The Illuminated Man by Christopher Priest and Nina Allan review – an unconventional portrait of JG Ballard | JG Ballard

The Illuminated Man by Christopher Priest and Nina Allan review – an unconventional portrait of JG Ballard | JG Ballard

✨ Explore this insightful post from Hacker News 📖 📂 **Category**: ✅ **What You’ll Learn**: The writer JG Ballard, who died in 2009, is a tantalising subject for a biographer. His extraordinary childhood in prewar Shanghai, his family’s subsequent internment in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, and the death of his wife, Mary, at the age of 34, were formative events in the creation of his unique vision. The vivid and sometimes shocking images he witnessed in his early life would resurface repeatedly in his fiction.Yet he always resisted approaches from those keen to tell his story, and at the end of his…
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NASA’s Artemis II Moon mission demonstrates the potential for extending laser communications from space to Earth

NASA’s Artemis II Moon mission demonstrates the potential for extending laser communications from space to Earth

🔥 Read this awesome post from TechCrunch 📖 📂 **Category**: Space,Exclusive,observable space 💡 **What You’ll Learn**: Earlier this month, NASA's Artemis II mission sent four astronauts into lunar orbit and used new laser communications systems to send dramatic images back to Earth. However, one of the receivers was not hosted by the US space agency. A low-cost station built by Observable Space and Quantum Opus, and operated by the Australian National University, pulled data beamed from a spacecraft to the moon at a rate of 260 megabits per second. The companies say this success proves that high-throughput communications between Earth…
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Growing corn for energy or solar?

Growing corn for energy or solar?

💥 Read this trending post from Hacker News 📖 📂 **Category**: 💡 **What You’ll Learn**: Solar energy expansion is often viewed as a threat to US food security. And yet roughly 12 million hectares of US farmland—an area the size of New York State—is currently devoted to corn crops that are farmed not for food, but for fuel. In a new PNAS study, researchers ask a provocative question: why not transition some of this corn-for-ethanol farmland to significantly more efficient solar energy production instead? They find that populating just a tiny percentage of that land with solar panels would dramatically increase…
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Apple is fixing a bug that cops use to extract deleted chat messages from iPhones

Apple is fixing a bug that cops use to extract deleted chat messages from iPhones

💥 Read this awesome post from TechCrunch 📖 📂 **Category**: Security,Apple,iPad,iPhone,privacy,surveillance,signal 📌 **What You’ll Learn**: Apple released an update to its software on Wednesday for iPhone and iPad to fix a bug that allowed law enforcement to automatically extract messages that had been deleted or disappeared from messaging apps. This is because notifications displaying message content are also cached on the device for up to a month. In a security notice on its website, Apple said the flaw meant that “notifications marked for deletion could be unexpectedly retained on the device.” This is a clear reference to an issue revealed…
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Coding Models Are Doing Too Much

✨ Read this must-read post from Hacker News 📖 📂 **Category**: 💡 **What You’ll Learn**: Code for this post is available here.AI-assisted coding has become the norm and with tools like Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, Codex, we are increasingly letting models touch our code. If you have used any of these tools in the past year, you have probably experienced something like this: you ask the model to fix a simple bug (perhaps a single off-by-one error, or maybe a wrong operator). The model fixes the bug but half the function has been rewritten. An extra helper function has…
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Google is turning Chrome into an AI-powered coworker in the workplace

Google is turning Chrome into an AI-powered coworker in the workplace

🚀 Check out this insightful post from TechCrunch 📖 📂 **Category**: Enterprise,AI,Chrome,Google,gemini,Google Cloud Next,ai automation 📌 **What You’ll Learn**: As part of a slate of Google Cloud Next announcements on Wednesday, the company shared plans to bring “auto-browsing” proxy capabilities to Chrome users on enterprise, along with enhanced security measures. With automated browsing, Chrome users can leverage Gemini to understand live context in open browser tabs, and then use AI to handle various tasks such as travel booking, data entry, meeting scheduling, and others related to web-based work. Image credits:Google Google suggests the tool can be used for things like…
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Surveillance Pricing: Exploiting Information Asymmetries

Surveillance Pricing: Exploiting Information Asymmetries

💥 Read this insightful post from Hacker News 📖 📂 **Category**: 💡 **What You’ll Learn**: Before the 1870s, retail goods rarely carried fixed prices. Instead, haggling was the norm. Customers and store clerks engaged in a song and dance, testing the other’s economic limits. Then, on the eve of the Philadelphia World’s Fair, businessman John Wanamaker transformed an abandoned railroad station into the Grand Depot, one of the first department stores in the United States. At the grand opening, each item in the sprawling store was affixed with a conspicuous label declaring a non-negotiable price. When millions came to the…
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Threads is adding live chats to boost real-time engagement

Threads is adding live chats to boost real-time engagement

🚀 Check out this insightful post from TechCrunch 📖 📂 **Category**: Apps,Meta,Threads 📌 **What You’ll Learn**: The Meta-owned platform announced Wednesday that Threads is launching “Live Chats” to allow real-time conversations during cultural events. The company says the idea behind the new feature is to help make the app feel more relevant and timely. Live chats launch first within the NBA Threads community during the playoffs. Media personalities, including Malika Andrews, Rachel Nichols and Da Kid Gowie, will host live chats during the matches. The company told TechCrunch via email that it is initially rolling out the feature to a…
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The Tech Oligarch’s Republic

The Tech Oligarch’s Republic

🔥 Discover this must-read post from Hacker News 📖 📂 **Category**: 💡 **What You’ll Learn**: A look at the Palantir manifesto, a logical conclusion of the War on TerrorEdited by Sam ThielmanTHANKS FOR BEARING WITH our pause in publication last week. Both Sam and I had inflexible deadlines for other projects. We should be back to a normal, if somewhat lighter, publication schedule now. I feel it would be foolish for this edition to forecast the next few days in the Iran War or to recap the past week. The only thing certain is insider trading. As things stand on Monday…
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Production of the Rivian R2 has begun despite hurricane damage to the plant

Production of the Rivian R2 has begun despite hurricane damage to the plant

✨ Discover this awesome post from TechCrunch 📖 📂 **Category**: Transportation,EVs,r2 suv,Rivian,RJ Scaringe 💡 **What You’ll Learn**: Rivian rolled its first customer-ready R2 SUV off the production line at its factory in Normal, Illinois, just days after it was hit by an EF-1 tornado that tore off part of the roof. Despite the damage, founder and CEO RJ Scaringe told Bloomberg TV on Wednesday morning that Rivian does not expect any delays in the rollout of the R2, which is critical to the company's survival. “The tornado passed through the south end of the plant, tore off the roof of…
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