Startups & Ventures

📊 Boston Dynamics teaches Atlas football

Boston Dynamics launched School of Football for the 2026 World Cup, training Atlas to play football fully, including kicking and goal celebrations.

Atlas has mastered the rabona kick, demonstrating advanced ball control.

📊@tech

🤖 OpenAI Scientist Sees AI Boosting Math Skills

Leading OpenAI researcher Noam Brown believes AI can improve human mathematical abilities. He compared this to how AlphaGo changed Go players' skills after its success.

AlphaGo introduced new tactics that top players adopted, altering their play styles. Brown expects AI to open new paths in math that humans will reuse in proofs, as already seen.

📊@tech

🤖 Anthropic updates Claude with Opus 4.8

The new model scored 69.2% on SWE Pro. Anthropic says it performs better on long coding tasks, catches and fixes its own mistakes 4x more often, and follows instructions more reliably.

Claude Code also got a new feature called dynamic workflows. The agent can now handle tasks that take days by launching and coordinating hundreds of subagents, adjusting plans, and reviewing outputs. Anthropic says this system was used during Bun’s migration from Zig to Rust.

Claude.ai and Cowork now let users control reasoning effort. Higher effort gives deeper reasoning, lower effort gives faster replies.

Fast mode for Opus 4.8 is also 3x cheaper, while overall pricing stays the same.

📊@tech

🔍 Google revamps Colab with AI agent

Google updated Colab with a Gemini-based AI agent integrated directly into the editor. The agent appears in a toolbar call line and a side window, letting users run and discuss entire pipelines.

The agent accesses the full notebook context to create and run cells, analyze files, build charts, and train models autonomously. It also offers inline error fix suggestions as diffs inside cells.

📊@tech

🤖 Anthropic launches security plugin for Claude Code

Anthropic released a new plugin for Claude Code that checks code for vulnerabilities during editing. It triggers on file writes and edits to catch issues before pull requests, reducing problems found at final review by up to 40%.

The plugin detects obvious security flaws and flags unsafe coding patterns. It also prevents agents from modifying sensitive files. The tool is free and available to all users.

📊@tech

🖥 Microsoft open-sources SkillOpt for agent skill tuning

Microsoft released SkillOpt, a framework that improves agent abilities by editing markdown skill files in the background. It runs a learning loop in text space, logging agent actions and suggesting small skill file updates after verification on a test set.

SkillOpt works by iterating on files, applying minor changes that pass safety rules and verification before adoption. This prevents large accidental regressions while boosting performance.

The framework shows consistent gains across models and benchmarks. On GPT-5.5, Codex and Claude Code saw average improvements of +21.8 and +18.6 respectively. The project includes code, overview, and usage instructions.

📊@tech

🧱 LEGO WALL-E Robot with Taser

YouTuber Crostplay2 spent 6 months converting a LEGO WALL-E set into a robot with motors, movie sounds, LEDs, a gyroscope, and a 2,000-volt taser module.

It’s controlled via a PlayStation 4 controller over Bluetooth using an ESP32 microcontroller and the Bluepad32 library.

WALL-E moves on two motors with tank controls. Custom 3D-printed mounts and gears replace LEGO parts to handle the motors. The head mimics controller tilt with the gyroscope.

The taser module is relay-controlled and used briefly to ignite objects, adding a surprising feature to the build.

📊@tech

🏎 Ferrari unveils its first electric car with ex-Apple designer Jony Ive

Ferrari officially introduced Luce, its first fully electric vehicle, designed together with LoveFrom, the studio of former Apple design chief Jony Ive.

The car is a major shift for Ferrari. Luce is the brand’s first 5-seat model, with automatic rear suicide doors and enough back-seat space for passengers over 190 cm tall. MKBHD called it the best rear row Ferrari has ever made.

Luce uses 4 electric motors with one motor per wheel and a 120+ kWh battery. The top Performance mode delivers 725 kW and 0–100 km/h in 2.5 seconds.

But most attention went to the interior. Ferrari removed nearly all visible plastic. Controls are made from metal, leather, and glass. Even the key is a metal rectangle that magnetically docks into the dashboard to start the car.

The starting price is around $640,000.

The reactions online are split between “future classic” and “what happened to Ferrari.”

📊@tech

⏰ Clock Shows Time with 60 Water Pumps

A maker called Strange Inventions built a clock that shows time using colored water in glass bottles. Each digit uses a 15-segment display made of small glass vials filled or emptied by pumps.

The clock has 60 pumps controlling the water flow to light or darken each segment. Four digits form the time display by combining these segments.

This design has no practical use. It needs constant water maintenance, the pumps add complexity, and it stops working if power goes out.

📊@tech