Daily Tech News 8 March 2026

• Look to the skies: For the first time a spacecraft has diverted the orbit of an asteroid. (Science News)
  
  Two asteroids, in fact, the pair Dimorphos, which was the direct target, and Didymos, around which it orbits.
  
  The deliberate impact not only shortened the orbital period of Dimorphos by half an hour from its original twelve, but slowed the orbit of the pair around the Sun by... 10 micrometers per second.
  
  The experiment was four years ago; it took a while for the difference to add up to enough to detect.
  
  
  
• Don't bother looking to the skies: Astronomers have found a galaxy that is estimated to be made of 99.9% dark matter. (CNN)
  
  If it's dark, you ask, how did they find it?
  
  With extreme difficulty. With extreme difficulty and three telescopes.

• The first car - for small values of "car" - has rolled off the production line at solar car maker Aptera. (Electrek)
  
  If it feels like that's taken twenty years, it may be because it has. Aptera was founded in 2006, with its corporate existence punctuated with a couple of bankruptcies along the way.
  
  
  
• OpenAI's head of robotics has resigned after the company signed a contract with the Department of War. (Engadget)
  
  OpenAI doesn't make robots, so the impact is not likely to be significant.
  
  
  
• Apple's 18 core M5 Max's CPU performance is mediocre compared to high-end server and workstation CPUs, but its integrated graphics performance is stellar - at least on synthetic benchmarks. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Yes, that's the opposite of the article's headline. The article is deliberately stupid.
  
  
  
• Who has the fastest cloud servers? Amazon, at least if you're in a datacenter with the new Amazon Turin (Zen 5) CPUs available. (Ecuadors)
  
  The new C8 instances are a lot faster - as much as 70% - than the Zen 3 C6 instances that we were using at my day job before we moved out of Amazon entirely.
  
  The associated Hacker News thread notes that you can get even better performance by the simple trick of running your own server.
  
  And save a ton of money.
  
  
  
• The new MacBook Neo is up to 40% faster than the original M1 MacBook Air. (WCCFTech)
  
  The same multi-threaded performance, but 43% faster single-threaded.
  
  And that's using an iPhone CPU.
  
  
  
• The new MacBook Air is even more faster. (Notebook Check)
  
  And more expensive, but it does have 16GB of RAM which the Neo can't do. And a wide colour gamut display, which likewise.
  
  
  
• Not entirely sure you can do that. (The Register)
  
  The maintainer of Python package Chardet, which dets chars, replace the manually-written code with a version largely generated by Anthropic's Claude, and swapper the license from LGPL to MIT, raising complaints from the original developer (maybe) who assigned the license, which prohibits future relicensing.
  
  The thing is, "copyleft" licenses in the GPL depend on copyright law for enforcement, and AI-generated content can't be copyrighted, at least in the US, so...
  
  If he'd just renamed the package it would probably be fine.
  
  Also, it apparently rewrote and optimised the inner loop of the code to be 48 times faster, which is something of a win.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

| Access Comments