Boom FlyBy: “AI needs More Power than the Grid can Deliver. Supersonic Tech can Fix That”

I was reading post after post about the power crisis hitting AI data centers—GPU racks sitting idle, waiting not on chips, but on electricity. I texted with Sam Altman—who confirmed power was indeed a major constraint. I pinged our engineering team—and found that they already had the outline of a plan to build a power turbine based on our Symphony supersonic engine.

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Today, we’re announcing Superpower, our new 42‑megawatt natural gas turbine, along with a $300M funding round and Crusoe as our launch customer. And most importantly: this marks a turning point. Boom is now on a self-funded path to both Superpower and the Overture supersonic airliner.

Blake Scholl, Founder & CEO, Boom Supersonic

Speaking of companies sidestepping their founding mission and jumping into short-term diversions to make a quick buck, here is the supposed trailblazer in supersonic aviation pivoting to energy generation for AI data centers. The tone of the announcement feels frantic, almost desperate for an ounce of relevance in a time when almost every company under the sun is scrambling to fit AI into their strategy – or at least their investor reports. The bit about the engineering team already having plans for a power turbine strikes me as quite odd as well: so, you’re telling me as a CEO you had no idea what your main engineers were working on!? And they were in fact not working on the airplane that should be your core product!?

The New Yorker: “The Dire Wolf is Back”

Science journalists were more cautious. They took issue with the fact that Colossal had used analogous genes from mice, not woolly-mammoth DNA, to achieve the effect of long, thick hair. A professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Buffalo did tell the Associated Press that the work was technologically pretty cool. But Nature noted that a Maine research facility has been offering its own long-haired mouse strain, named Wooly, for sale to scientists for the past twenty years.

Lamm was irritated when I mentioned the response to him. We are the most advanced multicellular-synthetic-biology company on the planet, he told me. The science behind the woolly mouse had been extraordinary, he reiterated—researchers had successfully made multiple gene edits on a living organism at the same time, a precursor to the quadruple-axel gene editing used in re-creating the dire wolf. It was the most unique germ-line edit in any animal to date, he said.

I asked Lamm if perhaps some overpromising by the Colossal brand had tamped down the applause. The word “de-extinction” appears nearly five hundred times on the company’s website; ordinary people could be excused for thinking that the word referred to creating an exact genetic replica of a once alive animal. Lamm responded, I was warned when I started this business that some of the scientific community will be, if we are successful, jealous and somewhat frustrated. He added, You would think spending half a billion on deëxtinction and conservation would get them excited.

D. T. Max

I rolled my eyes pretty hard when first reading the headlines about this company bringing back an extinct canine species. It was fairly obvious this was nowhere close to the Jurassic Park-like vision of recovering ancient DNA and recreating a live animal based on this genetic blueprint. Instead, the company spliced in a limited set of genes using CRISPR to mimic the visual appearance of a dire wolf and spun this into a massively overblown narrative. They essentially created a new wolf breed and sold it to the public as reviving an entire species…

Windows Central: “Mozilla says Firefox will evolve into an AI browser, and nobody is happy about it”

Every product we build must give people agency in how it works. Privacy, data use, and AI must be clear and understandable, says Enzor-Demeo. Controls must be simple. AI should always be a choice — something people can easily turn off … Firefox will grow from a browser into a broader ecosystem of trusted software. Firefox will remain our anchor. It will evolve into a modern AI browser and support a portfolio of new and trusted software additions.

Even with the confirmation that AI features will be optional, the internet is not pleased. Users online have expressed their disappointment in Mozilla focusing on AI features and capabilities. One post on X says This is a good example of how management doesn’t understand its own user base, which has amassed over 380K views so far.

Another post says I’ve never seen a company so astoundingly out of touch with the people who want to use its software, highlighting how a lot of people choose to use Firefox to get away from the AI obsession that other browsers such as Edge, Chrome, Opera, and Brave have endured over the last year.

Zac Bowden

I’ve been meaning to harp on Mozilla’s penchant for chasing the hype cycle of the broader tech landscape for the past decade or so, never quite managing to deliver a compelling addition to Firefox. Browsing through my posts, I was amused to rediscover the same plans for AI in Firefox from March 2024 – evidently nothing has moved forward yet, another sign of the terrible management at Mozilla. The potential silver lining I see here is that usually Mozilla joins the hype train late in the cycle when much of the enthusiasm has already drained away and people are looking for the next shiny mirage to sell to naive investors.

Ars Technica: “The EU made Apple adopt new Wi-Fi standards, and now Android can support AirDrop”

Google has updated Android’s Quick Share feature to support Apple’s AirDrop, which allows users of Apple devices to share files directly using a local peer-to-peer Wi-Fi connection. Apple devices with AirDrop enabled and set to “everyone for 10 minutes” mode will show up in the Quick Share device list just like another Android phone would, and Android devices that support this new Quick Share version will also show up in the AirDrop menu.

