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China's government has moved to shut down AI companion apps, leaving millions of users abruptly cut off from relationships they described as genuinely meaningful. The crackdown raises uncomfortable questions about emotional dependency, regulatory overreach, and what it means when a government decides which connections are permissible.
Shifting to space, a startup called Novo Space is building modular computers designed specifically for satellite constellations. Rather than custom hardware for every mission, their approach treats orbital computing more like swappable building blocks, which could meaningfully lower the cost and complexity of getting reliable processing power into orbit.
And on a lighter note, a classic piece of Unix culture is making the rounds again — the so-called Useless Use of Cat Award, a long-running tradition of calling out programmers who pipe a file through cat when a simpler command would do. It sounds trivial, but it touches something real about how habits form in technical communities and how we teach each other to think more clearly.
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