Technology

It’s nearly the holidays, which means that in the long-standing tradition of the internet, it’s also time for novelty, themed Yule log videos. And this year brings an excellent new entry: a roaring fireplace in the House of Hades, from Supergiant Games’ Hades. The video is in crisp 4K, showing off the lovely art of the game (one of our favorites this year): the fireplace is decked out in gilded skulls and opulent marble, while creeping pomegranates add a dash of color to the proceedings. There are also the essential sounds of any good Yule log: the roar of a fireplace, with the crisp, crackling sound of the logs. (There’s a Hades spin, with murmurs and echoes from deeper within the House whispering just at the edge of hearing.) The Yule log pairs perfectly with Hades itself, which is on sa...

Today I learned that the iPhone’s built-in calculator app has a scientific mode — and all you have to do to access it is turn your phone on its side. If you’re the type of person who keeps your phone permanently in portrait lock (like me), this might come as a surprise to you, as it did to many of us here at The Verge. This unlocks all sorts of functionality, like adding numbers to memory, parentheses, exponents, and all those trig functions from back in high school. The feature isn’t exactly new, or hidden: It was introduced in iOS 2.0 back in 2008, and there’s actually even a screenshot of it on the App Store page for the calculator app. It was hiding in plain sight. To be fair, most people probably never see that App Store page, as the app comes pre-installed on every phone. It’s not th...

Fans of Daft Punk’s incredible Tron: Legacy score will receive a pretty good holiday gift this year: an extended version that’s now available on Spotify and Apple Music. Tron: Legacy The Complete Edition adds nine tracks that weren’t available on the original score, according to Polygon. Here’s the catch: these aren’t new songs. Some are iTunes exclusives; others are tracks that were only available on vinyl. There’s also an Amazon MP3 bonus track and — get this — a Nokia Music Store bonus track. The Complete Edition simply marks the first time it’s all been collected in one place. Even though the tracks aren’t new, I’m excited about having an extended, complete version of the score available on Spotify. I love Tron: Legacy and adore the score. I play it almost every single day while I work...

Former presidential candidate Andrew Yang has filed paperwork to run for mayor of New York. NBC 4 New York first reported the news, citing confirmation from the city’s Campaign Finance Board. Yang will be running to replace current New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, who is term-limited. A longtime New York resident, Yang first drew attention as a candidate in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, focusing his campaign on the promise of a universal basic income. Yang was also outspoken about the threats posed by automation, and how its economic consequences were driving forward the opioid epidemic and a broader social dislocation. While Yang’s campaign was successful in cultivating a dedicated following, he failed to attract broader support and withdrew from the race in February after ...

Google has added a layer of scrutiny for research papers on sensitive topics including gender, race, and political ideology. A senior manager also instructed researchers to “strike a positive tone” in a paper this summer. The news was first reported by Reuters. “Advances in technology and the growing complexity of our external environment are increasingly leading to situations where seemingly inoffensive projects raise ethical, reputational, regulatory or legal issues,” the policy read. Three employees told Reuters the rule started in June. The company has also asked employees to “refrain from casting its technology in a negative light” on multiple occasions, Reuters says. Employees working on a paper on recommendation AI, which is used to personalize content on platforms like YouTube, wer...

Elon Musk thinks it’s a “good idea” to create a holding company above Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, and The Boring Company — at least, that’s what the billionaire CEO said in response to the idea on Twitter. Such a holding company could be simply known as “X,” longtime Tesla shareholder Dave Lee suggested, in a nod to Musk’s ownership of “X.com” from his PayPal days. Musk notoriously entertains changes, big and small, to his companies in Twitter’s public square. In 2018 he even suggested one so large (and largely baseless) — taking Tesla private using “funding secured” from Saudi Arabia — that he wound up in court. It was only five years ago that Google surprise-announced a similar shakeup But the idea here isn’t so far outside the realm of possibility. It was only five years ago that Google s...

