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The United States has deployed its first space-based weapon, according to the Air Force Secretary. The announcement, tied to a Washington Post report dated September of two thousand twenty six, marks a significant and sobering threshold in the militarization of orbit — a domain that was once governed by cooperation and is increasingly defined by competition.
Closer to Earth, Japanese memory maker Kioxia is making a bold case for replacing expensive DRAM with ultra-fast flash storage in AI data centers. Their XL-one drive pushes flash memory into territory previously reserved for RAM, and with AI workloads demanding ever-larger memory footprints, the economics of that trade-off are becoming harder to ignore.
And on the open-source front, two projects caught our eye this week. VoiceStudio offers a locally-run alternative to ElevenLabs for voice synthesis, while OpenDisplay brings Sidecar-style second-screen functionality to iPhones and iPads without Apple's official blessing. Both reflect a growing appetite for capable tools that don't require handing your data to a cloud service.
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