Facepalm: If you’re an astronaut sitting in a rocket waiting to blast into space, you’d want the reassurance of knowing that a sturdy and reliable vehicle will carry you to safety should the launch encounter problems. This task is usually performed by a heavily armored military personnel carrier, but for the upcoming SpaceX Crew-13 mission, rescue duties will be carried out by the Cybertruck, a vehicle that has been subject to 11 NHTSA recall campaigns.

Making a hasty exit away from the launch pad should something go wrong is important, obviously, but given the potentially destructive power of a rocket, the vehicle coming to astronauts’ aid also needs to be sturdy.

NASA uses Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles (MRAP) in this role. The agency previously said these vehicles’ armor is so thick that each door weighs 600 pounds, giving them the sound and feel of a bank vault. This means that even if they aren’t moving, they can still act as a bunker.

But for the four astronauts of SpaceX’s Crew-13 mission, their safety will be put in the hands of a Cybertruck. NASA’s Richard Jones said that using the EV means NASA doesn’t have to organize an MRAP and its crew for the launch. He also noted that this avoids any conflict over resources – SpaceX had been preparing to launch Crew-12 at the same time NASA was preparing a launch attempt for Artemis II.

SpaceX does use Cybertrucks during its own launches. Jones admitted that the vehicles are much quicker than MRAPs for moving astronauts out of danger. They’re also easier to drive while wearing gloves.

But Cybertrucks can’t exactly compete with MRAPs when it comes to durability. Elon Musk once said that irs Armor Glass could survive baseball-sized hail, but the famous on-stage demo in which a metal ball shattered a window didn’t inspire confidence – Musk later claimed hitting the car’s body with a sledgehammer in earlier demo weakened the windows. Jones said no modifications had been made to the Cybertruck.

The Cybertruck has been subject to 11 separate US NHTSA safety-recall campaigns for reasons that include an accelerator pedal that could become trapped, wheels that could separate, and drive-inverter failure, none of which you would want to experience while trying to escape an exploding rocket.

The Crew-13’s crew is made up of NASA’s Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney, plus the Canadian Space Agency’s Joshua Kutryk and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov. The launch will take place no earlier than 12 September 2026.

The crew will join Expedition 75 aboard the ISS, where it will conduct scientific investigations and technology demonstrations intended to support future missions to the Moon and Mars. Expedition 75’s research includes in-space manufacturing, AI- and augmented-reality-assisted health checks, and bioprinting human tissue.

An old laptop that had served for more than six years suddenly shut down mid-game and refused to power on again. Its owner, the LEGO builder known as Koenkun Bricks, recovered the hard drives without trouble and found them intact. Rather than scrap the machine, he decided the screen still had a future as a second monitor for his desk. The plan was simple on paper: free the LCD panel, give it a proper controller so it could accept a standard HDMI signal, and enclose everything in LEGO so the whole unit could tilt, rise, and spin as needed.

Opening the laptop proved to be a much bigger hassle than expected. There were no good service manuals available for that model, and Koenkun had never taken electronics apart before, so he was in unfamiliar ground. That being stated, he proceeded with caution, slowly detaching the display from the hinges, cables, and metal frame until it sat free on the workbench. Of course, a controller board was required to translate the laptop’s internal display signal into a format that a standard computer could understand. Now, after looking all over for a board that exactly matched the panel’s model number but running into long shipping delays, the builder ended up adding a universal one to his shopping basket, which costs roughly €20 or $20. When he had everything connected in and turned on, the screen lit up right immediately.

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Moving white dots began to drift over the display, which the builder eventually traced back to the universal board itself. Ideally, a model-specific controller would have resolved those issues, but even the general unit demonstrated that the panel was alive and functional. The next step was to figure out how to mount that panel inside a LEGO frame, which was another issue waiting to be solved. After attempting to match the factory screw holes to LEGO bars and discovering the holes were too small, the builder took a new look at the problem. The existing plastic bezels around the panel would suffice if he could discover a way to press a LEGO structure against them from the outside. He tried a few basic frames, but they were all a catastrophe because one was too wide, another had gaps along the borders, and a third felt too shaky. L-shaped panel components ultimately provided him with the appropriate balance of strength and a clean, gap-free edge, though he had to go back through some older versions and disassemble the entire thing to get enough of them.

