The schemes and shenanigans behind the Nexstar-Tegna deal.
This is also your last chance to catch any performances you might have missed. Last week I missed out on Clipse, Young Thug, The Rapture, and Tomora, so they’re my priority. But I also am looking forward to Röyksopp, who didn’t make the stream last weekend. Head over to the official Coachella YouTube channel.
We just flew around the Moon, which remains an incredible feat for human beings. On this planet, I’m really psyched to print and frame the official NASA posters for the Artemis II mission. And because they’re a public work you can get them for free. What a great use of taxes.
Some parts of the probe were powered down last year, but power dropped unexpectedly during a maneuver on February 27th, leading NASA to shut down the Low-energy Charged Particles experiment (LECP) earlier than expected. A fix is in the works that could extend the life of both Voyagers and possibly bring LECP back online.
“While shutting down a science instrument is not anybody’s preference, it is the best option available,” said Kareem Badaruddin, Voyager mission manager at JPL. “Voyager 1 still has two remaining operating science instruments — one that listens to plasma waves and one that measures magnetic fields. They are still working great, sending back data from a region of space no other human-made craft has ever explored. The team remains focused on keeping both Voyagers going for as long as possible.”
I love horror movies and overanalyzing things, so Horror Lex scratches a really specific itch. It doesn’t actually host any papers or books. Instead, it’s a hand-selected index of over 13,000 documents, many of them from peer-reviewed journals. A lot of them are free to read, too.
[Horror Lex]
The push for online child safety is forcing platforms to adopt a narrow set of privacy-encroaching age verification options.
It finished the 21.1-kilometer race in 50 minutes and 26 seconds. The world record was set just a month ago by Jacob Kiplimo, at 57 minutes and 20 seconds. More impressively, when this race was held last year, the winning robot finished in 2 hours, 40 minutes — a stunning improvement.
Correction April 19th: An earlier version used the wrong unit of measurement. A half-marathon is 21.1 kilometers, or 13.1 miles.
The first hint was a sponsored Instagram post on March 31st. But Curry has been spotted wearing the mysterious device in a video from Sotheby’s, and it even made an appearance in a behind-the-scenes clip way back from All-Star weekend. We don’t know much, but it looks like Google is getting ready to take on Whoop.
The New York Times has found hundreds of fake accounts on Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook that appear to be a pre-midterm push to get conservative voters to the polls in support of Trump’s agenda. The accounts often use the same captions and awkward phrasing.
It’s not clear who created the A.I. accounts, and determining whether they are the product of a hired content farm, a foreign influence operation, an experiment or something else is difficult, experts said. They all agree, however, that creating such avatars is becoming easier, especially for contractors and marketing companies that now specialize in developing and dispatching A.I. avatars in bulk for increasingly low prices.
[New York Times]
Last week we got special guest, Jack White. This week it’s Musgraves who gets that honor, after releasing the title track from her upcoming album Middle of Nowhere, the second single after “Dry Spell.” This weekend’s livestream replaces the stage with Yuma. That means no Model / Actriz or Drain, but you do get Armin van Buuren and a solo Boys Noize set. Watch here.
YouTuber Patrick Willems has argued that movies look objectively worse than they did 25 years ago. Digital cameras and an overreliance on CGI are factors. But he also argues that YouTube killed off the music video-to-Hollywood pipeline, starving the industry of inventive visual stylists.
And a whole lot more, including alternate versions of Acts 2 and 3, Steam Workshop support, and “experimental game modes.” The game got its first major update for all players on Thursday.
The game is a big hit, selling three million copies a week after its March launch, and I can tell you from personal experience that it’s a blast with a friend.
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During a press conference on Thursday, astronaut Reid Wiseman said if Artemis II had a lander, “at least three of my crewmates would have been in it trying to land on the Moon.”
“If you had given us the keys to the lander, we would’ve taken it down and landed on that moon.”
