Technology

Threes designer Asher Vollmer is launching a new studio, Vodeo Games, and announced the company’s first game, a turn-based adventure called Beast Breaker. Beast Breaker stars Skipper, a tiny mouse warrior fighting mosaic monsters. The game relies on tactical choices via pinball-like mechanics; players can also craft equipment to assist them on their journey. It’s heading to Nintendo Switch and PC this summer. Vodeo released a brief trailer alongside the news today that shows off the game’s quick gameplay and colorful art style. On its website, Vodeo says it plans to release small, intimate games “full of complex, interlocking systems that can take years to fully master,” once every year. The studio is already teasing a second one as part of its plan to work on multiple projects. Since rele...

NASA’s mini Ingenuity helicopter survived its first night all alone on the surface of Mars after getting dropped off by Perseverance on Saturday. Weathering frigid Martian temperatures, the newly deployed rotorcraft passed an important test of independence, giving engineers confidence to proceed with a series of warming-up exercises in preparation for its first flight this weekend. “That was one of the huge, huge achievements that we’ve been looking forward to, and now we can move on to the rest of the mission,” Teddy Tzanetos, Ingenuity deputy operations lead, said on Monday on a NASA live stream. “And now we’re on our own. We’re a separate spacecraft on Mars on our own energy.” The four-pound, solar-powered craft arrived on Mars attached to the belly of NASA’s Perseverance rover on Febru...

A Google researcher manager has resigned following the controversial firings of two female leaders in his organization. Samy Bengio, who oversaw the ethical AI team prior to a reorganization in February, is leaving to pursue other opportunities, according to Bloomberg. His last day will be April 28th. Bengio was a strong advocate of star AI ethics researchers Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell, who previously co-led the ethical AI team. Gebru was fired in December while working on a paper about the dangers of large language models. Mitchell was terminated in February after using a script to search her emails for evidence of discrimination against Gebru. In a statement on Facebook in the wake of the firing, Bengio said he was “stunned” by what happened to Gebru. The terminations sparked out...

Alphabet shareholder Trillium Asset Management is pushing Google to adopt better whistleblower protections in light of the firing of prominent AI ethics researcher Timnit Gebru. The $3.5 billion sustainable investment firm has filed a shareholder resolution asking the board of directors for a third-party review of current policies. “Reporting suggests that many Google employees who have resigned or been fired … publicly report retaliation after voicing human rights implications of company practices, including systemic workplace racism and sexism,” the resolution reads. “These red flags suggest the potential for culture, ethics, and/or human rights problems internally.” Trillium owns 63,078 Alphabet shares— a stake currently worth roughly $140 million. Gebru was fired late last year while w...

Build-A-Bear has finally revealed what its new Animal Crossing: New Horizons-themed lineup will look like with two stuffed animal versions of fan-favorite Isabelle and infamous loan shark (loan raccoon?) Tom Nook, decked out in island outfits that match the game. Of course, because it’s 2021, you simply can’t just buy a hot item like an Animal Crossing Build-A-Bear doll — you’ll need to sign up for a PlayStation 5-style queue, which will then randomly assign you a place on line to buy the bears (are they still bears if they’re a dog and a raccoon? How does Build-A-Bear’s taxonomy system work?) today, April 6th, at 11AM EST / 8AM PST. Right now, Build-A-Bear has only showed off those two characters, although its possible that the company will have other outfits or merchandise as part of the...

Microsoft is starting to submerge its servers in liquid to improve their performance and energy efficiency. A rack of servers is now being used for production loads in what looks like a liquid bath. This immersion process has existed in the industry for a few years now, but Microsoft claims it’s “the first cloud provider that is running two-phase immersion cooling in a production environment.” The cooling works by completely submerging server racks in a specially designed non-conductive fluid. The fluorocarbon-based liquid works by removing heat as it directly hits components and the fluid reaches a lower boiling point (122 degrees Fahrenheit or 50 degrees Celsius) to condense and fall back into the bath as a raining liquid. This creates a closed-loop cooling system, reducing costs as no e...