Now, each of the four sides of the laptop bezel measured slightly differently in thickness. So, to compensate, he piled tile after tile until everything was in order, and then he had some of those triangular tiles with the corners cut out nestle up into the L-panels so everything would sit flush. Beams and additional panels formed a top border, leaving spaces for the circuit boards that protruded, and the bottom edge gained some depth so those boards and the controller could sit without stressing them. Green brackets were used to hold specific pieces of metal in place, and he even incorporated a few Technic beams into the LEGO structure where the future stand would be attached.

With the basic shell securely fastened, the controller board finally had a place to call home. The frame had to be disassembled once more, so in went the bricks with studs on their sides, which will hold metal standoffs that keep the board firmly in place. Technic bushings in bright yellow do the job of locking everything into place, and a simple little cover on top keeps dust out. The smaller button board, however, told a different story. He was confident it would fit onto LEGO bars, but no such luck. Some smart usage of antenna pieces kept it solid in the end, but they needed to be reinforced so they didn’t flex and shift when you pressed the buttons. Meanwhile, a little portion of the bottom bezel was replaced with a flat screen to allow for the HDMI and power cables to depart without being tangled.

Even though the display was complete, he still need a stand that could rotate, adjust height, and remain steady throughout normal operation. A V-shaped base was roughly the start, with some LEGO tires put along the bottom borders to keep everything from sliding all over the desk. However, finding a heavy-duty turntable in the parts bin proved impossible, so he devised an other solution. In the center of it all, a large central gear serves as the mechanism’s true anchor. Then there are the smaller gears, which are mounted on friction pins all around to assist distribute the weight and keep things smooth and easy to spin. He tried an early version that only relied on a single axle, and it felt a little shaky, but with the multi-gear arrangement, everything worked out fine.

If you’ve been considering Photoshop, Premiere Pro, Illustrator, or any of Adobe’s other professional creative applications, and haven’t signed up before, you can save 50% on the Creative Cloud Pro plan for your first year.

This cuts the monthly cost from $69.99 to $34.99 (or from $91.99 to $45.99 in Canada) on an annual plan billed monthly. And the subscription comes with more than 20 industry-leading creative apps, alongside 4,000 monthly generative AI credits for premium features such as Text to Video.

Subscribers also gain unlimited access to standard AI tools like Generative Fill, Adobe Fonts, Adobe Stock assets, tutorials, collaboration tools through Frame.io, and integrated AI models from Adobe, Google, OpenAI, and others. The promotion for new subscribers ends August 10.

Why this is a great deal

I personally wouldn’t use anything else and there’s a good reason why Adobe’s apps always come out top in our round ups of the best photo editors, best video editing software and best PDF editors.

The Pro subscription includes more than 20 applications, from industry staples like Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, and Acrobat Pro to specialist tools such as After Effects, Audition, Lightroom, and InDesign, all designed to work seamlessly together.

Beyond the apps themselves, Creative Cloud Pro includes Adobe Firefly, 4,000 monthly generative AI credits for premium features such as Text to Video, unlimited access to standard AI tools like Generative Fill, plus Adobe Fonts, Adobe Stock assets, tutorials, and collaboration features through Frame.io.

At 50% off, this is one of Adobe’s best ever offers for new subscribers in the US and Canada.

As co-founder Grace Li tells it, her company started a few weeks before graduation in 2025, with a handful of college friends trying to make their AI game engine work. The models could make functional games, but none of the games were fun — which raised the interesting question, how can you tell if a game will be fun?

There was no substitute for human judgment, they decided, and soon they were brainstorming ways to get honest human feedback at scale. The result became Design Arena, an AI tool now used by 5.3 million people around the world. As it turned out, there were lots of AI companies looking for scalable user feedback — and many of them were willing to pay for it.

“It was the missing bottleneck for a lot of these models to make improvements in the design space,” Li says. “About a week later, we closed our first major deal with a frontier lab, and the rest is kind of history.”

