ArduinoMania

At one point Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb dons his iconic uniform — a fedora cap, a smoking pipe, a slightly over-sized suit — like Batman wearing his cape and cowl for the first time. It's a look that serves as a sort of armor against mere mortals, who he woos with a peculiar charisma, as well as the military and political bureaucracy he battles while leading the Manhattan Project. It's also a way for Oppenheimer (played by Cillian Murphy) to ground himself as he wrestles with the major conflict around his work: Building an atomic bomb could help to the war, but at what cost to humanity?

Oppenheimer may seem like a curious project for Nolan: Since wrapping up his Batman trilogy with The Dark Knight Rises, he's thrown himself into increasingly complex projects (perhaps to atone for that disappointment). Interstellar was ostensibly a story about a man exploring the cosmos to find a new planet for humanity, but it also wrestled with personal sacrifices as his children aged beyond him.

Universal Pictures

Dunkirk was a purely cinematic, almost dialog-free depiction of a famous wartime evacuation. And Tenet was a bold attempt at mixing another heady sci-fi concept (what if you could go backwards through time?!) with bombastic James Bond-esque set pieces. Oppenheimer, meanwhile, is a mostly talky film set in a variety of meeting rooms, save for one explosive sequence.

Take a step back, though, and a film about an intelligent and very capable man wrestling with huge moral issues is very much in the Nolan wheelhouse. Oppenheimer's swaggering genius fits right alongside Christian Bale's Bruce Wayne/Batman, the dedicated magicians in The Prestige or the expert dream divers/super spies in Inception.

The film, which is based on the biography American Prometheus by Martin J. Sherwin and Kai Bird, follows Oppenheimer from his time in Germany as a doctoral student, to his professorship at UC Berkeley. He mingles with notable scientists, including Albert Einstein himself, and makes a name for himself as a quantum physics researcher. We see Oppenheimer as more than just a bookish geek: He sends money to anti-fascists fighting in the Spanish Civil War, he pushes for unionization among lab workers and professors, and he supports local Communists. (Something that will come back to haunt him later.)

It's not too long before he's recruited to the Manhattan Project to build an atomic bomb, and the myth-making truly begins. Like a Nolan heist film, he assembles a team of the brightest scientific minds in America and beyond, and he pushes the government to establish a town doubling as a secret research base in Los Alamos, New Mexico. The film is strongest when it focuses on the specificities of the Manhattan Project: the rush to build a bomb before Nazi Germany, the pushback from scientists terrified about the damage "the gadget" could do.

Universal Pictures

The movie firmly focuses on Oppenheimer's point of view, so much so that we mainly see him as a heroic tortured genius. Only he can put the right scientists together and motivate them to work; only he can solve the riddles of quantum physics to keep America safe. Some colleagues criticize his cavalier attitude about building an atomic bomb — they think it can lead to untold disaster, while he naively thinks it may be so powerful it may end all war. But, for the most part, we're left feeling that he was a great man who was ultimately betrayed by a country that didn't care for his post-war anti-nuclear activism.

I wasn't able to see Oppenheimer on an IMAX screen, unfortunately, but sitting front row in a local theater still managed to be a thoroughly immersive experience. That was particularly surp—rising since it's really a movie featuring people (mostly men) talking to each other in a series of unremarkable rooms. Save for one virtuoso set piece — the build-up and aftermath of a successful atomic bomb test is Nolan at his best — what's most impressive is how cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema makes those conversations utterly engaging. We've never seen Cillian Murphy's piercing blue eyes do so much work in close-up.

Universal Pictures

Still, it's an overall disjointed experience. The few featured women — Emily Blunt as Kitty Oppenheimer, Florence Pugh as the Communist activist Jean Tatlock — are sketched thin, even by Nolan standards. And the movie would have benefitted from more insight into Oppenheimer's thinking. It's a surprisingly standard biopic, even though it's three hours long and far more technical than any studio film this year.

At the very least, it would have been interesting to see Oppenheimer reckon more directly with the aftermath of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We see him confront President Harry Truman (Gary Oldman) in a vain attempt to stop building nuclear weapons, and the film points to his very public stance against future bombs. But even those scenes feel self-serving.

