tag:www.freshnews.org,2005:/feedburner-feed 2026-08-10T06:39:12+00:00 tag:www.freshnews.org,2005:Post/3052416 2026-08-10T06:00:13Z 2026-08-10T06:00:13Z

Sometime next week, NASA's newest rover on Mars, Perseverance, will set a record for the most distance driven by any vehicle on another world. The automobile-sized rover, which landed on Mars in February 2021, will traverse beyond 45.16 km (28.06 miles) across the Martian surface. In doing so it will break the previous distance record held by the long-lived Opportunity rover, which ceased communications with NASA in 2018. So how did Perseverance reach this record-setting distance in just a third of the time?Read full article Comments

Eric Berger tag:www.freshnews.org,2005:Post/3055174 2026-08-10T05:00:13Z 2026-08-10T05:00:13Z

XDA Developers reports: On July 22, a Google DeepMind engineer, Vidy Thatte, shared a snippet of a browser he built that "treats every URL as a prompt and generates a site from scratch" on his X account. Just a few days later, he shared a TestFlight link to let iPhone users try it for themselves. The browser he launched is called Gem, and it's a browser that doesn't really...browse. Instead of fetching a webpage from a server the way Chrome or Safari would, Gem hands whatever URL you type over to Google's Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite model and asks it to generate a webpage on the spot. If you enter a real address, it builds its own interpretation of that site rather than loading the actual thing. If you enter an address that doesn't exist, Gemini simply invents a website to fill the gap. In other words, you're not visiting the internet so much as browsing one the model dreams up as you go... Thatte's reasoning was that with a model as fast and cheap as Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite, there's almost no practical difference anymore between loading a website and generating a brand-new one on the fly... Given that this tool is powered by Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite and it's just a side project rather than a full-fledged tool, it doesn't come with Gemini access baked in. Gem requires you to bring your own Gemini API key to get it working. Every URL you enter fires off a request to the model, so Gem needs a key linked to your Google account to actually generate anything, with the usage billed to you. You can grab a key for free from Google AI Studio, paste it into Gem's settings, and you're ready to start typing URLs. While you can get started for free, I ran into the limits within two minutes of playing around. So, I did need to enable billing on my API key and decided to load $10 into it. While the blogger's own site seemed to only get the Gemini logo, tapping it revealed nearly two dozen remixing options. (Dark mode, Reader, Neubrutalist, Broadsheet, Blueprint, Comic book, Punk zine, Notebook, Chalkboard, Receipt, Teletext, System 7, Wes Anderson, Cyber neon, Clay, Frosted, Geocities, Matrix, Museum, Windows 95, Terminal, Vaporwave, and Hide images...) "The frontend morphed before my eyes. Every new edit took practically no time to load, and within a second or two, the same XDA articles would reappear wearing a completely different skin..." For another site, it kept the article headlines, but then rewrote all the text! And after entering an address they knew didn't exist — their own name — in two seconds the browser whipped up a slick portfolio "genuinely been better than some of what those tools produced with far more time and context to work with." But its link to a LinkedIn profile led to a lookalike page, because Gem "had simply generated its own version of it, complete with a made-up follower number and details I never wrote...." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

EditorDavid tag:www.freshnews.org,2005:Post/3054558 2026-08-10T04:00:13Z 2026-08-10T04:00:13Z

