Technology

Tesla vehicles are inexplicably slamming on their brakes for no reason, frightening owners and eliciting over 100 complaints to the federal government in the last three months alone, according to The Washington Post. It’s been a persistent issue for the automaker. Last October, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said on Twitter that the company was forced to “roll back” version 10.3 of its Full Self-Driving beta software because of issues with forward collision warnings and phantom braking. But since then, the number of complaints about Tesla’s braking has spiked. According to The Washington Post’s analysis, reports from Tesla owners about phantom braking to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) rose to 107 complaints in the past three months, compared with only 34 in the preceding 2...

NFT marketplace OpenSea hit an all-time high of $5 billion USD in trading volume between Ethereum and its marketplace Polygon in January. This topped its previous monthly record of $3.4 billion USD in August 2021. The trading volume consisted of $4.95 billion of Ethereum and over $79 million on Polygon, according to public blockchain data compiled by Dune Analytics. OpenSea’s best day occurred yesterday, January 31, with $233 million USD worth of NFT trading. Earlier this month, the NFT marketplace revealed that it had raised $300 million USD in a Series C funding round, bringing its valuation to $13.3 billion USD. In other tech news, Realme debuted a color-changing 9 Pro Series smartphone. Read Full Article

Realme has just unveiled its newest flagship smartphone — the 9 Pro Series. Designed around the idea of witnessing a sunrise, the new 9 Pro is made with Realme’s Light Shift Design technology, a unique application on the back where the color changes in the presence of UV light. Light Shift Design is the result of 200 prototypes where OCA organic photochromic materials change the phone’s color from blue to red in three seconds under sunlight. When indoors, the phone will change back to blue in two minutes. In keeping with a slim profile, Light Shift Design sees the glass bonded with a dual-layer photochromic process to achieve an increase in color rendering by 40 percent and further guaranteed viscosity. The phone itself is 7.99mm thin and weighs 182 grams. While the complete list of specs ...

Polestar, the electric automaker jointly owned by Volvo and Geely, likes one-offs. There was the more powerful version of its electric fastback Polestar 2 sedan made for the Goodwood Festival of Speed. And now there’s the Arctic Circle, a high-riding, studded winter-tire-sporting, icy blast of winter racing prowess from the company’s Swedish engineers (who know how to design a vehicle for snow riding). The one-off was designed by Polestar chief chassis engineer – and trophy winning rally driver – Joakim Rydholm, who said he took on the challenge in order to improve the accuracy of the Polestar 2’s handling. “With such low levels of grip, we can feel and analyze the dynamics at a much slower pace than on tarmac, which means we can really fine-tune the way our cars behave, down to the smalle...

SpaceX’s satellite internet service Starlink is getting a pricey new high-performance tier called Starlink Premium. Announced by SpaceX founder Elon Musk, the new service includes a larger high performance antenna and advertises speeds of between 150 and 500Mbps (20 to 40ms latency), up from the 50 to 250Mbps (20 to 40ms latency) promised by its regular service. Premium also claims roughly double the upload speeds at 20 to 40Mbps, compared to 10 to 20Mbps for the standard tier. This increase in performance doesn’t come cheap. While the base Starlink service costs $499 for the hardware and $99 a month, Starlink Premium will cost $2,500 for the antenna, and $500 a month. Deliveries are due to start in the second quarter of this year. There’s also a $500 deposit to reserve a Premium dish. Sta...

Sony shipped just 3.9 million PlayStation 5 consoles in its all-important holiday quarter, a slight bump over the previous quarter’s figure of 3.3 million, demonstrating how the electronics giant is still struggling to meet demand during the ongoing global supply chain crunch. 17.3 million units in total have been shipped as of December 31st, nearly three million fewer than the PlayStation 4 had managed at the equivalent point after its release. The PS4, however, was easily found on store shelves during its first year on sale, whereas we don’t yet have a good measure of true demand for the PS5. The gaming division’s revenue was down 8 percent year on year to 813.3 billion yen (~$7.09 billion), but operating profit rose 12.1 percent to 92.9 billion yen (~$810 million). That’s what you’d exp...

Google parent company Alphabet hit a new record for annual revenue in 2021, showing no ill effects from the lingering coronavirus pandemic or ongoing issues with the global supply chain. For full-year 2021, the company saw a 41 percent year-over-year jump in revenue to $257 billion. The company reported revenue of $75.3 billion in the fourth quarter of 2021, up 32 percent from the year earlier. “Q4 saw ongoing strong growth in our advertising business, which helped millions of businesses thrive and find new customers, a quarterly sales record for our Pixel phones despite supply constraints, and our Cloud business continuing to grow strongly,” Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in a statement accompanying the earnings release. The company also announced a 20-for-1 stock split that w...

Netflix has announced that it’s adding two new titles to its small but steadily growing lineup of mobile games — including Riot’s newest League of Legends spinoff. Starting today, users can play Dungeon Dwarves and Hextech Mayhem on Android and iOS devices for free with a Netflix subscription. Dungeon Dwarves, developed by Hyper Hippo, is an idle dungeon crawler that continues to play if the app isn’t active. You control a party of five dwarves who beat down walls and monsters to reclaim their underground home bit by bit. They continue their dungeon dive even if you aren’t actively playing the game, rewarding you with the loot and weapons they found whenever you return. The more notable of the two releases is Hextech Mayhem, a rhythm runner featuring characters and locales from Riot Games’...

Yesterday, Team17, the developer and publisher of many beloved indie games, announced a “MetaWorms” project tied to its series of Worms games that stretches over 23 years and has sold over 75 million copies. Team17 said the generative NFTs would be “giving fans the chance to own a unique piece of video game memorabilia.” 24 hours later, Team17 now says it “is today announcing an end to the MetaWorms NFT project. We have listened to our Teamsters, development partners, and our games’ communities, and the concerns they’ve expressed, and have therefore taken the decision to step back from the NFT space.” How did things change so much, so quickly? As we’ve seen in the response to the announcement of NFTs for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, Ubisoft’s Ghost Recon items, and even an NFT project for voice actin...

After seven years in development, Albert Marin and his small team have completed their exhaustive reworking of Resident Evil 4’s graphics on PC. Compared to some other projects where developers upscale or otherwise modernize the visuals for a new generation or platform of hardware, this team pored over every image asset, using funds donated by fans of the project to improve upon Capcom’s PC port of the game. In some cases where old textures just didn’t look all that good at a higher resolution, the team remade many of them from scratch using photos or AI, while striving to remain faithful to the aesthetic of the original game. When I interviewed Albert Marin in early 2021, the team had amassed over 4,500 Photoshop files and had put in over 9,000 hours of work on the project. Personally, I’...

For the most part, EA’s most recent quarterly earnings statement was a positive one. The games publisher says that the fiscal quarter ending on December 31st, 2021 was “the largest quarter in the company’s history for net bookings, underlying profitability and cash generation,” according to CFO Blake Jorgensen. Games like Apex Legends and FIFA continue to be hits. But there was one noticeable issue: Battlefield 2042. “The launch of Battlefield 2042 did not meet expectations,” EA CEO Andrew Wilson said during the earnings call. The game, which launched in November after a last-minute delay, was built on the idea of scale, with gigantic multiplayer battles and even features like dynamic weather in the form of tornadoes. According to Wilson, that ambition, combined with the challenges of deve...