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"Liquid Glass" Update
Jun. 13th, 2025 02:57 pmAt the risk of oversimplifying, the "Liquid Glass" update from Apple is basically translucent buttons. How could one of the most famous design companies in the world classify this as its "broadest software design update ever," as Alan Dye, Apple’s VP of Human Interface Design, put it?
The translucence looks amazing, especially in person, but it prompted snickers from Microsoft enthusiasts who likened it to 2007's Windows Vista. At the end of the day, it's just...partially see-through buttons and menus. Like other people at the event, I politely "oohed" and "ahhed" at the demos while privately trying to piece together what was going on.
But then I figured out what this redesign is really about: Creating the optimal interface for smart glasses, which Apple is reportedly working on. It makes sense given Apple's focus on "visual intelligence," Meta's success with its Ray-Ban specs, and Google's new Android XR platform. The industry is going in this direction, and Apple wants to get a piece of it.
Liquid Glass makes it easier to stay focused on content on your iPhone, Mac, or iPad, even while accessing a menu. You can still see the gist of what's behind the menu, rather than it being completely blocked. So, it won't interrupt the experience of watching a full-screen movie, or browsing a web page quite as much as if it was a solid color. The menus also appear and disappear as you scroll, in case you want to navigate to a new web page.
When wearing a pair of glasses, the visual real estate is especially limited. The wearer will want to be able to access a menu without fearing they'll run into a tree. The translucent design makes that possible. If you look a little closer at the quote from Apple's Alan Dye, he says Liquid Glass "lays the foundation for new experiences in the future." Ah-ha.
Apple also punted on futuristic releases at this year's event, despite widespread criticism that it's falling behind in AI. Maybe it's just waiting to tie it all together at this fall's hardware event, where it'll wow us with a souped-up pair of glasses with translucent menus. Bloomberg puts mass production of Apple's smart glasses in 2026 or 2027, but Apple has been known to offer sneak peeks at products months before launch, from the Mac Pro more than a decade ago to the Vision Pro at WWDC 2023.
There's also the possibility I'm giving Apple way too much credit. Maybe Liquid Glass is just a fun redesign for existing gadgets. Apple devices are status symbols, and we like them to look pretty.
Apple may also have intentionally limited the scope of the design because it wants to prevent disrupting the experience too much for its enormous global userbase. Or, it's an overdue exercise in setting a standard design language across devices, even the Apple Watch.
More cynically, Apple might be distracting everyone from its AI mishaps. It could've done this a year ago. Why now? That brings me back to smart glasses. Liquid Glass is inspired by the design of visionOS for the Vision Pro, an impressive but pricey AR headset. Perhaps the company realizes a more clear AI future will involve a slimmer version of the Vision Pro, powered by Apple Intelligence, with a new UI that's easy on the eyes.
Wrong West's Approach to Weapons
Jun. 12th, 2025 11:39 am
Ukraine's defense industry is urging the West to abandon its longtime fixation on high-end, expensive weaponry in favor of cheaper, mass-produced arms, the kind needed to survive and win a grinding war of attrition against an adversary like Russia.Serhiy Goncharov, the CEO of the National Association of Ukrainian Defense Industries — which represents about 100 Ukrainian companies — told that the West's long-standing focus on fielding limited numbers of cutting-edge systems could be a serious disadvantage in a protracted conflict. Those systems are good to have, but mass is key.
The war in Ukraine shows that instead of a handful of ultraprecise, expensive weapons, countries need a massive supply of good enough firepower, Goncharov said.
He said the expensive weapons such as the US military's M982 Excalibur guided munition (each shell costs $100,000) "don't work" when the other side has electronic warfare systems and the kind of traditional artillery rounds that are 30 times cheaper in tremendous supply.
Goncharov pointed to the M107, a self-propelled gun that was first fielded by the US in the 1960s, as an example of inexpensive firepower that can be effective in large numbers.
"You don't need 10 Archers from the Swedish that are probably one of the best artillery systems in the world," he said, referring to the artillery system made by BAE Systems that was given to Ukraine by Sweden. Instead, you need 200 cheap howitzers, such as the Bohdana one that Ukraine makes.
The significant rate of ammo and equipment attrition in a fight such as this means a constant supply of weaponry is needed to keep fighting, especially when there isn't any guarantee the high-end weapons will be the game changers promised.
Russia's invasion of Ukraine has been marked by extensive use of artillery and tremendous ammunition expenditure. The war in some ways resembles the huge, destructive battles of World War I and World War II, with high numbers of injuries and deaths and substantial equipment losses.
Russia has one of the world's largest militaries, backed by a large population. The country has repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to pursue an attritional style of warfare, committing a lot of troops and weaponry to a fight to slowly wear down its foe.
Russia's invasion has chewed through equipment. The UK Ministry of Defense said in December that Russia had lost more than 3,600 main battle tanks and almost 8,000 armored vehicles since the full-scale invasion began in February 2022.
The Russians have the mass to absorb those losses. Ukraine has struggled with weapon and ammo shortages, as well as deficiencies in manpower. Ukraine turned to small, cheap drones as an asymmetric warfare alternative; Russia has employed uncrewed systems in battle as well.
China, another concern in the West, has built a similar kind of force, one with the mass to take losses.
The West, on the other hand, has spent the past two decades and change fighting lower-level adversaries where its forces can win the day with superior capabilities.
Goncharov's warning is one that has been echoed by other Western defense officials and companies.
Countries have been keen to learn lessons about fighting Russia from the conflict in Ukraine, particularly in Europe, where many countries warn Russia could pursue further aggression in the future, and defense spending is growing rapidly.
Gabrielius Landsbergis, the former defense minister of Lithuania, a NATO ally bordering Russia, previously described the war as one of "high quantities."
He said that while the West had largely focused on new and expensive weaponry that takes a long time to manufacture, Russia had been "building something that's cheap, that's expendable, that's fast."
He said the West had "been preparing for a different kind of war" than what it would face in one against Russia, focusing on impressive equipment that is "very expensive.
Troels Lund Poulsen, the Danish defense minister, previously told BI that "one of the lessons" from Ukraine was that the West needed far greater quantities of inexpensive weaponry to meet the threats posed by Russia and China.
The head of NATO, Mark Rutte, urged countries to take similar learnings earlier this year, saying the alliance was too slow at developing weapons. He said the alliance was working toward perfect, "but it doesn't have to be perfect."
He said Ukraine would go ahead with equipment that was a "6 to 7" out of 10, while NATO militaries insisted on reaching "9 or 10."
He said it wasn't about getting rid of the expensive weaponry completely but about finding a balance: It's about "getting speed and enough quality done in the right conjunction."
Michael O'Hanlon, a senior fellow and the director of research in the foreign-policy program at the Brookings Institution, said the West's approach needed to change. The American military, for instance, is far more used to wars where "the whole point is you're not going to be slogging it out for months and years on end," he said.
But he also said that didn't mean the West needed to completely abandon the development of advanced systems. "Those things have not become unimportant just because we realized that other things are also important," he said.
The UK's armed forces minister also warned last month that the war showed the West needs to change how it procures weaponry. Luke Pollard said Ukraine's fight showed NATO "the way we have run our militaries, the way we have run our defense, is outdated."
He said NATO militaries "build and procure really expensive high-end bits of kit," adding: "It will take you five, 10 years: five years to run a procurement challenge, another 10 years to build it."