Tech companies don’t just want to identify you using facial recognition — they also want to read your emotions with the help of AI. For many scientists, though, claims about computers’ ability to understand emotion are fundamentally flawed, and a little in-browser web game built by researchers from the University of Cambridge aims to show why. Head over to emojify.info, and you can see how your emotions are “read” by your computer via your webcam. The game will challenge you to produce six different emotions (happiness, sadness, fear, surprise, disgust, and anger), which the AI will attempt to identify. However, you’ll probably find that the software’s readings are far from accurate, often interpreting even exaggerated expressions as “neutral.” And even when you do produce a smile that con...

YouTube wants the world to know that it’s doing a better job than ever of enforcing its own moderation rules. The company says that a shrinking number of people see problematic videos on its site — such as videos that contain graphic violence, scams, or hate speech — before they’re taken down. In the final months of 2020, up to 18 out of every 10,000 views on YouTube were on videos that violate the company’s policies and should have been removed before anyone watched them. That’s down from 72 out of every 10,000 views in the fourth quarter of 2017, when YouTube started tracking the figure. The figure measures enforcement of YouTube’s own rules But the numbers come with an important caveat: while they measure how well YouTube is doing at limiting the spread of troubling clips, they’re ultim...

Google has started rolling out the April Android security update for Pixel phones, and it looks like it’s brought some performance improvements to the most recent devices. Google says the update includes “performance optimizations for certain graphics-intensive apps and games” on the Pixel 5 and 4A 5G, and, as noted by XDA Developers, some testers are noticing substantially improved GPU performance on the Pixel 5. Anandtech previously found that the Pixel 5 turned in much worse GPU results than other phones using the same Qualcomm Snapdragon 765G chip. Now, the site’s reviewer Andrei Frumusanu says that performance on his Pixel 5 has been “essentially doubled” from the review’s initial figures and is now “in line or better than other 765G phones.” Benchmarks don’t necessarily translate int...

Yelp is rolling out a new tool that will allow businesses the option to identify themselves as Asian-owned, chief diversity officer Miriam Warren announced today. The new optional attribute will make it easier for Yelp users to find and support Asian-owned businesses easily. Business owners will be allowed to edit their existing listing on Yelp and select the attribute that notes they are an Asian-owned business. The feature will be available when a business owner logs in to their Yelp for Business account. Once enabled, users who filter by “Asian owned” restaurants will find a list of businesses near their location that have self-selected that attribute. Yelp previously rolled out similar attributes for businesses to display, such as the option to identify as Black– or women-owned. ...

By now, you have probably heard of the huge Facebook data breach, in which upwards of 533 million Facebook users from 106 countries had personal data leaked online, including phone numbers, Facebook IDs, birthdates — you name it. Your first question will be, of course, how to check whether you are part of that breach. There are a couple of places out there where you can find out whether your data has been compromised. One well-known site that tracks data breaches is Have I Been Pwned. Just follow the link to the site and put in your email address or phone number. You will find out not only if you’ve been part of the Facebook breach, but also any other breaches in which your data may have been compromised. Troy Hunt, creator of Have I Been Pwned, was considering whether to include a phone n...

TikTok creators will soon be able to add automatically-generated captions to their videos as the app attempts to make itself more accessible. The option to add auto captions will appear in the editing page after a video has been uploaded or recorded. TikTok says the feature will be available in American English and Japanese at first, but that it plans to add support for more languages “in the coming months.” The platform is adding the feature to make TikTok videos easier to watch for deaf and hard of hearing viewers. However, a TikTok dialogue box also says the feature is useful for anyone watching videos “when it’s difficult or inconvenient for them to listen to audio.” Creators can edit their captions after they’ve been automatically generated to fix any mistakes, and viewers can turn ca...