At the end of the film, Oppenheimer finally comes to understand something many of his colleagues have been saying from the beginning. Nothing will be the same because of him. There is no peace now, only the undying specter of nuclear annihilation.

ExpressVPN has become a household name – or at least as close to one as a VPN is likely to get – taking over mainstream advertisements on sites like YouTube. On our roundup of the nine top providers in June, it came out tops for streaming services, frequent travel and gaming. But, notably, it wasn’t the overall best, falling short on areas like security and user friendliness.

There are three main VPN use cases on top of general security: geoblocking, streaming and gaming. That means my tests looked like watching Shrek on the clock, by using a VPN to access Canadian Netflix from my US-based home office, where the ogre movie isn’t currently available.

ExpressVPN was easy to sign up for, download and use, but compared to the other services, it didn't wow me. Competitors like ProtonVPN, for example, had easier ways to sign in across platforms. But an ExpressVPN subscription does come with a password manager to store and autofill credentials across websites. That’s a plus in a world where complex passwords are crucial to keeping your accounts secure.

The best VPNs stay out of your way and you'll barely even notice they’re running. But one oddity was that ExpressVPN internet speeds outperformed our baseline internet speed measures. The service is likely circumventing traffic shaping by the internet service provider or a similar anomaly because every other VPN will hurt internet speed in some way. But it did successfully mask the IP address, and pass the DNS and WebRTC leak tests as privacy measures.

ExpressVPN

It was also easy to access geo-blocked content using ExpressVPN, with little-to-no buffering. There were some loading delays that only lasted a few seconds when I tried to stream the news on YouTube using ExpressVPN, but no lag came up after that. Finally, ExpressVPN passed the gaming test by avoiding lag and maintaining a normal loading time. Although, it was a pretty basic test where I logged into online game Slither.io from a UK-based VPN to play the worm-eating competition with international users. Surfing the web with ExpressVPN was just as easy as being online without it. With ExpressVPN, a ping test measured how long data takes to travel from the computer to the server and back at 100 milliseconds, versus 16 milliseconds with no VPN turned on.

ExpressVPN’s biggest perk is that it supports up to five devices at once. That means I could conduct all tests simultaneously and still had no slowdown. That’s great for sharing it with a family, or folks that like to game, watch TV and scroll on their phone at the same time. It’s the main reason ExpressVPN landed as our top choice for streaming and gaming. The connectivity was solid, it had a wide range of servers in 94 countries and provided clear instructions on configuration for any device.

But security-wise, I found myself wanting more. ExpressVPN is based in the British Virgin Islands, which the company touts because the territory lacks any foreign intelligence operations and does not participate in 14 Eyes intelligence-sharing agreements. But it is owned by Kape Technologies, which also owns competitor CyberGhost, and Kape has a problematic history that includes spreading malware. Not only that, in 2021, the Department of Justice charged ExpressVPN CIO Daniel Gericke for cyberspying activities on behalf of the UAE. ExpressVPN stood by the CIO in a blog post.

But it’s not all bad. ExpressVPN publicly shared security audits of its mobile apps, protocol and desktop apps last year. That’s a win for security transparency. Still, a 2021 Consumer Reports study found that ExpressVPN didn’t support multifactor authentication, did not meet brute force mitigation checks and retained some data even after an account was terminated. ExpressVPN did, however, exceed industry standards in protections against unauthorized access, implement a vulnerability disclosure program and said it would not pursue legal action against security researchers. That means when it comes to security standards and practices, ExpressVPN as a company has a few too many misses and not enough hits.

I recommended ExpressVPN as our top choice for gamers, frequent travelers and heavy users of streaming services because it lets users access a wide range of locations from a variety of devices with high speed connections and no lag. With options to configure directly to routers and gaming consoles, it’s a solid choice for people that put a lot of strain on their ISPs. Still, there are better VPNs for the security-minded or those who want something more affordable.

Tesla has started notifying owners that they can transfer the Full Self-Driving (FSD) feature they purchased to a new vehicle, as long as they take delivery within the next three months. During the automaker's Q2 2023 investor call, Elon Musk announced a "one-time amnesty" that will allow owners to transfer their FSD. Now, Twitter user Keith Dahlenburg has posted a screenshot (via Not A Tesla App, The Verge) of the offer, along with its rules and conditions. 