Kuldar Väärsi, the CEO of Milrem Robotics, an autonomous uncrewed ground vehicle company in the NATO ally Estonia, told BI in May that "we need to learn from Ukraine, and we need to get more pragmatic about what kind of equipment we buy."
He said Europe needed to learn that "having a hundred more simple pieces of equipment is better than having 10 very sophisticated pieces of equipment."
He said countries needed to start buying less sophisticated pieces of weaponry en masse so industry could adjust. "Industry has to manufacture what the customer is buying. And if the customer is still buying only a few very sophisticated items, then the industry just aligns with that," he said. And the reality is that may not work.
The American Party
Jun. 7th, 2025 07:38 am
Elon Musk floated a new political party on Friday after falling out with President Trump over the big, beautiful bill. He launched a Thursday poll on the social platform X, which he owns, asking about whether or not the country needed a new faction for political nominees.
“The people have spoken. A new political party is needed in America to represent the 80% in the middle! And exactly 80% of people agree. This is fate,” Musk wrote, citing numbers from his survey.
He followed up with a potential name for the group, “The America Party.”
In recent days, Musk has railed against Trump for suggesting the United States increase its national debt by $4 trillion as proposed in the bill.
The tech giant said it “undermines” all the work he did at the Department of Government Efficiency, geared towards reducing government spending.
Florida Republican Rep. Jimmy Patronis cast doubt on Musk’s claim of creating “The America Party” in Friday comments, suggesting the two will be “hanging around again” shortly.
“Elon Musk is not gonna create a new political party,” Patronis told NewsNation’s Blake Burman during an appearance on “The Hill.”
“Trump knows that sometimes you’re going to have falling out with those that you trust, you like, that you’re friends with. It happens with us in DC all the time. So again. Mark my words. About a month from now, these guys will be hanging around again."
Quantum Error Correction
Jun. 3rd, 2025 10:32 am
Nord Quantique has announced what it calls a breakthrough in quantum physics that will make quantum error correction a bit better. Errors are the top obstacle today preventing the industry from having usable quantum computers, since the individual qubits are prone to mistakes and degradation.Typically, quantum computing companies address the error problem with redundancy. They add extra qubits to compensate for those that go off the rails. The problem is that the more qubits, the faster the errors multiply, and the more additional qubits the computer needs to compensate for.
Getting to a point where adding new qubits lowers the error rate is the break-even point, what some experts call the “escape velocity” for quantum computing. Several companies have claimed to reach this point, though, without seeing them build large-scale quantum computers there’s no way to really know for sure.
Nord Quantique claims to be one of the companies to have reached this point.
Their trick? To create a qubit that holds multiple photons inside, and then use the redundant photons for error correction. They claim that this reduces the need to have any extra qubits, making it possible to build large, usable, quantum computers.
According to quantum computing expert Bob Sutor, founder and CEO at Sutor Group Intelligence and Advisory, it takes, on average, 1,000 redundant qubits to error-correct one qubit.
The industry calls this “logical qubits” — so, on average, 1,000 physical qubits is equivalent to one usable, working logical qubit. In Nord Quantique’s approach, one physical qubit is the same as one logical qubit.
“It’s almost like turning the error correction problem inside out,” says Sutor. “Instead of having redundant qubits on the outside to create one good logical qubit, you’re focusing on the inside of the qubit.”
According to Sutor, quantum computers get interesting at around 100,000 qubits. At a ratio of 1,000-to-one, that will require 100 million physical qubits to accomplish. Today’s most advanced quantum computers have less than 1,200 qubits.
By reducing the ratio, quantum computers would need a thousand times fewer qubits, making them significantly easier to build and scale, while also requiring less power and computational error-correction overhead. Last year, Nord Quantique demonstrated that their multiple-photons-in-a-single-qubit approach was feasible, creating qubits with up to 30 photons inside.
The limitation then was that their error correcting photons were only able to compensate for two types of errors. In today’s announcement, they’ve figured out how to compensate for six types of errors, by adding an additional mode to the qubit. This makes the qubit more resilient and accurate, and opens the path to add even more error-correcting modes in the future.
According to Nord Quantique CEO Julien Camirand Lemyre, each qubit is about the size of a walnut. Since the company uses the superconducting approach to quantum computing, it still needs that giant chandelier to get the system cool enough, which takes about four-and-a-half square meters of floor space.
With the current technology, a single chandelier will be able to support more than 2,000 qubits, says Lemyre. So how close is the industry to seeing a working Nord Quantique quantum computer? Not that close.
Even though DARPA selected Nord Quantique for its quantum benchmarking initiative in April — one of fewer than 20 companies chosen — an actual computer is still years away. “We expect to have more than 100 logical qubits by 2029,” says Lemyre. “And then scaling from there to 2,000.”
That’s a long wait. But, according to Sutor, Nord Quantique technology could make an impact earlier. “It could be a technology that is ultimately adopted by other players,” he says.
Nord Quantique makes superconducting qubits, he says, just like IBM, Google, and Rigetti. That means its redundant-photons-in-a-qubit approach could be adopted by someone who is further along by swapping in the better qubit but keeping the rest of the architecture the same.
“You always have to ask with startups — are they going to be a great, big, huge company or is someone going to buy them?” he says. he new breakthrough does make their approach more attractive, he says — and shows that DARPA was right in picking the company for their initiative.
Nord Quantique’s news isn’t the only big recent announcement from a quantum computing company.
D-Wave, which uses an older and less flexible approach to quantum computing, announced record-high $15 million in revenues for the first quarter of this year, a 509% increase from this time last year, along with commercial deployments in the automotive, pharma, and defense verticals.
In general, over the first quarter of this year, private investment in quantum computing reached $1.2 billion, up 125% year-over-year, according to data from The Quantum Insider’s Intelligence Platform(More details: https://thequantuminsider.com/2025/04/25/quantum-startups-secure-1-billion-in-q1-as-commercial-race-accelerates).
Notable investments include $360 million in IonQ, $230 million in QuEra Computing, $170 million in Quantum Machines, $150 million in D-Wave Systems, and 100 million Euros in Alice & Bob.
Another significant announcement was that of a rack-mountable, silicon-based quantum computer. Equal1’s computer has its own built-in cooling system, weights 440 pounds, and only has six qubits. Still, at about the size of a GPU server, it can fit into a regular data center.
Finally, earlier this month, Cisco announced a quantum entanglement chip(More details: https://www.networkworld.com/article/3978702/cisco-unveils-prototype-quantum-networking-chip.html). The research prototype, developed in cooperation with University of California, Santa Barbara, generates pairs of entangled photons that instantly transmit quantum state between each other, regardless of the distance between them.
Fibre Optic Drones in Ukraine
May. 30th, 2025 08:21 amRodynske is about 15km (9 miles) north of the embattled city of Pokrovsk. Russia has been trying to capture it from the south since the autumn of last year, but Ukrainian forces have so far managed to stop Russian soldiers from marching in.
So Russia has changed tactics, moving instead to encircle the city, cutting off supply routes.
In the past two weeks, as hectic diplomatic efforts to bring about a ceasefire in Ukraine have failed, Russia has intensified its push, making its most significant advances since January.
You can find proof of that in Rodynske.
Within minutes of arriving in town, you can hear a Russian drone above us. Our team runs to the closest cover available – a tree.
We press up against it so the drone won't see us. Then there's the sound of a loud explosion – it's a second drone making impact nearby. The drone above us is still hovering. For a few more minutes, we hear the terrifying whirring sound of what's become the deadliest weapon of this war.
