Technology

Google has the ability to text from the web with Android Messages. The feature gives users a lot more flexibility in choosing how and where they can carry on conversations. As long as your Android smartphone is powered on, you can text from a desktop computer or even other mobile devices — including iOS products like an iPad if you just open up Safari. Aside from text, you can also send emoji, stickers, and images over the web. Using Android Messages on the web requires using Android Messages as your main texting app on your phone. I like it just fine, and Google is clearly planning big things for the future, but if you prefer, say, Samsung’s default messages app or something else, the two don’t work together. With that out of the way, getting started and setting things up is fairly simple...

You’re not imagining it: Slack has been acting up all day. Per an official statement: “Users are experiencing degraded performance across devices and may be unable to connect.” The outage seems to be affecting all services across the platform. The problems have been happening since 10AM ET, and Slack has been sharing updates over on its status page since people started reporting the disruptions. At 2:39PM ET, the company said the investigation was trending in the right direction, but by 4:20PM ET, it acknowledged that it was still working on resolving the issues. Here’s hoping the engineers figure out how to fix whatever’s gone wrong before too long. In the meantime, of course, there’s always Discord. You Deserve to Make Money Even When you are looking for Dates Online. So we reimagined wh...

If you are looking to get your hands on an Nvidia RTX 3080 or 3090 graphics card, you’re probably going to have to wait until 2021. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced today that the company expects shortages for both graphics cards will continue to for the remainder of the year, Tom’s Hardware and Wccftech reports. During a Q&A with press to cover its GTC announcements, Huang responded to the continuous shortages for both graphics cards. “I believe that demand will outstrip all of our supply through the year,” Huang said. “Even if we knew about all the demand, I don’t think it’s possible to have ramped that fast” The RTX 3080 and 3090 had extremely rough launches, with both cards selling out within minutes of preorders going live, but Huang says the issue is not with supply but rather t...

In most games, death feels like a waste of time. That’s true whether I die because I fail to react quickly enough, don’t have the right gear, or am just outmatched by the challenge before me. But in Hades, a new roguelike from Bastion maker Supergiant Games, losing against a horde of enemies or a challenging boss in my attempts to escape the Underworld rarely feels like a waste of time. When I die in Hades, it’s usually after an exhilarating battle where I tried an unproven strategy. Those strategies evolve organically thanks to the frequent but unpredictable power-ups given out during a run. Instead of finding that unpredictability as a limitation, though, I’ve found it freeing. It encourages me to test unproven combinations of powers to unexpected and often surprisingly fun results. Here...

Nathaniel Galicia Chien was driving down Interstate 580 with his parents in their brand-new Tesla Model Y when he started to hear a lot of wind. “I thought a window was open,” Chien recalled in an email to The Verge, “but half a minute later the entire glass top of the roof just flew off in the wind.” Chien said the incident occurred hours after he and his parents picked up the new Model Y from the Tesla dealership in Dublin, California. Right off the bat, they noticed some minor “fit and finish” problems, such as “spacing issues and unevenness in the gaps that are pretty well-known issues with new Teslas.” But they didn’t expect any problems with the crossover’s mammoth panoramic glass roof, and certainly not on the same day they drove it off the dealer’s lot. No one was injured by the fl...

As the 2020 presidential election approaches, social networks have promised to minimize false rumors about voter fraud or “rigged” mail-in ballots, a mostly imaginary threat that discourages voting and casts doubt on the democratic process. But new research has suggested that these rumors aren’t born in the dark corners of Facebook or Twitter — and that fighting them effectively might involve going after one of social media’s most powerful users. Last week, Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center put forward an illuminating analysis of voting misinformation. A working paper posits that social media isn’t driving most disinformation around mail-in voting. Instead, Twitter and Facebook amplify content from “political and media elites.” That includes traditional news outlets, particularly wire service...