On Monday, the company behind Design Arena — dubbed Intelligence — announced a $7.9 million seed round led by Index Ventures with participation from Conviction (Sarah Guo and Mike Vernal), A*, Valkyrie, and others.

For non-enterprise users, using Design Arena is a lot like using a sophisticated model router. There’s a ChatGPT-style window for prompts, with separate dropdowns for websites, images, and a dozen other visual formats. Once you put in the request, format, and style, you’ll be presented with a series of “A vs. B” choices until you’ve ranked the handful of outputs from best to worst.

It’s a useful service, but the real value of the platform comes from the enterprise side, where participating models can treat it as a source of endless instant feedback for their media-generating models. The users tend to be indifferent to which models they’re ranking — as Li puts it, they just want the best output they can get — so their rankings can give critical input to what users really want.

For frontier labs, that’s a service worth paying for, Li says, adding the site is currently generating $60 million in ARR, solidifying its position as a key source of human-led evaluation data for the AI industry.

Crucially, users have to log in to get their output, so Intelligence can also track how those tastes change across different continents and over time. (Li notes that web dashboards in Asia tend to have a more maximalist design style.) These measures are an important complement to automated benchmarks, which can operate at a greater scale but are often subject to being gamed or otherwise manipulated, as the Hugging Face breach demonstrated in dramatic fashion last week.

That’s not to say that crowdsourced human feedback will be an automatic winning market. Less than a year after launching, Yupp shuttered its doors earlier this year after raising $33 million from a16z crypto’s Chris Dixon. It too nabbed some frontier models as customers and had, it said, over 1.3 million users, but still couldn’t build a sustainable long-term business.

Even so, other startups based on human evaluation seem to be thriving. LM Arena, which takes a similar approach to text-based responses, raised $150 million in a Series A in January, just four months after formally launching its paid product.

Telegram was removed from the App Store briefly Monday after CSAM was posted by a user. The app was restored after the content was removed.

Telegram is known widely as a secure alternative to Messenger, WhatsApp, and iMessage. Its cross-platform availability and options for end-to-end encryption have made it attractive to privacy and security-conscious users.

Reports began showing up across social media of Telegram disappearing from the Apple App Store around 9:30 p.m. EST on Monday night. Users searching the App Store or opening a direct link to the app showed that it was no longer available.

Apple shared a statement with AppleInsider regarding the removal:

We briefly removed Telegram from the App Store after our review found content that violates our strict guidelines prohibiting child sexual abuse material. The app was subsequently restored after the developer promptly removed the content and banned the user who posted it.

The app was likely pulled suddenly to ensure it couldn’t be downloaded by new users while the content was being removed. Apple has a history of taking fast action blocking app downloads when CSAM is discovered on the platform with only one notable exception.

When users were actively generating sexualized images of minors on the social media app X, it remained active throughout. It isn’t clear why swift action was taken with Telegram versus X.

Users that had Telegram already installed were not affected by the app’s removal. Telegram was restored to the App Store at around 10:10 p.m EST.

Updated August 4, 1:50 a.m EST: added Apple’s statement on why Telegram was removed.

from the everything-is-about-to-get-much-dumber dept

Ideally, I think it makes sense to open up the U.S. market to Chinese goods (AI, EVs, robots), but have functional and well-funded regulators that policy all labor, competition, environmental, privacy, and consumer rights abuses. But big companies don’t much like that because it would boost competition and accountability, eroding quarterly revenues.

So instead we get protectionism. Or in the case of the Trump administration, protectionism run by a bunch of corrupt, incompetent clowns who gutted most of our federal regulators, then saddled them with an elaborate new policy ask that’s impossible to implement, even if the admin were competent.

Which it isn’t.

If you want a good idea of what Trump protectionism looks like in practice, I recommend this Verge piece about the Trump effort to ban Chinese drones. Spoiler: it’s not going well, and it’s trivial to trick the administration and bypass the ban without doing much, resulting in U.S. consumers losing access to lower-cost popular goods (DJI was the most popular and successful drone maker by far) under the pretense this is helping Americans and rekindling U.S. domestic electronics manufacturing.