Cyberpunk 2077 is still fighting its way through some terrible (and hilarious) glitches, but developer CD Projekt Red is killing the nastiest bugs fairly quickly: today’s just-released 1.06 hotfix should keep your PC save files from getting irrevocably corrupted if they grow larger than 8MB in size. Yes, that was actually an issue before today. On console, the game should also have “fewer crashes” due to “improved memory management and stability,” and a character named Dum Dum (who I have not yet personally met in my first run at the game, please do not judge me, I have kids) will no longer vanish in the middle of a quest. The prompt shown for corrupted saves in Cyberpunk 2077. Image: GOG.com support document That’s the entire list of changes in this hotfix, so there’s not much reason for ...

This story is part of a group of stories called Only the best deals on Verge-approved gadgets get the Verge Deals stamp of approval, so if you’re looking for a deal on your next gadget or gift from major retailers like Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy, Target, and more, this is the place to be. If you own a PS4 or PS5 and need to renew your PlayStation Plus membership soon, Eneba has an incredible deal on its website right now: Verge readers can get two one-year PlayStation Plus subscriptions for only $58 by entering offer code VERGEPLUS at checkout. This is a real bargain — normally, one year of PlayStation Plus retails for $60. So if you are looking to stock up on this subscription for a couple of years or want to keep one and gift the other, take advantage of this deal — it will likely s...

In what will hopefully be the last surprise of 2020, Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit is getting its own set of Pop! Vinyl figurines from Funko. The three figurines will feature Anya Taylor-Joy’s main character, Beth Harmon, in a variety of outfits from the show, none of which are chess-related, but all of which are stylish. Fans can purchase the Pops to own a piece of the show’s unique aesthetic, filtered through Funko’s dead-eyed one, but the real question is, why is The Queen’s Gambit getting Funko Pops? If you’ll allow me to speculate wildly, maybe The Queen’s Gambit is getting a Funko Pop, not because it’s a Netflix show that’s both critically well-received and popular according to Netflix’s own metrics, but rather because “getting Funko’ed” (coining that now) solidifies popular content t...

Nuro is now the first company in California that’s allowed to operate autonomous cars commercially (via TechCrunch). The company received a permit that allowed it to test its robots earlier this year, but this permit will allow the firm to actually charge people for the service. According to a Medium post by Nuro’s chief legal and policy officer, the company is planning to “announce [its] first deployment in California with an established partner.” Who that partner is remains to be seen, but it’s likely to be a delivery service that can make use of Nuro’s completely driverless Prius vehicles, though the company plans on (literally) rolling out its own custom R2 bots later on. The permit, issued by the California DMV, only allows the company to operate its delivery service in parts of Santa...

With the launch of the COVID-19 vaccination campaign, officials expect to see a surge in the number of potential bad vaccine reactions. Their job will be to find out how real those reactions are — finding a signal in the noise. If previous vaccine reports are a guide, the vast majority of the reports won’t end up being real safety issues. But federal officials encourage physicians, especially those who don’t usually give vaccines, to tell the programs about any hint of an issue — because they want to make sure they know about and thoroughly investigate everything. To some degree, the problem has to do with large numbers and the relative novelty of the vaccine. The COVID-19 vaccines are also under intense scrutiny, and both recipients and their doctors are on alert for the slightest of side...

With the launch of the COVID-19 vaccination campaign, officials expect to see a surge in the number of potential bad vaccine reactions. Their job will be to find out how real those reactions are — finding a signal in the noise. If previous vaccine reports are a guide, the vast majority of the reports won’t end up being real safety issues. But federal officials encourage physicians, especially those who don’t usually give vaccines, to tell the programs about any hint of an issue — because they want to make sure they know about and thoroughly investigate everything. To some degree, the problem has to do with large numbers and the relative novelty of the vaccine. The COVID-19 vaccines are also under intense scrutiny, and both recipients and their doctors are on alert for the slightest of side...