Lifeboat Foundation

More headroom, more legroom, more room in general.

A new design for an autonomous taxi without a steering wheel or pedals has been unveiled by Waymo. The company, which has partnered with the Chinese automaker Geely, announced this week its intention to build a Zeekr minivan filled with passenger seats and little much else.

The minivan will be all-electric and self-driving as in being designed and developed in Gothenburg, Sweden. According to the US-based Waymo, the robot minivan will be added to its existing fleet “in the years to come.”

Continue reading “Alphabet’s Waymo Unveils Its New Taxi: No Steering Wheel or Pedals?” »

Meta has reportedly poached about 100 engineers from Apple.

Apple is giving its top engineers in the hardware as well as software divisions out-of-cycle bonuses in a bid to stop them from jumping ship to Meta. These bonuses are largely in the form of restricted stock units valued in the range of $50,000 to $180,000, Bloomberg reported.

Earlier in October, we reported that Meta, then Facebook, was planning to hire 10,000 engineers to build Zuckerberg’s version of the metaverse. In the little time that has passed since the company rebranded itself and even opened up its Horizon Worlds for users. But what is not in the public domain is that Meta has poached about 100 engineers from Apple during the period, according to Bloomberg’s report.

Continue reading “Apple Pays Its Engineers $180,000 Bonuses to Stop Them From Joining Meta” »

SKYNET BABY STEPS.

Amazon has fixed its voice assistant so that it will not suggest the dangerous “challenge” again.

Lawns are becoming less and less popular these days. Besides being high-maintenance, they are terrible for the environment. The mono-crop grasses require lots of watering, fertilizing and “herbiciding.” With mounting water shortages around the world, should we really be dumping clean water on non-edible grass?

Naturally, people are looking for alternatives. Some are planting edible gardens, some are planting prairie grasses and flowers for pollinators, and some are planting eco-friendly clover lawns, for a look and feel more similar to a regular lawn.

And now we’ve found another alternative — creeping red thyme. Like clover, the fast-growing cover crop can take over your whole lawn like a carpet.

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The James Webb Space Telescope launched, but now its deployments must work. Even though the launch was successful, the hardest part is yet to come. We’ll take a look at each of the deployment steps and understand why Webb has to be so complex to accomplish its mission.

Continue reading “How James Webb’s Deployments MUST Work” »

The reconfigurable hybrid robotic gripper can pick and place a wide range of delicate food items.

Earlier this month, Airtable announced it’s now worth $11 billion after its latest funding round. The company’s “code-for-everyone-else approach allows professionals who aren’t fluent in coding languages such as Java or Python, and don’t have their desk buried deep within the stack, to play a part in rethinking and remaking the consumer and client digital experience,” reports Riley de León of CNBC. “The low-code movement has attracted an even higher level of attention as a result of the pandemic, during which organizations from hospitals to government entities and corporations have had to develop online offerings at a faster pace than ever expected and for new use cases.”

This movement is part of an increasing democratization of programming — borne of extreme necessity. At a time when digital transformation is everywhere, “relying on IT departments and professional programmers is unsustainable,” an O’Reilly report states. “We need to enable people who aren’t programmers to develop the software they need. We need to enable people to solve their own computational problems.”

Why space tourism is not just fun for rich people.

Mon, Jan 3, 2022 at 12 PM PST.

Interested.

The Chinese inroads into space have got strategic circles abuzz with discussions about a possible revival of a Cold War-type competition between the US and the erstwhile Soviet Union.

China has yet again made headlines with a move that goes beyond just sending missions to the Moon or Mars. It has claimed to have launched a satellite that could take high-resolution photos of American cities from space, which can capture even details of a vehicle’s number plate.

According to experts, a Chinese satellite captured photographs of a vast region around a US city in just 42 seconds, crisp enough to recognize a military vehicle on the street and tell what type of weapon it might be carrying.