ArduinoMania

Your PS5 might have some fresh features coming its way, with Sony announcing a new PS5 software beta update with Dolby Atmos support, more accessibility components, and greater M.2 SSD storage. The addition of Dolby Atmos support should let you play the PS5's 3D Audio powered by Tempest 3D AudioTech on any compatible Dolby Atmos-enabled HDMI device, like your home theater or soundbar. Storage-wise, the beta increases M.2 SSD limits from 4GB to 8GB — giving your PS5 more storage space.

There are two big accessibility features available with the beta, including the ability to add a second controller for assistance during gameplay. You can try this option when using a DuelSense Edge or classic controller — it will turn off features like motion sensor and haptic feedback — or a third-party controller supported by the PS5. However, you can't use the DuelSense Edge as your second controller. Sony has also introduced the option to turn haptic feedback effects on while gaming with either of the DualSense controllers or the PS VR2 Sense controller.

Sony is trying to change how people interact in games, adding a "join" button next to your friend's name if they're playing a game you can hop into. Plus, you can now invite people to your parties without adding them to an existing group or needing to form a new one — or send an invite to an entire group versus to each person individually.

The beta will be available to certain PS5 users in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, Japan and France. These features should be widely available within a few months if it follows the timeline of other updates. In the meantime, you can sign up to be a PS5 beta tester on the PlayStation website.

It looks like the Mark Zuckerberg vs Elon Musk cage match isn’t happening, according to audio exclusively heard by Reuters. In the recording, the now surprisingly buff Zuckerberg told Meta employees at a company town hall he’s “not sure if it’s going to come together.”

Zuck didn’t actually say the match is off, just unlikely. For those of us excited by the prospects of billionaires punching each other in the face, let’s hold out hope. Musk hasn’t issued a response – which is odd when he responds to so much – but given Zuckerberg’s continued training in jiu jitsu (and some competition success), Musk could be relieved.

– Mat Smith

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Apple is aware of bug that may affect Screen Time restrictions for kids

It's working on updates to 'improve the situation.'

Apple has promised to fix a bug in iPhones, iPads and iPod Touch devices that may affect Screen Time restrictions for kids. It affects the Downtime function parents use to remotely set hours when kids can't use their devices. "We are aware that some users may be experiencing an issue where Screen Time settings are unexpectedly reset," a spokesperson told the WSJ. "We take these reports very seriously and we have been, and will continue, making updates to improve the situation."

Continue reading.

'Final Fantasy XIV' is coming to Xbox next spring

Possibly ready in time for the next expansion.

Square Enix

It took a decade, but Square Enix's premier massively multiplayer online role-playing game is finally coming to Xbox consoles. The developer has revealed Final Fantasy XIV will be available for Xbox Series X/S in spring 2024. An open beta is expected for patch 6.5X, and given the dates, the Xbox port should be ready in time for the new Dawntrail expansion, due next summer.

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Engadget Podcast: Samsung’s foldable summer

And, of course, we discuss Twitter's X rebrand.

Engadget

Following Samsung’s first Unpacked event in Seoul, South Korea, Cherlynn, Devindra and Senior Writer Sam Rutherford dive into all of Samsung’s news: the Galaxy Z Fold 5, Z Flip 5, Watch 6 and Tab S9. Is Samsung playing it safe this year, or is it bringing something new to the world of foldables? Also, we discuss Twitter’s rebrand to X (sigh). And talk alien balls.

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As we slowly shift towards electric vehicles, there’s a growing number of big, fancy battery-powered SUVs. However, for those looking for something smaller, the options are a lot more limited. But with the upcoming EX30, Volvo has created a compact electric SUV with a ton of premium features and a surprisingly affordable price. After getting to check one out in person at its North American debut, it’s clear we need more electric vehicles like this in the market.

Due out sometime in the summer of 2024, a base EX30 will start at just $35,000 for a single-motor setup with around 275 miles of range. Granted, that’s a bit more than a gas-powered alternative like a Honda CR-V (which starts at just under $30,000) or a Subaru Crosstrek (around $25,000). But when you consider the average price of a new electric vehicle is over $53,000, Volvo is definitely helping make EVs a bit more affordable.

