James Altucher:

Chinese Supercomputer Leapfrogs Best U.S. Machines To Be Ranked World’s Fastest

A supercomputer in China now outranks its U.S. counterparts as the world’s most powerful. It is the first time since 2017 that a Chinese computer has topped a list sometimes viewed as a measure of a nation’s technological prowess.

The LineShine computer in Shenzhen displaced top-ranked U.S. computer El Capitan in the Top500 rankings released on Tuesday. It was LineShine’s debut on the list.

China’s LineShine differs from other high-performance computers in that it runs entirely on conventional computer chips (CPUs), instead of the graphics processors (GPUs), commonly used for AI. It requires about 42.2 megawatts of electricity to operate, according to the list.

Scientists involved in the Top500 project said LineShine at China’s National Supercomputing Center achieved 2.198 exaflops, meaning it can perform more than 2 quintillion calculations per second.

El Capitan, at the U.S. government’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, now ranks second, ahead of two other U.S. supercomputers at national laboratories in Tennessee and Illinois. Dropping to fifth place is the Jupiter supercomputer in Germany. The five are the only publicly verified exascale computers in the world.

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Davis Wilson:

Slate Auto’s Radically Simple Electric Truck Starts at $24,950

Slate Auto, the EV startup backed by billionaire Jeff Bezos, has finally revealed the starting price of its electric truck: $24,950.

That’s excluding taxes, title, license, registration, governmental fees, destination charges, documentation fees, and any optional equipment, according to the company. Slate started taking preorders for the truck on Wednesday.

Crucially, Slate also said that it has boosted the estimated range of its base model from 150 miles to around 205 miles – although that comes at the cost of abandoning plans for a larger, 240 mile battery pack.

The truck largely comes bare, though it’s customizable. It has hand-crank windows, lacks an infotainment system, and all orders start with the same gray composite material, with no paint options, as Slate plans to let buyers order customizable wraps for the vehicle.

The aggressive pricing – half the average cost of a new car in the United States – puts Slate in position to capture a share of the lowest end of the new car market, which has few gas and fewer electric options these days. The Chevrolet Bolt is one of Slate’s closest EV competitors on price, starting at around $29,000, while the Nissan Leaf starts at around $32,000.

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Ray Blanco:

SpaceX Launches Its 1st ‘Starfall’ Reentry Capsule in Early Morning Falcon 9 Liftoff

SpaceX's newest spaceflight tech, the Starfall capsule, took to the skies on its debut mission yesterday (June 23). The mission lifted off from Space Launch Complex-40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 6:52 a.m. EDT.

Starfall is a cargo transportation vehicle designed to carry payloads to low Earth orbit (LEO) and beyond, aboard SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, and also return materials safely back to Earth.

The platform isn't designed to fly human passengers; it's geared toward the support of research or other payloads that require retrieval after a stint in space, such as pharmaceuticals and other products of orbital manufacturing.

The concept has already been put into practice by Varda Space, which has landed five of its 3-foot-wide, roughly 650-pound conical "W-series" capsules to date, one of which returned a payload for the U.S. Air Force after more than eight weeks on orbit. However, Starfall is more than three times as large, measuring 10 feet across and 2.5 feet tall. The SpaceX vehicle can carry up to 2,200 pounds of payload.

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