🚀 NASA’s Moon Base missions start this year

NASA will launch three spacecraft to the Moon’s South Pole this year, the first of over a dozen missions before 2028 supporting a crewed Artemis landing.

Moon Base I will fly no earlier than late 2026 on Blue Moon Mark 1 Endurance, carrying instruments to study rocket plume effects and a laser reflector for orbital positioning.

Moon Base II will deliver 500+ kg of cargo with Astrobotic Griffin, including the FLIP rover to develop crewed lunar rovers. Moon Base III will carry NASA, ESA, and Korean instruments on Nova-C Trinity to study lunar swirls.

Firefly Aerospace plans to launch four MoonFall drones in 2028 to capture high-res images of hard-to-reach lunar areas.

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🤖 Claude Code Unlocks Turbo Mode

Activating /ultracode in Claude Code switches the agent to turbo mode, adding a full color fill and a rainbow blinking prompt line in the "thinking" mode.

Claude then starts requesting "real" work instead of trivial questions, showing a new level of engagement.

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🚀 Blue Origin’s New Glenn Explodes in Test

A fiery explosion destroyed Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket during a routine engine test at Cape Canaveral. The blast heavily damaged launch complex LC-36, the only pad for New Glenn, putting the rocket’s next flight on hold.

New Glenn is a 98-meter heavy-lift rocket designed to carry NASA’s Blue Moon lunar lander and deploy Amazon’s satellite internet constellation. It has flown only three times, with its last launch delayed by an FAA investigation after a satellite was placed in the wrong orbit.

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🤖 GPT-4.1’s random numbers aren’t random

An enthusiast named Exmergo asked GPT-4.1 to pick a random number from 1 to 100, 10,000 times. The results failed a chi-square test with a value of 15,604 and p near zero, showing the choices are far from truly random.

GPT-4.1 avoided round multiples of ten except for 10 once, and nearly ignored the extremes 1 and 100. The number 42 appeared four times more often than expected, a nod to “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” Numbers with 7 were favored, while 69 appeared much less, likely due to training filters.

The model reflects human biases in number selection despite being asked for randomness. It seems to have absorbed our quirks from the texts it was trained on.

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This floor projection turns property blueprints into a real walk-through.

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CEO of Palantir: People are afraid of an AI-Driven economy with no jobs.

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When you get older you get excited over these things

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💻️ Nvidia launches RTX Spark AI chip

Nvidia introduced the RTX Spark SoC for AI-PCs at Computex. It features a 20-core ARM CPU, a Blackwell GPU with 6144 CUDA cores, Tensor Cores supporting FP4, and up to 128 GB of unified memory.

The chip delivers up to 1 petaflop of AI performance at low precision, enough to run models with 70-120 billion parameters using quantization. It supports CUDA and Nvidia's AI software stack out of the box.

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🏎 Honda revealed its first passenger eVTOL flight

Honda quietly completed the first flight of its passenger eVTOL on April 1, but only disclosed it weeks later. The company has been developing the aircraft since the early 2020s, mostly out of public view.

Like projects from Joby Aviation and Archer Aviation, Honda is betting on electric vertical takeoff aircraft as a future alternative to short-distance air travel.

Honda's design uses 8 propellers, which the company says improves safety and reduces noise compared to helicopters.

Its biggest differentiator is range: while many eVTOLs target around 100 km, Honda's hybrid design aims for up to 400 km.

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😭 Microsoft unveils a desktop AI box for developers

Microsoft introduced the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box, a compact PC built around Nvidia’s new Arm-based RTX Spark chip.

The device is designed for local AI development and can run models with up to 120B parameters without relying on cloud infrastructure.

It comes preloaded with Windows 11, VS Code, WSL, and PowerShell 7, targeting developers building and testing AI applications.

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💻️ Nvidia launches DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction

Nvidia introduced DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction at Computex, compatible with all GeForce RTX cards including older RTX 20 series.

It uses a second-generation neural network trained on Nvidia’s supercomputer to clean up ray tracing noise by reconstructing missing pixels while combining denoising and resolution scaling.

This new engine delivers 35% more compute power and uses 20% more parameters at the same speed.

Nvidia claims it improves lighting accuracy and image stability in motion, reducing artifacts like ghosting in games such as Indiana Jones and refining screen noise effects in Alan Wake 2.

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🤖 Anthropic launches CLI for Claude API

Anthropic introduced CLI called ant to manage all Claude API resources from the terminal. Commands like ant models list and ant messages create let users interact directly with the platform.

The CLI supports defining agents in YAML and deploying them with a single command. This turns agents into version-controlled configurations that fit into Git workflows and CI/CD pipelines.

This approach is common in agent frameworks but now is officially integrated into Anthropic's Claude ecosystem, simplifying infrastructure management for developers.

📊@tech