Good morning ✈️ Next time your flight’s delayed, consider this: air traffic control still runs on floppy disks and Windows 95. Over 30% of systems are already failing, and the rest are duct-taped to ’90s hardware that can’t even be powered down. The FAA is finally asking for bids to upgrade everything without losing a single plane. Swapping Windows 95 for AI might just trade one kind of crash for another.
🦸♂️ Boston Dynamics just gave Atlas a superhuman upgrade, and it’s not new dance moves. The robot now sees in 3D, tracks objects in real time, and makes sub-millimeter adjustments on the fly. It can judge depth, stay spatially aware, and lock onto targets even as the environment shifts. It went from parkour to precision manufacturing without breaking a sweat.
📉 One obscure rule might explain tech layoffs – and it’s not AI. Until 2022, companies could deduct 100% of R&D costs, including salaries. A quiet tax change flipped that. Now they have to spread those deductions over five years. The result? It’s cheaper to run ads than to build something new.
👽 Physicists are building an AI to hunt UFOs. A respected team built a dark-matter-inspired system to analyze UAP footage. It’s rigorous, data-driven, and so far… it’s found almost nothing. Cool tech. But here’s the real question: why is it suddenly easier to fund UFO research than climate study or public education? The study calls it a matter of air safety and national security. Makes you wonder what this system is actually built to detect.
😈 Big Tech says they can’t build AI without stealing. Ethics and consent slow things down. But a small team from MIT, Cornell, and Toronto did it anyway. They trained a language model using only public and openly licensed data. No scraping. No lawsuits. Just eight terabytes of clean text. If AI had to license content, Substack would be minting unicorns.
⚖️ Should lawyers face life in prison for fake AI citations? A UK judge says submitting AI-generated nonsense in court could count as perverting the course of justice. This isn’t just a legal warning – it’s the first real collision between gen AI and a system built on trust. This might be the first time a hallucination carries a life sentence.
Turn prompts into film
Runway Gen4 lets you create short videos from a single image and a prompt. You get smooth camera motion, consistent characters, and real visual storytelling, no film crew required.
Why does it matter? Most AI video tools still feel like toys. Gen‑4 is being used in real projects by real creators. At this year’s AI Film Festival, a ten-minute short made with Runway and animated image stills took top honors. The film didn’t use a camera. It used Gen‑3, ElevenLabs, and imagination.
Use it to animate storyboards, pitch concepts, or build entire scenes from scratch. There’s no limits to what you can make.
🌪️ What happens when you stick molten uranium in a blender? You get a rocket engine that could cut the trip to Mars in half. It’s called a Centrifugal Nuclear Thermal Rocket. Chemical engines won’t get us to other planets, so now we’re spinning molten uranium to heat hydrogen and blast it into space. The first person to test this is either a legend or a cautionary tale.
☀️ China is powering AI with solar and wind. The US is firing up gas turbines. These are the same engines we scrapped for being too dirty and too slow. Now they’re back while we wait on nuclear plants that might go online sometime next decade. China plans for the future. We’re planning for next quarter.
🤓 30 of the world’s best math nerds tried to stump ChatGPT – and failed. The challenge was simple: write math problems too hard for OpenAI’s o4-mini to solve. Only it didn’t go as planned. The bot read research papers in real time, solved PhD-level proofs, and talked them through the answers like it was running office hours. In the end, the PhDs got smoked by autocomplete.
Fun stats
6.5 billion
number of searches that Instagram now processes every day, making it #2 for daily search volume.
★ Google is still #1 at 13.7 billion daily searches
★ Amazon, YouTube, and LinkedIn make up the middle of the pack, with 3.5 – 3 billion per day
★ ChatGPT isn’t even in the top 10, with only 1 billion
Miss dancing robots? There’s always China.