When we can't hear it any more we take the chance to run to hard cover in an abandoned building 100ft away.
From the shelter, we hear the drone again. It's possible it returned after seeing our movement.
That Rodynske is being swarmed by Russian drones is evidence that the attacks are coming from positions much closer than known Russian positions to the south of Pokrovsk. They were most likely coming from newly captured territory on a key road running from the east of Pokrovsk to Kostyantynivka.
After half an hour of waiting in the shelter, when we can't hear the drone anymore, we move quickly to our car parked under tree cover, and speed out of Rodynske. By the side of the highway we see smoke billowing and something burning – it's most likely a downed drone.
We drive to Bilytske, further away from the frontline. We see a row of houses destroyed by a missile strike overnight. One of them was Svitlana's home.
"It's getting worse and worse. Earlier, we could hear distant explosions, they were far away. But now our town is getting targeted – we're experiencing it ourselves," says the 61-year-old, as she picks up a few belongings from the wreckage of her home. Luckily Svitlana wasn't at home when the attack occurred.
"Go into the centre of the town, you'll see so much that is destroyed there. And the bakery and zoo have been destroyed too," she says.
At a safehouse just out of reach of drones, we meet soldiers of the artillery unit of the 5th Assault Brigade.
"You can feel the intensity of Russian assaults increasing. Rockets, mortars, drones, they're using everything they have to cut off supply routes going into the city," says Serhii.
His unit has been waiting for three days to deploy to their positions, waiting for cloud cover or high-speed winds to give them protection from drones.
In an ever-evolving conflict, soldiers have had to rapidly adapt to new threats posed by changing technology. And the latest threat comes from fibre optic drones. A spool of tens of kilometres of cable is fitted to the bottom of a drone and the physical fibre optic cord is attached to the controller held by the pilot.
"The video and control signal is transmitted to and from the drone through the cable, not through radio frequencies. This means it can't be jammed by electronic interceptors," says a soldier with the call sign Moderator, a drone engineer with the 68th Jaeger Brigade.
When drones began to be used in this war in a big way, both militaries fitted their vehicles with electronic warfare systems, which could neutralise drones. That protection has evaporated with the arrival of fibre optic drones, and in the deployment of these devices, Russia currently has the edge. Ukraine is trying to ramp up production.
"Russia started using fibre optic drones much before us, while we were still testing them. These drones can be used in places where we have to go lower than usual drones. We can even enter houses and look for targets inside," says Venia, a drone pilot with the 68th Jaeger Brigade.
"We've started joking that maybe we should carry scissors to cut the cord," says Serhii, the artillery man.
Fibre optic drones do have drawbacks – they are slower and the cable could get entangled in trees. But at the moment, their widespread use by Russia means that transporting soldiers to and from their positions can often be deadlier than the battlefield itself.
"When you enter a position, you don't know whether you've been spotted or not. And if you have been spotted, then you may already be living the last hours of your life," says Oles, Chief Sergeant of the reconnaissance unit of the 5th Assault Brigade.
This threat means that soldiers are spending longer and longer in their positions.
Oles and his men are in the infantry, serving in the trenches right at the very front of Ukraine's defence. It's rare for journalists these days to speak to infantrymen, as it's become too risky to go to these trenches. We meet Oles and Maksym in a rural home converted into a makeshift base, where the soldiers come to rest when they're not on deployment.
"The longest I spent at the position was 31 days, but I do know guys who have spent 90 and even 120 days there. Back before the drones arrived, the rotations could have been between 3 or 7 days at the position," says Maksym.
"War is blood, death, wet mud and a chill that spreads from head to toe. And this is how you spend every day. I remember one instance when we didn't sleep for three days, alert every minute. The Russians kept coming at us wave after wave. Even a minor lapse would have meant we were dead."
Oles says Russia's infantry has changed its tactics. "Earlier they attacked in groups. Now they only send one or two people at times. They also use motorcycles and in a few instances, quad bikes. Sometimes they slip through."
What this means is that the front lines in some parts are no longer conventional lines with the Ukrainians on one side and the Russians on the other, but more like pieces on a chessboard during play, where positions can be intertwined.
This also makes it harder to see advances made by either side.
Despite Russia's recent gains, it will not be quick or easy for it to take the whole of the Donetsk region, where Pokrovsk lies.
Ukraine has pushed back hard, but it needs a steady supply of weapons and ammunition to sustain the fight.
And as the war enters a fourth summer, Ukraine's manpower issues against a much bigger Russian army are also evident. Most of the soldiers we meet joined the military after the war began. They've had a few months of training, but have had to learn a lot on the job in the middle of a raging war.
Maksym worked for a drinks company before he joined the military. I asked how his family copes with his job.
"It's hard, it's really hard. My family really supports me. But I have a two-year-old son, and I don't get to see him much. I do video call him though, so everything is as fine as it could be under the circumstances," he trails off, eyes welling up with tears.
Maksym is a soldier fighting for his country, but he's also just a father missing his two-year-old boy.
Introduced by Sun Microsystems on May 23, 1995, Java is a pillar of enterprise computing. The language has thrived through three decades, including the transition to Oracle after the company purchased Sun in 2010. Today, it maintains a steady position at or near the top of the Tiobe language popularity index. Java designer James Gosling, considered the father of Java, said this week that Java is “still being heavily used and actively developed.” Java’s usage statistics are still very strong, he said. “I’m sure it’s got decades of life ahead of it.”Oracle’s Georges Saab, senior vice president of the Oracle Java Platform, took a similar stance. “Java has a long history of perseverance through changes in technology trends and we see no sign of that abating,” Saab said. “Time and time again, developers and enterprises choosing Java have been rewarded by the ongoing improvements keeping the language, runtime, and tools fresh for new hardware, programming paradigms, and use cases.”
Paul Jansen, CEO of software quality services vendor and publisher of the monthly Tiobe language popularity index, offered a more mixed view. “Java is the ‘here to stay’ language for enterprise applications, that is for certain,” Jansen said. However, “it is not the go-to language anymore for smaller applications. Its platform independence is still a strong feature, but it is verbose if compared to other languages and its performance could also be better,” he said.
Kohsuke Kawaguchi, developer of the Java-based Hudson CI/CD system, later forked to Jenkins, sees Java lasting many more years. “Clearly, it’s not going away,” he said. Scott Sellers, CEO and cofounder of Oracle rival and Java provider Azul, said Java remains essential to organizations. In a recent survey, Azul found that 99% of companies it surveyed use Java in their infrastructure or software, and it serves as the backbone of business-critical applications.
Java also is expanding into new frontiers such as cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and edge computing, Sellers said this week. “It’s been incredible to witness Java’s journey—from its early days with Sun Microsystems, to its ongoing innovation under the OpenJDK community’s stewardship,” Sellers said. “It continues to deliver what developers want and businesses need: independence, scalability, and resilience. Java is where innovation meets stability. It has been—and will continue to be—a foundational language.”
Java is in good hands with Oracle, Saab stressed. Oracle continues to drive Java innovation via the OpenJDK community to address rapidly changing application use cases, he said. “Equally, Oracle is advancing its stewardship of the Java ecosystem to help ensure the next 30 years and beyond are open and inclusive for developer participation.”
