Month: January 2024
Google spent billions of dollars to lay people off
Google spent $2.1 billion on severance and other expenses as it laid off more than 12,000 employees over the course of 2023. And the layoff charges keep coming: in just the one month of 2024 so far, the company has already spent $700 million on employee severance charges as part…
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Replika’s new AI therapy app tries to bring you to a zen island
AI companion company Replika partnered with the team behind the AI dating simulator Blush to release Tomo, a wellness and meditation app with an AI-generated avatar guiding users. Its the kind of concept that seemed destined as soon as generative AI took off, but in the time I’ve spent with…
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Gamers rejoice: AMD may be cooking up a GPU with RTX 4080 performance at half the price
According to a new report, AMD may be working on a graphics card that offers the same performance as the Nvidia RTX 4080 but at only half the price. This isn’t the first time these rumors cropped up either, with a report back in 2023 about the manufacturer focusing on…
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YouTube TV listened to sports fans, and it’s fixing multiview’s biggest problem
Since its launch last spring, YouTube TV’s multiview functionality has been a huge quality-of-life improvement for sports fans. You can use it to watch multiple games concurrently without making space for extra TVs — but until now, you could only watch the predetermined sets of games that YouTube thinks would…
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Spec Ops: The Line permanently removed from Steam and other digital stores
On X, Cory Davis, the game’s designer and director, was also out of the loop asking the game’s publisher 2K why this happened. “Makes no sense,” Davis wrote. “Especially because the themes portrayed in [Spec Ops: The Line] are more relevant now than ever.” In an email to The Verge,…
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UK law could ban Apple security updates across the world in an ‘unprecedented overreach’
Apple is no stranger to controversy, especially involving government bodies. But a new proposal could aim to be “unprecedented” in its reach over the tech giant. Several amendments to the UK’s Investigatory Powers Act (IPA) have been proposed, one that would require Apple (and any other company) to “notify UK…
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