Twenty-five years ago, Kevin Lewandowski founded Discogs, arguably the destination online for obsessive vinyl collectors and music nerds of all stripes. It is a marketplace for buying and selling records, obviously, but it's also become so much more. It's a shockingly comprehensive database that covers not just albums and singles, but all the various versions and pressings. It's a really fun rabbit hole to disappear down when you're trying to figure out what obscure pressing of Ministry's The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste or Psalm 69 you had in high school, because you definitely blasted the cover of "Lay Lady Lay" all the time and 100 p …
inMusic, the parent company of Akai, Moog, Native Instruments, and more, has decided to embrace the modding community. In an interview with The Verge, inMusic CEO Jack O'Donnell said, "We're going to provide a toolbox to the community, we're going to provide the inner workings of, say, an MPC or Sample so that people can do what they want." That "toolbox" includes making the code for devices like the recently teased MPC Sample Key open source, but also offering developers an SDK to make modifications easier and lessen the risk of bricking your beloved sampler.
While Akai is eager to see what the modding community cooks up, and has started s …
Welcome to Edition 9.18 of the Rocket Report! Blue Origin packed a lot of news into one afternoon Thursday with the reveal of a new kick stage for the New Glenn rocket, a new rocket engine design, and the minor and widely expected delay for New Glenn's return-to-flight mission from December until January. The reconstruction of Blue Origin's wrecked launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida, continues apace after a catastrophic explosion nearly six months ago. There's a lot of pent-up demand from NASA, Amazon, and the Space Force for Blue Origin to get New Glenn back in action.
As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
SpaceX vets work on water-fed propulsion. Three brothers who worked at SpaceX in the Falcon 9 era are now building satellites that run on water, a potentially harvestable resource on the Moon and found all over the Solar System, Ars reports. In late 2022, the three Carlisle brothers founded Argo Space to build infrastructure in space. Their vision was not just in-space transportation but also removing the need to use propellants from Earth to move around the heavens. Argo Space's satellites will use water not only as a propellant, but also as a coolant and radiation shield.
Note: Some spoilers for Control Resonant's "Recursions and Iterations" mission follow.
One of Control Resonant's most memorable missions involves time travel - kind of. There are certainly multiple timelines intersecting, or maybe overlapping, or maybe running in parallel. As protagonist Dylan Faden, you meet some of the researchers who are trapped in and investigating these timeline anomalies. Dylan's first encounter with the researchers is somehow not the researchers' first time meeting Dylan. But before we can learn much more, time glitches out, and they all turn up dead.
That seems to be the end result in every timeline Dylan comes acr …
These aren’t even all the foldables in my house right now.
When I first read Allison and Nilay's Verge review of the iPhone Duo, I was immediately struck by one of their complaints: that the cover display is too small. That's not how the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 feels, I thought. Had they got it wrong?
After a week and a half using the Duo, I know exactly what they mean - and it's not the screen's fault at all. Apps that feel comfortable on Samsung's short foldable and the similarly sized Xiaomi 18 Fold are often cramped and compact on the Duo's cover screen, robbed of screen space by a right-hand rail that most apps don't make use of anyway.
That's just one of the ways that Apple's first foldable …
A week before the midterm elections, Vice President JD Vance hosted a town hall in Texas with Fox News host Jesse Watters. It was a friendly event with a friendly audience in what should have been a friendly state, and maybe that's why Vance couldn't help himself. When a college student earnestly asked how the right expected young people like her to settle down and have kids, given the ever-growing cost of living, Vance replied with a quip about Jon Husted's ass.
The student, Kate White, introduced herself as the vice president of the Texas Christian University chapter of Turning Point USA, the conservative group started by Donald Trump all …
On Tuesday night, Democrats made history as they took control of the House and the Senate, and a blue wave swept through traditionally red and swing states - with the nation's first Black woman governor elected in Georgia, the country's first Native American woman governor elected in New Mexico, and a Maine Senator ceding to a Democrat after 30 years in office. In these and other campaigns, one theme keptcomingup: holding AI companies accountable to the American people. Now, the AI industry is left considering the prospect of regulation, data center construction slowdowns, and more.
Publicly, most major AI company CEOs have remained silen …
Tech CEO hearings. Tougher AI and data center guardrails. Investigations of Elon Musk's DOGE cuts. The gates are open for Democrats once they regain control of committee gavels come January after a historic win of majorities in both the House and Senate on Tuesday.
"LAWYER UP," the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee wrote on X in a message aimed at the Trump administration as well as "corporate corruption" shortly after networks like NBC News projected Democratic control of the House. "Subpoenas," Senate Finance Ranking Member Ron Wyden (D-OR) posted. It's clear tech executives will also be caught in Democrats' crosshairs. "They …
The Ocarina of Time remake on the Switch 2 smashes together the past and present. The game retains much of the original N64 experience while updating it with modern graphics and gameplay that make it feel contemporary. But the mingling of time periods also extends to the development team. While Ocarina's remake was led by producers Eiji Aonuma (a director on the original game who is now the franchise's steward at Nintendo) and Hidemaro Fujibayashi (best known for directing Breath of the Wild and its sequel), the team also featured a number of younger developers, including some who had never played the original. According to Fujibayashi, thos …
Data center developers are poised to face a more restrictive building environment after voters across the country voted in candidates who favor moratoriums and ballot measures that put more obstacles on their expansion, delivering a stinging blow to a central pillar of the AI industry.
Of voters polled by NBC News on Election Day, 76 percent said they opposed data centers in their communities. Dozens of local communities voted directly to restrict development through ballot measures. And upset winners like Texas Democratic Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa and Michigan's Democratic Senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed support moratoriums on development.
