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You're probably more than a little tired of video meetings at this (hopefully late) stage of the pandemic, but Zoom thinks it can inject some life into them. The company has introduced avatars that replace your head with a 3D character that mimics your facial expressions — effectively, it's Apple's Animoji for virtual offices and classrooms. Only animals like cats, dogs and foxes are available for now, but Zoom is teasing more avatars in the future.

You'll need Zoom 5.10.0 or later on iOS, Mac and Windows devices. The company stressed that this doesn't use facial recognition. The software is just looking for the presence of a face, not yours in particular.

It won't be surprising if the novelty wears out quickly, as it has for Animoji and other digital stand-ins. However, Zoom suggests avatars could be practical in some cases. Avatars let you avoid showing your real face on camera without removing all facial expressions, the company said. This might also be useful for teachers and pediatric doctors wanting to lift the moods of children. If nothing else, they could provide some much-needed silliness in the middle of a dull business seminar.

Nintendo's first foray into original mobile games is coming to an end. As Polygonreports, Nintendo and developer Cygames are gradually shutting down the gacha fantasy RPG Dragalia Lost. The last big content update arrives March 31st, when new characters come to the game. After that, the producers won't provide new content updates apart from those for "certain quests" and the main story, which wraps up in July.

Dragalia Lost itself will shut down at an unspecified "later date" following the core campaign's end. There will still be "summon showcases" and event revivals until the full shutdown, the companies said.

The companies didn't explain the decision. Dragalia Lost wasn't strictly a failure. Sensor Tower estimated the game earned $146 million in revenue by October 2020, roughly two years after launch. It also had 3.9 million installs across Android and iOS, and in 2019 had made more money than every Nintendo mobile game beyond Fire Emblem Heroes. Dr. Mario Worldshut down sooner, in November.

The title has lately faced stiff competition from heavyweights like Genshin Impact, however. And as Niko Partners analyst Daniel Ahmad observed, Nintendo hasn't exactly been rushing to expand its mobile catalog — the only release in the past two years was the licensed Niantic game Pikmin Bloom. This may be as much about consolidating around adaptations of well-known franchises, such as Super Mario Run and Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp.

At the start of the year, Angela Hession, Twitch’s vice-president of Trust and Safety, promised the company would implement an improved reporting and appeals process, and now it’s doing exactly that. Starting next week, the company will begin rolling out an updated reporting tool it says features a more intuitive design for flagging bad behavior. Among other enhancements, it includes new search functionality that Twitch says will make it easier to specify the exact reason you want to report someone. It will now also include menus tailored to the content you’re watching.

Twitch

The company anticipates it will take a few months to roll out its new reporting tool to all Twitch users. “We know that sounds like a while,” said Twitch. “But the reporting tool touches every single Twitch user across the globe, so we’re taking a thoughtful approach to make sure it all goes safely and smoothly for our global community.” The updated tool will be first available through Twitch’s web client, with it slated to come to its mobile app at a later date.

Twitch is also launching a new appeals portal, and that’s available to use starting today. The tool features some behind-the-scenes upgrades Twitch promises will allow its Trust and Safety team to more quickly work through appeals. As a Twitch user, the company says the updated portal will provide visibility into what enforcement actions you can appeal, as well as to see the status and outcome of any ongoing and previous requests.

Taken together, Twitch says today’s updates will allow it to more quickly and consistently enforce its safety policies. At the same time, the company believes they will provide it with better insights into emerging patterns of behavior on its platform. Twitch doesn’t mention the events of 2021 in its latest blog post, but last year was a challenging one for the company. The summer's hate raids left many streamers with the feeling that they weren't safe on the platform. Twitch promised to do better and the new tools it's introducing today represent an important milestone in those efforts.

YouTube’s existing policies are not enough to discourage creators from posting “problematic” content. That’s one of the findings of new research from Cornell Tech on how YouTubers make money.

YouTube has long used the threat of demonetization to encourage creators to follow its rules. Creators who violate its policies or who veer into so-called borderline content — videos that don’t outright break the rules but come close enough the company stops recommending them — are at risk of losing access to monetization features.

But researchers at Cornell and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne found that demonetization may not always have the intended effect. That’s because it’s still exceedingly easy for creators who have been demonetized to direct viewers to other money-making platforms like Patreon.

Moreover, they found that YouTubers who traffic in extreme and “problematic” content are significantly more likely to employ “alternative monetization” sources than their peers. According to their findings, 61 percent of “fringe channels” used an alternative monetization source, compared with just 18 percent of channels overall.

At the same time, the researchers found that demonetizing a channel tends to result in creators producing more content — not less. And demonetization may even result in more divisive and extreme content because they are now trying to appeal to “committed audiences” rather than the general YouTube viewer.

“On the one hand, weakening the link between exposure and earnings may allow higher-quality content to be produced,” they write in the paper. “On the other, it may also encourage creators to embrace divisive rhetoric … Even if videos are demonetized by YouTube for breaching their policy, it could be that, due to alternative monetization strategies, creators still have substantial financial incentives to create content espousing false, hateful, and divisive narratives.”

