Reports this week put a possible NVIDIA purchase of Hugging Face near $13 billion. This morning the company’s Bordeaux robotics group still went ahead and opened pre-orders on something far smaller: Microduck, a 25-centimeter biped from Pollen Robotics that looks like a one-eyed water bird and costs $399 before tax and shipping.
Google and The Pokémon Company spent Pokémon’s 30th anniversary year pairing a screenless fitness band with the one app that already treats sleep like a daily hunt. Fitbit Air Special Edition Pokémon Sleep arrived this morning as a $129.99 US / ¥19,800 Japan exclusive, limited to those two countries and rated for ages 13 and up. Preorders opened today at the Google Store and Target, with shipments starting September 15.
Boston Dynamics spent years sending Atlas over boxes and through parkour courses with almost nothing on top that looked like a head. Hydraulic Atlas lived as a research machine built for flips, runs, and balance tests. Forward sensors were enough when the only job was reading the ground a few steps ahead.
SpaceX spent seven years looking for a stretch of Earth quiet enough, empty enough, and rich enough in natural gas to fly Starship the way airliners leave a busy airport. On Tuesday, August 25, company leaders and Louisiana officials said they found it on about 125,000 acres of Gulf marsh near Pecan Island in Vermilion Parish, a former Exxon property roughly 50 miles south of Lafayette and about 200 miles west of New Orleans. They are calling the place Starbase Louisiana.
Andrea Ricci wanted a language model to do more than answer questions. He wanted it to walk a corridor, notice a door, raise a shotgun, and live long enough to tell you what just tried to kill it. He put that test on a board small enough to sit in a palm, running the 1993 shooter that still gets ported to anything with a screen. Claude Sonnet is the marine, and a custom ESP32 module is the planet.