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29 Mar 2026 8:21pm GMT

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29 Mar 2026 8:00pm GMT

Utility-scale solar construction... by robots! It's "one of the largest real-world demonstrations," notes Electrek, with 100 MW of capacity installed by the "Maximo" robots from AES, one of the world's top power companies. Maximo uses AI "to automate the heavy lifting of solar panels and accelerate solar installation," according to their web page, which shows a video of Maximo at work installing a vast field of solar panels in Kern County, California. With assistance from Nvidia, the Maximo team could "develop, test and refine robotic capabilities through physics-based simulation and AI driven modeling before deploying updates in the field," reports Electrek, and they're aiming for a full GW of solar generating capacity: After completing the first half of the Bellefield complex last summer, Maximo engineers went into a higher gear, with the latest version 3.0 robots consistently surpassing an installation rate of one module per minute, with construction crews installing as many as 24 solar panel modules per hour, per person. If that sounds fast, that's because it is. At full tilt, the latest Maximo robot-equipped crews have nearly doubled the output of traditional installation methods at similar solar locations throughout Southern California. "Reaching 100 MW is an important milestone for Maximo and for the role robotics can play in solar construction," explains Chris Shelton, president of Maximo. "It demonstrates that field robotics can move beyond experimentation and deliver consistent results at utility scale. As solar deployment continues to accelerate globally, technologies that improve installation speed, quality and reliability will become increasingly important...." Like just about every other business that demands a high degree of physical labor, the construction industry is facing huge labor shortages, making machines like Maximo that provide real efficiency gains welcome additions to the job site. "The combination of AI, vision, robotics and simulation driven engineering reduced development and validation timelines," the Maximo team said in a statement, "and increased confidence in field performance as the robotic fleet scaled."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

29 Mar 2026 7:48pm GMT

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29 Mar 2026 7:42pm GMT

"What happens when you can describe the social experience you want and have it built for you...?" asks Bluesky? "We've just started experimenting, but we're sharing it now because we want you to build alongside us." Called "Attie" - because it's built with Bluesky's decentralized publishing framework, AT Protocol (which is open source) - the new assistant turns natural language prompts into social feeds, without users having to know how to code. (It's part of Bluesky's mission to "develop and drive large-scale adoption of technologies for open and decentralized public conversation.") Engadget reports: On the Attie website, examples include prompts like, "Show me electronic music and experimental sound from people in my network" or "Builders working on agent infrastructure and open protocol design." "It feels more like having a conversation than configuring software," [writes Bluesky's former CEO/current chief innovation officer, Jay Graber, in a blog post]. "You describe the sort of posts you want to see, and the coding agent builds the feed you described." Graber added that Attie is a separate app from Bluesky and users don't have to use the new AI assistant if they don't want to. However, since Attie and Bluesky were built on the same framework, it could mean there will be some cross-app implementation between the two or any other app built on the AT Protocol. "Attie is open for beta signups today, and we'll be sharing what we learn along the way," Graber writes in the blog post. "To learn more about Attie, visit: Attie.AI. Come help us find out what this can be." The blog post warns that "Right now, AI is undermining human agency at the same time it's enhancing it," since "The proliferation of low-quality AI-generated content is making public social networks noisier and less trustworthy..." And in a world where "signal is getting harder to find... The major platforms aren't trying to fix this problem." They're using AI to increase the time users spend on-platform, to harvest training data, and to shape what users see and believe through systems they can't inspect and didn't choose. We think AI should serve people, not platforms... An open protocol puts this power directly in users' hands. You can use it to build your own feeds, create software that works the way you want it to, and find signal in the noise. We built the AT Protocol so anyone could build any app they imagine on top of it, but until recently "anyone" really meant "anyone who can code." Agentic coding tools change that. For the first time, an open protocol can be genuinely open to everyone... The Atmosphere [Bluesky's interoperable ecosystem] is an open data layer with a clearly defined schema for applications, which makes it uniquely well-suited for coding agents to build on... Bluesky will continue to evolve as a social app millions of people rely on. Attie will be where we experiment with agentic social. AI is an accelerant on whatever it's applied to. I want it to accelerate decentralizing social and putting power back in users' hands. But I don't think the most interesting things built on AT Protocol will come from us. They're going to come from everyone who picks up these tools and starts building.

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29 Mar 2026 6:34pm GMT

In many rural areas, America's online shoppers can wait half a week or more for deliveries. But Amazon started a $4 billion "rural delivery push" last year, reports Bloomberg, and has now cut delivery times to under 24 hours for 1 in 5 rural and small-town households, with 48-hour delivery to 62% of rural households. The payoff could be huge. Rural shoppers in the US collectively spend $1 trillion a year on clothing, electronics, household goods and other items, representing about 20% of retail purchases excluding cars and gasoline, according to Morgan Stanley. Amazon aims to recondition those shoppers to expect quick delivery, which would play to its strengths and make the company top-of-mind for online purchases... "Rural America is often overlooked," said Sky Canaves, an analyst at EMarketer Inc. who tracks online sales. "This is the opportunity Amazon is trying to seize because e-commerce growth is getting harder to come by...." Amazon's rural push will require a lot more rural business owners willing to make deliveries... Today, Amazon delivers more parcels overall than UPS and FedEx, which are both shedding workers and shrinking their delivery networks, including in rural areas. By picking up the slack, Amazon is expected to become the largest parcel carrier in the US - surpassing the postal service - in 2028, according to the shipping software company Pitney Bowes. Amazon currently delivers two of three orders itself. For rural shoppers, the most visible change will be fewer brown UPS trucks, fewer packages delivered by mail carriers and more small business owners pulling up in their minivans. Amazon's relationship with America's postal service "has become rocky following a dispute over contract terms," notes the Wall Street Journal. But they also share an interesting calculation by Marc Wulfraat, president of MWPVL International, a supply-chain consultancy monitoring the e-commerce company's logistics network. . At Amazon's current pace of constructing 40 to 50 new delivery hubs each year, he estimates Amazon will be able to ship packages to every single U.S. ZIP Code within four years.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

29 Mar 2026 4:34pm GMT

Incus 6.23 arrives as the final 6.x release before 7.0 LTS, bringing security fixes, new features, and improved VM and storage capabilities.

29 Mar 2026 2:32pm GMT

Why did a leading prediction market feel the need for an in-person bar in DC?

29 Mar 2026 11:35am GMT

Research proceeds on alternatives, but some doubt whether true lie detection is possible.

29 Mar 2026 11:01am GMT

Celluloid 0.30 video player fixes Blu-ray detection, improves file chooser behavior, and updates UI elements, including the shortcuts dialog.

29 Mar 2026 9:42am GMT

MX Linux opposes age verification rules, citing concerns about privacy and the impact on open source development.

28 Mar 2026 11:54pm GMT

Breathing capacity could have compensated for lower atmospheric oxygen.

28 Mar 2026 12:30pm GMT