The job cuts could affect around 10 percent of Meta’s workforce, or around 8,000 employees, according to Reuters. This is reportedly the first of two waves of layoffs planned for this year, and follows an earlier report from Reuters that suggests Meta could cut as much as 20 percent of its workforce.
The field of brain-computer interfaces is moving away from mind-controlled computer cursors to restoring speech.
Some of the best explorations of virtual worlds come from anime, and up next is Labyrinth from director Shoji Kawamori. It centers on a high school student who gets trapped in her phone, only for a virtual doppelgänger to take over her life. It’s hitting theaters soon, but only for two days: May 10th and 11th.
In December, we explained how Valve architected a push for Windows games on Arm — the Steam Frame is just the tip of the iceberg. Now, Valve’s released a public beta of Steam for Arm+Linux (download link) — and one person’s already got it running on a rooted Switch! Can’t play games yet, though.
After announcing that the Galaxy Z TriFold phone would be discontinued and offering one final restock, Samsung now says that the “limited-run” phone is “completely sold out,” as reported by 9to5Google. If you want to know what it was like to actually use, check out Allison Johnson’s writeup.
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Just press play. Trust me. Also see this! And maybe this. I would absolutely pay for tickets to watch this live.
Iron Galaxy Studios, which has also helped support and port dozens of games, including BioShock Infinite, Diablo III, and The Last of Us Part I, is cutting around 90 employees, according to Kotaku.
The layoffs follow last year’s job cuts at Iron Galaxy Studios, and come as the developer works to “adapt to the climate of the video game industry,” according to a post on LinkedIn.
Last week I told you how much better the MacBook Neo is compared to similarly priced Windows laptops. Now, let me show you.
A new Wired investigation details the lengths Jim Dolan, owner of the New York Knicks and venues like MSG and the Las Vegas Sphere, goes to to spy on perceived enemies, fans, and critics. The vast surveillance apparatus includes dossiers, social media posts, and facial recognition tech.
Last year I wrote about one fan who believes a t-shirt design he had made resulted in a lifetime ban from Dolan’s venues — and that facial recognition picked him out of the crowd.
With the next batch of pre-orders, the Thor Max model with 1TB of storage is getting a $100 price hike to $549, according to a Discord announcement.
AYN is also switching from UFS 4.0 storage to the slower UFS 3.1 storage starting with the next pre-orders of the Thor and the AYN Odin 3 because “UFS 4.0 is no longer available at a sustainable level.”
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Panic detailed the changes in a policy that went into effect this month. For now, however, Panic will allow Catalog titles that “have used AI assistance in the coding process,” but those games will be flagged to note that.
For its own games, Panic cofounder Cabel Sasser recently told The Verge that it does not “have any interest in generative AI-created products.”
[Playdate]
Pilots have apparently been meowing and barking at each other over air traffic control radio, but the Federal Aviation Administration isn’t amused by the bit. Some in the industry fear pilots will tune out the jokes and miss timely safety information, according to CNN.
[The New York Times]
Claude Design — powered by the company’s newest model, Opus 4.7 — allows users to create designs, prototypes, pitch decks, marketing materials, and more. It’s available in research preview for paying subscribers.
[Anthropic]
The company, which is the subject of multiple state lawsuits over alleged child safety issues, will also be required to implement a “default content mode” for users who haven’t had their age verified — which is basically what Roblox announced on Monday.
The settlement was reached after Nevada approached the company ahead of a lawsuit, Reuters reports.
[Nevada Attorney General Aaron D. Ford]
European Mammotion owners took to Reddit to complain that their expensive machines have been offline for three days. Mammotion says a fix is in the works, but hasn’t said what happened. One Redditor claims the outage stems from a bug in the Mammotion Home Assistant integration he had built. We’ve reached out to the company for the full story.
The same day DJI announced the new Osmo Pocket 4, leaker Igor Bogdanov shared two new videos of the rumored pro version on X. The first video appears to be an official leaked teaser from DJI briefly showing the Osmo Pocket 4P’s dual cameras in motion, while in the second the camera is controlled using a wireless touchscreen remote.