The researchers say that platforms like Patreon, as well as lesser-known sites like SubscribeStar, need more scrutiny as they are becoming more popular across YouTube, not just with “problematic” streamers.

The issue of how to handle borderline content, and how far YouTube should go in discouraging it isn’t a new issue. Last month, YouTube’s Chief Product Officer Neal Mahon said the company was wrestling with whether to take more aggressive steps to prevent problematic YouTube content from going viral on other platforms. One idea under consideration, he said, would be to “break” sharing on these videos so they can’t spread as easily.

Partway through last year, NVIDIA announced Grace, its first-ever datacenter CPU. At the time, the company only shared a few tidbits of information about the chip, noting, for instance, it would utilize its NVLink technology to provide data transfer speeds of up to 900 GB/s between components. Fast forward to the 2022 GPU Technology Conference, which kicked off on Tuesday morning. At the event, CEO Jensen Huang unveiled the Grace CPU Superchip, the first discrete CPU NVIDIA plans to release as part of its Grace lineup.

Built on ARM’s recently introduced v9 architecture, the Grace CPU Superchip is actually two Grace CPUs connected via the company’s aforementioned NVLink interconnect technology. It integrates a staggering 144 ARM cores into a single socket and consumes approximately 500 watts of power. Ultra-fast LPDDR5x memory built into the chip allows for bandwidth speeds of up to 1 terabyte per second.

While they’re very different chips, a useful way to conceptualize NVIDIA’s new silicon is to think of Apple’s recently announced M1 Ultra. In the most simple terms, the M1 Ultra is made up of two M1 Max chips connected via Apple’s aptly named UltraFusion technology.

When NVIDIA begins shipping the Grace CPU Superchip to clients like the Department of Energy in the first half of 2023, it will offer them the option to configure it either as a standalone CPU system or as part of a server with up to eight Hopper-based GPUs (more on those in just a moment). The company claims its new chip is twice as fast as traditional servers. NVIDIA estimates it will achieve a score of approximately 740 points in SPECrate®2017_int_base benchmarks, putting it in the upper echelon data center processors.

Alongside the Grace CPU Superchip, NVIDIA announced its highly anticipated Hopper GPU architecture. Named after pioneering computer scientist Grace Hopper, it is the successor to the company’s current Ampere architecture (you know, the one that powers all of the company’s impossible-to-find RTX 30 series GPUs). Now before you get excited, know that NVIDIA didn’t announce any mainstream GPUs at GTC. Instead, we got to see the H100 GPU. It’s an 80 billion transistor behemoth built using TSMC’s cutting-edge 4nm process. At the heart of the H100 is NVIDIA’s new Transformer Engine, which the company claims allows it to offer unparalleled performance when it needs to compute transformer models. Over the past few years, transformer models have become widely popular with AI scientists working with systems like GPT-3 and AlphaFold. NVIDIA claims the H100 can reduce the time it takes to train large models down to days and even mere hours. The H100 will be available later this year. 

If you've been eager to use NVIDIA's more powerful robotics 'brain' for projects, you now have your chance — provided you're willing to pay a premium. The company is now selling the Jetson AGX Orin developer kit for $1,999. The palm-sized computing device is now billed as eight times more powerful than Jetson AGX Xavier (275 trillion operations per second, or TOPS) thanks to its 12-core ARM Cortex-A78AE CPUs, Ampere-based GPU and upgrades to its AI accelerators, interfaces, memory bandwidth and sensor support.

You'll have to wait a while longer for production-ready units. They'll be available in the fourth quarter of the year starting at $399 for a 'basic' Orin NX kit with six CPU cores, a 1,792-core GPU, 8GB of RAM and 70 TOPS of performance. To match the claimed 275 TOPS, you'll need to use a $1,599 Orin module with the full 12 CPU cores, 2,048-core GPU and 64GB of RAM.

NVIDIA is doing more to give robot creators a helping hand, though. It's launching an Isaac Nova Orin platform that includes two Jetson AGX Orin modules and the sensor suite needed for a robot to detect the world around it. The platform can handle up to six cameras, three LiDAR units and eight ultrasonic sensors. You'll also get the tools needed to simulate the robot, not to mention support for software that helps speed up mapping, navigation and perception. NVIDIA hadn't mentioned pricing as of this writing, but it's safe to presume the extra module and sensors will cost significantly more.

You probably won't use the new Jetson hardware for amateur projects, but it could have a significant impact on the technology you use or buy. NVIDIA is keen to note existing Jetson users like John Deere (which uses the tech in an upcoming autonomous tractor) and Hyundai Robotics. Orin's extra performance isn't guaranteed to lead to more intelligent robots, but it should at least help those robots handle tasks quickly.

Netflix is now using its growing mobile game collection to support a good cause. The streaming service has launched three Android and iOS games headlined by This Is A True Story, a game meant to raise awareness about the lack of safe drinking water. The team-up between Frosty Pop, Charity:Water and Pantone is a puzzle title that challenges you walk miles in sub-Saharan Africa to find water while dealing with poachers, windstorms and other hazards. It's a frank commentary on a dire state of affairs (771 million people don't have access to clean water), although the hand-painted backdrops might keep you coming back after you understand the message.

