Some sad news to start this week off — after 52 years in business, Sherline has announced they are winding down their manufacturing operations. By the end of October they estimate they’ll have produced their last tool, and although they will no longer be making new products, they plan on supporting their existing customers for as long as possible. Although from the sound of the press release, that may mean simply keeping the website up and selling through their inventory of spare parts.

The company offered a range of American-made miniature lathes and mills, and while their manual machines may have been better known in our community, they did eventually branch out into CNC. The press release doesn’t go into a lot of detail about the chain of events that led up to this decision, but it does mention the challenges of modern manufacturing and the lingering aftereffects of the COVID pandemic.

At first blush, it might seem strange that the company would falter just as desktop CNCs appear to finally be gaining momentum, but of course that doesn’t change their ability to compete with overseas manufacturing in terms of price.

Of course, keeping competitive is only a concern when you actually have competitors in the first place. That’s the situation that NASA and Boeing may find themselves in should SpaceX decide to retire the Crew Dragon after 2030. While the International Space Station will (probably) be out of the equation by that point, the US space agency will still need the capability to fly humans to… somewhere, and that means there will be lucrative government contracts up for grabs.

The chances of any other American company developing and launching a human-rated spacecraft between now and the end of the decade are pretty much zero, which means Boeing will have to pick up the slack with their Starliner capsule. Or at least, try to, as Starliner hasn’t exactly had the best track record so far. Although by the 2030s SpaceX plans to have transitioned most, if not all, of its operations to Starship, one does wonder if a big enough check from Uncle Sam could change its mind.

While the market for putting humans into orbit might be shrinking, there’s no shortage of new ways to move stuff around here on terra firma. IEEE Spectrum has the details on a rather unique electric vehicle from startup Revoy that’s designed to sit between a traditional diesel semitruck and its cargo trailer. This essentially turns the combined rig into a hybrid, with the EV module capable of pushing the load for up to 400 kilometers (250 miles). Though it might seem rather low-tech, this approach offers a major advantage in that fleets won’t need to replace their existing vehicles to take advantage of the efficiency gains promised by electrification — with the company claiming that it can cut a truck’s total fuel consumption by up to 85%.

If the day has been going a little too smoothly for your liking and you need something to be frustrated about, here’s something to agonize over. Reality Check shows you images and tasks you with determining if they’re AI-generated or not. As the timer ticks down, you’ll be furiously searching the background for malformed bits of text or extra fingers, but even that trick won’t necessarily save you in this era of increasingly capable image models.

Finally, while AI is getting very good at fooling grandmothers on Facebook, we can take some comfort in the knowledge that it’s finding the business world far more difficult to dominate. Drew Magary recently wrote up the experience of visiting a store “managed” by an AI model for SFGATE, and it sounds like things are going just as poorly as you’d imagine.

Given agency to pick the items it wanted to sell in the store, the computer stocked the shelves with bric-a-brac that has no obvious overarching theme, and although there’s a human staffer behind the counter, purchases apparently need to be negotiated with the AI via voice chat. The store is burning through its initial investment money with no profit in sight, made all the worse by the fact that one of the line items on the budget is the token cost to run the AI that’s mismanaging the whole thing in the first place.

It’s an entertaining read, and a refreshing splash of cold water on the general AI hype that seems so prevalent these days. But its impact as a condemnation of machine learning in business is undermined a bit when the bottom of every page on SFGATE reminds readers that they are producing content with the assistance of generative AI. C’est la vie.

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