On top of that, a base EX30 appears to be well-equipped, with Volvo including things like a 12.3-inch touchscreen based on Android Automotive (with support for wireless Apple CarPlay), cyclist detection, Pilot Assist and rear passenger detection as standard. And as you’d expect from Volvo, you get a very Scandinavian minimalist interior made from a range of recycled and sustainable materials. Now some may take issue with a few of the components Volvo is using like the speckled panels on the dash – which kind of remind me of a fancy gym mat. But in a car sporting a slick modern design, I think it works.

That said, if you don’t mind spending a bit more, the EX30 is also available with an upgraded dual-motor all-wheel-drive configuration that boasts a 0 to 60 time of just 3.4 seconds. Not only does that make the EX30 faster than bigger and more expensive electric SUVs like a Tesla Model Y Performance, it’s also the fastest Volvo ever (across both electric and ICE vehicles).

The EX30 feels rather roomy in the front, with Volvo simplifying its interior by using a soundbar that runs the width of the windshield instead of multiple individual speakers. The company has also moved a lot of common controls for stuff like the windows to the center console to help streamline the interior. And Volvo put an emphasis on storage, with the EX30 featuring a lot of handy cubby holes including a center-mounted glove box and a dishwasher-safe removable tray (with a cute little moose graphic) for rear seat passengers. Thankfully, there’s no shortage of power options for your devices with two USB-C ports in the front, another two in back, and a built-in dual phone wireless charging pad between the driver and passenger seats.

When sitting in the rear, things do feel a bit tighter, though that’s somewhat expected for a car that’s only a few inches longer (166) and a couple inches (61) shorter than a Chevy Bolt. As someone who’s six feet tall, there’s very little legroom if the front seats are pushed all the way back. And in the truck, you get a surprising amount of cargo space at 31.9 cubic feet if you include the extra room underneath the load flat floor.

Photo by Sam Rutherford/Engadget

So while I haven’t had a chance to take it for a drive, all told the EX30 looks to offer a great blend of premium features and decent range in a compact size. Not to mention excellent performance, just so long as you’re willing to pay for it. And coming from someone who lives in the city, the EX30 seems like a great EV for getting around town while still being easy to park on the streets, which is something we need more of among electric SUVs.

Reservations for the EX30 in the U.S. are available today with a $500 refundable deposit before the car arrives at dealerships sometime next summer. 

We're one step closer to getting a complete picture of Apple's upcoming iPhone 15. New information on the iPhone 15 has leaked, and with it comes insight into everything from bezel size to a new charging port. For starters, the classic iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus are allegedly bidding farewell to the top notch in favor of the Dynamic Island, an interactive pill-shaped cutout first released with the iPhone 14 Pro, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports. The iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max are likely getting a new look up top all together, with low-injection pressure over-molding (LIPO) shrinking the iPhone's border from 2.2 millimeters to 1.5 millimeters. Apple first used LIPO in its Watch Series 7.

The iPhone 15 might also finally swap out its lightning charger for a USB-C port, limiting the number of cords you need to carry around at once. Even if the change doesn't happen for this generation, it's only a matter of time. Last year, the European Union announced that all smartphones and tablets sold in the region must have a USB-C charging port starting in 2024. The European Parliament called the measure, which will extend to laptops two years later, "beneficial for the environment and for consumers."

Other updates to the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus might include camera upgrades and the A16 processor, first seen in the iPhone 14 Pro. The new iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max will reportedly have titanium edges instead of stainless steel and a 3-nanometer chip. There are also rumors of an iPhone "Ultra" hitting the market as a higher-end option. Apple will likely release at least the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Pro in September — based on the company's usual schedule — and potentially at a more expensive price than previous generations. 

X, formerly known as Twitter, has reinstated Kanye West after he was banned last December for tweeting an image of a swastika, The Wall Street Journal has reported. Elon Musk's platform only made the move after being assured that West would not post antisemitic or other harmful content. In addition, ads won't appear next to his posts and he won't be able to monetize the account. 