Charles Oliver Nutter, a core member of the team building JRuby, a language on the JVM, sees Java now evolving faster than it ever has in his career. “From the language to the JVM itself, the pace of improvements is astounding. Java 21 seemed like a big leap for JRuby 10, but we are already looking forward to the new releases,” Nutter said. “It’s a very exciting time to be a developer on the JVM and I’m helping projects and companies take advantage of it today.”
JDK 25, the next version of standard Java and a long-term support release, is due September 16.
Good, Bad, and Ugly of AI
May. 23rd, 2025 08:07 am
It’s almost exactly five years since Arvind Krishna was elevated to CEO at IBM. Roughly 35 years since he joined the company in 1990. He’s led IBM research, IBM Cloud, and was a key force in the Red Hat acquisition. At IBM’s recent annual Think conference, he spent an hour taking questions from analysts about the state of IBM and, not surprisingly, mostly focused on its plans for AI.AI writ large will wrought many things. Innovation to be sure, Workforce decimation, very likely. AI overlords, not-so-much, says Krishna. In the war over model size – if it is a war – small will win for most organizations seeking to get into the game. Why does IBM (almost alone) persist in having a separate independent research organization?
Since taking over as CEO (April 2020), Krishna has worked to refocus IBM, shedding less core functions, and betting big on a hybrid cloud and AI strategy. The company’s stock has risen dramatically (~130%), though perhaps predictably, not enough to please everyone. The S&P 500 index grew roughly 105% in the same period.
Agree or disagree with Krishna — and he has plenty of fans and critics — his thoughts on AI’s future role make fascinating reading.
Question: What’s AI’s Impact on Innovation?
Answer by Arvind Krishna: I think we’ll give you a multi-layered answer. First, put aside AI as a market. How do you apply AI inside to improve innovation? I think this is something that everybody ought to understand. This is mostly a question of the speed and cost of innovation. I think I see AI directly providing — if I look at a two-year picture — anywhere from 30% to 60% improvement in the speed and cost of doing innovation. I hear people talking about 80 to 90%. I think that’s a bit of a stretch, at least in technology. We see 10% already in terms of pure programmer productivity across the board. When I measured across 5000 people, I think that 10 goes to 20% once I include test cases and requirements, and [it] goes to 30% with just improvement in these capabilities over the next two years.
[Also,] we should never forget the innovation that sits inside many, many different functions. How about procurement? How about accounting? I easily see those kinds of numbers in that range that’s in there. The third and final, of course, is we want to be an AI provider for people. We want to help them become more and more innovative. Now, it’s not really a savings now. It’s a cost of building those capabilities. Like some of the things we announced this morning, we’re going to lean in very heavily. I think AI models, especially smaller models. I think there’s a lot of opportunity for those. I think agents and our people use them. There’s a lot of opportunity for those, but that’s going to be an investment, not a not a savings like the for the first two; that’s why, I’m sorry, [I say there are] three different layers, and all three apply — the first two help in giving us money that we’re going to pull into bucket three.
Q: AI Destroys Jobs, Ruins Economy…But Fuels Rebirth?
A: Let’s take a simple example. Let’s take the mechanization of farms. In 1900, if I remember the number right, 47% of the US labor force directly worked on a farm. By 1960, that number was 3%, maybe around the same, maybe even lower. Now I didn’t bother to go further. So mechanization, as in combines, harvesters, tractors, all of those things, dropped the 47% to 3%. The doom and gloom people turn around and say oh my god, 45% of all jobs were lost. [That’s] completely BS. I mean, the total number of jobs only increased in that time period. But these things didn’t exist in 1900 and did exist by 1960. Restaurants and fast food together, about 15% of all jobs. The whole automobile industry and the appropriate service industry around that.
Why? Because, as time got filled up, people now had the option to do leisure activities, go to restaurants. As productivity increased, they had the money to go and do all those things. And so to me, this is the same exact thing that is going to go on here. I mean, I’m 100% sure when the steam engine came on, I’m guessing that people who sold horses and oxen felt their livelihood would go away. So there is displacement, total employment increases, but there is displacement.
So let’s take IBM. I’m pretty open about it. I think that there are about 20,000, which is about 8% of our (IBM workforce) total, which I think there will be displacement. Now we do offer a lot of upscaling and rescaling. Can all of those people be able to take advantage of that and emerge in a place inside us? I think that’s only a third of those people. I’ll be straightforward. At least 14,000, what happens to them? Well, we churn about 15,000 people a year. That’s just an average year, that number of people leave us either to retire or to go to other places or go do other things. So I think at the numbers and scale we’re talking about between re-skilling and just churning, you can absorb those things.
I think there’s a bigger societal question [that] should be asked. Jobs that require critical thinking will very much be in demand, jobs that require creativity will very much be in demand, but a lot of good jobs [will be eliminated]. But this has been, I mean, I’m sorry to say it this way, but I think that’s been the nature of progress for the last 300 years, that jobs which can be automated tend to get automated away. Now the question is, what are those people going to do who did those kinds of jobs? They’re not going to have those jobs here. Let’s just be straightforward. But are there other jobs for people like that? I think those are another data space. I think I’ve always been of the opinion that I think that elderly care is a big topic. If a third of our population is going to be over the age of 65 — it used to be five to 10 — If it’s a third, that’s a massive amount of a service in that.
Q: Managing Human and Digital Workers will be the Norm?
A: So I’m one of the people who believe that AI becoming autonomous and taking over [like] Skynet is ludicrous. But are there going to be a lot of digital workers alongside the human workers? I think that we’re going to be managing populations where the number of digital workers, outnumber human workers ten to one. So the point that you’re asking at a more serious level, I think, for the next three to five years, it is a deep understanding of how do these two augment each other, and how do they make the human a lot more productive?
Where people often go wrong on being scared is if you make the human more productive, then the nature of the world has shown us that those people will actually command a lot higher wage and a lot better life, but they need to be able to work with their digital workers and that will be of incredible value. I mean, the same is true in our [IT] industry. I mean it’s going to maybe somewhat similar in journalism. People who use an AI system to very quickly scrape what may be in a company’s earnings release are going to be more valuable [at first] but then, if they can put it in context with other companies and other knowledge and what the industrial trends are, that’s incredibly more value than the people who are originally just scraping the release to give you the basic facts.
Do I believe that we’re going to be managing both? Absolutely. Do I believe that the people who talk about the company of one, where it’s all digital workers and there’s no humans, I think that’s a bit far-fetched. I always tell our people in the field, people who are directly marketing inside the clients, taking the information of what we have for the client, could we put an AI agent do that? Of course. But the empathy of understanding what motivates a particular human being, what is the structure and what is the incentives inside a particular client, what are the exact gaps today — I don’t think AI is going to get there in the next 10 years. That’s very much the human who’s in front of them understanding what appeals today versus what will appeal maybe a year from now. That’s very much, I think, still a human task.
Q: IBM’s BIG Bet on Smaller Vertical Models?
A: I mostly believe there will be a ton of domain-specific models. And almost by definition, a domain-specific model will be a small one. If it’s a lot, then it’s not domain-specific. It just happens to be able to go across many different domains, and then you have to say, well, running it is the same cost and it’s equally power efficient. But I’m sorry that breaks the laws of both physics and computer science, because the [model that] is 100 times the size is going to probably cost you 10,000 times more energy and compute cost to run it. So I think economics drives you to say, if you’re doing specific domains, it’s much better to be small than large.
