Future Technology[Daily Briefing] Robotaxi permit split 🚗, Webb Lion Nebula ðŸ”, Zimbra deadline 🔓
Nevada just showed you who is actually ready to run robotaxis
Four companies are building self-driving cars and they disagree about almost everything: which sensors to trust, what the vehicle should look like, and whether a steering wheel needs to exist at all. Nevada's permit numbers finally put rough figures against the argument.
Tesla holds roughly 5,000 permitted vehicles in the state, Waymo about 1,000, Zoox about 100. Tesla is betting on cameras and neural networks alone. Waymo and Zoox both carry lidar. Zoox has gone furthest on the hardware question, winning US approval for a purpose-built vehicle with no steering wheel in it.
Permit counts are not deployment counts, and it is worth keeping those apart. A permit means a regulator will let you operate. It says nothing about how many cars are actually running tonight, or how far they travel before a human has to step in. Waymo's expansion into Ojai and Zoox's vehicle approval are the more useful signals in that respect.
Why it matters: the sensor argument is going to be settled by cost, not by engineering taste. Whoever is right ends up with a fleet that is cheap to build and cheap to scale. Whoever is wrong spends the next decade retrofitting.
Quick hits
- Alibaba built an AI that drives real screens. Qwen-UI-Agent claims 82.1 percent on the MobileWorld benchmark, a figure Alibaba reports itself. Read more
- Webb turned on the Lion Nebula. NGC 2392 is a dying star shedding its outer shells, and this is the sharpest view we have of it. Read more
- The Zimbra deadline was today. CVE-2026-73570 is under active exploitation and the federal patch window closed on 24 August. Read more
- Windows on Arm finally goes cheap. Snapdragon C lands in the Acer Aspire Go 15 and pushes Arm laptops into the budget aisle. Read more
- Physicists watched a crystal made of electrons move. A Wigner crystal, predicted in 1934, finally caught in motion. Read more
Tool of the day
Celestron Cometron 7x50 binoculars. Honest take: these will not show you the Lion Nebula, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something. What they will show you is the Moon's terminator in real detail, the four big moons of Jupiter, and a lot more of the Milky Way than your eyes manage alone. There is a deep partial lunar eclipse on the night of 27 August, which is exactly the sort of thing they are good for. Cheap, light, and hard to get wrong.
Celestron Cometron 7x50 on Amazon
One question before you go: cameras only, or lidar? Which sensor bet do you think is going to look obvious in five years? Hit reply and tell me, I read every one.
Nath, Future Technology
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