The FCC's ban on Chinese-made robots extends well beyond humanoids to quadrupeds, research platforms, and many robot vacuums from allied countries. Supporters call it a major boost for domestic robotics, but critics warn that cutting researchers and startups off from affordable foreign hardware could slow U.S. innovation instead. Ars Technica's Jeremy Hsu examines who stands to gain and who stands to lose from the prohibition: Such an import ban would apply to some of the most affordable robots primarily produced by Chinese companies, including Unitree's humanoid robots that are used by robotics labs and researchers for tasks such as experimental robot surgeries. US consumers would also likely lose access to the newest robot vacuum cleaners that are mainly manufactured by Chinese companies such as Roborock. But the ban also broadly applies to foreign-made robots produced by countries nominally allied to the United States, including Japan, South Korea, and Germany. [...]

The ban on foreign-made robots could theoretically encourage more US and foreign companies to set up manufacturing facilities in the United States. There are already multiple companies racing to scale up production of humanoid robots in US factories, including Agility Robotics, 1X Technologies, and Figure AI. Tesla has been attempting to shift production away from older electric vehicle models and toward its Optimus humanoid robot. Boston Dynamics has already been making its Atlas humanoid robot, along with its four-legged Spot robot and wheeled Stretch robot, at its main facility in Waltham, Massachusetts. The US robotics company is also planning to massively scale up manufacturing of the Atlas robot under South Korea's Hyundai Motor Company, which gained full ownership of Boston Dynamics in July 2026.

"This is one of the strongest technology-security actions in modern US history," wrote Evan Beard, CEO of Standard Bots, in a LinkedIn post. "The message is unambiguous: robotics is a technology America must lead and own -- and foreign-subsidized robots will not be allowed to unfairly dominate US robotics as they did solar." Similar praise came from Rush Doshi, director of the Initiative on China Strategy at the Council on Foreign Relations, who, in a social media post, described the FCC decision as "one of the most significant actions taken so far in support of the US robotics ecosystem."

However, several robotics researchers and analysts interviewed by The Robot Report expressed skepticism about any potential boost to US competitiveness in robotics. Some even warned that the ban could prove counterproductive for US robotics efforts to develop humanoid robots. "In the near term, the measure could slow US physical AI innovation by cutting startups and researchers off from future low-cost Chinese platforms before comparable Western alternatives exist," said Georg Stieler, a global robotics advisor and managing director for Asia at Stieler Technology & Market Advisory, in an interview with The Robot Report.

US domestic production of robots lags behind China in terms of mass manufacturing at lower cost, said Rueben Scriven, a senior analyst at Interact Analysis. "This announcement is more likely to inhibit the US humanoid robotics industry, as the presence of low-cost Chinese humanoid robots has been helping educate the US market through promotional and entertainment use cases -- an effect this policy risks undermining," Scriven told The Robot Report. The report notes that previous FCC bans have done little to help create competitive U.S. alternatives, with restrictions on Chinese drones instead prompting companies to sell barely disguised versions of DJI technology.

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Valve is funding Collabora's experimental effort to port the open-source RADV Vulkan driver from Linux to Windows. The team has already demonstrated Counter-Strike 2 running with RADV, but a stable interface or compatibility shim will be needed to handle undocumented driver changes. Phoronix reports: Louis-Francis Ratte-Boulianne put out a blog post highlighting their initial work on porting RADV to Windows. Besides working on Windows WDDM2 integration for Windows, a big challenge with porting RADV to Windows is on relying on the AMD Radeon Software Windows kernel driver.

It's out-of-scope of this current work for trying to port the AMDGPU Linux kernel graphics driver to Windows, so they are working on bringing RADV to Windows while relying on AMD's official Windows kernel driver. That in turn has led to reverse engineering and other steps for figuring out the proprietary kernel driver's data structures and other elements so RADV can be adapted to use it.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

US announces attacks early on Thursday, as experts say strikes carried out by both sides in previous day increase risk of return to all-out war

• US-Saudi strikes in Iraq push region into ‘uncharted territory’, analysts warn

Three explosions have been heard on Iran’s Qeshm island, Iran’s semi-official Tasnim news agency is saying.

Before Wednesday’s flare-up of hostilities, mediators had expressed optimism about bringing the US and Iran back to the negotiating table following the collapse of an interim agreement amid renewed fighting over the strait of Hormuz.

