrestrial-only users, 86% versus 70%. The gap already exists. Most buyers are still treating adoption as a future decision rather than a current one.

D2D satellite connectivity is heading toward near-universal adoption on paper, but the buyers who already made the move are quietly pulling ahead of everyone still planning to. Viasat and Vanson Bourne surveyed 600 IoT decision-makers across agriculture, energy, transport and logistics, mining, and utilities, and found that organizations blending satellite and cellular connectivity report increased progress at 86%, compared with 70% for organizations relying on terrestrial-only networks, according to IoT Tech News’ coverage of the report.

The headline figure from the Viasat-commissioned study, conducted by Vanson Bourne, is that 91% of decision-makers plan to adopt D2D IoT devices within 18 months, with 69% planning adoption within 12 months and 32% within just six, according to Viasat’s own release. That number is genuinely significant. D2D satellite connectivity, enabled by 3GPP’s Release 17 standard for narrowband non-terrestrial networks, lets a device with a standard cellular chipset connect to satellite without a separate terminal, gateway, or bespoke hardware, removing what used to be the single biggest cost barrier to satellite IoT.

DeepSeek (@deepseek_ai) on X

DeepSeek-V4-Flash-Vision-Exp is now live on the DeepSeek API Platform! 🚀 🔹 This experimental multimodal model matches DeepSeek-V4-Flash on text capabilities—including agents, reasoning, and world knowledge. 🔹 On multimodal agent benchmarks, V4-Flash-Vision-Exp makes a major leap over V4-Flash, bringing multimodal agent performance close to Opus-4.8. Try it with model=’deepseek-v4-flash-vision-exp’. DeepSeek Harness 0.1.1 was released today with out-of-the-box support for the new model. 1/n.

A 250seat jet is being built with four aisles instead of one. The reason is the shape: when you blend wings directly into a body wide enough to hold a small apartment, a single corridor down the middle no longer makes any sense

As aircraft bodies grow wider and flatter, the traditional single-aisle layout becomes a relic—forcing designers to reimagine what the inside of a plane should actually look like.

The Machine Metaphor That Shaped Modernity and Its Limits

Your body is a machine. Your brain is a machine. Soil is a machine. The planet is a machine.

We say these things so casually that they no longer sound like claims. They sound like common sense. We hardwire beliefs, rewire habits, debug organizations, optimize people, scale solutions. When something breaks, we go looking for the faulty component.

That metaphor built the modern world. Science, medicine, industry, computation. It did not just work; it worked spectacularly.

But every metaphor is a tool, not a truth. And this particular tool was built for closed systems with clean inputs and clean outputs. Look at what we now point it at: forests, economies, cultures, minds, and the #AI we are racing to deploy before we have agreed on what it is for.

I have argued for years that technology is the How, never the Why or the What. A machine cannot tell you what something is for, who benefits, or who pays the cost. It was never designed to.

So here is the question I could not shake while writing this: what if our deepest ecological, technological and cultural crises are not failures of intelligence at all, but failures of imagination? Failures of the stories we use to make sense of the world?

The problem with the machine story is not that it is false.

Over 30% shift stance on ethical dilemmas after AI rebuttal, Japan study shows

If ChatGPT challenged your moral judgment, would you be persuaded?

A recent study suggests that more than 30% of people would, highlighting the significant influence of artificial intelligence on views about questions with no easy answers.

The study also found that older adults showed a greater tendency to be swayed in their opinions, pointing to a potential danger of persuasive technologies in a rapidly graying society such as Japan.

Chinese RAM hits 9000 MT/s and even matches the speed and latency of the memory in our western gaming PCs

So, that’s 48 GB of “domestically produced”, ie, Chinese, DDR5 RAM hitting 9,000 MT/s. Admittedly, we’re far beyond that with Western memory, having hit over 8,700 MT/s all the way back in 2021 and 10,000 MT/s the following year. Now, we’re at over 13,000 MT/s.

Still, 9,000 is an achievement for Chinese memory and shows how fast the country is progressing in its DRAM development. In fact, Asus ROG also recently shared that Chinese memory now works at 6,000 MT/s with low CAS latency timings of C28 and C30. Notably, this is exactly the kind of fast DDR5 RAM we like to buy for gaming PCs in the West: DDR5-6000 memory with low latency.

The main Chinese memory maker is CXMT, and we’ve recently seen the company’s shares surge as it continues to collect more of the global memory market. This is possible because there’s just so much demand for memory these days, thanks to the AI boom, that demand far outstrips supply and will do for quite some time.

/* */