Technology

Amidst the news of a new Pixel phone this week, Google quietly indicated that it’s the end of the road for two other Pixel devices: the Pixel 4A 5G and the Pixel 5. Both are currently listed on Google’s online store as sold out, and remaining stock at other retailers likely won’t last long. A company spokesperson offered the following statement: With our current forecasts, we expect Google Store in the U.S. to sell out of Pixel 4a (5G) and Pixel 5 in the coming weeks following the launch of Pixel 5a (5G). These products will continue to be available through some partners while supplies last. It’s not too surprising that the 4A 5G being discontinued given that the 5A 5G looks to be a fairly direct successor. However, it is a little unusual to see the Pixel 5 discontinued well in advance of ...

Peloton’s rumored rowing machine may finally be on the way, according to text that 9to5Google discovered in the Peloton Android app. When looking through the app’s code, 9to5 discovered references to the rowing machine we’ve been hearing about for the past couple of years — including instructions on how to do a rowing stroke, as well as language suggesting Peloton will offer real-world water scenery that people could view on a screen while rowing. Bloomberg wrote about plans for a Peloton rower nearly two and a half years ago. More recently, there have been job listings mentioning a rower, and Peloton’s CEO has made multiple comments about rowers and rowing. If information about the rower is starting to show up in the app’s code, though, it may signal that the machine is already in the wor...

NASA has halted work on its $2.9 billion USD deal with Elon Musk’s SpaceX after Jeff Bezos‘ Blue Origin space company filed a federal lawsuit. In a statement to Space.com, NASA officials said that they “voluntarily paused work with SpaceX for the human landing system” until November 1 in order to resolve the issue. “In exchange for this temporary stay of work, all parties agreed to an expedited litigation schedule that concludes on Nov. 1. NASA officials are continuing to work with the Department of Justice to review the details of the case and look forward to a timely resolution of this matter,” the statement said. NASA awarded SpaceX with a $2.9 billion USD contract in April, as part of its Artemis program aimed at exploring the lunar surface. According to NASA, the progra...

Tyga on Friday announced that he deleted his OnlyFans account and plans to launch a competing platform called Myystar, almost one year after joining the site. The “Taste” rapper took to Instagram to make the announcement, writing, “Just deleted my Onlyfans, starting my own platform @myystar8 more futuristic, better quality & only 10% fee. Creators will also be able to make content of their choice!” Myystar will provide content creators with more creative freedom, following news that OnlyFans will ban sexually explicit content come October, according to a release. Tyga’s platform will only take 10 percent of users’ earnings, a sizable deduction from OnlyFans’ 20 percent fee. Additionally, Myystar will allow creators to “sell NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain, as well as features relevant ...

We’ve made suggestions to Jeff Bezos about what he could do with his hundreds of billions of dollars before, and we’re certainly not the only ones to do so — but it seems like we’ve all been thinking small. While the public has been calling on Bezos to end world hunger or buy vaccines for almost two-thirds of the planet’s population, Bezos has been able to live out every child’s wildest dream by putting a soft-serve ice cream tap in his house, according to ice cream machine maker CVT Soft Serve. The “What The Actual. Fuck? !?” part of CVT’s caption seems to express surprise that the billionaire would do this, but I’m honestly unsure why. Who wouldn’t want their own ice cream machine if they had all the money? If I were as rich as Bezos, I’d have an entire Golden Corral (which, from what I ...

General Motors is expanding its recall of the Chevy Bolt to include all models — including the two new versions released earlier this year — after multiple fires in the electric vehicle’s battery packs caused by defects in the LG Chem cells found inside. GM is warning owners not to charge their Bolts in or near their homes overnight, and to park the vehicles outside when not being charged. It’s also asking owners not to charge their Bolts above 90 percent, or to deplete the battery to below 70 miles of remaining range. Owners should follow these guidelines until replacement modules — the groups of batteries that make up the pack — are ready. It’s not clear when that will be, though. GM says it will “only begin replacing battery modules in customer vehicles when GM and LG are confident in t...

While many video games might feel nearly effortless to play, letting you make impossible jumps, drive cars at breakneck speeds, cast magic out of thin air, and so much more, actually making those games is a superhuman feat of its own. Just one game often requires the efforts of a huge team laboriously crafting every minute detail, and very little of it that comes easy, as detailed by numerous developers who spoke to IGN’s Rebekah Valentine in this article that you should read. Valentine’s article has a lot of fascinating stories from developers answering this question: “What is a thing in video games that seems simple but is actually extremely hard for game developers to make?” Take elevators, for example, which, in a video game, aren’t just a moving platform behind doors. BioShock and Bio...

NASA’s Mars rover, Perseverance, is getting ready for another attempt, in the coming weeks, to scoop up Martian rocks after its first attempt earlier this month didn’t play out as engineers expected. The rover’s sample-caching arm worked, engineers say, but the sampling tube turned up empty. Now the rover, a science lab on wheels that landed on Mars in February, will drive to a new location called Citadelle for a second shot at picking up its first rock sample. This time, to make sure a sample is actually collected, engineers will wait for images of the sample tube to come back before it gets processed and stowed inside the rover’s belly. ‘No sample? What do you mean no sample?’ “We were just super excited that the hardware worked from beginning to end without any faults. And then there wa...

Dom Hofmann, one of Vine‘s creators and founder of Byte and Peach, has announced a new project dubbed “Supdrive.” Hofmann took to Twitter to make the initial announcement, describing the new entity as an “on-chain fantasy game console.” ? New project alert SupdriveOn-chain fantasy game consoleComing soon@supdrive pic.twitter.com/ELu9Hvj9ng — dom (@dhof) August 18, 2021 He later detailed the platform in an email shared to Twitter by Jackson Dame, explaining that the “games themselves are NFTs.” “You can think of it sort of like Artblocks for games,” Hofmann wrote. “These games all run on the Supdrive Virtual Firmware, a toolkit that allows games to be written in concise instructions that are gas friendly and ideal for on-chain storage.” While each game will be released in fixed edition size...

After a dense presentation about the undeniably impressive work Tesla is doing with AI, the company’s self-anointed Technoking, Elon Musk, capped the evening by bringing out a dancer in a spandex suit. Behold, said Musk: my Tesla Bot. The dancer in the suit, he said, was the model for a new humanoid robot Tesla will produce in the near future. After the dubstep and applause had faded, the vaguest of briefing slides promised that the Tesla Bot will stand five feet, eight inches (1.7m), weigh 125 pounds (56kg), have “human-level hands,” and eliminate “dangerous, repetitive, boring tasks.” A robot is just a Tesla without wheels, says Musk Musk said that building a human-replacement robot — something no company in the world is close to achieving — was a logical step forward from Tesla’s work d...

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Facebook’s head of security policy said the company is putting into place security measures for users in Afghanistan, including hiding “friends” lists and adding a tool to quickly lock down accounts. Nathaniel Gleicher said in a thread on Twitter that Facebook made the changes based on feedback from activists, journalists, and civil society groups. As the Taliban have regained control of the country over the past week, the group has found ways to push its messages on social media, despite being banned by YouTube and Facebook. NBC News reported Friday that people in Afghanistan fearful of the Taliban were deleting from their social media accounts and phones any photos that could show a connection to Western countries, the former Afghan government, or the Afghan military. People in Afghanist...