Kanye has had multiple run-ins with Twitter/X. In October, Elon Musk welcomed him back after he went two years without tweeting — but he stayed just a short time before being banned again for saying he would go "def con 3 on Jewish people." Shortly after that Ye entered a deal to acquire the "free speech" social media app Parler, but that fell through soon after. West has paid a price for past comments, with major brands including Adidas and Gap cutting ties.

Shortly after acquiring Twitter last fall, Musk — who calls himself a "free-speech absolutist" — vowed to rethink permanent bans based on the site's rules, unless laws were broken. Since then, he has restored the account of Donald Trump (who has not subsequently tweeted), along with other controversial personalities, including avowed neo-Nazis. Earlier this year Israel’s Foreign Ministry said that Musk was responsible for a rise of antisemitism on the site, adding that Twitter is now “filled with antisemitic conspiracies and hate speech targeting Jews all over the world."

The news comes after Musk changed Twitter's name and logo to X. He recently placed a strobing X sign on the roof of the company's San Francisco headquarters. X subsequently told the city's building inspectors that the sign was temporary for an event. Yesterday, Musk tweeted that X's HQ would remain in "beautiful" San Francisco despite the city being in a "death spiral." 

Apple has promised to fix a bug in iPhones, iPads and iPod Touch devices that may affect Screen Time restrictions for kids, The Wall Street Journal has reported. It affects a function called Downtime that allows parents to remotely set hours when kids can't use their devices. 

"We are aware that some users may be experiencing an issue where Screen Time settings are unexpectedly reset," a spokesperson told the WSJ. "We take these reports very seriously and we have been, and will continue, making updates to improve the situation."

Parents checking the feature have found that scheduled times have either reverted to older settings or been removed altogether — allowing kids to use their devices at will. One user changed his passcode to be sure his kids hadn't guessed it, but found he needed to reset the feature "two or three times a week." Suffice to say, kids don't always report the issue in a timely fashion either. Around 2,300 people on an Apple discussion page on the subject said they experienced the same bug. 

Apple knew about the issue before, but reported it fixed with the release of iOS 16.5 in May. However, WSJ reporters found the issue in subsequent releases and even in the iOS 17 beta. 

Screen time was introduced in 2018 at Apple's developer's conference, allowing parents to remotely check their kid's Activity Report and manage their app use time. They can also set a custom amount of time per app that kids can't extend, or create a Downtime to block everything but selected software and phone calls for a set hourly range. Apple has yet to say when it will release a fix. 

If reality television has taught us anything, it's there's not much people won't do if offered enough money and attention. Sometimes, even just the latter. Unfortunately for the future prospects of our civilization, modern social media has focused upon those same character foibles and optimized them at a global scale, sacrifices at the altar of audience growth and engagement. In Outrage Machine, writer and technologist Tobias Rose-Stockwell, walks readers through the inner workings of these modern technologies, illustrating how they're designed to capture and keep our attention, regardless of what they have to do in order to do it. In the excerpt below, Rose-Stockwell examines the human cost of feeding the content machine through a discussion on YouTube personality Nikocado Avocado's rise to internet stardom.

Legacy Lit

Excerpted from OUTRAGE MACHINE: How Tech Amplifies Discontent, Disrupts Democracy—And What We Can Do About It by Tobias Rose-Stockwell. Copyright © 2023 by Tobias Rose-Stockwell. Reprinted with permission of Legacy Lit. All rights reserved.

This Game Is Not Just a Game

Social media can seem like a game. When we open our apps and craft a post, the way we look to score points in the form of likes and followers distinctly resembles a strange new playful competition. But while it feels like a game, it is unlike any other game we might play in our spare time.

The academic C. Thi Nguyen has explained how games are different: “Actions in games are screened off, in important ways, from ordinary life. When we are playing basketball, and you block my pass, I do not take this to be a sign of your long-term hostility towards me. When we are playing at having an insult contest, we don’t take each other’s speech to be indicative of our actual attitudes or beliefs about the world.” Games happen in what the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga famously called “the magic circle”— where the players take on alternate roles, and our actions take on alternate meanings.