Number two, I think the problem set leads itself to small, not large models. If I’m worrying about corrosion in pipelines, how much data am I going to get that I draw upon. So it’s going to it’s going to lead you towards a much smaller data set, which means that it makes sense to have a smaller model. And three, if people want to augment a base model, let’s say big or large, with their own data. Their own data, by definition, is small. What do you gain from going from large refined model to another large model, if a smaller model can ingest all your data, which is the value to the enterprise? So that’s why I got to argue that there is a world for small.
But I was very careful to say I think there will be space for…I don’t know whether it’s three, four, or a dozen very large models. I do think there will be space for that. If I’m building a consumer app and I want to be able to answer questions, maybe for the current or the next generation of search, I can’t predict what people are going to ask. In that case, the one who builds the wider model actually has a business and fundamental advantage. They don’t mind the cost and the energy use of that because they win if they have a total larger base of people who use it.
So I think there will be space for, let’s call it a dozen of those. Those will cost you $1 billion, $10 billion, maybe $30 billion to go build, and they have a role to play. Then there will be space for 1000s of the domain-specific smaller models. And if you go into the enterprise, there are 6 million enterprises. Half the spend is in the top 2000 so suppose we just stop it there. These 2000 will guarantee, in the next five years, have enough models that are proprietary to that. So there’s a space for 10,000-to-20,000 small models.
Q: Will IBM app store have verified models?
A: Well, I always like to experiment before coming to a conclusion. So the fact that we put an agent catalog in what’s the next orchestrate(https://www.ibm.com/products/watsonx-orchestrate), and we put 150 agents, and we had people calling us wants to find out about it, to get their agent in there.
Booleans are deceptively simple. They look harmless—just true or false, right? What could possibly go wrong? But when you actually use them, they quickly become a minefield. After many years of coding, I have learned to tread very lightly when dealing with this simple type. Now, maybe you like Booleans, but I think they should be avoided if possible, and if not, then very carefully and deliberately used.
I avoid Booleans because they hurt my head—all of those bad names, negations, greater thans, and less thans strung together. And don’t even try to tell me that you don’t string them together in ways that turn my brain into a pretzel because you do.
But they are an important part of the world of programming, so we have to deal with them. Here are five rules that I use when dealing with Booleans:
1. Stay positive
2. Put positive first
3. No complex expressions
4. Say no to Boolean parameters
5. Booleans are a trap for future complexity
1. Stay positive
When dealing with Boolean variables, I try to always keep their names positive, meaning that things are working and happening when the variable is True. So I prefer expressions like this:
if UserIsAuthorized {
// Do something
}
rather than:
if !UserIsNotAuthorized {
// Do something
}
The former is much more readable and easier to reason about. Having to deal with double negatives hurts the brain. Double negatives are two things to think about instead of one.
2. Put positive first
In the spirit of staying positive, if you must use an if... else construct, put the positive clause first. Our brains like it when we follow the happy path, so putting the negative clause first can be jarring. In other words, don’t do this:
if not Authorized {
// bad stuff
} else {
// good stuff
}
Instead put the positive clause first:
if Authorized {
// Things are okay
} else {
// Go away!!
}
This is easier to read and makes it so you don’t have to process the not.
3. No complex expressions
Explaining variables are drastically underused. And I get it—we want to move quickly. But it is always worthwhile to stop and write things out—to “show your work,” as your math teacher used to say. I follow the rule that says only use && and || between named variables, never raw expressions.
I see this kind of thing all the time:
if (user.age > 18 && user.isActive && !user.isBanned && user.subscriptionLevel >= 2) {
grantAccess();
}
Instead, you should consider the poor person who is going to have to read that monstrosity and write it out like this instead:
const isAdult = user.age > 18;
const hasAccess = !user.isBanned;
const isActive = user.isActive;
const isSubscriber = user.subscriptionLevel >= 2;
const canAccess = isAdult && hasAccess && isActive && isSubscriber;
if (canAccess) {
grantAccess();
}
This is eminently readable and transparent in what it is doing and expecting. And don’t be afraid to make the explaining variables blatantly clear. I doubt anyone will complain about:
const userHasJumpedThroughAllTheRequiredHoops = true;
I know it is more typing, but clarity is vastly more valuable than saving a few keystrokes. Plus, those explaining variables are great candidates for unit tests. They also make logging and debugging a lot easier.
4. Say no to Boolean parameters
Nothing generates more “What the heck is going on here?” comments per minute than Boolean parameters. Take this gem:
saveUser(user, true, false); // ...the heck does this even mean?
It looks fine when you write the function, because the parameters are named there. But when you have to call it, a maintainer has to hunt down the function declaration just to understand what’s being passed.
Instead, how about avoiding Booleans altogether and declare a descriptive enum type for the parameters that explains what is going on?
enum WelcomeEmailOption {
Send,
DoNotSend,
}
enum VerificationStatus {
Verified,
Unverified,
}
And then your function can look like this:
function saveUser(
user: User,
emailOption: WelcomeEmailOption,
verificationStatus: VerificationStatus
): void {
if (emailOption === WelcomeEmailOption.Send) {
sendEmail(user.email, 'Welcome!');
}
if (verificationStatus === VerificationStatus.Verified) {
user.verified = true;
}
// save user to database...
}
And you can call it like this:
saveUser(newUser, WelcomeEmailOption.Send, VerificationStatus.Unverified);
Isn’t that a lot easier on your brain? That call reads like documentation. It’s clear and to the point, and the maintainer can see immediately what the call does and what the parameters mean.
5. Booleans are a trap for future complexity
And you build your system around that Boolean variable, even having Boolean fields in the database for that information. But then the boss comes along and says, “Hey, we are going to start selling medium drinks!”
Uh oh, this is going to be a major change. Suddenly, a simple Boolean has become a liability. But if you had avoided Booleans and started with:
enum DrinkSize {
Small,
Large
}
Then adding another drink size becomes much easier.
Look, Booleans are powerful and simple. I’m old enough to remember when languages didn’t even have Boolean types. We had to simulate them with integers:
10 LET FLAG = 0
20 IF FLAG = 1 THEN PRINT "YOU WILL NEVER SEE THIS"
30 LET FLAG = 1
40 IF FLAG = 1 THEN PRINT "NOW IT PRINTS"
50 END
So I understand their appeal. But using Booleans ends up being fraught with peril. Are there exceptions? Sure, there are simple cases where things actually are and always will be either true or false—like isLoading. But if you are in a hurry, or you let your guard down, or maybe you feel a bit lazy, you can easily fall into the trap of writing convoluted, hard-to-reason-about code. So tread lightly and carefully before using a Boolean variable.
Отець Агапій Гончаренко народився Андрієм Онуфрієвичем Гумницьким 19 (31) серпня 1832 року. Його батько Онуфрій був православним пастором у їхньому селі Кривень, Київської області, Україна. Як і його батько, мати Андрія, Євдокія, була гордою нащадкою давнього українського козацького роду — Богунів. У 1651 році, під час українсько-польської боротьби, полковник Іван Богун прийняв командування козацьким військом у битві під Берестечком, Україна, коли гетьмана Богдана Хмельницького викрали татари.Дитина середнього класу, Гончаренко восени 1840 року вступив до бурси (інтернату для хлопчиків), а пізніше до Київської духовної семінарії. На початку свого життя він мав змогу на власні очі бачити страждання простих українських селян. «Під час відпусток я мав змогу бачити, як польська аристократія ставилася до наших православних і як їхні слуги б'ють дівчат батогами», – писав Гончаренко у своїх «Спогадах» (опублікованих у 1894 році Михайлом Павликом у Коломиї, Західна Україна (Галичина)).