The other games are less poignant, but may still be worth a try. Pik Pok has unveiled both Into the Dead 2: Unleashed, a sequel to its endless runner/shooter hybrid, as well as Shatter Remastered, a modernization of its brick-breaker/shoot-em-up crossover for the PS3.

All three games should be available on Android and iOS today (March 22nd) at 1PM Eastern. As with other Netflix games, the latest selection is 'free' once you've signed in with your account. These releases probably won't convince you to sign up for Netflix. However, This Is A True Story might just use Netflix's size to reach a large audience.

A week ago, Google somewhat surprisingly announced that Steam was coming to Chromebooks in a very early alpha test format — but aside from a mention of this during the company's Games Developer Summit keynote, there were no details to be had. Given the somewhat surprising amount of interest around it, Google is now making things a bit more official by releasing instructions on how to get Steam up and running on Chrome OS. The company is also providing details on supported hardware, games that should work and bugs you can expect to run into. 

For starters, you'll need a supported device, and it's only a handful of Chromebooks. Google says that you'll need a device with Intel Iris Xe Graphics, 11th-generation Core i5 or i7 processors and at least 8GB of RAM. Google specifically said that configurations with an Intel i3 processor or 4GB of RAM aren't supported. For the alpha, only the following devices are supported:

●  Acer Chromebook 514 (CB514-1W)

●  Acer Chromebook 515 (CB515-1W)

●  Acer Chromebook Spin 713 (CP713-3W)

●  ASUS Chromebook Flip CX5 (CX5500)

●  ASUS Chromebook CX9 (CX9400)

●  HP Pro c640 G2 Chromebook

●  Lenovo 5i-14 Chromebook

Assuming you have supported hardware, Google says you'll need to switch your Chromebook to the Dev channel, and cautions that you shouldn't do this with hardware that you rely on for daily use. From there, you'll need to enable a specific flag in Chrome as well as type a few commands into Chrome OS's Crosh terminal. Google says you can find full directions here.

Once you have Steam installed, there's a surprisingly large group of games that Google has tried and suggests testers try as well. Unsurprisingly, it includes a lot of Valve titles like Portal 2, Dota 2, Team Fortress 2 and Half-Life 2. Other games Google suggests trying include Celeste, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (i7 and 16GB of RAM required for that one, with graphics set to medium or lower), Hades, Cuphead, TEKKEN 7, Fallout 4 and more. 

Google notes that Steam will default to installing and running a Linux version of your selected game, assuming it's available (which is why so many Valve games are supported here). But the Steam Play compatibility tool means you can try other games, as well; it leverages the Proton software that allows some Windows-based games to run on Linux. Of course, there are no guarantees this will work, but it's worth a shot if there's a particular title you want to try on Chrome OS. 

Come to think of it, "there are no guarantees this will work" sums up the vibe of Google's blog post pretty well. The company took great pains to note this is an alpha release; between the less stable nature of the Dev channel in general and the alpha status of Steam, Google says that "anything can break" and that "you will encounter crashes, performance regressions, and never-before-seen bugs." 

So, this isn't exactly a release for the faint of heart — but the good news is that it's extremely easy to roll back Chrome OS to its original state, and most of your settings and preferences are all kept in the cloud. If you have one of the few supported Chromebooks and want to give it a shot, you can do so now, but just make sure you've backed up any local files on your device before you take the plunge. 

Maserati is already following the reveal of an electric GranTurismo with another, decidedly more practical model. The trident badge has introduced its first electric SUV, a Folgore edition of its upcoming Grecale crossover. While the company didn't share many technical details, it promised a familiar 400-volt architecture (not like the speedier 800V of the Porsche Taycan or Hyundai Ioniq 5) and previously indicated it wouldn't share a platform with other Stellantis EVs. The Vergenotes Maserati will instead use a modified take on the platform from Alfa Romeo's Stelvio SUV.

The in-cabin tech also represents an upgrade for Maserati. The Grecale Folgore and its siblings will include a digital instrument cluster (a first for the brand), a 12.3-inch main center screen and an 8.8-inch sub-screen for extra controls. Passengers will have their own touchscreen, too. You can also expect a 3D sound system with 14 speakers standard and 21 available as an upgrade.

The Grecale Folgore is due in 2023 alongside two "mild hybrid" variants, the 300HP GT and 330HP Modena, as well as a gas-only Trofeo with the 530HP V6 from the MC20. The price of the Folgore wasn't available, but the GT will start the line at $63,500.

This and the GranTurismo aren't Maserati's only EVs. The automaker also plans electric versions of all its models by 2025, including the GranCabriolet convertible, Levante SUV, MC20 Spyder sports car and Quattroporte sedan. While Maserati won't completely drop combustion engines until 2030, the marque's role is clear — it's becoming the vanguard for Stellantis' upscale EV efforts.