180996454
submission
sziring writes:
The company casts blame on U.S. tariffs and Chinese competition, two easy targets. But it never really had a viable EV strategy to begin with.
Honda kicked things off on Thursday by halting development of the electric Acura RDX and the Honda 0 sedan and SUV, three models that were the companyâ(TM)s first ground-up EVs â" but about which very little was shared with outsiders. It continued on Friday, with Automotive News reporting that Honda was going to stop production of the Prologue, a vehicle that was essentially designed and entirely built by GM.
The decision could backfire in a number of different ways, but there are two that Iâ(TM)d argue are most important. By shelving EVs, Honda will fall farther behind in two of the biggest shifts sweeping the automotive industry: electric drivetrains and software-defined vehicles.
180958440
submission
sziring writes:
GFiber (formerly Google Fiber) and Stonepeak today announced that they have entered an agreement to combine GFiber with Astound Broadband, creating a leading independent fiber provider. The new company will be majority owned by Stonepeak, an investment firm specializing in infrastructure and real assets. Alphabet will remain a significant minority shareholder, reflecting its confidence in GFiberâ(TM)s growth opportunity and leadership.
The combined business will be led by the existing GFiber executive team, utilizing their expertise in high-speed fiber innovation to manage the combined network footprint. The combination of GFiberâ(TM)s high-growth metropolitan networks with Astoundâ(TM)s established infrastructure, team and capabilities creates a highly complementary, national network platform.
180948090
submission
sziring writes:
Silicon Valley has long competed for talent with ever-richer pay packages built around salary, bonus, and equity. Now, a fourth line item is creeping into the mix: AI inference.
As generative AI tools become embedded in software development, the cost of running the underlying models â" known as inference â" is emerging as a productivity driver and a budget line that finance chiefs can't ignore.
Software engineers and AI researchers inside tech companies have already been jousting for access to GPUs, with this AI compute capacity being carefully parceled out based on which projects are most important. Now, some tech job candidates have begun asking about what AI compute budget they will have access to if they decide to join.
"I am increasingly asked during candidate interviews how much dedicated inference compute they will have to build with Codex," Thibault Sottiaux, engineering lead at OpenAI's Codex, the startup's AI coding service, wrote on X recently.
180599730
submission
sziring writes:
Unless you live under a rock (or in a Moon crater) you are fully aware of the renewed space race. Who will be the first to establish a base on the Moon or Mars? Are we actually ready for such an undertaking both technically and morally? The fact that an astronaut needed to be shuttled back to earth early from the ISS is a telling sign we aren't ready to deal with medical emergencies in the near future. Yes, the Moon and Mars are important first steps to deeper exploration, to what ends I cannot answer. There are plenty of articles and videos out there of all the ways space can kill you. Even NASA has a more friendly article of the "dangers" space presents. We have all seen the articles about knowing that signing up for a Mars mission is a one way ticket, but do we really mean it? What about the Moon? Do we ferry every medical issue back to Earth? Are we ready to draw a line and inform them on Earth you would have survived but due to budget constraints it doesn't look like you will.
180568368
submission
sziring writes:
Harvard Business Review's IdeaCast podcast interviewed CEO Bob Sternfels from McKinsey where he classified AI agents as people. "I often get asked, “How big is McKinsey? How many people do you employ?” I now update this almost every month, but my latest answer to you would be 60,000, but it’s 40,000 humans and 20,000 agents." This statement looks to be the opening shots of how we as a society need to classify AI agents and them possibly replacing human jobs. Did the agents take roles that previously would have been filled by a full-time human? By classifying them as people did the company break protocol or laws by not interviewing candidates for said job, not providing benefits or breaks, etc. Yes it all sounds silly but words matter. What happens when a job report comes out that claims we just added 20k in Q1, etc. Which leads to Bill Gates point of agents that take the role of humans might need to be taxed. (https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bill-gates-wants-tax-robots-233045575.html).
176057583
submission
sziring writes:
Eric Migicovsky, the founder of Pebble, is reviving the smartwatch he sold to Fitbit in 2016. He's starting a new company focusing on new hardware aiming to recreate the beloved features of the original Pebble watches. As of Monday Google has released the Pebble OS firmware as open-source on GitHub. https://repebble.com/
