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Verge Score
This powerful Atmos theater on wheels is pure chaos.
The parent company of Jeep and Dodge just took a $26.5 billion hit on its EV investment. But its problems run much deeper than that.
“If your best idea for what AI can do in the workspace is ‘replace a hundred human beings with a server rack doing the same thing’, you’ve got no business calling yourself a techno-optimist.” Let’s gooooo!
[Back of Mind, Dan Davies]
The EV company says the staff cuts are intended to “improve operational effectiveness and optimize our resources,” TechCrunch reports. An internal memo added that the company is still focused on “further expansion into the robotaxi market,” following the launch of a robotaxi collaboration with Nuro and Uber last year.
Now that Andor has come to end, series Tony Gilroy is free to speak more openly about what it was like working for Disney, and in a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter he says that the studio was very insistent on him not using the word “fascism” while talking about his show focused on fighting fascism.
[The Hollywood Reporter]
Following a successful wet dress rehearsal on Thursday plagued only by ground communications glitches, NASA says March 6th will be the earliest launch date for the long-delayed Artemis II mission that will send four astronauts on an approximately 600,000-mile trip to circle the moon and return to Earth.
The ex-employees, along with one of their husbands, were arrested on Thursday after allegedly stealing trade secrets related to the Tensor chips in Google’s Pixel phones and sending them to Iran.
They’re now facing 14 felony counts of conspiracy, theft of trade secrets, and destruction of evidence, Bloomberg reports.
The EV tech startup rocked the auto industry with its CES announcement of a production-ready solid-state battery. Since then, there’s been a lot of skepticism and some out-right denials that the battery is even real. Now, Donut Labs is pushing back with a cleverly titled new video series, “I Donut Believe,” and independent test results that verify its claims. The first report is expected to drop next week.
What does it really mean to be number one on the App Store?
I Am Frankelda — co-writer / directors Arturo and Roy Ambriz’s stop motion dark fantasy film about a girl with a strange connection to another dimension — has been acquired by Netflix and is slated to debut on the streamer sometime later this year.
Ahead of the debut of The Gorillaz’s new album The Mountain, the animated band has dropped a teaser video that makes it seem like there might also be a short film situation on the way.
A federal jury in Florida last year found Tesla partly liable for a deadly 2019 crash involving the company’s Autopilot driver assist software, and ordered the company to pay the families $243 million. Tesla appealed the ruling, but now a judge has dismissed that effort. In her ruling, US District Court Judge Beth Bloom stated that Tesla’s arguments “were already considered and rejected” and that the evidence at trial “more than supports the jury verdict and does not find it committed any error.”
Sonic The Hedgehog Classic and Sonic The Hedgehog 2 Classic are the latest games from Sega’s Forever program that could soon disappear from the Google Play and Apple app stores. Both games now display a pop-up message warning that “support for this game will be discontinued, but you can continue playing offline!”
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On Friday morning, the court ruled against the Trump administration (pdf) in the case of Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, about whether the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) gave the president the power to impose sweeping tariffs on imports from more than 100 countries.
The immediate impact of the ruling is not clear, as the president may try to use other justifications for the tariffs and everything that has followed. The NYT, WSJ, and CNBC have more coverage.
Skinfluencers swear topical salmon-sperm serums will make your skin glow. The reality is a bit less impressive.
It’s rolling out Group Message History, which lets group chat admins (and members, depending on permissions) share the most recent messages with new members of a chat. That should make it easier to catch people up without blasting old messages back to the whole group.
In case you haven’t heard, RAMageddon is here. And while the tech industry will survive this apocalypse, it might well be forever changed by it.
letechguye:
This feels like a watershed moment for the personal computer and consumer tech in general. No matter what happens with AI, it’s clear tech companies no longer value consumers/users at all. Price hikes, subscription models, and “protect the children” will continue until eventually every device is a thin client that requires a call home. But not before being intercepted by Palantir. It’s quite sad.
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The “conversational” assistant was announced for phones last month, after a rollout on TVs, and is now available in the One UI 8.5 beta in the US and a few other countries. Expect to hear more about it, and its full release plans, at next week’s Unpacked.
[Samsung Newsroom]
