What launching rockets taught this CTO about hardware observability
Austin Spiegel, CTO and co-founder of Sift, tells Ben and Ryan about his journey from studying film to working at SpaceX to founding Sift. Austin shares his perspective on software development in high-stakes environments, the challenges of hardware observability, and why paranoia is valuable in safety-critical engineering. Bonus story: Austin
Read moreConstellation Technologies & Operations wants to work with telecom operators to deliver 5G internet from space
The telecom industry is undergoing its greatest period of disruption since the telegraph, as companies work to open up space as the next frontier for communications. French startup Constellation hopes to take part by repurposing 5G tech to provide a Starlink-like satellite broadband that uses telecoms’ existing assets. Constellation Technologies
Read moreRerail is a new fintech-focused angel fund from Cocoa’s Anthony Danon
If you’re starting a fintech company, there’s a new, small early-stage fund looking for investment opportunities. Founded by Anthony Danon (pictured above), Rerail could be called a micro-fund, a solo GP fund, or an angel fund. Danon has been an investor for the past 10 years. He started his career
Read moreWhy does FM sound better than AM?
The original form of radio broadcast was amplitude modulation (AM). With AM radio, the changes in the amplitude of the carrier wave carries the signal you want to broadcast. Frequency modulation (FM) came later. With FM radio, changes to the frequency of the carrier wave carry the signal. I go
Read moreDirector Morgan Neville is steering clear of generative AI after ‘Roadrunner’ backlash
One of the most attention-grabbing aspects of “Roadrunner,” the Morgan Neville-directed documentary about Anthony Bourdain, was Neville’s use of generative AI to replicate Bourdain’s voice. Looking back now, Neville told Wired that he saw this as a “fun” way to “keep [Bourdain’s] voice going in the film.” But his approach
Read moreX blocked hacked JD Vance dossier links after the Trump campaign flagged it
Illustration by Laura Normand / The Verge The Presidential campaign of Donald Trump asked X to stop links to a story containing VP nominee JD Vance’s hacked dossier from circulating before X chose to block them, reports The New York Times. X had cited its “rules on posting unredacted private
Read moreShifted reciprocal
It’s interesting to visualize functions of a complex variable, even very simple functions like f(z) = 1/z. The previous post looked at what happens to triangles under the reciprocal map w = 1/z. This post will look at the same map applied to a polar grid, then look at the
Read moreSpaceX successfully catches returning Starship booster
For the first time, SpaceX not only launched its mammoth Starship, but also returned the booster to the launch site and to caught it with a pair of oversized “chopsticks.” This test flight — the fifth in the Starship development program — took place Sunday morning at the company’s Starbase
Read moreApple might release a $2,000 Vision headset next year
Apple’s Vision Pro hasn’t exactly reshaped the market, but the company isn’t giving up on headsets that combine the digital and real worlds. A new report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman says that Apple’s next big mixed reality release could come as early as next year, with the launch of a
Read moreThe promise and perils of synthetic data
Is it possible for an AI to be trained just on data generated by another AI? It might sound like a harebrained idea. But it’s one that’s been around for quite some time — and as new, real data is increasingly hard to come by, it’s been gaining traction. Anthropic
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