Month: January 2024
TikTok’s CEO can’t catch a break from xenophobia in Congress
Today’s hearing on child safety was — mostly — an unusually focused affair. The Senate Judiciary Committee called up the CEOs of X, Meta, Snap, TikTok, and Discord and grilled them for four hours on the potential dangers their services posed for children. Many of the lawmakers emphasized emotional impact,…
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Spotify’s exclusivity era nears its end
This is Hot Pod, The Verge’s newsletter about podcasting and the audio industry. Sign up here for more. I just got back from Puerto Rico and wow, there is a lot of podcast news! Let’s get into it. Call Her Daddy is getting wide distribution It’s very nearly the end of the exclusivity era…
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Konami just stealth launched a Silent Hill game
Silent Hill, the town in desperate need of a city council or something, showed up during PlayStation’s State of Play in a big way with two new trailers and a stealth drop of a new, free-to-play game. The first game was the debut of Silent Hill: The Short Message, an…
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Death Stranding 2’s new trailer is delightfully disturbing
The sequel to Death Stranding is shaping up to be just as strange as the original. At its State of Play showcase today, Sony showed off a new trailer for the game that… starts out with a particularly disturbing bit of surgery. The lengthy clip features a whole bunch of…
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Apple’s Vision Pro battery pack is hiding the final boss of Lightning cables
Ray Wong of Inverse discovered a hidden joy today: The Apple Vision Pro power cable connects to the battery with what may well be Lightning’s final form. Using a SIM removal tool, he pushed into a small hole in the silver external battery pack of the Vision Pro next to…
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Microsoft LASERs away LLM inaccuracies
During the January Microsoft Research Forum, Dipendra Misra, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research Lab NYC and AI Frontiers, explained how Layer-Selective Rank Reduction (or LASER) can make large language models more accurate. With LASER, researchers can “intervene” and replace one weight matrix with an approximate smaller one. Weights are…
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