8
Verge Score
Asus made all the right tweaks, and the new Panther Lake chip delivers.
Fresh off releasing the latest Super Mario Galaxy movie trailer, Nintendo is holding another Direct soon, this one focused on the delightfully strange-looking Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream. You can watch it live on January 29th at 9AM ET. Nintendo says it’ll last around 20 minutes.
Disney Plus’ latest superhero series is dropping at a time when the MCU feels like it’s moving back to square one.
Parents since the ‘80s Satanic Panic have worried that kids playing Dungeons & Dragons wouldn’t be able to tell reality from fantasy, but maybe it was AI they should have been worried about all along.
cowboyxboombap:
I’m getting a kick out of this, honestly. I use Gemini as a D&D DM copilot and for some of the roleplaying moments with the players and now it thinks that’s all my actual life. I had to give it instructions that all of that stuff was made up. It’s hilarious
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When you’re cool with doing a fascism, what’s a few sexual misconduct accusations? Ratner, who directed Melania, faced multiple allegations of sexual assault and harassment, which led Warner Bros. to cut ties. But a little sexual misconduct (and ties to Epstein) never seemed to bother Melania. And it doesn’t seem to bother Tim Cook either, who posed for this photo on Ratner’s Instagram Stories.
Not everyone in Hollywood can be as thoughtful about AI as Ben Affleck. Thankfully, better thinking prevailed, and Chris Pratt quickly decided that creating an actual AI to play the tyrannical AI judge in the sci-fi thriller was not a good idea.
Doxxing is not a good reason to have faceless police.
There’s a bunch of references to the games, including Mario and Luigi using fire flowers and Birdo from Super Mario Bros. 2, but it’s Yoshi that’s the obvious star. Oh, and he’s pretty dang cute, too. The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is coming to theaters April 1st.
7
Verge Score
The Sony LinkBuds Clip are comfortable with good sound, but are light on features for the price.
Whether this is just a regular outage or a result of this week’s changes in management, reports tracked on Downdetector and Reddit confirm many people are having trouble loading TikTok right now.
If the mobile app loads, it’s not consistently showing comments or other features, and the algorithm managing the For You page doesn’t feel like it’s working correctly.
If you’re wondering what kind of access a gold-and-Gorilla-Glass statue, a $1 million donation, and endless fawning buys you, well, it gets a special advanced screening of a state-sanctioned propaganda documentary film about the First Lady. Okay, it buys more than that, this is just a nice bonus.
Photographer Steven Garcia followed peaceful protestors as they withstood being teargassed by ICE agents.
Belkin’s $100 Charging Case Pro for the Switch 2 looks similar to the $70 version; it’s a thick zip-up case with a 10,000mAh battery, plus pockets for cartridges and an AirTag. But the battery here, cleverly redesigned as a folding stand that magnetically snaps into the case, makes it feel worth the higher cost.
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8
Verge Score
I should want this, but don’t.
Soon, you’ll be able to play as The Office’s Dwight Schrute and Michael Scott in Fortnite when new skins of the characters debut in the game’s item shop. It’s one of Fortnite’s stranger collaborations, but it makes more sense when you consider how many people are still watching the show.
According to a post from earlier this month, you can set a form to stop taking responses after receiving a certain number of them or on a certain date and time. Previously, you had to close forms manually. Handy update!
Patent infringement lawsuits are heating up in the world of smart glasses, with Xreal suing Viture earlier this month and Meta being sued last year over the electromyography tech in the Neural Band used to control the Meta Ray-Ban Display.
Every time it gets really cold, the climate change deniers come out of the woodwork with their best “I am very intelligent” grins to sputter some version of “whither global warming?” Fortunately, The Verge’s senior science reporter Justine Calma knew to anticipate these inane inquiries in her story today about the approaching winter storm:
“People say, ‘Oh, well, it’s really cold or we’re getting a lot of snow — how is the world warming?’ Climate change is an increase in the baseline temperatures, but it’s also an increase in extremes from both ways,” says Kaitlyn Trudeau, a senior research associate at the nonprofit Climate Central. “It can make more extreme cold outcomes; it can make more extreme warm outcomes … judging climate change by a cold storm is like judging a baseball season by a single inning.”
The Nation interviewed Graham Granger, the student arrested for consuming part of an exhibit of AI-generated art — although apparently he didn’t eat everything he chewed up.
Do you have any qualms about the fact that AI art is made by scraping other artists?
Yeah, I mean, that’s part of why I spat it out, because AI chews up and spits out art made by other people.
President Trump has talked about dismantling FEMA as his administration slashes staff from federal agencies. But now, FEMA will “cease offboarding” workers, CNN reports. A major winter storm threatens to wreck power grids and make travel treacherous across much of the US over the weekend and into next week.
The breach of Luxshare allegedly happened in December, though Cybernews reports that there is “no evidence” that “consumer iCloud accounts or user passwords were accessed.” The ransomware group RansomHub, which announced the breach, also claims that information from Nvidia, Tesla, and others is part of the stolen data.