With social media we never exit the game. Our phones are always with us. We don’t extricate ourselves from the mechanics. And since the goal of the game designers of social media is to keep us there as long as possible, it’s an active competition with real life. With a constant type of habituated attention being pulled into the metrics, we never leave these digital spaces. In doing so, social media has colonized our world with its game mechanics.

Metrics are Money

While we are paid in the small rushes of dopamine that come from accumulating abstract numbers, metrics also translate into hard cash. Acquiring these metrics don’t just provide us with hits of emotional validation. They are transferable into economic value that is quantifiable and very real.

It’s no secret that the ability to consistently capture attention is an asset that brands will pay for. A follower is a tangible, monetizable asset worth money. If you’re trying to purchase followers, Twitter will charge you between $2 and $4 to acquire a new one using their promoted accounts feature.

If you have a significant enough following, brands will pay you to post sponsored items on their behalf. Depending on the size of your following in Instagram, for instance, these payouts can range from $75 per post (to an account with two thousand followers), up to hundreds of thousands of dollars per post (for accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers).

Between 2017 and 2021, the average cost for reaching a thousand Twitter users (the metric advertisers use is CPM, or cost per mille) was between $5 and $7. It costs that much to get a thousand eyeballs on your post. Any strategies that increase how much your content is shared also have a financial value.

Let’s now bring this economic incentive back to Billy Brady’s accounting of the engagement value of moral outrage. He found that adding a single moral or emotional word to a post on Twitter increased the viral spread of that content by 17 percent per word. All of our posts to social media exist in a marketplace for attention — they vie for the top of our followers’ feeds. Our posts are always competing against other people’s posts. If outraged posts have an advantage in this competition, they are literally worth more money.

For a brand or an individual, if you want to increase the value of a post, then including moral outrage, or linking to a larger movement that signals its moral conviction, might increase the reach of that content by at least that much. Moreover, it might actually improve the perception and brand affinity by appealing to the moral foundations of the brand’s consumers and employees, increasing sales and burnishing their reputation. This can be an inherently polarizing strategy, as a company that picks a cause to support, whose audience is morally diverse, might then alienate a sizable percentage of their customer base who disagree with that cause. But these economics can also make sense — if a company knows enough about its consumers’ and employees’ moral affiliations — it can make sure to pick a cause-sector that’s in line with its customers.

Since moral content is a reliable tool for capturing attention, it can also be used for psychographic profiling for future marketing opportunities. Many major brands do this with tremendous success — creating viral campaigns that utilize moral righteousness and outrage to gain traction and attention among core consumers who have a similar moral disposition. These campaigns also often get a secondary boost due to the proliferation of pile- ons and think pieces discussing these ad spots. Brands that moralize their products often succeed in the attention marketplace.

This basic economic incentive can help to explain how and why so many brands have begun to link themselves with online cause-related issues. While it may make strong moral sense to those decision-makers, it can make clear economic sense to the company as a whole as well. Social media provides measurable financial incentives for companies to include moral language in their quest to burnish their brands and perceptions.

But as nefarious as this sounds, moralization of content is not always the result of callous manipulation and greed. Social metrics do something else that influences our behavior in pernicious ways.

Audience Capture

In the latter days of 2016, I wrote an article about how social media was diminishing our capacity for empathy. In the wake of that year’s presidential election, the article went hugely viral, and was shared with several million people. At the time I was working on other projects full time. When the article took off, I shifted my focus away from the consulting work I had been doing for years, and began focusing instead on writing full time. One of the by-products of that tremendous signal from this new audience is the book you’re reading right now.

A sizable new audience of strangers had given me a clear message: This was important. Do more of it. When many people we care about tell us what we should be doing, we listen.

