Technology

The best kind of door in a video game is the one no one remembers. Sure, everyone can appreciate a big, beautiful door with great animations, says Owlchemy Labs developer Pete Galbraith. But in a video game, doors are often synonymous with a massive design headache. Forgettable means a developer has done their job well. “If it fits into the environment, makes sense for its context, and works exactly how the player expects, then in that instant it was simply a door as real as any other in the player’s real life,” says Galbraith. “I can’t imagine higher praise for a door in a game.” Over the past week, dozens of developers across multiple disciplines and teams shared their frustrations on Twitter. Death Trash creator Stephan Hövelbrinks explained that doors “have all sorts of possible bugs.”...

Over the last decade, hundreds of newspapers have disappeared largely due to Big Tech’s disruption of the ad market. Republicans and Democrats can’t agree on much when it comes to tech reform, whether it be content moderation or spinning off acquisitions, but they do seem to agree that local journalism needs saving. On Friday, a House Judiciary subcommittee hearing focused on the way Google and Facebook distribute news, and a new bill introduced earlier this week has already found Republican support. It’s one of the biggest legislative threats to tech that’s come out of the years-long antitrust debate, and much of its political force comes from the precarious state of local journalism. “The crisis in American journalism has become a real crisis in our democracy and civic life,” Cicilline s...

MetaKovan, the pseudonymous founder of MetaPurse, is the buyer behind the $69 million winning bid for a Beeple NFT at Christie’s yesterday. It was the third-highest sale price ever for a work from a living artist. “When you think of high-valued NFTs, this one is going to be pretty hard to beat,” MetaKovan said in a statement published by Christie’s. “And here’s why — it represents 13 years of everyday work. Techniques are replicable and skill is surpassable, but the only thing you can’t hack digitally is time. This is the crown jewel, the most valuable piece of art for this generation. It is worth $1 billion.” The $69 million NFT represented a collage containing 5,000 mostly digital illustrations from Mike Winkelmann, better known as Beeple, that were created for his Everydays series, in w...

Pocket, an app for saving articles to read later, is rolling out a sorting option to Android users over the next few weeks that could solve my paralysis when choosing something to read. The new sort by time-to-read feature, spotted by The Verge’s Dan Seifert, means articles can be organized where they fit best, whether it’s the five minutes it takes to microwave lunch, or a 20-minute wait for the late bus. The feature appears in both the search section of the app, and as a sorting feature in your main list. A reader can sort their saved article search by length, choosing from Quick (less than five minutes), Medium (six to ten minutes), Long (eleven to twelve minutes), and Very Long (over twenty-one minutes). Your list of saved articles can also be organized by newest saved, oldest saved, l...

Microsoft is going to adjust its release cycles for Microsoft Edge to match the every-four-weeks release cadence for Chrome that Google announced last week. “As contributors to the Chromium project, we look forward to the new 4-week major release cycle cadence that Google announced to help deliver that innovation to our customers even faster,” Microsoft said in a blog post on Friday. The change will go into effect with Edge 94, which is targeted for a September release. Google has committed to making the switch with Chrome in Q3 with Chrome 94, but hasn’t given a specific month like Microsoft has. Like Google, Microsoft is also offering enterprises the option of a longer release cycle enterprise customers. On that Extended Stable schedule, there will be a new release every eight weeks. How...

Writing in USA Today on Friday, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) made a surprise endorsement of a fledgling union at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama. In the op-ed, Rubio frames the union drive as a necessary response to the encroaching power of Amazon, a longtime target for Republicans. “When the conflict is between working Americans and a company whose leadership has decided to wage culture war against working-class values, the choice is easy — I support the workers,” Rubio writes in the op-ed. “And that’s why I stand with those at Amazon’s Bessemer warehouse today.” Rubio says Amazon “wages culture war against working-class values” Workers at the Bessemer warehouse are in the process of voting on whether to unionize, as overseen by the National Labor Relations Board. Amazon had sought to...

