AWS has a long tradition of releasing EC2 instance families that sound like they were named by a committee with a Scrabble addiction. But every now and then, the letters actually signal something meaningful: a shift in what the cloud is optimizing for. This week’s example is the new Amazon EC2 X8i family, now generally…
OpenFOAM on AWS Without the Usual HPC Drama: A Deep Dive into Yobitel’s Enterprise AMIs
Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) has a weird superpower: it can turn an innocuous-looking spreadsheet of boundary conditions into a week-long argument about turbulence models, mesh quality, and whose workstation is “allowed” to run overnight. OpenFOAM, the open-source CFD workhorse, has long been the tool of choice for teams that want deep control, automation, and no…
Amazon EC2 X8i Is Here: AWS’s 6 TB Memory Monsters, Custom Xeon 6 Silicon, and What It Means for SAP HANA and Big Databases
AWS just did what AWS does best: quietly turn a very specific enterprise pain point into a new instance family, then casually drop performance numbers that make your current fleet feel like it’s running on politely overclocked calculators. On January 15, 2026, Amazon Web Services announced the general availability of Amazon EC2 X8i, a new…
Retailers Bring Conversational AI and Analytics Closer to the User: Why “Dialogue, Not Dashboards” Is the New Retail Operating System
Retail has always loved a good dashboard. It’s comforting: neat charts, tidy KPIs, and enough color gradients to make a PowerPoint feel like a work of art. But dashboards also come with an inconvenient truth: they’re often where insights go to… wait. Wait for a specialist. Wait for the next refresh. Wait for someone to…
Cutting Through the AI Coding Hype (Without Cutting Corners): What Developers and Biotech Teams Should Actually Watch in 2026
AI coding is now everywhere. If you can open an IDE, you can probably also open a dropdown full of copilots, agents, “plan modes,” and chat panes that promise to turn your backlog into a vaguely working demo before lunch. And yet, for all the hype, a stubborn reality remains: software engineering is still an…
NeurIPS 2025’s uncomfortable RL lesson: depth beats “more data” (plus gated attention, diffusion anti-memorization, and the rise of the AI hivemind)
NeurIPS papers have a funny habit: they don’t just propose a new tweak, they quietly invalidate your last six months of engineering decisions. And while the 2025 conference (held in early December 2025 in San Diego) produced its usual flood of cleverness, a handful of works did something more interesting: they attacked the comfortable assumptions…
Who Gets to Inherit the Stars? Space Ethics, Space Labor, and the New Lunar Land Rush
On January 17, 2026, TechCrunch editor-in-chief Connie Loizos published a deceptively simple question with a very large blast radius: who gets to inherit the stars? citeturn1view0 Loizos’s piece isn’t about propulsion breakthroughs or shiny renders of lunar condos with tasteful recessed lighting. It’s about the topics that make the space business crowd shift in their…
Cutting Through AI Coding Hype (Without Cutting Yourself) — and the Biotech Trends Worth Watching in 2026
On January 16, 2026, MIT Technology Review published an edition of its weekday newsletter The Download titled “The Download: cut through AI coding hype, and biotech trends to watch”, credited to Rhiannon Williams. The piece is a compact two-for-one: a reality check on AI coding’s claims of effortless productivity, and a quick scan of biotech…
Infrastructure for AI Is Finally Getting a Standard: What Kubernetes AI Conformance Means (and Why You Should Care)
AI infrastructure has spent the last couple of years doing its best impression of a garage-band soundcheck: loud, experimental, and held together by duct tape. Lots of innovation, sure—but also lots of “works on my cluster” energy. That’s why a new move from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is quietly a big deal: the…
Retailers Bring Conversational AI and Analytics Closer to the User: Why “Chat With Your Data” Is Suddenly Retail’s Most Profitable Interface
Retail has a long-standing love affair with dashboards. Beautiful, colorful dashboards. Dashboards with just enough filters to make you feel powerful and just enough dropdown menus to make you question your career choices. But as anyone who has tried to make a pricing or assortment call at 5:47 p.m. on a Friday can tell you:…