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The robot butler dream doesn’t have legs

LG’s CLOiD is a robot housekeeper on wheels, not legs. The company says it’s developing a robot foundation model by training hundreds of CLOiDs in home environments. | Image: LG The idea of humanoid robots running our homes has been the stuff of science fiction for years. But unlike hoverboards and self-tying sneakers, a robot housekeeper has never felt close to rolling into our homes. Until now. This has been the year of the humanoid robot. At CES, there were dozens of human-shaped bots on the show floor, a handful designed for homes. US-based robotics company 1X has already put its $20,000 Neo robot into homes to do housework (with a lot of remote assistance); and this week at the IFA tech show in Berlin, around half a dozen humanoids, mostly from China, will take to a catwalk to show off the alarming (?) accele … Read the full story at The Verge.

Is this the future of America?

In 2007, the US was on the cusp of an economic recession, and Buddy Rizer was tasked with finding Loudoun County, Virginia, a new way to make money. Rizer’s earlier career as a radio DJ didn’t exactly make him an obvious candidate to find a solution, but he was looking for what he called a “real job” and stumbled into a role at Loudoun’s economic development authority. This new gig came with urgency thanks to the bursting of the housing bubble: More than 80 percent of the county’s revenue came from residential real estate. The goal, at the time, was to raise the commercial tax base from about 19 percent of revenue to something like 23 percent, Rizer recalls. Today, just over half of the county’s tax revenue comes from commercial sources. To jumpstart that turnaround, Rizer turned to the carcasses of another recent bubble burst — those of the dot-com era. The county had been home to the headquarters of AOL, which by 2000 was the US’s largest internet provider. Combined with its proximit

My AI Draft Passed Every Check. I Deleted It Anyway

The score was 50 out of 50. I still would not read the article, so I stopped polishing and found the real story.Continue reading on Medium »

AI Roadmap for Beginners: A Practical Step-by-Step Path to an AI Career

When people tell me they want to start a career in AI, one of the first questions they usually ask is:Continue reading on Medium »

Acer’s new MacBook Air rival is nearly a pound lighter than Apple’s laptop

Acer calls the Swift Blade 14’s colors marshmallow blue and marshamallow white. Now I want sweets. | Image: Acer Acer is announcing a new laptop poised to rival the MacBook Air's thinness and lightness - and in the process, it cops another laptop's name. The Acer Swift Blade 14 (not to be confused with the Razer Blade 14) is a productivity machine weighing just 1.76 pounds / 799g and measuring as little as 0.51 inches / 12.95mm thin. That's around 1.7mm thicker than Apple's svelte 13-inch MacBook Air, but Acer's Blade is nearly a pound lighter. Its featherweight stature is partly due to Acer using carbon fiber in the laptop's top lid and bottom plate. Inside the Swift Blade will be a range of Intel Wildcat Lake processors, from the lowly five-core Co … Read the full story at The Verge.

Acer’s new concept hardware is a gaming handheld with a keyboard

Acer has invented… the laptop. For the last few years, PC gamers on the go have had a choice: Buy a gaming laptop, or pick up one of the many Steam Deck-inspired handhelds that are a fraction of the size but a lot less versatile. Acer's latest concept device, Project DualPlay Mini, is an attempt to upend that dichotomy by sticking a keyboard in a handheld. The DualPlay Mini is first and foremost a Windows gaming handheld, cut from the same cloth as Acer's existing Predator Atlas 8 (which is being joined this week by a new 7-inch model). In its default configuration, the handheld's screen is flanked by analog sticks, a D-pad, and Xbox-style ABXY face buttons, plus two tri … Read the full story at The Verge.

Robotics

Surviving the paper deluge: Notes from an ICRA panel on publishing, LLMs, and the future of peer review

A recent ICRA panel titled “Surviving the Paper Deluge” brought together leading robotics researchers who have grappled with the overwhelming number of robotics papers being published today. The discussion ranged from hard numbers on publication growth, through the promises and risks of large language models (LLMs), to radical proposals for reshaping peer review as we [ ]

RoboHub·Sep 2, 2026

Human-in-the-Loop Isn’t a Nice-to-Have Anymore

A candidate misses an AI-generated threshold by two points. The system rejects them instantly. No recruiter sees the response, questions Continue reading on Medium »

India Wants a $150 Billion Chip Market. Japan May Be the Industrial Partner That Makes It Real

A Tokyo roundtable this week exposed a powerful division of labor: India brings scale, engineers and data-center demand; Japan brings the Continue reading on Medium »

Dell’s newest laptop sounds a lot like a MacBook Neo

That’s a bold color, especially for a Dell. | Image: Dell Dell's new Dell 14S laptop sounds a lot like a MacBook Neo: it comes in four colors, is aimed at students, and it starts with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. Announced at IFA 2026, the 14S is meant to sit below the recently launched XPS 13 and offer another affordable laptop option as most other models continue to climb in price. The 14S will come in linen (beige), dusty rose (pink), washed denim (blue), and velvet green (yep, that's green). That's much more colorful than the XPS 13, and like its fancier brethren, the 14S can be configured with 16GB of RAM and a 512GB or 1TB SSD. The Dell 14S isn't as thin or as light as the XPS 13, but in … Read the full story at The Verge.