Today, Anthropic rolled out Opus 5, the newest update for the model that has recently become a popular choice for coding and other software development tasks, among other things.
While this is a noteworthy bump for Opus, it doesn't seem to be an Opus 4.5-level breakthrough in agentic coding performance.
Luxury SUVs are often associated with high purchase prices and equally expensive running costs. While premium interiors and advanced technology are easy to find, impressive fuel economy usually isn't, especially once you move beyond mainstream options and start exploring the luxury segment.
The European Union has begun delaying the release of satellite images showing shipping lanes near the Strait of Hormuz by 24 hours. The move comes in response to an earlier US government request and coincides with the Trump administration ramping up the war with Iran once again.
The unusual change in the free and open data policy for Europe’s Copernicus Earth observation program was revealed by Space News, which reviewed a copy of the decision made by the Council of the EU on July 13. The ordered delay applies to images taken by Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 satellites and covers the Gulf of Oman region that includes shipping lanes leading to and from the contested Strait of Hormuz.
The US government first requested that the European Union restrict Copernicus satellite imagery on May 26, according to the decision document seen by Space News. That request occurred during a shaky ceasefire period for the war that began on April 8 and ended on July 8, when the US military resumed a broader campaign of military strikes following an announcement by President Donald Trump.
An excavator and bulldozer operating autonomously using AIM Intelligent Machines’ AI platform work at the company’s proving grounds near Monroe, Wash. (AIM Photo)
In a headquarters and lab space formerly occupied by SpaceX in Redmond, Wash., AIM Intelligent Machines (AIM) is focused on solving big problems on Earth. But the startup’s CEO envisions a day when autonomous bulldozers and excavators will dig, haul, and grade on the moon or Mars, and take AIM’s “terraforming mission” off planet.
For now, AIM’s 25,000-square-foot facility in a nondescript business park is a long way from Mars. Inside the sprawling space, there are glimpses of what the rapidly growing company is working on, including the apparatuses that attach to existing machines to make them self-driving.
Around the office, desk cubicles are decorated with tiny yellow excavator buckets, mirroring photos on the walls of heavy equipment operating on job sites worldwide.
AIM founder and CEO Adam Sadilek. (AIM Photo)
The toy excavators are a nod to a massive global market that AIM founder and CEO Adam Sadilek wants to continue to disrupt with modern technology.
Autonomous passenger vehicles have captured the public’s attention for decades, but construction, mining and hauling equipment attracts little fanfare, even as legacy companies including Komatsu and Caterpillar embrace new technology.
AIM’s goal is not to build new machinery, but retrofit existing earthmoving fleets with a physical AI platform — using advanced sensors and edge compute to let heavy iron operate entirely on its own.
Founded in 2021, the startup grew out of Sadilek’s background at Google where he spent nine years working on projects involving AI and autonomous vehicle systems.
Whether building anti-flood structures or wildfire breaks, managing nuclear waste, mining critical materials or clearing land for agriculture or the military, Sadilek views AIM’s work as immediate terraforming on Earth that is necessary to drive down costs for housing and commodities. But the long-term vision remains interplanetary.
“When humanity goes to Mars, the real question is not so much around what the rocket looks like as a vehicle to get us there, but what is going to happen after the rocket lands,” Sadilek said. “You cannot have human operators run there. That’s why this is a very long mission that we are on.”
Building autonomy for heavy equipment presents a paradox self-driving cars never have to face: the ground itself is constantly changing. While a Tesla or Waymo relies on pre-mapped roads and predictable lanes, a bulldozer or excavator’s entire job is to reshape its environment. AIM’s physical AI platform has to continuously build real-time 3D maps using onboard 360-degree LiDAR and edge compute, making split-second decisions without relying on persistent GPS or cloud connectivity on remote job sites.
Furthermore, taking human operators out of cab seats addresses one of the most perilous aspects of heavy industry. By creating “zero-entry” sites where machines operate autonomously, AIM’s platform effectively removes workers from harm’s way — transitioning traditional equipment operators into remote site supervisors who oversee entire fleets from a safe distance.
Beyond early deployments in mining and site preparation for data centers, AIM landed a $4.9 million U.S. Air Force contract earlier this year to deploy autonomous machines for airfield repair and base construction in remote or high-risk zones. The military work builds on the company’s growing momentum following a $50 million funding round backed by Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst, and Human Capital.
