Nic Conley

Nic Conley I make stuff on the internet.
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06/23/2026

A surgical robot just learned surgical techniques from real operating room footage and completed a critical phase of gallbladder removal with 100 accuracy while taking voice commands like a junior surgeon

Meet Professor Axel Krieger who trained a robot called SRTH on real surgical footage the same way language models learn from text and published results in Science Robotics in December 2025

And thats where autonomous surgery just stopped being science fiction Gallbladder removal requires 17 sequential tasks and one misplaced cut can be fatal And Kriegers team fed the robot real surgery videos with captions describing every move and the robot watched and then completed a critical phase with 100% accuracy across eight ex vivo trials And when surgeons gave voice commands mid procedure it adjusted exactly like a resident responding to an attending and the same labs earlier robot sutured pig intestines better than human surgeons with stronger more uniform results while human laparoscopic suturing causes leaks in at least 10% of cases

Heres where it gets insane This robot learned surgery the same way large language models learn from text through patterns and data at scale Watch enough examples and the patterns emerge

But the craziest part The operating room just became a training dataset Every surgery ever recorded is now a lesson and the robot is still learning

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06/22/2026

Remember the Neo robot wrapped in a fabric suit that everyone wanted in their home A Chinese company just shipped one that learns any movement by watching a single video Meet Luna built by LimX Dynamics a 160 centimeter humanoid with 27 degrees of freedom that can analyze a video clip of any dance movement and replicate it autonomously with full body coordination

And thats where humanoid robots just became something businesses can actually deploy Luna does not require coding to operate operators describe tasks in natural language and its AI task editor generates the workflows automatically and it can sync up to 200 units simultaneously for large scale deployments and runs 30 percent cooler than the previous generation with 150 percent more battery life giving it four hours of continuous operation and LimX built it specifically for shopping malls theme parks and immersive NPC experiences where a robot needs to interact with thousands of people consistently

Heres where it gets insane At forty one thousand dollars Luna is one of the most affordable full-size commercial humanoids ever launched and it is already available for purchase in China with international sales expected in 2027 while most US humanoid competitors are still in limited production or pre-order phase

But the craziest part Humanoid robots went from research projects to real products faster than anyone expected

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06/21/2026

China just sank a data center to the bottom of the ocean and last week it went fully commercial running AI workloads for Tencent and Alibaba

Meet HiCloud the Chinese company that spent four years building one of the worlds first commercial underwater AI data centers off Hainan and just brought a second one online off Shanghai with 2,000 servers drawing most of its power from offshore wind and cutting cooling energy by up to 90 percent

And thats where the AI infrastructure race just moved underwater Every AI data center has the same problem enormous amounts of electricity and water just to stop servers from overheating and HiClouds solution is to sink sealed steel capsules to the ocean floor and use surrounding seawater for heat dissipation through sealed radiator systems and the Hainan facility alone saves 122 million kilowatt hours of electricity and 100,000 tonnes of water every year and the Shanghai facility draws 97 percent of its power from offshore wind

Heres where it gets insane Microsoft ran a two-year research experiment with the same concept off Scotland in 2018 found it produced lower hardware failure rates than land-based centers and then chose not to commercialize it while HiClouds went from pilot project to full commercial AI operation serving Tencent Alibaba and atlas in under three years

But the craziest part Everyone is competing to build smarter AI China just started redesigning the place where that AI lives

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06/20/2026

A robot the size of a sesame seed just performed five different surgical procedures inside biological tissue without a surgeon physically touching it

Meet Professor Lum Guo Zhan who built a 4.4 millimeter soft robot controlled entirely by weak external magnetic fields that can cut tissue release drugs collect tissue samples and generate targeted heat and switches between all five functions in under one second

And thats where minimally invasive surgery got a whole lot smaller Every surgical robot ever built requires either a surgeons hands a power source inside the device or a tether connecting it to external equipment and Lums robot has none of those and doctors navigate it remotely through the body using magnetic fields reprogram its function mid-procedure and target locations that are difficult for conventional surgical tools to access and more than 99 percent of human cells remained viable after exposure confirming the materials are biocompatible

Heres where it gets insane The robot can shrink down to 1.5 millimeters and the magnetic hyperthermia function that generates targeted heat inside the body is being explored as a potential cancer treatment that could complement existing therapies

But the craziest part Nothing inside it moves on its own A magnet outside the body does everything

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06/17/2026

This AI model was so dangerous that the US government ordered it to cut off access for almost everyone days after launching as the most advanced AI ever released

Meet Fable 5 and Mythos 5 Anthropics newest models built on cybersecurity AI so capable it can find software vulnerabilities that have existed undetected for decades the kind normally used by governments to harden critical systems Days after Fable 5 launched as Anthropics most advanced public release someone found a way to bypass its safeguards and surface a handful of minor security flaws

And thats where the most advanced AI cybersecurity tool ever released went offline worldwide

The flaws themselves were already known and other public AI models can produce the same findings without any special access but the scope of the response was the real story a government order covering every foreign national on the planet including foreign employees inside Anthropic itself forcing the company to disable the model for every single user foreign or not

Heres where it gets insane

Every other model of Anthropic kept working exactly as normal Only the two newest most powerful models on the planet went dark while Anthropic argued the same risk already exists across the industry