Most megafactories usually take years to go from conceptualization to construction, but a recent drone flyover of the Terafab showed that progress has already started on the ground less than five months after Musk unveiled it. However, the video doesn’t do justice to the true scale of its footprint, so X user Nic Cruz Patane created a visualization to help us understand how large the chip manufacturing facility is.Terafab approximate size comparison between Giga Texas, the Pentagon, Apple Park, and the Mall of America.There has never been a building this large. Elon Musk says it will be the most valuable building by far. pic.twitter.com/GCmpfeduJnAugust 6, 2026The site will reportedly have a floor space of at least 100 million square feet, making it larger than Giga Texas (10 million sq. ft), the Pentagon (6.6 million sq. ft), Apple Park (2.82 million sq. ft), and the Mall of America (5.6 million sq. ft), combined. This also makes it significantly larger than New Century Global Center in Chengdu, China, with has an interior space of “just” 18.9 million sq. ft.While this might seem like an absurd amount of space for chip manufacturing, it appears that the Terafab will need it because it’s going to be more than just a chip fab making AI processors — instead, it will be an all-in-one facility that will produce logic and memory chips, as well as have lithography, packaging, and testing under one roof.Elon Musk started talking about building his own chip manufacturing facility in late 2025 and officially announced the project in March of this year. The reasoning behind this project is that both SpaceX and Tesla will require at least 1TW of compute, which is more than ten times that current global chip supply.Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang warned that a project like this will be an “extremely hard” challenge, but it appears that Musk is willing to put his massive resources on the line for this. Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan even said that he can “think of no better partner than Elon Musk” to explore “unconventional” ways of chip manufacturing.Musk is no stranger to both leading and funding projects that otherwise seemed impossible. Although he did not found Tesla, his investment and leadership in the company led it to become an industry trailblazer in EVs. He fundamentally changed commercial space travel with SpaceX; something that used to be the purview of NASA and other national governments, and he also broke a record when he set up 100,000 Nvidia H200 GPUs in just 19 days back in 2024 — a process which Huang said usually takes four years.It seems that Terafab is Musk’s biggest project to date, which is estimated to require up to $119 billion in investments. But even though it seems that this project already has a secure customer base in SpaceX and Tesla, the former acknowledges that there’s a risk that this ambitious megafactory may not be successful.

Jowi Morales tag:www.freshnews.org,2005:Post/3054665 2026-08-10T02:00:14Z 2026-08-10T02:00:14Z

Researchers believe they've found evidence that brain signals reveal the pitches of notes in imagined musical melodies, reports Medical Express: Study participants were 10 epilepsy patients with electrodes on the surfaces of their brains for clinical monitoring. Participants quietly listened to the first bars of children's tunes, then imagined the melodies of subsequent bars before humming their imagined melodies. Brain activity from the patients carried information about relative pitches within the imagined melodies. Combining note-level pitch predictions over time allowed the research team to recreate melodic changes that reflected the structure of the imagined songs... "The model we created decodes relative pitch classes — such as do, re, mi, fa, sol, and la — rather than exact, absolute pitches," [said tudy co-lead Jii Kwon of Seoul National University]. "This is useful because people often recognize melodies by the relationships between notes, even when the same melody is played in a different key." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

EditorDavid tag:www.freshnews.org,2005:Post/3055081 2026-08-10T01:00:13Z 2026-08-10T01:00:13Z

UI changes, lost productivity, untransferrable knowledge... Long-time Slashdot reader theodp notes the folly of switching to an unfamiliar new environment to be "more productive"... Champions of the switch often insist workers will be able to hit the ground running and get the same or even more work done from the get-go in the new unfamiliar environment because it's 'more productive', a conclusion often shaped by conventional wisdom or their 'gut' feeling. Decision makers may also mistake their own 'light-user experience' for universal experience and believe all platforms are fungible. And while it's one thing for a business to delay their delivery dates and increase costs of by introducing a switch in computing environments that's of unquantified and possibly dubious value, how about when a switch in computing environments is made that affects schoolchildren's ability to learn for a period of time? While a MacBook Neo is indeed cute, what might be the possible consequences of a decision to move 25,000 students off Windows and onto MacBook Neos...? Or even the impact on a single kid who moves from a MacBook school to a Windows or Chrome school (or whose home computing environment isn't aligned with their school). Or students whose teachers decide learning in their classrooms should now additionally require an understanding of the Minecraft computing platform/UI (used in over 40,000 school systems.). Learning Management Systems and now various AI Edtech tools used by schoolkids are also subject to change. "Even if students and schools eventually benefit from a new platform, one wonders how much learning is lost during the switch," theodp asks, "and what the financial and educational ROI and payback period look like." Are there bigger problems than we realize? Share your own thoughts and experiences in the comments. What are the costs of switching between Windows, MacOS, and Chrome? Read more of this story at Slashdot.

EditorDavid