TLDR 2021-07-27

Tesla China's Model 3s are able to wade through water. China experiences dozens of hurricanes or typhoons every year, so floods are common. Many videos of the Model 3's 'Boat Mode' have come out in the last few days. The footage shows the vehicles traveling through deep floodwaters with no issues. Videos are available in the article.

Netflix is in the early stages of developing a live-action Pokémon TV series. Nintendo and Netflix were previously developing a live-action Legend of Zelda series, but it was canceled due to leaks. Netflix has had success with game-based series and it plans to release more. It is also planning to fund and deliver mobile games to its subscribers at no additional cost.

VTubing has grown significantly during the pandemic. Motion capture technology is now affordable and accessible. The technology has evolved to where people can feel like they're interacting with a 'real' anime character. Anime and manga have seen record-breaking profits internationally over the past year and a half. There are agencies that create VTubers, carefully crafting their personas for the most appeal.

PlasticARM is a proof-of-concept plastic microprocessor created by Arm that is low-cost and flexible. It can manage speeds of 29 kilohertz while using 20 milliwatts of power. The chip doesn't have a reprogrammable memory, but researchers expect that to change in future versions. While the chips aren't very powerful, they are significantly cheaper, making them an attractive choice for disposable items.

BLAKE3 is a cryptographic hash function that is fast, secure, highly parallelizable, capable of verified streaming and incremental updates, and more. It is not designed to be a password hashing algorithm. Benchmark results are available.

Apollo is a personal search engine for your digital footprint. Users can store information in the database for easy retrieval through search. It stores all data locally. A short video demo is available.

Citizen, the app that allows people to submit local crime reports, is paying people at a starting rate of $25 an hour to livestream crimes around New York City. It is keeping its hiring activity quiet and posting ads for the position through another company. Citizen is not mentioned in the job postings, which have all been deleted. The company has been criticized many times for encouraging reckless behavior.

Jeff Bezos published an open letter to NASA offering to pay more than $2 billion towards the Human Landing System program. NASA already has a $2.9 billion contract with SpaceX for a human lander. The agency had wanted two providers for a lander, but it didn't have the budget for it. Blue Origin had submitted a proposal for the project, but it was rejected for being too expensive. It is up to Congress whether NASA can accept the offer.