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The Last Museum is the largest search engine for museum art. It uses semantic search, allowing you to search for artworks by theme, style, subject, vibes, cultures, artists or any description you can imagine. They currently have around 5 million artworks indexed, and strive to eventually index all museum art in the world. For a more charming browsing experience check out The Tenth Muse with works from 20 Western museums.

From the About: on The Last Museum - "This website is completely free to use. We are not affiliated with any museums or galleries, and we do not own any of the images. Much of the art we index is in the public domain. Where works are still under copyright, we show them in accordance with fair use: We operate as a search engine and reference tool, an informational purpose rather than a substitute for the original work. Works are shown for educational and non-commercial purposes. We index art that is already freely available to the public online. Copyrighted works appear only at browsing resolution, not as high-quality reproductions. Every artwork links back to its original source." hat tip to NYT's The Good List.

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Hindley Street, Adelaide CBD.
Yet another example of awful 1960's cladding to try to make a building look modern. Hopefully some day we will see the cladding removed and a beautiful old stone facade will shine though...

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The Newmarket Hotel oepned in 1847 at the corner of North and West terraces where the city of Adelaide began soon after the European settlement of South Australia.

On 11 January 11, 1837, first surveyor general colonel William Light started his famous survey to lay out the city of Adelaide at the future hotel's site. It was known as Town Acre 1, the first 750 one-acre lots that would comprise the Adelaice city square mile. With the Botanic Hotel at the other end of North Terrace, the future Newmarket would form a notable bookend of the four city terraces.

After a livestock market and slaughterhouse was set up nearby of the northern side of North Terrace, the New Market Inn quickly began trading, licensed in 1847 by W.H. Dumbleton. The South Australian beer measure, the “butcher”, was said to have come from the hotel's link to the market that was removed from its North Terrace site in the 1920s.

The hotel gained a new grand building in 1883, with its name contracted to the Newmarket. Designed by Daniel Garlick and built by W. Barker, it replaced the earlier brick and stone structure and opened “to cater for the tastes of the better classes”. The new Newmarket hotel was described as the “nearest approach to a first-class American hotel of any . . . seen in Australia”. The South Australian Register newspaper commented: “The old building was a relic of the past primitive days but the new one means luxury and progress . . . the building has three floors, besides cellarage with 48 rooms in all . . . Altogether the hotel is a fine example of the wide gap existing between Adelaide of 1850 and Adelaide of 1883”.

The new 1880s hotel was built for Frances Badman, a former licensee of the Earl of Zetland Hotel who owned the Newmarket from 1876 to 1899. One of the more notorious licensees was Albert Augustine (Bert) Edwards, “king of the West End”, who owned the Newmarket from 1924-31. Reputedly an illegitimate child of South Australian premier Charles Cameron Kingston, the extraordinary and unconventional Edwards was a West Adelaide Football club official, a Labor state politician and held Grey Ward on Adelaide city council. He was a major supporter of Adelaide’s poor and prisoners and had strong views on anti-conscription.

In 1915, Edwards bought his first hotel, the Duke of Brunswick in Gilbert Street, Adelaide city, and later operated several city and country hotels as well as the Newmarket. In 1930, he was arrested for sodomy, and gaoled for two and a half years at Yatala Labour Prison. Edwards could not return to the Newmarket after being released as a foreclosure order had been served during his imprisonment. This order enabled Arthur Green to buy the hotel in 1931.

In the late 20th Century, the Newmarket became the venue for the nightclubs Bojangles and Joplins. These were followed in 1995 by Heaven, Adelaide’s first superclub. Heaven closed in the early 2000s and reopened under new owners and managers as HQ, the premier nightclub in Adelaide. The HQ Complex closed its doos, along with the hotel in 2017.

In 2013, “carpark king” Damien Lester had unveiled ambitious plans for a $150 million office and hotel project. Next came 2015 plans for $32 million hotel fronting West Terrace. Both projects never started.

In 2018, the state-heritage-listed Newmarket Hotel stirred support with reports that it might be partly demolished, leaving only the facade, as the site for a new women’s and children’s hospital opposite the Royal Adelaide Hospital. Among those calling for the hotel to be saved was Lumen Studio director architect Julian Rutt: “While I applaud the proposal for a new WCH hospital in the vicinity of the new medical precinct, any proposal that could suggest demolition of the Newmarket [would be] so ill considered, it goes beyond short-sighted or visionless, and into urban vandalism.”

The hotel building was saved but remained vacant into the 2020s.

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Great mural on Hindley Street, Adelaide CBD

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