Even if the ultra-feminine aesthetic isn’t your thing — and it’s not really mine — you have to hand it to the Barbie flip phone. From the box it comes in, to the interchangeable back plates, rhinestone stickers, and Barbie-fied interface, it’s a delight. The charger and battery are both pink, though they’re a lighter shade than Mattel’s trademarked Barbie Pink (Pantone 219). The phone says “Hi Barbie!” when you turn it on. It’s the definition of committing to the bit.

The breezy fun of the Barbie aesthetic, Pantone 219 or otherwise, is at odds with the actual experience of using the phone. It’s based on one of HMD’s feature phones, and it runs an operating system called KaiOS. The phone is designed for basic connectivity — texting, calling, emails — and even includes a web browser.

The world's first nuclear-powered battery, which uses a radioactive isotope embedded in a diamond, could power small devices for thousands of years, scientists say.

The nuclear battery uses the reaction of a diamond placed close to a radioactive source to spontaneously produce electricity, scientists at the University of Bristol in the U.K. explained in a Dec. 4 statement. No motion — neither linear nor rotational — is required. That means no energy is needed to move a magnet through a coil or to turn an armature within a magnetic field to produce electric current, as is required in conventional power sources.

The diamond battery harvests fast-moving electrons excited by radiation, similar to how solar power uses photovoltaic cells to convert photons into electricity, the scientists said.

A console modder and retro gaming enthusiast has realized his dream of becoming the owner of what he claims to be the holy grail of CRT TVs. Shank Mods managed to save an extremely rare 43-inch Sony Trinitron KX-45ED1 from an untimely ending, as it was being kept on the second floor of an Osaka noodle shop due for demolition before getting it shipped to the U.S.

The Sony Trinitron KX-45ED1, aka the PVM-4300, is thought to be the largest CRT TV ever sold to consumers, delivering a 43-inch visible diagonal on its 45-inch tube. Shank Mods began his video by explaining how rare these TVs were, likening it to "the Bigfoot of CRTs."

There are one or two reasons why CRT TVs of such a size were/are rare. As tube sizes increased, device weights went up almost exponentially. And then there was the price. Regarding mass, a popular domestic TV set like a 27-inch model might weigh about 50kg or 110 pounds, but you would have to handle a set weighing double that for a 36-inch model. The KX-45ED1 weighs over 200kg or 440 pounds and comes with a 77kg or 170-pound stand. The stand might be advisable so you don't accidentally crush a less well-prepared piece of furniture. KX-45ED1 buyers were also warned to make sure their floors were strong enough.

Source Financial Times article

But while Nvidia remains an AI infrastructure titan, it's facing stiffer competition than ever from rival AMD. Among earlier adopters of its Instinct MI300 series GPUs, AMD is quickly gaining share.

Despite growing share among key customers like Microsoft and Meta, AMD's share of the broader GPU market remains comparatively small next to Nvidia.

How much of this thirst is driven by limited supply of Nvidia hardware is hard to say, but at least on paper, AMD's MI300X accelerators offered a number of advantages. Introduced a year ago, the MI300X claimed 1.3x higher floating point performance for AI workloads, as well as 60 percent higher memory bandwidth and 2.4x higher capacity than the venerable H100.

Even with Nvidia's Blackwell, which is only just beginning to reach customers, pulling ahead on performance and memory bandwidth, AMD's new MI325X still holds a capacity advantage at 256 GB per GPU. Its more powerful MI355X slated for release late next year will push this to 288 GB.

Omdia expects Nvidia to struggle over the next year to grow its share of the AI server market as AMD, Intel, and the cloud service providers push alternative hardware and services.

"If we've learned anything from Intel, once you've reached 90-plus percent share, it's impossible to continue to grow. People will immediately look for an alternative," Galabov said.

Summary

Based on slides presented by Bernt Børnich, cofounder and CEO of 1X Technologies, the firm's Neo humanoid robot is scheduled to debut in 2025 for a set of early adopters in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Milburn said 1X is likely to be conservative about where it places Neo initially – meaning homes with children would be avoided due to the higher safety concerns. Neo is only 5' 4" and 66 lbs, with four hours of battery life, but it could still do damage if it fell on a child. The biz is looking specifically for customers who want to provide feedback and help it gather the data to improve Neo.

The limited autonomy of the first robots headed into people's homes follows from the fact that, like autonomous cars, a lot of data is required for a machine to operate in a residential environment – and that data has not yet been gathered. Simulated data can help, but for humanoid robots to navigate effectively in the human world, they have to stumble and fumble before they can walk among us.

Just as Waymo robotaxis initially were accompanied by a human supervisor, Neo bots and other domestic human-like machines will head out into the world, awkwardly, under human oversight, to gather the data required to allow them, eventually, to operate on their own. And as with mobile phones, expect that the privacy policies imposed by robot makers will not afford much privacy – the robot's video record of dropping the breakfast you requested will help company engineers improve its performance.