Overview
Today’s feed splits in two: a noisy debate about AI compute in orbit versus on Earth, and a steady run of practical wins for builders. GitHub previews stacked diffs, Claude Code gets smarter with rewinds, and xAI dangles credits to nudge more Grok apps. Around that, NASA talks savings for Moon goals, design teams show polish, gaming leans into AI worlds, and Grok entries remind everyone that the web still has heart.
The big picture
Space compute and rivalry take centre stage.
Musk’s hardware warning and bold timelines
Elon Musk’s interview is still echoing, from warnings about a hard lesson in hardware to punchy timelines on space-based compute, satellite data centres, and humanoid robots. The thread rounds up the claims and context in one place.
Altman pushes back on orbital data centres
OpenAI’s Sam Altman says orbital data centres will not add meaningful compute for the company within five years, wishing Musk luck. The clip sits squarely against recent talk of large satellite constellations for AI workloads.
The counter-take on Altman’s call
Nic Cruz Patane shares the same Altman quote and bets it will not age well, pointing to Musk’s satellite plans and the SpaceX-xAI tie-up as a possible route to cheaper compute.
Developer tooling and incentives kept moving.
Stacked diffs are coming to GitHub
Jared Palmer shows GitHub’s take on stacked diffs, letting teams build and review dependent PRs as tidy layers. The early UI covers creating stacks, jumping between layers, and merging a stack or single slice.
Claude Code now summarises after /rewind
Rewind a coding session, get a crisp recap of what you rolled back, then try a new path without losing the thread. It is a small thing that saves re-explaining context when you branch your approach.
xAI dangles Grok credits for X app builders
Spend on X API credits, get up to 20% back as xAI credits for Grok, tied to total spend. It lands alongside a pay-per-use API model aimed at indie builders who want to scale without subscriptions.
Anthropic’s virtual hackathon for Opus 4.6
A week of building with Claude Code and the Opus 4.6 model, judged by Anthropic engineers, with $100K in API credits for winners and a showcase slot in San Francisco.
Design and type took a bow.
Vercel introduces Geist Pixel
A bitmap-inspired extension to the Geist family lands with five variants, 480 glyphs across 32 languages, and careful pixel grids for crisp UI text on dashboards, banners, and badges. It aligns with Geist Sans and Mono so you can mix families without fuss.
Google shares Gemini’s visual design playbook
Google’s guidelines lean into ethereal gradients, sparkle cues, and fluid motion to signal intelligence and state. The video shows smooth transitions from abstract auras to voice queries in-app.
Adoption and stories stayed front and centre.
OpenAI spotlights 300 million weekly learners
OpenAI says hundreds of millions use ChatGPT each week to learn how to do things, with vignettes from farms, family shops, and metalwork. It arrives as the product line changes, keeping focus on everyday wins.
a16z tells the ElevenLabs growth story
An 11-minute short tracks ElevenLabs from a 2022 weekend project to $330M ARR by late 2025, weaving founder clips, clients, and the latest funding round into a neat arc.
Space policy and the noise around it.
NASA chief eyes $1B in yearly savings for Moon and science
New administrator Jared Isaacman outlines a push to rebuild core engineering skills, cut overhead, and redirect funds toward a return to the Moon and key research. The video leans on centre visits, town halls, and cost charts.
A conspiratorial reply hijacks a NASA update
A heated reply to a routine NASA Minute accuses the agency of murder tied to UFO claims. Official records list an accidental death, and no peer-reviewed evidence backs the allegation, yet the clip gained traction.
Culture, play, and products rounded things out.
Pax Historia brings alt-history sandboxes with AI agents
Players spin up worlds and see what might have happened if Rome never fell or the USSR endured, with agents that react to your choices in real time. Early stats look punchy, and debates over who did it first have already begun.
CyberTent Mode makes a flat bed anywhere
Cybertruck’s camping mode auto-levels suspension on rough ground so you can sleep flat in the CyberTent. A short video shows setup against mountain backdrops in under a minute.
“Make America Grok Again” leans into satire
An Imagine 1.0 entry paints a 2029 where Grok ends wars, puts McDonald’s on Mars, and turns partisan mascots into friends. It rides the Super Bowl wave with cheeky optimism.
“For Winston” turns grief into a short
A tender Grok Imagine film about a beloved Golden Retriever who died of cancer, posted without concern for contest rules. The replies turned into a support thread for people processing loss.
Mamdani’s faith-rooted case for welcoming migrants
New York Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani quotes the Hijrah and Quran 16:41 to argue for hospitality to strangers, while the poster adds concerns about Western identity. The replies split along familiar lines.
Musk revisits his critique of Bill Gates
A resurfaced clip has Musk saying Gates is not strong in the sciences, citing past disagreements on long-range electric trucks. It rekindles an old rift over engineering bets.
Why it matters
The space compute debate is not just theatre, it is a proxy for who sets the cost curve for the next wave of AI. If launch costs keep falling and solar in orbit multiplies output per panel, xAI plus SpaceX could try to redraw the map. If not, terrestrial data centres win on pragmatism and supply chains.
On the ground, the stack keeps getting kinder to humans. Stacked diffs tame PR sprawl, Claude’s rewind summaries cut context tax, and credits or hackathons pull more developers into real builds. Small frictions removed add up to faster release cycles.
Design and type matter because AI is becoming an interface as much as a model. Geist Pixel shows care for pixels where it counts, and Gemini’s visual language sets expectations for how AI “feels” in motion, not just what it says.
NASA’s push to refocus spending underlines how leadership and budgets decide what flies. As lunar plans firm up, public trust still needs tending, especially when conspiracies flare in the same feeds as official updates.
Finally, culture remains the best signal of where tools land. From alt-history games to camping modes, from satire to mourning, people keep turning raw capability into stories and habits. That is where adoption lives.