AIM has risen to No. 110 on the GeekWire 200 ranking on top Pacific Northwest startups.
To support its growth, AIM has rapidly expanded its headcount, doubling in size to about 80 employees in the last few months. Sadilek is attracted to the Seattle area’s intersection of hardware expertise from companies like Boeing and Amazon alongside top-tier software and AI talent.
But while AIM has managed to hire a couple former SpaceX engineers to build out its team, it isn’t the only startup mining that rocket-engineering pedigree. TerraFirma, an Austin-based company founded by two more SpaceX engineers, raised $115 million earlier this month in the burgeoning race to semi-automate physical construction.
For Sadilek, anchoring his team in Redmond rather than Silicon Valley was a deliberate decision to stay rooted in physical engineering. Having spent years in the Bay Area during his time at Google, Sadilek wanted to avoid the tech industry’s “echo chamber.”
“I wanted to be somewhat shielded from the Kool-Aid in Silicon Valley,” he said. “We wanted to build something that’s real and gets in the black really quickly… To do that, you need to do it in an environment that is more anchored in reality.”
That philosophy extends directly into their field testing. AIM’s regional proving grounds in the mountains near Monroe, Wash., expose the autonomous equipment to heavy snow and inclement weather early in development so the physical AI is built for harsh, real-world conditions from day one.
The poster that hangs in AIM’s lunchroom: “Building the plane while flying it” is a popular startup cliche, but it was close to real life during an April 1949 endurance flight in which the Sunkist Lady took on supplies while in the air. (Image via Orange County Public Libraries)
Amid the hard hats, safety vests and construction-related decor in AIM’s headquarters space, one piece of art offers a fun take on where AIM has been and where it’s headed.
The 1949 photograph, titled “Refueling the Sunkist Lady,” shows a Jeep driving beneath a low-flying plane and transferring supplies to aid the crew during an endurance flight.
Sadilek likes it as a reminder of getting started, and what it feels like to build a company from scratch, literally working on the airplane while it’s already rolling down the runway.
“The first years of AIM were exactly like that,” he said. “I think every tech startup is like that in the early days. The problem is that some of them never finish building it before the runway ends.”
My family has enough solar panels on our roof to offset all of our annual home energy needs, but just covering our roof with photovoltaic panels was not enough to make our renewable energy dreams come true. Here are the other investments we've made along the way.
Photos of scorched, twisted wreckage now circulating from Russian sources may be the first physical proof that a Dutch-built cruise missile has actually been used in combat. Images shared by the open-source tracking account on Telegram show what is presumed to be the tail section of a Ruta Block 1 cruise missile, built by the […]
Ransomware and phishing have always been linked, but the old model was blunt: a phishing email carried the payload, the recipient opened it, encryption followed within hours.
One of the strongest arguments for buying physical media in a digital world is the unwritten rule that "the disc is always the true version." It's long been the case that buying DVDs or Blu-rays allows access to original edits or missing episodes that aren't available on any streaming service. However, for one of my favorite shows, streaming has now become the version that's more faithful to the original.
An artillery rocket costs a fraction of what it takes to shoot one down, and that math has quietly become one of the grinding problems of the current wars and conflicts. European defense company Destinus previewed a possible answer at the Farnborough International Airshow, unveiling Vorexon, a concept-stage ground-based interceptor built to protect specific high-value […]
The Toyota Prius arrived in the United States in 2000 amid the SUV boom with the sole purpose of squeezing as many miles as possible out of a gallon of gas. Before the Prius, a “hybrid car” was not something American consumers had seen, let alone driven.
There's a reason Paramount+'s fast-paced new movie Wardriver sits at the top of the streamer's Top 10 rankings—it's a thriller, and people love them. In fact, according to FlixPatrol, most of the biggest streaming services currently have thrillers among their top five because they offer mystery, crank up the tension, and dare you to look away lest you miss something.
You might have heard about BIP-110; here’s why this fork is not just bad for Bitcoin, but it is built on a misunderstanding of what a Bitcoin node is and what it is good for. As well as why, because of this misunderstanding, BIP-110 will fail.
