They turned cattle ranches into tropical forest — then climate change hit
They brought forests back to life in Costa Rica. Their next challenge? Restoring ecosystems in a warming world.
They brought forests back to life in Costa Rica. Their next challenge? Restoring ecosystems in a warming world.
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GamesIndustry.biz did the math to put it in perspective: Zuck’s Reality Labs has burned a billion dollars every month since June 2022, and plans to spend even more: “We continue to expect operating losses to increase meaningfully year-over-year,” CFO Susan Li said on the Q1 earnings call.
Meta is plenty profitable overall, though: it raked in $12 billion last quarter alone.
[GamesIndustry.biz]
Paging Helen Hunt. Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton to Twister, please.
Don’t know how I missed this the other week: Nvidia’s quietly pointing its board partners towards small GPUs again! I sincerely hope this means blower cards are back on the menu to exhaust hot air from my case. Nvidia cracked down on those years back, allegedly to avoid cannibalizing workstation GPU sales. It’s one way GPUs might head back in the right direction.
On this episode of The Vergecast: the $100 billion sale coming soon, the Rabbit R1, Tesla earnings, and more.
The company responsible for Bored Ape Yacht Club is restructuring, and as a result, firing some of its employees. In a memo, its CEO complained that “The creative-first spirit that drove this company from inception has been getting muddied by labyrinthine corporate processes."
This time, we get a full-on Pixel 8A promo video leaked courtesy of MySmartPrice showing it’ll get Google’s AI features from the Pixel 8, including Best Take, Circle to Search, Live Translate, and Audio Magic Eraser.
It’s arriving just hours after the last Pixel 8A leak, but Google’s tradition of coughing up hardware info early goes back much, much, much further.
Following a report by Puck’s John Ourand that ESPN has carved out a piece of the new NBA media landscape, The Athletic added an Amazon rumor:
It is expected that Prime Video’s package will include significant regular season and postseason games, perhaps even some conference finals. The anticipation is that the final contract will be for at least a decade and begin the 2025-2026 season.
If the deals go through, this might add streaming NBA games on Thursdays when Amazon’s NFL games aren’t on.
[The Athletic]
The creator subscription platform markets itself as basically the opposite of the algorithm-driven TikTok — but that doesn’t mean Patreon is celebrating the forced divestment from ByteDance.
Banning TikTok just serves to further entrench YouTube and Instagram as the dominant platforms in this industry. But more competition is good for creators–it gives them more leverage and ultimately more control over their businesses.
We found a collection of unique gift ideas that go beyond the flowers and chocolates that typically rule the day.
The company worked with IBM to release a 1998 uncompiled version DOS 4.0 on Thursday, although unfortunately, this release lacks the app-switching capabilities that landed it the nickname MT-DOS. Multitasking was scrapped in later versions to make way for GUI operating systems like Windows.
Microsoft already released MS-DOS 1.25 and 2.0 in 2014, in cooperation with The Computer History Museum.
Underneath your Home and Work address shortcuts, the Google Maps widget now has a shortcut that lets you launch a map of your current location. This is neat, considering that, unlike Garmins, most Wear OS watches don’t have native compasses or maps preloaded.
I mean, what could go wrong? A new video conferencing feature in the style of Zoom, Meet and Microsoft Teams is coming soon to X, according to X user/Elon whisperer DogeDesigner and X Daily News.
X Conferences will be hosted on the the platform’s existing live audio platform X Spaces (which added video earlier this year), according to a screenshot of the beta version.
Specifically, the rails that keep Joy-Cons firmly connected to the Switch? Because Spanish pub Vandal (which correctly reported minor details of the Switch OLED before launch) says a larger Switch 2 will replace those rails with magnets.
That’s according to accessory vendors who apparently didn’t even see the Switch 2, mind, just touched it in a box. Still: magnets alone? I could see magnets and rails, but...
Romulus is looking pretty scary, but if you’re in the mood for something more immersive there’s an Alien horror game for VR on the way as well. Unfortunately there’s no actual gameplay in this trailer for Rogue Incursion, but the developers at Survios describe it as a “single-player, action-horror game” launching this holiday on PS VR2, PCVR via Steam, and Meta Quest 3.
Reuters reports Pope Francis will head to Puglia in Italy to meet leaders from the US, Germany, UK, France, Italy, Canada, and Japan to discuss regulating AI.
The pope previously expressed concerns about AI-driven inequality and has learned more about the technology since then.
The pontiff will presumably not wear a Balenciaga coat.
The epic Saturn V and Space Shuttle Discovery didn’t come with a gantry, but Lego’s making up for it with the 3,091-piece NASA Artemis Space Launch System, coming May 28th for $259.99.
How much better is it? Here it is alongside all the other official Lego launchpad examples I could think of:
Note: If you buy something from these links, we might get affiliate revenue.
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What it does, the R1 seems to do well enough — with some typical AI quirks. But where are all the features we were promised?
The WSJ’s Joanna Stern wanted to find out just how it survived the fall — by dropping phones from a drone, of course.
Alex Garland isn’t the only filmmaker thinking about the current state the US’ political system. During a recent appearance on The Ringer’s The Town podcast, Aaron Sorkin shared that he’s in the early stages of writing a new The Social Network-esque movie about January 6th and Facebook’s role in galvanizing the attempted coup.
[The Hollywood Reporter]
Jason Parham’s 2021 Wired article about Black Twitter detailed quite a bit about what made the community such an enriching space for Black people. But Hulu’s new docuseries based on the piece looks like going to be focused on detailing how Black Twitter became a broader cultural phenomenon. The series premieres on May 9th.
Early bird pricing starts at $399 via Indiegogo, with shipments expected to start in May. It’s advertised as the first device with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon G3x Gen 2 that’s designed to chase the booming gaming handheld market.
There are Android gamers out there, right? We’ve been asking you to email The Vergecast about your Android gaming life, let us know!
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Years of security issues and mounting criticism have left Microsoft needing to overhaul its cybersecurity.
One owner apparently plugged his into his car after recieving it at the swanky NYC event a few days back and it promptly bricked itself.
They said that Rabbit was quick to replace it, but not before they snapped a pic of what looks like an Android debugging UI.
It yanked the App Store listings days after a 404 Media report on the existence of Instagram ads advertising the apps as tools that can non-consensually remove the clothes of any person. Google also took down similar apps on the Play Store.
Overall, Apple removed three apps from the App Store, but only after we provided the company with links to the specific apps and their related ads, indicating the company was not able to find the apps that violated its policy itself.