Virginia doesn’t allow autonomous vehicles yet, but Wired reports the company told state officials in a meeting this week its vehicles are in the state, mapping Arlington and Alexandria with their sensors. Updated laws governing self-driving vehicles are still under discussion, but it’s preparing to bring its vehicles one step closer to Washington, D.C., despite public skepticism and some recent issues.
Richard Lawler

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Variety reports on why early uploads of Stephen Colbert’s post-The Late Show endeavor were pulled, citing copyright complaints from Paramount/CBS. A statement from the company says it was because it financed and produced the episode with Colbert, which was eventually published on his YouTube channel, but it has now “decided to waive further enforcement of this standard industry practice until additional review.”
The latest update on an overheating tank filled with an estimated 7,000 gallons of methyl methacrylate is that firefighters were still trying to determine if some pressure had been released, after discovering a crack that could lessen the risk of a BLEVE, or Boiling Liquid Expanding Vapor Explosion.
ABC 7 reports that more than 50,000 people in Orange County have had to leave their homes since the leak was discovered at the GKN Aerospace facility on Thursday.
Update (11:48AM ET): The Orange County Fire Authority says that it now believes the threat of a BLEVE is “off the table,” with pressure and temperature in the tank dropping.
After a scrubbed launch on Thursday, SpaceX’s first V3 Starship left Pad 2 at Starbase on Friday evening.
SpaceX is now preparing to go public, and a lot of its big promises hinge on the development of vehicles like the next-generation Starship and Super Heavy vehicle launched today. The booster will not attempt a return this time, while the Flight 12 Starship is attempting to deploy 20 Starlink simulators and two “modified” Starlink satellites.
The Director of National Intelligence confirmed her resignation on X Friday afternoon, saying, “My husband, Abraham, has recently been diagnosed with an extremely rare form of bone cancer.” Trump announced Aaron Lukas will take over as Acting Director.
Gabbard, a former US Representative who reversed her previous stand against warrantless wiretapping before taking the post, was reportedly “largely sidelined” from national security operations in Venezuela and Iran, while Reuters reports a source claiming the White House forced her to resign.
After being pushed back an hour, we were a few minutes away from the scheduled 7:30PM ET opening of a 90-minute window for the 12th Starship flight test, before it was scrubbed about ten minutes later, saying they will try again tomorrow.
This is the first test flight since SpaceX and its most significant risk factor filed for a massive IPO yesterday, the first attempt for new “next generation Starship and Super Heavy vehicles,” and the first launch scheduled from a new Pad 2 at the Starbase in Boca Chica, TX.
Apparently, that SpaceX $15 billion per year megadeal isn’t even enough capacity for Claude, as The Information reports Anthropic is in early talks to rent Azure servers with Microsoft’s chips, and that “Anthropic has been steadily increasing its Azure usage.”
Like OpenAI, Microsoft’s arrangement with Anthropic runs hot and cold, but its Maia 200 chips are designed to help run existing models like Claude, even if they aren’t as fast at helping to train new ones.
[The Information]
A security bulletin from Nvidia breaks down new vulnerabilities found in some of its GPU drivers for Windows and Linux and vGPU software. As Digital Foundry and Club386 point out, they affect drivers prior to 596.36 on the current branch, so if you’re running the most recently released update (596.49, which was released on May 12th), you don’t have anything to do.
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak was a commencement speaker for Grand Valley State University a few weeks ago, and managed to mention AI without being booed or completely ruining the event.
Despite its claim of explaining how AI tech threatens to impose “potentially catastrophic robotic certainty” on the concept of the truth, the NYT points out that this book contains multiple quotes made up by AI.
Author Steven Rosenbaum (“The Truth Whisperer”) says he takes “full responsibility” after using Claude and ChatGPT for research, writing, and editing, but claims: “These AI errors do not, in fact, diminish the larger questions that the book raises.”
[New York Times]