Having unsuccessfully “blocked” Chinese drones (read: caused a bunch of annoying and pointless chaos), the Trump administration is dramatically expanding its protectionist campaign to include everything from cheap Chinese power converters (necessary for the world’s migration away from fossil fuels), to low-cost Chinese vacuum robots:

“While the government did include “humanoid robots” and “quadrupeds” among the bots it wants to ban, the ban is far broader than that. It covers almost any new software-controlled robot that travels over the ground, weighs more than 4.4 pounds (including any dock), can perceive its environment, and has wireless connectivity.

By that definition, the FCC is banning future robot lawnmowers, sidewalk delivery robots, and the robots that crate around packages at your local Amazon warehouse, too.”

Great stuff. Surely this will be competently enforced by… (checks notes)… Brendan fucking Carr.

Like his bumbling and unpopular boss, Brendan Carr has always made a gigantic stink about China. If you recall, he was one of the biggest proponents of a “ban on TikTok,” which he claimed was necessary to protect national security and stop propaganda. The solution to that problem was to steal the company and offload it to Trump’s billionaire friends so they could spread propaganda and abuse privacy.

The stupidity, xenophobia, and corruption on display with the Trump “TikTok ban” is going to be adapted for AI, and the next six to twelve months of U.S. tech policy will be dumber and more chaotic than ever. Especially as the biggest U.S. AI companies — swimming in debt, facing a data center glut bubble, and a long way from profitability — look to the government to protect them from all manner of competition (foreign, on device, open source, whatever).

This may come as a surprise to you, but Trump incorporated doesn’t actually care about protecting U.S. consumers from Roomba privacy abuses, propaganda, or national security abuses. If they did, they wouldn’t be supporting Trumpism. If they did, they’d regulate data brokers and pass a modern internet privacy law that applied to every company and executive doing business in the U.S.

What they care about is stuff like trying to shovel more drone business to the president’s sons, or protecting Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk from having to compete with cheaper overseas AI models.

Being mindlessly and personally transactional, the Trump administration is also keen to erect additional troll and tribute systems if companies want to continue doing business in the U.S. The money will go to his business interests and allies, but in a bid to appeal to nationalists, it’s going to all be layered under the pretense that this is all going to magically shift robotic manufacturing back to the U.S:

“But again, the government isn’t asking these companies any questions about security — not one — to get the waiver that lets them through. The FCC only wants to know where they’re designed and made and assembled and tested and influenced, and get a specific commitment to start manufacturing them in the US instead.”

But they’re not going to be competent enough to make any of this happen, even if shifting the entirety of low-cost electronics manufacturing back to the U.S. was a thing you could actually accomplish. A key part of the problem is that, as we saw from Trump’s dream of having U.S.-made smartphones, the folks in charge of this effort have a child-like understanding of how everything works. And everybody else — like massive swaths of the business community, academia, and the press — are too feckless to stand up to the corrupt stupidity in any meaningful way.

The Trump administration has also gone out of its way to ensure our federal regulators no longer have the resources or legal autonomy to function. Then they’re saddling them with this massive new layer of protectionism they’d be incapable of enforcing even if they wanted to. They’re not even bright enough to understand that even base protectionism is out of their reach.

This is just racist, crony capitalism by corrupt and incompetent zealots, and it’s going to cause irreparable harm to consumer prices, product quality, product availability, hobbies, science, the shift to renewables, and everything else over the next two to three years. All propped up by a lazy press, self-serving domestic monopolists, and a whole lot of bullshit about privacy and national security by the kind of people who are a direct and obvious threat to both.

Filed Under: ai, china, competition, crony capitalism, drones, incompetent, protectionism, robots, vacuums

Artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping the scale and complexity of data center infrastructure.

Traditional data center facilities were designed around relatively steady CPU workloads and predictable growth in power demand, allowing developers to secure energy supply alongside growing demand, cooling systems based on known and mature technology and infrastructure capacity with a reasonable degree of certainty.