This article is a Take. Opinions expressed are entirely the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
BIP-110 is a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal titled as a Reduced Data Temporary Softfork. The BIP proposes a consensus change to Bitcoin, which attempts to limit the types and amounts of arbitrary data that can be added to consensus-valid transactions by limiting a wide range of Bitcoin’s scripting capabilities. BIP-110 is led by a pseudonymous developer known as Dathon Ohm and is widely supported by the Knots community, an alternative implementation of Bitcoin led by one of Bitcoin Core’s earliest contributors, Luke Dashjr and its supporters.
The BIP-110 consensus change is headed towards a mandatory signaling period in the coming weeks and thus a potential fork with the main consensus rules as implemented in Bitcoin Core. The proposal needs to gain a great deal of support from miners within the coming weeks to change Bitcoin consensus. As of the time of writing, miner signaling for BIP-110 stands at less than one percent.
The Knots community, widely made up of Bitcoiners running nodes on machines like Start9 and Umbrel, has rallied around Knots in protest of a series of development decisions made by Bitcoin Core, the primary open source development community and reference implementation of Bitcoin. While a majority of senior Bitcoin developers are either opposed or apathetic to the changes proposed by BIP-110, the movement has gained enough steam to become an ongoing topic of discussion on social media.
Supporters of BIP-110 believe that by running Bitcoin full nodes that signal for the consensus change, they alone can change Bitcoin. Here are the main concepts being debated, the biggest misconceptions about Bitcoin consensus, what a Bitcoin node is, and why BIP-110 is almost certain to fail.
The Power and Limits of a Bitcoin Node
Many of the disagreements and misconceptions in this recent cultural conflict within Bitcoin revolve around the idea of a Bitcoin full node. Influencers like Knut Svanholm, author and podcaster, have elevated the role of the full node to heights perhaps too close to the sun.
Knut recently tweeted: “Every person on Earth is a node in the Bitcoin network. Most to a minuscule extent, of course, but every node is first and foremost a person, not a machine. Which tools we use to interact with the network (and, by extension, to which extent they influence the network) is entirely dependent on the choices we make.”
Statements of this sort are poetically beautiful, philosophically grand, romantic even, but nevertheless technically incoherent and fundamentally meaningless. Knut’s tweet attempts to redefine what a ‘Bitcoin node’ means and fails at it, instead diluting the value of the term entirely. He might as well have said that every atom in the universe is a Bitcoin node, since apparently to him the term is all-encompassing.
Knut, though well-intentioned, is wrong. A Bitcoin node is something very specific. It is a full copy of all of Bitcoin’s transaction history, block headers and transaction-related data. Its purpose is very specific: to let users verify the integrity of Bitcoin’s supply and transaction history in relation to Bitcoin’s consensus rules.
Bitcoin nodes grant users a variety of benefits, such as privacy. Third-party wallet providers query their copy of the Bitcoin blockchain for the user’s balance and serve it back to the user via the wallet app. Most mobile wallets function this way, with users asking a third-party server for their balances. Some, very few, can connect to a user-run Bitcoin node, in which case the user’s public addresses and balances are not shared with any third-party wallet company.
Another benefit Bitcoin nodes grant users is the ability to check whether they are in consensus with the rest of the network, staying in sync. If the user mines Bitcoin or contributes any significant amount of hashing power to Bitcoin’s proof-of-work network, the node also provides the opportunity to assemble a block, choosing which transactions go into it. This is only possible if the user manages to mine a Bitcoin block, which is quite an achievement today, given the difficulty and steep competition.
Even new kinds of mining pools like Ocean, which attempt to decentralize block template production, letting retail miners have more influence over which transactions enter the chain, still need enough hashing power to win the proof-of-work race, resulting in sporadic blocks being mined and thus limited influence over the blockchain.
Bitcoin nodes also relay transactions across the network, with tens of thousands of them communicating via a flood network; this results in a censorship-resistant system where a small number of nodes can get controversial transactions to miners, bypassing any kind of filters, as demonstrated by Peter Todd’s relay libre. Thus, Bitcoin nodes can not easily filter which transactions enter the blockchain.
Even a large majority of Bitcoin nodes alone cannot alone change Bitcoin consensus. Not without having a large amount of economic activity entering the Bitcoin network through them, as exchanges do on behalf of millions of users. Not without having the protocol and application developer community behind them. Not without having the investor community behind them. Bitcoin is not a node democracy, contrary to popular memes today.
