Lifeboat Foundation

Volvo Cars is another automaker that officially announced a switch from the Combined Charging System (CCS1) to Tesla’s North American Charging Standard (NACS) charging connector in North America (United States, Canada, and Mexico).

Volvo entered into an agreement with Tesla to use the NACS charging connector, as the first European brand. Previously, a similar move was announced by Ford, General Motors, and Rivian, not forgetting about Aptera (an EV start-up).

According to Volvo, the deal with Tesla will open the Tesla Supercharging network (more than 12,000 stalls in more than 2,000 locations) for all existing Volvo BEVs from the first half of 2024. However, the CCS1-compatible Volvo cars (XC40, C40 Recharge, and the upcoming XC30 and XC90) will have to use a NACS to CCS1 adapter.

TOKYO (Reuters) — What would society look like if cyborg body parts were freely available for use like roadside rental bicycles? Masahiko Inami’s team at the University of Tokyo have sought to find out by creating wearable robotic arms.

Inami’s team is developing a series of technologies rooted in the idea of “jizai”, an Japanese term that he says roughly denotes autonomy and the freedom to do as one pleases.

The aim is to foster something like the relationship between musician and instrument, “lying somewhere between a human and a tool, like how a musical instrument can become as if a part of your body.”

The Tesla Cybertruck automatic tailgate and tonneau cover motions, as well as its interior have been extensively filmed during its chief designer visit to an EV exhibit inauguration at Peterson’s museum. The new shots also revealed a cool storage space under a lid in the truck bed as well as possibly vented seats.

Tesla Cybertruck has showcased its rear-wheel steering by maneuvering inside a parking garage in a new video.

Rear-wheel steering, or four-wheel steering, is the ability to steer the rear axle, generally to a smaller degree than the front wheel, and to create a tighter and more precise turning radius.

While the feature was originally introduced two decades ago, it never really took off. Now it seems to be having a renaissance as it is quickly becoming a must-have feature for electric pickup trucks coming to market.

In response to a Tesla fan account on Twitter, the CEO suggested AGI was more profound than full self-driving technology.

You may have stumbled across the Flipper Zero hacking device that’s been doing the rounds. The company, which started in Russia in 2020, left the country at the start of the war and moved on since then. It claims it no longer has ties to Russia and that it is on track to sell $80 million worth of its products this year after selling almost $5 million worth as Kickstarter preorders — and it claims it sold $25 million worth of the devices last year.

So what are they selling? Flipper Zero is a “portable gamified multi-tool” aimed at everyone with an interest in cybersecurity, whether as a penetration tester, curious nerd or student — or with more nefarious purposes. The tool includes a bunch of ways to manipulate the world around you, including wireless devices (think garage openers), RFID card systems, remote keyless systems, key fobs, entry to barriers, etc. Basically, you can program it to emulate a bunch of different lock systems.

Continue reading “Flipper hacking device on track to make $80M worth of sales” »

Just to shake it up a little bit more, Chatbot Arena is an LLM benchmark platform created by the Large Model Systems Organization (LMSYS Org). It is an open research organization founded by students and faculty from UC Berkeley.

Their overall aim is to make large models more accessible to everyone using a method of co-development using open datasets, models, systems, and evaluation tools. The team at LMSYS trains large language models and makes them widely available along with the development of distributed systems to accelerate the LLMs training and inference.

Chatbot Arena is a benchmark platform for large language models, where the community can contribute new models and evaluate them.

Tesla says its long-awaited Dojo supercomputer, which is supposed to bring its self-driving effort to a new level, is finally going into production next month.

Dojo is Tesla’s own custom supercomputer platform built from the ground up for AI machine learning and, more specifically, for video training using the video data coming from its fleet of vehicles.

The automaker already has a large NVIDIA GPU-based supercomputer that is one of the most powerful in the world, but the new Dojo custom-built computer uses chips and an entire infrastructure designed by Tesla.

EPFL

Engineers at EPFL’s Computational Robot Design & Fabrication (CREATE) lab are training robots to pick the famous fruit on a silicone version that mimics the real thing.