Молодий Андрій намагався уникнути цієї неприємної сцени в селі. У 1853 році він закінчив Київську духовну семінарію і, одягнувши чернечий одяг, переїхав до Печерської лаври в Києві, щоб стати послушником. Саме тут він прийняв чернече ім'я «Ахапій». Ахапій був вражений, побачивши мирськість ченців. Їхнє життя різко контрастувало з бідністю та стражданнями сільських людей, з якими юний послушник стикався, виконуючи свої обов'язки помічника митрополита Київського Філарета.
12 липня 1857 року Гончаренко мав насичену подіями зустріч у Києві з князем Сергієм Трубецьким, політичним вигнанцем, який повернувся з країни після невдалого повстання декабристів 1825 року. Ця група повстанців, яка мала значну кількість послідовників серед офіцерського корпусу, мала на меті ліквідувати два стовпи Російської імперії — самодержавство та кріпацтво. Таємні товариства були створені як у Росії, так і в Україні в 1818 році. Ці змовники так і не розібралися з політичною проблемою, яку ставила Україна, але багато їхніх письменників висловлювали співчуття до героїчних традицій України, особливо до саги про козаків. Декабристський рух став каталізатором розвитку української політичної та культурної свідомості 19 століття. Його зустріч із Трубецьким надихнула Гончаренка продовжити справу декабристів.
Восени 1857 року Гончаренко опинився в Афінах, Греція. Священний Синод (керівний орган царської Російської православної церкви) рекомендував призначити архідиякона (ієродиякона) до Російської консульської церкви в Афінах. Митрополит Київський Філарет обрав на цю посаду свого молодого помічника. Ахапій швидко занурився в грецьку культуру та почав вивчати мову філософів. Перебуваючи в Афінах, він зв'язався з Олександром Герценом та Миколою Огарьовим — двома відомими російськими політичними емігрантами, які публікували антицарські матеріали в Лондоні. Живо згадуючи страждання та жорстоке поводження з селянами поблизу Києва, аморальність та пияцтво в монастирі, Гончаренко почав писати статті для цих лондонських видань, для «Колокола» (Дзвін).
Ополудні 2 лютого 1860 року київського архідиякона запросили приєднатися до Олександра Петровича Озерова, російського посла в Афінах, на вечерю на борту корабля «Русалка». Після посадки на це судно Гончаренку вручили папірець, у якому повідомлялося, що він заарештований і буде депортований до Росії. «Русалка» перевезла київського ченця до Константинополя, де його кинули до в'язниці разом зі «злодіями та п'яницями російського походження». За дванадцять днів, які знадобилися російському військовому кораблю, щоб дістатися до цього міста, друзі Гончаренка в Афінах зв'язалися зі своїми контактами в османській столиці.
16 лютого молодому ченцю допомогли втекти з в'язниці, і він негайно вирушив до Лондона, куди прибув 4 березня. Він пробув там близько вісімнадцяти місяців. Перебуваючи там, він зустрівся з Герценом, Огарьовим та італійським політичним емігрантом Джузеппе Мацціні. Гончаренко працював у Британському музеї класифікатором та нумізматом. Він продовжував писати для Герцена та працював друкарем у крамниці Людвіга Чернецького. Агапій добре заробляв за свою роботу. Йому вдалося фінансово допомогти численним російським біженцям, які стікалися до Лондона в роки політичної невизначеності за царя Олександра II.
Агапій продовжував писати статті для видання «Колокол». На початку 1861 року він почав використовувати псевдонім «Гончаренко», а згодом обрав псевдонім як прізвище. Наприкінці 1861 року київський чернець повернувся до Греції через Туреччину. У січні 1862 року він відвідав свого дядька, Дмитра Богуна, на Афоні. Пізніше того ж місяця, після подання прохання про висвячення там, його було висвячено на священика. З Греції отець Гончаренко вирушив до Єрусалиму. Коли російський консул у Святому Місті дізнався про його присутність, Агапію погрожували арештом та депортацією. Молодий священик мав рекомендаційний лист, наданий йому князем Іваном Гагаріним, російським римо-католиком. Це забезпечило йому захист Єрусалимського патріарха. За пропозицією Гагаріна український вигнанець деякий час викладав у єзуїтській школі в Ліванських горах. Зрештою він переїхав до Александрії, Єгипет, де знайшов притулок у англійця сера Семюеля Бейкера.
Отець Гончаренко відкрив невеликий магазин поблизу залізничного вокзалу Каїра. Саме тут він зазнав першого нападу на своє життя. Його грецький нападник зізнався, що його найняв російський консул, щоб «вмовити» священика покинути Александрію. Еллінські друзі Ахапія закликали його повернутися до Греції та подати заяву на отримання громадянства. Він так і зробив і отримав громадянство 6 червня 1863 року. Наступного року український емігрант подорожував грецькими островами та східними містами як перекладач для двох російських вчених, Ямонського та Перцова, які шукали слов'янські реліквії.
Гончаренко поступово дійшов висновку, що його народ може повною мірою реалізувати свій інтелектуальний та культурний потенціал за кордоном. Розмови з впливовими російськими політичними емігрантами в Лондоні переконали його, що йому слід емігрувати до Сан-Франциско, щоб відкрити російське видавництво. Молодий священик сподівався об'єднати слов'янський народ Тихоокеанського узбережжя Сполучених Штатів у сильну організацію. Він попрощався з Афінами 18 жовтня 1864 року. Корабель «Ярінгтон» перевіз його з Ізміра, Туреччина, до Бостона, штат Массачусетс. У Новий рік 1865 року український православний священик прибув до Америки.
Перша неофіційна служба Грецької православної церкви, яку провів в Америці отець Гончаренко 6 січня 1865 року, викликала інтерес місцевих членів цієї віри. У лютому цей український емігрант був гостем на вечері, яку влаштував єпископ Поттер з Трійці-каплиці в Нью-Йорку. На цьому зібранні він дізнався від присутніх духовенства, що минулого року православних капеланів, які супроводжували російський флот (командувачем якого, до речі, був український адмірал С. Лессовський), запросили відслужити літургію в єпископальних церквах цього міста. Російські священики відмовили, мотивуючи це тим, що православ'я забороняє їм служити в протестантських церквах. Вони сказали: «Ми не будемо мати справ з єретиками». Єпископ Поттер запропонував отцю Ахапію можливість відслужити літургію в церкві Святої Трійці, розташованій на 26-й вулиці в Нью-Йорку. 2 березня 1865 року український священик відслужив першу публічну православну службу в Новому Світі.
Гончаренку було тридцять два роки, коли він вперше привернув увагу двох американських газет, The New York Evening Post та The New York Times. The New York Evening Post (2 березня 1865 року) надрукувала довгий звіт про православну службу, що відбулася в каплиці Святої Трійці, характеризуючи її заголовком «Значна та політична церемонія». Газета «Нью-Йорк Таймс» (3 березня 1865 року) також присвятила кілька колонок огляду цієї Літургії та її значення для російсько-американських відносин. В одному абзаці було наведено цікавий опис українського священика-вигнанця.