PmsProxy, a partnered Twitch streamer who has 147,000 followers, was tired. Tired of streaming Grand Theft Auto roleplay, and of streaming herself playing games more generally — something she’d been doing nearly every day for around six years. “I didn’t just want to sit and play games all day, I realized,” she says when I reach her by Discord. “I want to either tell a story through roleplay or just do something that made it feel fulfilling, and roleplay wasn’t that.” So she decided to make a change: instead of streaming herself playing games, she’d stream herself making things for her business. That business was leatherworking. Proxy made the jump from full-time game streamer to full-time crafting streamer at the beginning of this year; it was a nerve-wracking but ultimately necessary step...

Woot has discounted Samsung’s Galaxy Note 20 line today, with up to $500 in savings available depending on which phone you buy. You can buy the Galaxy Note 20, which comes in mystic green and features 8GB of RAM and a 6.7-inch 1080p LCD screen for only $600. Alternatively, you can get the Galaxy Note 20 Ultra for $200 more, which comes in mystic bronze and features 12GB of RAM and a 6.9-inch 1440p OLED screen. These prices are for the unlocked versions, and both include 128GB of storage; however, only the Note 20 Ultra features a microSD slot, allowing you to expand your storage if you choose. Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra (128GB, unlocked) $800 $1,300 39% off Prices taken at time of publishing. One of two phones in the Note 20 line, the Galaxy Note 20 Ultra has a 6.9-inch 1440p OLED screen...

Albert Marin has taken some very specific vacations. In Wales, he visited Raglan Castle to snap pictures of its stone wall. At the Palau Güell in Barcelona, he took meticulous photos, not of the building itself, but of the marble floor and its unique veins. His trips followed in the steps of Capcom, which put bits of real-world architecture found across Europe into Resident Evil 4, which was originally released over 16 years ago. “I collected a great number of locations the game’s developers use as source material,” Marin told The Verge. Fast forward to 2021, and Marin is now seven years into a project to remaster Resident Evil 4’s blurry GameCube-era graphics into crisp HD, in part using high-resolution photos he’s taken of everything from surfaces and doors to general architecture that s...

Facebook has nearly 10,000 employees in its division working on augmented reality and virtual reality devices, according to a report in The Information based on internal organizational data. The number means the Reality Labs division accounts for almost a fifth of the people working at Facebook worldwide. This suggests that Facebook has been significantly accelerating its VR and AR efforts. As UploadVR noted in 2017, the Oculus VR division accounted for over a thousand employees at a time when Facebook’s headcount was 18,770 overall, indicating a percentage somewhere north of five percent. Since then, Facebook has shifted its VR focus away from Oculus Rift-style tethered headsets by releasing the Oculus Quest and Quest 2, which are standalone wireless devices that don’t require a PC. The $...

Google has detailed the efficiency improvements it made with Chrome 89, the latest version of its browser released earlier this month. Depending on whether you’re using the browser on Windows, macOS, or Android, Google says the browser should use less resources, launch quicker, and feel more responsive to use. There’s no mention of any improvements specifically for users on iOS. The exact benefits vary by OS. Across platforms, Google says Chrome is able to reclaim as much as 100MiB (or over 20 percent on some sites) by using foreground tab memory more efficiently, and on macOS it’s saving up to 8 percent of its memory usage based on how it handles background tabs (something which Chrome already does on other platforms). Google says these improvements on macOS have benefited the browser’s E...

Tenet, the latest film by director Christopher Nolan, arrived on Blu-ray in December 2020, but now it has been released in another physical format: Game Boy Advance cartridges. Via Engadget, YouTuber Bob Wulff managed to fit the two-hour, 30-minute time-bending film with a nearly incomprehensible plot on five cartridges, compressed down to a 192 x 128 resolution that looks blurry even on the GBA’s 240 x 160 display. The worst (best) part of the experience might be that it runs at six frames per second. They even made bespoke labels for each cartridge that are, actually, very well done. Now, before you ask aloud “why?” just say “thank you, Bob Wulff!” instead. This obviously doesn’t need to exist, but the promise of these little displays of technical prowess applied in strange, delightful w...