New Florence. New Renaissance.

Project Astra – Google’s vision of AI assistants

Hassabis called Astra "a universal agent helpful in everyday life." During a demonstration, the research model showcased its capabilities by identifying sound-producing objects, providing creative alliterations, explaining code on a monitor, and locating misplaced items. The AI assistant also exhibited its potential in wearable devices, such as smart glasses, where it could analyze diagrams, suggest improvements, and generate witty responses to visual prompts.

Google says that Astra uses the camera and microphone on a user's device to provide assistance in everyday life. By continuously processing and encoding video frames and speech input, Astra creates a timeline of events and caches the information for quick recall. The company says that this enables the AI to identify objects, answer questions, and remember things it has seen that are no longer in the camera's frame.

Ars Technica

 

Reinventing the fridge

The new approach (from Whirlpool)  is called SlimTech, and it replaces the thick polyurethane foam and plastic that form the walls and doors in almost every refrigerator on the market. Instead, SlimTech is a vacuum insulation structure that contains a thin layer of compressed and proprietary powder sealed inside walls of steel.

Doors using SlimTech will be up to 60% thinner than the typical refrigerator door, and will increase the interior capacity by 25%. In another configuration, slightly thicker SlimTech installations could improve the internal temperature control so much that energy use would drop by 50%.

Fast Company

 

 

A “hellscape” to defend Taiwan

It has become conventional wisdom among the halls of the United States government that China will launch a full-scale invasion of Taiwan within the next few years. And when that happens, the US military has a relatively straightforward response in mind: Unleash hell.

Speaking to The Washington Post on the sidelines of the International Institute for Strategic Studies’ annual Shangri-La Dialogue in June, US Indo-Pacific Command chief Navy Admiral Samuel Paparo colorfully described the US military’s contingency plan for a Chinese invasion of Taiwan as flooding the narrow Taiwan Strait between the two countries with swarms of thousands upon thousands of drones, by land, sea, and air, to delay a Chinese attack enough for the US and its allies to muster additional military assets in the region.

Wired

The largest LED orb

At 366 feet tall and 516 feet wide, the towering orb is not only the world's biggest spherical structure, but also the largest LED screen, according to a press release issued by Sphere Entertainment Co. The exterior of Sphere consists of approximately 1.2 million hockey puck-shaped LEDs, each of which contains 48 individual diodes capable of emitting 256 million different colors. And it only cost $2.3 billion.

EDM

more of what's inside Las Vegas 'latest spectacular attractions

The cult of Costco

There is method to the madness here. Warehouses (a.k.a. stores) that seem haphazard and chaotic are in fact run with military precision, and virtually every detail of merchandise selection, store layout, and pricing is designed to turn wary first-timers into loyalists. Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s late lieutenant and a longtime Costco board member, famously said that he wished everything in the U.S. ran as well as Costco. Indeed, the company has nailed the science, and art, of retail like virtually no competitor.

Costco’s eclectic sales assortment—Shrimp cocktail! Khakis! Coffins!—has helped embed it firmly in pop culture. Costco obsessives throng dedicated groups on Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, and X to trade information on a great find, or discuss which celebrity was spotted in which of its 600 U.S. stores, or just to bemoan leaving a store after spending $300 more than they’d intended

Fortune

An interview with the former CEO, Jim Sinegal which explains more of the corporate philosophy

Wall Street, meet Y’all Street

Goldman Sachs is building a massive office complex near downtown as part of its expansion plans beyond New York City. The hub is expected to bring 5,000 jobs to Dallas.

• JPMorgan Chase has more employees in Texas than in New York. Nearly 13,000 people work at its campus in Plano, which has doubled its employees since it opened in 2017, per the Wall Street Journal.
• Also expanding in the Dallas area: Wells Fargo, Deloitte and Charles Schwab, which moved its headquarters from California to Westlake five years ago.

By the numbers: In January 1990, there were 324,600 Texans employed in finance and insurance. By June of this year, that number had grown to 658,600.

Axios

More on the “Texas Stock Exchange”

Chick-Fil -A turbocharges the drive thru

Chick-Fil-A opened near us a new store concept with a drive thru delivery door rather than a window. Associates can simultaneously walk out from the kitchen and deliver food to multiple customers who drive in on 2 lanes.

They also equipped team members to greet vehicles a tablet to enter orders and scan mobile payments, a device to tap and stripe credit cards and with two pouches to handle currency and coins.

Pretty cool.

However, they were just prepping for their next concept – an elevated drive through - see video below

USA Today - “it features four drive-thru lanes and an elevated kitchen with a "unique meal transport system" described by the company as a "sophisticated conveyor belt" that streamlines food delivery by "quickly moving the meal from the elevated kitchen above to a Team Member on the ground below."

The kitchen is double the size of a typical Chick-fil-A restaurant kitchen and the conveyer belt allows for a meal to be delivered to a Team Member every six seconds, according to Chick-fil-A. There is no dining room or dine-in services at this restaurant, Chick-fil-A noted, but the four-lane drive-thru has the capacity to support "two to three times more vehicles" than a standard Chick-fil-A restaurant drive-thru.”

Waymo starts to scale robotaxis

Alphabet's Waymo units has doubled its paid rides to 100,000 per week in just over three months as the autonomous ride-hailing firm expanded its areas of service and allowed more people to ride its robotaxis.

Waymo, which has about 700 vehicles in its fleet, is the only U.S. firm operating uncrewed robotaxis that collect fares. The company opened its service to everyone in San Francisco in June without joining a waitlist while expanding its operations in metro Phoenix. This month, Waymo extended services to the San Francisco Peninsula and to certain parts of Los Angeles.

"People still think of autonomous vehicles as the faraway future, but for more and more people they're now an everyday reality," Chief Product Officer Saswat Panigrahi said in a statement, adding that Waymo's expanded "deliberately" and by "optimizing costs".

Reuters

Take a ride below....

 

Billions of Humanoid Robots

This next generation of AI-driven robots won’t be one-off demo units show-boating for the media, or hyper-specialized logistic bots scurrying around Amazon fulfillment centers, but a mass-manufactured cohort of mechanical humanoids numbering in the tens or hundreds of millions, walking and working side by side with all of us in our homes and places of work.

However, the real game-changer will be the surge in home-based market demand. She draws a compelling parallel between cars and humanoid robots, equating the transformational impact of cars on commute times to humanoid robots' potential to revolutionize housework and daily chores.

An even more compelling prediction comes from serial entrepreneur Brett Adcock, founder of the robotics company Figure. According to Adcock the world might soon be home to a whopping 10 billion humanoid robots—potentially during our lifetime. Which is rather a shocking number, especially when you recognize that the total number of cars on Earth is only about 1.5 billion as of 2023.

Abundance Blog

Here are some of the robots available today

Startups target the military sector

Allen persuaded Simoni to leave DoorDash earlier this year and work with him at his new company, Allen Control Systems, to build a gun turret that uses computer vision to blast drones out of the sky. The goal was to create something affordable that could stop the HESA Shahed-136 drones Russia was sending to attack Ukraine’s infrastructure. “Right now, cheap drones like that are a weapon without a countermeasure,” Allen says.

The former restaurant-tech entrepreneurs are among a new breed of founders bringing the startup playbook to the staid defense industry. With wars raging in Europe and the Middle East, the need—and opportunity—for innovation are on display every day as drones, AI, and other commercially available technologies reshape reality on the battlefield.

Fortune

Dedrone, featured below, is another startup which sells to the military and to law enforcement agencies