«Російсько-грецький священнослужитель, преподобний Агапій Гончаренко, — приємний і гідний на вигляд священнослужитель приблизно п'ятдесяти років. Він росіянин за походженням і випускник церковної академії Санкт-Петербурга. Корабель «Олександр Невський», який близько дванадцяти місяців тому вирушив з цього міста до Афін, приніс звістку до грецької столиці, що в цій країні багато представників Православної Церкви не мають пастора, і він прибув, запропонувавши свої послуги, акредитований митрополитом Афінським та Священним Синодом Королівства Греції».
Можливо, п'ять років постійних подорожей Гончаренка та його густа борода робили його набагато старшим (50), ніж він насправді мав (32). Швидше за все, сам священнослужитель дещо змінив ці друковані деталі свого життя, щоб замаскувати свою присутність у Нью-Йорку від пильних очей царського уряду.
Невдовзі з київським священнослужителем зв'язався російський консул у Нью-Йорку, барон Роберт Остен Сакен, щоб навчити цього чиновника грецької мови. Минуле Гончаренка, що був у втечі, поки що залишалося прихованим. Гострий погляд двоголового орла (символу царської влади) невдовзі простежив невловимі обриси попередньої «злочинної» діяльності отця Агапія. Барона попросили заарештувати українського вигнанця. Консул відмовився ініціювати цю дію.
Гончаренко знову потрапив у заголовки газет 15 квітня 1865 року, проводячи православну службу в церкві Святого Павла в Новому Орлеані, штат Луїзіана. Він провів освячення цієї першої грецької православної церкви в Сполучених Штатах. Імперський уряд вжив рішучих заходів, щоб ізолювати його від грецьких друзів. 13 травня 1865 року грецького консула в Нью-Йорку, Кира Ботассі, відвідав російський посол, барон Едвард де Штекль. Росіяни погодилися виділити кошти на будівництво нової православної церкви в місті з пастором, отцем Ніколасом Б'єррінгом. Грекам було наказано розірвати зв'язки з отцем Агапієм, «ворогом Росії». Гончаренко був змушений шукати нову роботу. Американське біблійне товариство найняло його для перекладу Біблії арабською та церковнослов'янською мовами.
Завдяки знайомству з італійським революціонером Мадзіні, українець потрапив до будинку Джона Сітті у Філадельфії, чий дім був місцем зустрічей іммігрантів-італійських патріотів. 28 вересня 1865 року в Нью-Йорку Гончаренко одружився з Альбіною, дочкою пана Сітті. Альбіна Сітті стала супутницею українського емігранта на все життя і зробила важливий внесок у його видавничу роботу на узбережжі Тихого океану.
Царські шпигуни уважно спостерігали за життям київського вигнанця в Нью-Йорку. Займаючись перекладами Біблії, він ніколи не забував про свій попередній план відкрити видавництво на Західному узбережжі. 1867 рік остаточно переконав його здійснити свою мрію. Переговори про продаж Російської Америки Сполученим Штатам відбувалися взимку та навесні того ж року. 18 жовтня 1867 року російський прапор було востаннє приспущено в Сітці, Аляска. Починаючи з 1808 року, Сітка стала столицею Російської Америки.
Точний характер участі Гончаренка в купівлі Аляски залишається прихованим. Цілком ймовірно, що він зв'язався з державним секретарем Сьюардом десь у 1867 році. Перші американські публікації православного священика (1868) були започатковані на прохання Сьюарда. За чотирнадцять днів до відправлення росіян з Аляски отець Агапій та його дружина-вчителька сіли на пароплав «Америка» в Нью-Йорку та відпливли до Панамського перешийка. Він та Альбіна накопичили значну суму грошей — 2500 доларів. Під час подорожі на захід серед їхніх речей був друкарський верстат з кирилицею вартістю 1600 доларів.
Потяг перевіз їх п'ятдесят сім миль через Центральну Америку, а потім інший корабель 6 листопада доставив їх до Сан-Франциско.
Український вигнанець розглядав можливість заснування свого видавництва на Алясці, але боявся цензури з боку американської військової влади, яка там контролювала. Сан-Франциско, головний порт судноплавства та сполучення з Російською Америкою та з неї, пропонував більш підходяще місце. Будинок за адресою Маркет-стріт, 536, став домівкою для першої російсько-англійської газети, що видавалася у Сполучених Штатах, «The Alaska Herald» («Свобода»). Протягом наступних п'яти років друкарня отця Гончарека також була місцем збору колишніх жителів Аляски, а також біженців з Росії та Сибіру.
Rubik's Cube World Record
May. 19th, 2025 09:46 amYou might recall that during the Olympics, American gymnast Stephen Nedoroscik (better known as Pommel Horse Guy) was the hero of STEM types everywhere when it was revealed that, as a Rubik’s Cube enthusiast, he prepared for competition by solving the cube in 8.5 seconds.
That is incredibly fast, and the world record of 3.13 seconds, by Max Park is faster still. But those times pale in comparison to the speed of the robot developed by a team of students from Purdue University’s Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. They’ve built a machine (dubbed Purdubik’s Cube) whose solution time is approaching zero: 0.103 seconds, and they’re hoping to tweak it further to get that time below a tenth of a second.
According to the esteemed beer purveyors at Guinness, whose world record authority is renowned, the Purdue team’s robot now holds the Guinness World Record for “Fastest robot to solve a puzzle cube." For reference, that’s quicker than the blink of an eye, which takes two or three tenths of a second and crushes the previous official record of 0.305 seconds, which was set by a team of Mitsubishi Electric professional engineers in May 2024.
The Purdue undergrads who bested the Mitsubishi pros are Junpei Ota, Aden Hurd, Matthew Patrohay, and Alex Berta. They met while participating in Purdue’s co-op program for work rotations. “It helped us build not only the friendships that led to this collaboration but also the professional and technical skills we needed to actually pull it off,” said Hurd, demonstrating some of the many benefits of co-oping for engineering students. This real-world experience also helped them secure corporate sponsorships to support the project.
Team member Patrohay’s motivational fire to take on this challenge goes back to his high school years. “Back in high school, I saw a video of MIT students solving the cube in 380 milliseconds. I thought, ‘That’s a really cool project. I’d love to try and beat it someday.,’” he recalled. “Now here I am at Purdue—proving we can go even faster.”
The team unveiled their project at Purdue’s SPARK annual student design competition in December 2024 and continued refining the robot after the event. Purdue’s robot uses machine vision for color recognition, custom solving algorithms optimized for execution time, and industrial-grade motion control hardware from Kollmorgen. Its movement is programmed to maximize acceleration, deceleration, and mechanical efficiency.
“Before you realize we’ve solved it, we’ve solved it,” observed Patrohay. “Before you realize it is moving, we’ve solved it.”
While the Kollmorgen robotic hardware could still go faster, the plastic cube itself is the obstacle. “The cubes are really the biggest limitation at this point,” he explained in the team’s YouTube video. “The cubes themselves just kind of disintegrate. Pieces just snap in half and fall apart.”
The solution is obviously more engineering. “We did a lot of mechanical optimization inside the Rubik’s Cube,” Patrohay continued. “We designed a custom internal core that holds all the pieces together stronger because the original one was very weak. There’s a lot of optimization inside each center piece to ensure we don’t slip or turn-in-places don’t happen. The design was able to bring together all of our knowledge from other course work.”
Observers can try their best to befuddle Purdubik’s Cube by scrambling the cube themselves through Bluetooth-enabled Smart Cube. Of course, the robot solves the cube instantly once the scramble is complete.