For those times when you’re constantly singing a line of a song but just can’t remember what song those lyrics came from, Spotify can now help you with that. You can now search for songs by their lyrics on iOS and Android (via 9to5Mac). The feature looks to be pretty straightforward — type in some lyrics into Spotify’s search bar and the app will surface songs that match. Songs that could be what you’re looking for will have a “Lyrics match” tag, as you can see in this tweet from Spotify designer Lin Wang: I could see how searching by lyrics could be a really handy feature, especially for people like me. I’m quite bad at remembering song titles, but I can usually remember the key line of a chorus. It seems like that’s all I’d need to know to be able to find a song on Spotify that’s stuck i...

Leo* stepped out of his house in Oakland recently to start his day as a backup driver for Waymo, the self-driving car company owned by Alphabet, and couldn’t believe what he saw. Wildfires raging along the length of the West Coast had turned the sky an unsettling and unnatural shade of orange. Later in the day, the air would be acrid and thick with particulate matter. But for now, it was like stepping onto the surface of another planet. He couldn’t understand why Waymo was still operating its fleet of autonomous vehicles in such dangerous conditions. “The sky looked like Tang,” Leo recalled, “yet they still got us setting up cars that are covered in ash.” Across town, John* was having an eerily similar experience. A backup driver for Cruise, the self-driving car company affiliated with Gen...

Instagram only widely launched its TikTok competitor Reels in August, and it’s already looking to monetize the format. The company announced today that it’ll start testing shopping within Reels later this year and will also start making shoppable IGTV videos global starting today. Eventually, these IGTV videos will also be available through Instagram Shop, a dedicated page for shopping within the app. Viewers can just tap through an IGTV video and purchase the items they’re interested in through Instagram checkout or the seller’s website. It’s unsurprising to see Instagram try to make shopping at thing on Reels, although the rollout timeline seems fast. Still, Facebook has prioritized commerce over the past few years, which could lead to it taking a bigger role in online transactions. The ...

Nvidia has announced a new videoconferencing platform for developers named Nvidia Maxine that it claims can fix some of the most common problems in video calls. Maxine will process calls in the cloud using Nvidia’s GPUs and boost call quality in a number of ways with the help of artificial intelligence. Using AI, Maxine can realign callers’ faces and gazes so that they’re always looking directly at their camera, reduce the bandwidth requirement for calls by up to 90 percent by only transmitting “key facial points,” and upscale the resolution of videos. Other features available in Maxine include face re-lighting, real-time translation and transcription, and animated avatars. Nvidia’s face alignment feature will make sure you’re always looking at the camera Not all of these features are new ...

When I first got to see Volkswagen’s new ID 4 electric SUV at an eerily empty launch event in Brooklyn last month, the company’s executives warned me not to make the obvious comparisons to other electric vehicles, namely Tesla. That was because Volkswagen’s real targets are popular gas-powered compact SUVs, like the Ford Escape, Honda CR-V, and Toyota RAV4. VW has its eyes on a higher prize. A couple weeks later, as I climbed into the front seat of the ID 4 for a brief test drive across Manhattan, my main objective was to see how this car stacked up against those other popular players. Compact SUVs are one of the most popular segments in the American car market, and as a compact SUV owner myself (2010 Subaru Outback, what what?), I felt uniquely qualified to tease out the ID 4’s quirks. I ...

The Zeiss ZX1, a unique camera that was announced more than two years ago before the company essentially stopped talking about it, may actually be in customers’ hands at some point in the near future. As noted by DPReview, B&H Photo has sent out emails saying that it’s coming soon and is now available to preorder for $6,000. It was originally supposed to be released in early 2019. Why would anyone pay $6,000 for the ZX1? Well, it wouldn’t be wise to order without at least waiting for hands-on impressions of the finished product, but it is fair to say that it’s a one-of-a-kind camera. It has a 37-megapixel full-frame sensor, a fixed 35mm f/2 lens, an electronic viewfinder, and three dials to control aperture, shutter speed, and ISO. More unusually, it has a 4.3-inch touchscreen and runs...