This is the result of “audience capture”: how we influence, and are influenced by those who observe us. We don’t just capture an audience — we are also captured by their feedback. This is often a wonderful thing, provoking us to produce more useful and interesting works. As creators, the signal from our audience is a huge part of why we do what we do.

But it also has a dark side. The writer Gurwinder Boghal has explained the phenomena of audience capture for influencers illustrating the story of a young YouTuber named Nicholas Perry. In 2016, Perry began a You- Tube channel as a skinny vegan violinist. After a year of getting little traction online, he abandoned veganism, citing health concerns, and shifted to uploading mukbang (eating show) videos of him trying different foods for his followers. These followers began demanding more and more extreme feats of food consumption. Before long, in an attempt to appease his increasingly demanding audience, he was posting videos of himself eating whole fast-food menus in a single sitting.

He found a large audience with this new format. In terms of metrics, this new format was overwhelmingly successful. After several years of following his audience’s continued requests, he amassed millions of followers, and over a billion total views. But in the process, his online identity and physical character changed dramatically as well. Nicholas Perry became the personality Nikocado — an obese parody of himself, ballooning to more than four hundred pounds, voraciously consuming anything his audience asked him to eat. Following his audience’s desires caused him to pursue increasingly extreme feats at the expense of his mental and physical health.

Legacy Lit

Nicholas Perry, left, and Nikocado, right, after several years of building a following on YouTube. Source: Nikocado Avocado YouTube Channel.

Boghal summarizes this cross-directional influence.

When influencers are analyzing audience feedback, they often find that their more outlandish behavior receives the most attention and approval, which leads them to recalibrate their personalities according to far more extreme social cues than those they’d receive in real life. In doing this they exaggerate the more idiosyncratic facets of their personalities, becoming crude caricatures of themselves.

This need not only apply to influencers. We are signal-processing machines. We respond to the types of positive signals we receive from those who observe us. Our audiences online reflect back to us what their opinion of our behavior is, and we adapt to fit it. The metrics (likes, followers, shares, and comments) available to us now on social media allow for us to measure that feedback far more precisely than we previously could, leading to us internalizing what is “good” behavior.

As we find ourselves more and more inside of these online spaces, this influence becomes more pronounced. As Boghal notes, “We are all gaining online audiences.” Anytime we post to our followers, we are entering into a process of exchange with our viewers — one that is beholden to the same extreme engagement problems found everywhere else on social media.

[Nick] does a lot of custom work with vacuum tubes. So much so that he builds his own vacuum tubes of various shapes, sizes, and functions right on his own workbench. While the theory of vacuum tubes is pretty straightforward, at least to those of us who haven’t only been exposed to semiconductors, producing them requires some specialized equipment. A simple vacuum won’t get you all the way there, and the complexity of the setup that’s needed certainly calls for some automation.

The vacuum system that [Nick] uses involves three sections separated by high-vacuum valves in order to achieve the pressures required for vacuum tube construction. There’s a rough vacuum section driven by one pump, a high vacuum section driven by a second pump, and a third section called the evac port where the tube is connected. Each second must be prepared properly before the next section can be engaged or disengaged. An Arduino Pro is tasked with all of this, chosen for its large amount of ADC inputs for the instrumentation monitoring the pressures in each section, as well as the digital I/O to control the valves and switches on the system.

The control system is built into a 19-inch equipment rack with custom faceplates which outline the operation of the vacuum system. A set of addressable LEDs provide the status of the various parts of the system, and mechanical keyboard switches are used to control everything, including one which functions as an emergency stop. The automation provided by the Arduino reduces the chances for any mistakes to be caused by human error, allows the human operator to focus on other tasks like forming the glass, and can also react much faster to any potentially damaging situations such as the high-pressure pump being exposed to atmospheric pressure.

[Nick] might look a little familiar to some of us as well. If you can’t quite place him, he did a talk at Hackaday Supercon 2022 detailing all of the intricacies of building one’s own vacuum tubes. Since getting into the somewhat niche field of constructing vacuum tubes, he’s gone on to produce all kinds of specialty devices and his YouTube channel is definitely worth a watch.

Thanks to [M] for the tip!

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