“What I really love about it is that senior design allowed us to bring together everything we’ve learned,” said Patrohay. “From our freshman year on, you build skills—but this project showed how they all come together to create something meaningful.”
“This achievement isn’t just about breaking a record, it pushes the boundaries of what synthetic systems can do,” said Nak-seung Patrick Hyun, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, who mentored the student team. “It brings us closer to understanding ultra-fast coordinated control systems like those found in nature.”
AI to Cut an IT Jobs
May. 15th, 2025 09:42 amMicrosoft (MSFT) on Tuesday said it is laying off 3% of its employees, which equals an estimated 6,000 positions.
This move will reportedly include a cut in the number of middle managers in the company, though it will affect “all levels, teams. The company is “aiming to reduce management layers.” It reported that the current layoffs are not tied to performance, unlike the round of layoffs in January.
A second goal, according to another report, is to increase the ratio of coders versus non-coders on projects.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has predicted that AI will be doing all coding tasks by next year—but an existential crisis is already hitting some software engineers. One man who lost his job last year has had to turn to living in an RV trailer, DoorDashing and selling his household items on eBay to make ends meet, as his once $150k salary has turned to dust.
Tech layoffs are nothing new for Shawn(https://www.linkedin.com/in/shawnfromportland).
The software engineer first lost his job after the 2008 financial crisis and then again during the pandemic, but on both occasions, he was back on his feet just a few months later.
However, when Shawn was given the pink slip last April he quickly realized this time was different: AI’s revolution of the tech industry was playing out right in front of him.
Despite having two decades of experience and a computer science degree, he’s landed fewer than 10 interviews from the 800 applications he’s sent out. Worse yet, some of those few interviews have been with an AI agent instead of a human.
“I feel super invisible,” Shawn tells... “I feel unseen. I feel like I'm filtered out before a human is even in the chain.”
And while fears about AI replacing jobs have been around for years, the 42-year-old thinks his experience is only likely the beginning of a “social and economic disaster tidal wave.”
The Great Displacement is already well underway,” he recently wrote on his Substack(https://shawnfromportland.substack.com/p/the-great-displacement-is-already).
Shawn’s last job was working at a company focused on the metaverse—an area that was predicted to be the next great thing, only to be overshadowed in part by the rise of ChatGPT.
Now living in a small RV trailer in central New York with no lead on a new tech job, Shawn’s had to turn to creative strategies to make ends meet, and try to replace a fraction of his former $150,000 salary.
In between searching incessantly for new jobs, checking his empty email inbox, and researching the latest AI news, he delivers DoorDash orders, like Buffalo Wild Wings to a local Holiday Inn, and sells random household items on eBay, like an old laptop. In total, it only adds to a few hundred bucks.
He’s also considered going back to school for a tech certificate—or even to obtain his CDL trucking license—but both were scratched off his list due to their hefty financial barrier to entry.
Shown’s reality may shock some, considering that the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has consistently labeled software engineering as one of the fastest growing fields, but stories like his may soon become all more common.
Earlier this year, the CEO of Anthropic Dario Amodei predicted that more software jobs will soon go by the wayside. By September, he said AI will be writing 90% of the code; moreover, “in 12 months, we may be in a world where AI is writing essentially all of the code,” he tells the Council on Foreign Relations.
In 2024, over 150,000 tech workers lost their jobs, and so far in 2025, that number has reached over 50,000, according to Layoffs.fyi.
“It’s coming for basically everyone in due time, and we are already overdue for proposing any real solution in society to heading off the worst of these effects,” Shawn wrote.
“The discussion of AI job replacement in the mainstream is still viewed as something coming in the vague future rather than something that’s already underway.”
Despite being unemployed for over a year, Shawn still hasn’t lost hope, nor is he necessarily mad at AI for replacing him and still calls himself an “AI maximalist.”
"If AI really legitimately can do a better job than me, I'm not gonna sit here and feel bad about, oh, it replaced me and it doesn't have the human touch,” Shawn says.
What’s frustrating, he adds, is that companies are using AI to save money by cutting talent—rather than leveraging its power and embracing cyborg workers.
“I think there's this problem where people are stuck in the old world business mindset of, well, if I can do the same work that 10 developers were doing with one developer, let's just cut the developer team instead of saying, oh, well, we've got a 10 developer team, let's do 1,000x the work that we were doing before,” Shawn says.
Colossus AI
May. 14th, 2025 09:24 amWith the on-site substation going online and connecting to the main power grid, phase 1 of Colossus AI infrastructure, located in Memphis, TN, is now complete. The supercomputer is now running at 150 MW from the grid, according to the Greater Memphis Chamber. The additional 150-megawatt Megapack battery system will act as a backup power source, ensuring continued operation during outages or periods of heightened electricity demand.
Colossus AI is the flagship product of Musk’s official AI company, xAI. The supercomputer was first activated in July last year with 100,000 Nvidia GPUs, after being built at an astonishing pace. The entire project was completed in 122 days, while the hardware installation to training phase took only 19 days. The pace of the project impressed Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who pointed out that projects of this scale typically take around four years, making its deployment remarkably fast.
“As far as I know, there’s only one person in the world who could do that,” said Huang. “Elon is singular in his understanding of engineering and construction and large systems and marshaling resources; it’s just unbelievable.”
However, the speed came at a cost, as the facility initially lacked a direct connection to the power grid. To keep operations running, the site depended on natural gas turbine generators for electricity, raising concerns about emissions and sustainability.
Early reports suggested 14 turbines were supplying power, each generating 2.5 MW, but observations from residents indicated the number may have exceeded 35 in the surrounding area. That is more than twice the permitted limit. This reliance on temporary power sources had sparked discussions about the long-term energy plan for the facility, especially as xAI looks to scale up operations further.
Adding more GPUs to the infrastructure means that the AI cluster can now rely more on grid power rather than gas-powered generators. This will help improve efficiency and address environmental concerns. Reportedly, xAI plans to remove half the temporary generators by the end of the summer. The other half of the temporary generators will have to remain to deliver the electrical needs of the second phase of the Memphis Supercluster.
Musk plans to double the capacity of Colossus AI before the end of this year. Another 150 MW is going to be added, taking the total capacity to 300 MW. This translates to powering 300,000 homes. It’s not surprising that this massive power demand has sparked concerns about whether the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) has sufficient capacity to support it.
xAI has publicly stated plans to expand its Colossus supercomputer to over 1 million GPUs.For the local economy, Colossus AI promises economic development and infrastructure investment. However, concerns persist regarding disruptions to power quality for residents and the project’s environmental impact.
“You don’t become the moniker for technological innovation because someone comes in and exploits your natural resources, your water, exploits the loopholes that allow them to pollute the air,” said KeShaun Pearson, the director of the grassroots organization Memphis Community Against Pollution (MCAP). “That’s not what makes you a technological city. That spin is dangerous because it opens our city up for exploitation even further.”
The road to powering a million GPUs started when Musk founded xAI in July 2023. The stated goal of “understanding the true nature of the universe.” In more practical terms, Musk wanted an AI lab under his own direction, free from the influences of Microsoft, Google, or other major tech firms.
The company is an answer to the growing dominance of OpenAI (which now has Microsoft as a close partner) and Google’s DeepMind. xAI is also integrated with Musk’s other ventures, including SpaceX and Tesla. With Colossus now operating at full capacity, xAI is positioned to accelerate the development and deployment of AI across Musk’s broader ecosystem.
