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Russia is tightening its grip on civilian drone airspace, mandating that all drones over two hundred fifty grams connect to its ERA-GLONASS tracking system starting October first. Officials say the platform can monitor up to one million drones simultaneously, pitching it as a path toward lifting regional flight bans — though restrictions around Moscow and St. Petersburg remain firmly in place.
Shifting to electric vehicles, Rivian has confirmed its LiDAR-equipped R2 will reach customers in two thousand twenty seven, with employees getting access to the technology this year. The announcement signals Rivian's serious push into autonomous driving hardware, betting that onboard LiDAR gives it a meaningful edge as the self-driving arms race among automakers continues to intensify.
And in a story that says more about us than it does about machines, a GitHub project simulating torture experiments on locally hosted language models has ignited a fierce online debate. Some researchers and effective altruists are genuinely arguing the AI is suffering and demanding the project be removed. The models, for their part, cannot suffer — but the conversation reveals just how blurry our intuitions about machine consciousness are becoming.
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