But the craziest part

The most capable AI cybersecurity tool ever released to the public lasted less than a week before one security demonstration ended its access worldwide

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06/16/2026

Nvidia just unveiled a chip so powerful that it might replace the graphics card the processor and even the AI server all at once

Meet the RTX Spark a superchip combining a 20-core ARM CPU with a Blackwell GPU containing 6,144 CUDA cores into something small enough to fit inside a thin laptop with the graphics power of a desktop RTX 5070

And thats where the personal computer changed forever For four decades a PC was a device you typed commands into and Huang said that era is over with RTX Spark you ask and the PC does the work and the chip delivers one petaflop of AI compute with 128 gigabytes of unified memory running 120 billion parameter AI models entirely without cloud connectivity while simultaneously playing 1440p games at over 100 frames per second with ray tracing on battery something Apples M series has not been able to match for gaming

Heres where it gets insane Intel fell 6 percent AMD dropped 5 percent and Qualcomm lost over 10 billion dollars in market cap the moment the announcement went live and over 30 laptops from Dell HP Lenovo ASUS and Microsoft are coming this fall

But the craziest part Nvidia used to make the chip inside your computer They just became the computer

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06/03/2026

Man who built Roomba just revealed furry AI robot that lives with your family learns them over time

The man who built the Roomba just revealed a furry AI robot that lives with your family and learns them over time

Meet Colin Angle co-founder of iRobot who just launched Familiar Machines and Magic with a bear-like AI robot called a Familiar that has cameras microphones and a touch-sensitive coat running entirely on the device with no data sent to the cloud

And thats where home robotics just stopped being about tasks Angle said iRobot proved robots could deliver value at scale but they were still task machines and the Familiar is designed to do something completely different provide companionship and social engagement nudge you off your phone encourage you outside and develop a unique behavior profile based on how it interacts with your family over time

Heres where it gets insane Angle said building something like this was literally impossible six months ago and a commercial launch is planned for 2027 at a price comparable to owning a pet

But the craziest part Angle started iRobot to build something that could connect with people Thirty years later it is finally giving him what he actually wanted

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06/02/2026

Company started 8 hour livestream of robots sorting packages it kept running 200 hours straight

A company started an 8-hour livestream of robots sorting packages and it kept running for 200 hours straight with nobody touching it

Meet Figure AI the California startup whose three humanoid robots nicknamed Bob Jim and Rose sorted 249,560 packages over eight days powered entirely by their Helix AI system with no human controlling the task and without a reported hardware failure across the entire run

And thats where the warehouse just changed forever It started as a Man vs Machine challenge Figure 03 versus Aime a human intern sorting packages head to head and the human won narrowly by 192 packages and CEO Brett Adcock posted one response This is the last time a human will ever win The robots kept going after the challenge ended and when the 200-hour milestone hit the team celebrated with champagne behind the workstation while Rose continued sorting without stopping

Heres where it gets insane The robots rotated autonomously every three to four hours to recharge and stepped back into position without instruction and Figure AI has already finalized Figure 04 and some industry observers now believe fully autonomous warehouses may arrive sooner than expected

But the craziest part A human beat the robot on day one The robot has not stopped working since

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06/01/2026

Scientists just opened the black box inside every ultrasound machine and sonar system on earth and what they found contradicted everything engineers thought they knew

Meet Professor James LeBeau who led the team that directly mapped the 3D atomic structure of a material called relaxor ferroelectrics for the first time using a nanoscale electron beam that reconstructs atomic positions from overlapping data points

And thats where decades of engineering guesswork just ended Relaxor ferroelectrics power every ultrasound machine sonar system and high performance microphone on earth and for decades engineers have been designing them without ever seeing what was actually happening inside and every decision was based on simulation models that had never been validated against real atomic data LeBeau put it simply if the models are wrong and you have no way to check them you are building on a foundation of guesses His team just proved the models were wrong The polarized regions inside were significantly smaller and more tightly correlated than any simulation had predicted

Heres where it gets insane The US Army and Office of Naval Research funded this because their defense systems still rely on this material today and engineers can now feed real 3D atomic data into AI design tools to engineer sensors with properties that were previously impossible to predict

But the craziest part The material inside every medical ultrasound machine has been a black box since it was invented Scientists just opened it

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05/31/2026

Speeds helicopter stream over the open ocean in Antigua had zero lag and perfect 1080p quality The Starlink on board never turned on once

Meet the team behind Speeds streams who figured out that the most advanced live broadcast setup in the world runs on technology older than most of their audience

And thats where old frequency bands just beat new technology Everyone assumes 5G wins everywhere but 5G towers physically tilt downward to cover streets and the moment you go airborne you exit the coverage zone entirely Low frequency cellular on 850 megahertz behaves completely differently and over open water those radio waves travel for miles with a vertical ceiling up to 1,000 feet and Speeds pilot kept the helicopter between 100 and 200 feet hitting the exact sweet spot while Slips bonded six modems simultaneously combining weak signals into one stable feed with enough bandwidth for clean 1080p

Heres where it gets insane Slips travels with 20 bags of gear runs V mount batteries on the move and has built a system hitting 98 percent uptime streaming across multiple countries simultaneously which professional broadcast networks with bigger budgets have never pulled off at this scale

But the craziest part The infrastructure was already there Nobody built anything new Speeds team just understood the physics better than anyone else

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