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But earlier this year, the EU adopted new specification decisions that required Apple to adopt new interoperable wireless standards, starting in this year’s iOS 26 release. If you don’t want to wade through the regulatory documents, this post from cloud services company Ditto is a useful timeline of events written in plainer language.

The rulings required Apple to add support for the Wi-Fi Alliance’s Wi-Fi Aware standard instead of AWDL—and in fact required Apple to deprecate AWDL and to help add its features to Wi-Fi Aware so that any device could benefit from them. This wasn’t quite the imposition it sounded like; Wi-Fi Aware was developed with Apple’s help, based on the work Apple had already done on AWDL. But it meant that Apple could no longer keep other companies out of AirDrop by using a functionally similar but private communication protocol instead of the standardized version.

Andrew Cunningham

I didn’t pay much attention to the initial reports about this – AirDrop always struck me as the type of feature Apple fanboys incessantly fawn about while everyone else shrugs off because there are many alternatives to share files between people that aren’t confined to Apple devices – but this angle of reporting is certainly intriguing. This would not be the first time Apple was compelled by regulation to relax its tight control on its devices and users, the most famous being the forced adoption of USB-C on iPhones.

Windows Latest: “Meta just killed native WhatsApp on Windows 11, now it opens WebView, uses 1GB RAM all the time”

WhatsApp on Windows 11 has just got a ‘major’ upgrade, and you’re probably going to hate it because it simply loads web.whatsapp.com in a WebView2 container. This means WhatsApp on Windows 11 is cooked, and it’s back to being absolute garbage in terms of performance.

WhatsApp is one of those Windows apps that went from being a web wrapper to a native app and then back to the web again after all these years of investment.

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An app can use a lot of memory, and it does not necessarily mean it’s a performance nightmare, but the issue with the new WhatsApp is that it feels sluggish. You’re going to notice sluggish performance, long loading time, and other performance issues when browsing different conversations.

We also noticed that it does not work well with Windows notifications. It also struggles with Windows 11’s Do Not Disturb mode or Active Hours. And there are delayed notifications problems as well.

Mayank Parmar

While reading about this update I initially doubted it was as bad as people feared, since people do tend to exaggerate things online for dramatic purposes. But after the update reached one of my devices, I get what everyone was complaining about, and I feel compelled to join in!

Engadget: “Everything Apple revealed at the iPhone 17 launch event”

As expected, Apple announced a new member of the iPhone family during the event. The iPhone Air is the thinnest iPhone yet, measuring just 5.6mm thick, and made of spacecraft-grade titanium. Ceramic Shield 2 surrounds the iPhone Air on both sides, which helps make it more durable than any previous iPhone. The Air’s always-on screen measures 6.5-inches, and it supports ProMotion and up to 3,000 nits of brightness.

Valentina Palladino

Not sure how you can get away with claiming this as the thinnest iPhone yet when its upper quarter is thicker than many past iPhones. No longer the inconspicuous camera bump from 10 years ago, this is a full-blown bulge, with a camera bump on top.

Paul Kedrosky: “Honey, AI Capex Keeps Eating… Everything”

There is so much that is unprecedented about the current AI capital expenditure wave that I'm going to break from my usual format and collate it, with some (mostly amazed) analysis. Consider this an update to my two recent pieces on this topic, here and here.

By way of preamble, the overarching point is that AI spending is eating everything, like a golden retriever left unsupervised in a room full of food bowls. You can shout LEAVE IT! all you want, and the food will still be gone before you can get the door open.

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Why did the WSJ think the report so strange? Because imports collapsed (tariffs), exports picked up (tariffs), some capital spending went nowhere (rates smashed real estate), and other capital spending jumped (IT). It was a mess of conflicting forces that somehow worked out, like a tornado passing over a junk yard and whirling out a reasonable facsimile of the Kohinoor diamond. How did that happen?

I'm going to focus on one weird detail of the report, but ignore tariffs, which had a huge impact, but about which I wrote at length earlier this week. The key data point is IT spending, as the following table shows.

Paul Kedrosky

The topic of capital expenditure on AI infrastructure has emerged over the past month largely as a warning signal. In an earlier article, Paul Kedrosky notes that current AI datacenter spending is already larger than peak telecom spending (as a percentage of GDP) during the dot-com era, essentially acting as a massive private sector stimulus program, masking weaker sectors of the US economy (flat consumption, weak job growth, declining housebuilding). Other sources have pointed out that AI capex (information processing equipment plus software) has added more to GDP growth than consumers’ spending over the first two quarters of 2025. And Nvidia, arguably the largest beneficiary of this massive spending, now has the biggest weight in the S&P 500 of any individual stock since 1981 and the highest P/E as the index’s top stock since Microsoft in 1999.