Bitcoin nodes do not grant you ‘citizenship’ in the ‘Bitcoin nation’. Satoshi Nakamoto was quite clear about this in the Bitcoin white paper. Bitcoin’s ultimate security and governance structure is: one CPU cycle, one vote, not one node, one vote. And miners, who run the CPU cycles over Bitcoin’s proof-of-work, are very sensitive to investor sentiment and the broader developer community, resulting in a distributed global protocol for money that is very difficult to change.
Bitcoin nodes ultimately let you know if you are connected to the network with the most accumulated proof-of-work and that its consensus rules are being followed, but a node alone does not let you change the consensus rules. Users who change the consensus rules of their Bitcoin node are, by definition, no longer running Bitcoin. As a result, changing Bitcoin consensus as a node runner is very difficult, and that’s a feature, not a bug. Bitcoin is money for enemies.
History and Bitcoin Consensus Games
Deep work has been done, trying to understand Bitcoin consensus, its various pillars and interest groups. Ren Crypto Fish, Steve Lee and Lyn Alden identified six of them in BCAP, an open-source effort to analyze Bitcoin consensus and risks in protocol upgrades. BCAP identified stakeholders such as Economic Nodes, Investors, Media Influencers, Miners and Protocol Developers, and Users and Application Developers
Historically, in the case of a consensus crisis, it is true that Bitcoin nodes have been used to signal support for one version of Bitcoin over another. Fork events like 2017’s Bitcoin Cash fork are often cited as examples of economic nodes winning against opposition by miners. 2017’s legendary User Activated Soft Fork (UASF) faced major opposition in theory; a large majority of mining pools and their corresponding collective hashrate supported the Segwit2x version of Bitcoin, with many exchanges and corporations having signed the infamous New York Agreement in support of it.
The Bitcoin node-supported soft fork against it won nonetheless, bluffing the Segwit2x version from a contested blockchain altogether. But that’s the thing: while the Bitcoin nodes technically won, they did so by having massive support from protocol developers, investors and media influencers: these nodes really had economic weight and rough consensus. BIP-110, on the other hand, does not have the protocol developers, nor does it have enough investors behind it. Michael Saylor has come out against it, with many industry leaders also openly opposing it or staying out of the matter entirely.
In fact, during the Bitcoin Cash fork, the limits of retail Bitcoin nodes were clearly understood. A Bitcoin node run by an exchange is orders of magnitude more influential than that of a retail user, as it introduces large amounts of new transactions into the Bitcoin network. The Bitcoin node of a major mining pool is far more influential than that of a hobbyist solo miner, as it more often assembles blocks and chooses which transactions settle to the blockchain.
Most Bitcoiners outside of exchanges use mobile wallets to access their Bitcoin. Such users and investors can ‘vote’ with their money, so to speak, by moving their bitcoins and economic activity elsewhere, be it to a wallet that supports their vision of Bitcoin, or their own full node. But while users remain on mobile wallets that talk to third-party nodes, those users have little individual influence over Bitcoin consensus. And the vast majority of mobile wallets are using a Bitcoin core-compatible back end.
The same goes for exchanges; their users effectively delegate consensus decisions to the exchange operators. In some cases, exchanges have put consensus issues to a user vote, weighed by their total holdings, returning that decision to end users weighed by capital; we may see this happen again with BIP-110.
Votes of the sort have started happening with Foundry today. One of the biggest Bitcoin mining pools in the world, Foundry, recently emailed its miners informing them that they can vote on the proposal with their hashrate. A high enough support could result in Foundry signaling for BIP-110, though that remains unlikely. Users who do not vote will effectively signal against BIP-110, defending the status quo. Thus apathy about the topic of BIP-110 would be a win for Bitcoin Core by default. BIP-110 supporters need to culturally win over a majority of the Foundry hash rate, who then must act to vote against the Bitcoin Core developer consensus, the most popular Bitcoin implementation and best supported codebase.
BIP-110 has so far failed to gain consensus across major interest groups within Bitcoin; neither developers, investors, miners, nor large economic nodes support the consensus change. The result is likely to be a chain split in the coming weeks, which could have significant consequences for lightning wallets running on BIP-110-compliant nodes, ultimately resulting in a new, yet small blockchain that would probably have to change the proof-of-work used to stay alive.
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