James Talarico, the Democratic Texas senator-elect, not only managed to flip the state in yesterday's midterms but prevailed in the most expensive Senate election to date. More than $573 million was spent on advertisements between Talarico, his Republican opponent Ken Paxton, and their aligned PACs. And a big chunk of that money came from just one man: Elon Musk.
Musk reportedly spent more than $445 million supporting Republicans in the midterms, making him not only by far the biggest donor in the 2026 election cycle but also in American history. And most of his money was spent in Texas, his home state and the headquarters of both Tesla and …
When Donald Trump began his second term as president, Silicon Valley gratefully embraced moral nihilism. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and more collectively donated millions to Trump's inauguration fund to ensure his favor in a new era of gangster tech regulation. Meta overhauled its content policy to allow calling gay people mentally ill and women property. Elon Musk started throwing Nazi salutes - yes, allegedly, but he would soon be posting nonstop about protecting the white race from extinction, so that's the most fragile of fig leafs.
As of mere months ago, this was working out pretty well for them. The Trump administration took a mostly …
In many circles, "Ask Chat" has replaced "Google it," and that's reflected in a new announcement from OpenAI: the volume of search queries run through ChatGPT now equals 20 percent of the volume run through Google.
Adam Fry, OpenAI's consumer product lead for ChatGPT, made the announcement at a press event on Monday. He said the company defines a search as any time a user inputs a query that results in a web search, as opposed to tasks like defining a term or a simple how-to explanation. (Fry did not specify the source of the Google search volume number.)
Having one-fifth as many searches as Google is still a long way from overtaking it, b …
Microsoft is about to launch its new Xbox Nano controller tomorrow, and the tiny device has a little secret. The Nano can connect directly to Xbox Cloud Gaming over Wi-Fi to improve latency. It's a feature Microsoft hasn't officially announced yet, but one I've been anticipating since the Xbox Nano leaked earlier this year.
The Nano will be able to connect directly to Microsoft's cloud servers to reduce latency, much like how Google's Stadia controllers used to work. This new cloud connect feature for the Nano is being privately tested on the new Xbox Cloud Gaming website, and it will require you to pair the controller over Wi-Fi to Microso …
The Stargate AI data center “compute campus” in Abilene, Texas. | Photo: Bloomberg via Getty Images
People hate data centers. They're loud, resource-hungry eyesores that are so profoundly unpopular they have managed to achieve the near-impossible in today's polarized political landscape: genuine bipartisan opposition. But what about "compute campuses"? Those sound lovely, right?
OpenAI seems to be gambling that a quiet rebrand could be all it takes to defuse the growing political backlash that threatens to derail the infrastructure fueling the AI boom.
OpenAI debuted the new terminology on Monday in an announcement launching its new "Grid Protectors Program." The initiative, starting with an upcoming site in Effingham County, Georgia, ai …
Three years ago, I told you how home 3D printers had evolved for speed, producing parts in minutes that used to take hours or days. Now, the next evolution is here: printers that can swap between materials on the fly, mix different colors to produce nearly the full rainbow, mix soft and hard materials, and even mix different sizes of nozzle and different diameters of filament so you can switch between high speed and fine detail in a single print.
Today, Bambu Lab is announcing its most advanced 3D printer yet, the $2,499 H3C, which can do all of that mixing goodness - by loading nine different rolls of filament into nine different print hea …
Chris Yu, president of Also, stands behind the TM-B electric bike at the company's headquarters in Palo Alto, California, in October 2025. | Photo: Jason Henry / Bloomberg via Getty Images
When Rivian quietly spun off its micromobility brand, Also, a lot of observers wondered if the luxury EV maker had bitten off more than it can chew. Chris Yu insists that's not the case.
Yu, a Stanford aeronautics PhD and former CTO at Specialized, runs the startup as an independent business that counts Rivian as a minority shareholder. Under his lead, Also rolled out the TM-B - a quirky, modular e-bike with a raft of unique features, including a swappable top frame, USB-C chargeable battery, a built-in screen, a series hybrid pedal-by-wire system, and proprietary "Dream Ride" software. There's also the TM-Q, an electric four-wheeler aimed …
Patti Zirhut, a lifelong Republican, has been studying her ballot for weeks. Zirhut eagerly voted for President Donald Trump in 2016, 2020, and 2024, but she isn't toeing the party line this year. "My ballot is all mixed up," she says. She's voting for some Republicans, some independents, and even a few Democrats. Zirhut remains undecided on a few races, but of one thing she is absolutely certain: "I will not vote for Byron Donalds," she tells me. "No way will I ever vote for him."
Donalds, the Republican nominee in Florida's gubernatorial election, has Trump's endorsement, the party's backing, and $148 million in campaign funds, much of it …
Vic Mensa is one of those people who has done so many things that it's hard to remember where you were first introduced to him. Was it his debut mixtape Innanetape, which finally hit the major streaming services for the first time in September? Or maybe his house-influenced single "Down On My Luck"? Maybe you didn't even realize that Mensa was a rapper. Maybe you know him from his roles on The Chi or Bel-Air. Or perhaps you're mostly aware of him through his activism, social media presence (peeling oranges and waxing poetic), or his podcast The Vic Mensa Show.
Point is, the man wears many hats. Part of the secret to being so prolific, it tu …
"Its James Talarico. Can you please please please please pretty pretty please rush in even just $1?"
"Who's working to elect James Talarico? Marxists."
"Wow! Wow! Wow! Mark Kelly just made a HUGE announcement!"
"We asked Ben Verlander, MLB analyst and former Tigers prospect, to record a quick video about the election this Tuesday, November 3rd."
"See which of your friends or family members have voted in the past and remind them to vote this year."
If any of these messages sound familiar, it's likely because they're part of the massive stream of text messages flooding your phone leading up to the US midterm elections on Tuesday. The scal …
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