Perhaps the most pertinent condition is that owners can only take advantage of this one-time amnesty if they take delivery of a new Tesla vehicle between July 20th and September 30th, 2023. It can't be applied retroactively, so those who've taken delivery before and after those dates unfortunately have to pay for access again. And FSD doesn't come cheap — Tesla raised its price to $15,000 last year. That's an enormous price jump for early adopters who were able to snag the feature for $5,000 years ago. Now, they can get a new model without having to pay for the feature again. 

Owners who choose to take the transfer offer will have to forfeit the capability in their current vehicle. Tesla will remove FSD from their old EV up to a week before their scheduled delivery date, and they can't get it back even if they cancel their purchase for a new car. That said, Tesla also doesn't guarantee delivery by the time the promo is over, so owners could still miss the offer if their deliveries unfortunately get delayed. 

Twitter has again made its platform a little less usable for people who choose not to pay for a Blue subscription. The company has announced that it will soon implement a new rule that puts a limit on the number of DMs unverified accounts can send per day. In a tweet, Twitter said the change is part of its efforts to reduce spam in direct messages, which has seen a sharp uptick recently. 

On July 14th, the website added a new message setting that sends DMs from accounts people follow to their primary inbox and DMs from verified users they don't follow to their message request inbox. Twitter said it saw a 70 percent reduction in spam messages a week after the new setting came out. Before that, the website limited the ability to send DMs to people who don't follow them to Blue subscribers only. 

While Twitter said the upcoming change is meant to reduce DM spam, it's still another move that not-so-subtly pushes unverified subscribers towards paying for Blue membership. In fact, the website's announcement about it explicitly tells people to "subscribe today to send more messages" and includes a link to the subscription page. Twitter also previously put a strict cap on how many tweets a day a user can see, with unverified accounts being limited to 600 posts. 

Elon Musk tweeted this month that Twitter is suffering from an ongoing negative cash flow, because its advertising revenue has dropped by 50 percent. Even if money from subscriptions can't make up for that, it's still money in the company's pocket. 

When OpenAI released a ChatGPT app for the iPhone in May, it promised that Android users will get theirs soon. Now, the company has announced that ChatGPT for Android is rolling out to users sometime next week. Moreover, its Google Play listing is already up, and users can pre-register to get it as soon as it becomes available. 

It's unclear if the app will initially only be available in the US like the iPhone app, but I was able to pre-order it from Asia. OpenAI expanded the iOS app's reach to more regions just a few days after it was released, so the Android app will most likely be accessible in other countries soon even if it does launch only in the US. 

People can already access ChatGPT on Android through a browser, but the interface, while not exactly difficult to navigate, isn't ideal for mobile devices. A dedicated app means an interface optimized for mobile, as well as features tailored for users on the platform. iOS users, for instance, got support for Siri and Shortcuts in June. They can create a ChatGPT prompt in Shortcuts and save it as a link to send to friends, and they can ask Siri to fire up the app or create those Shortcuts, among other things. 

OpenAI has recently started testing a new opt-in feature for ChatGPT Plus subscribers that gives the AI chatbot a continuous memory. With the feature switched on, the chatbot remembers who the user is across conversations, which the company says can streamline queries. The feature was designed to work across the platform, meaning paying Android users who opt in will likely see continuous memory in their app when it comes out. 

You no longer need to try a beta to stream Android apps on your Chromebook. Google has released a Chrome OS M115 update that makes Android app streaming available to many more people. If you have Phone Hub enabled, you can run an Android app directly from your mobile device rather than installing it on the computer. The update allows you to reply to a message or check your lunch delivery without the distraction of reaching for your handset.

The feature is still limited to a handful of Android 13-capable phones from Google and Xiaomi. From Google, you'll need a Pixel 4a or later. Xiaomi fans, meanwhile, need at least a 12T. Both your Chromebook and phone must be on the same WiFi network and physically close by. Some networks might not support the feature, but you can use Chrome OS' Instant Tethering to establish a link if need be.

As during the beta, you won't want to use app streaming for games or other intensive Android apps. This is more for responding to notifications than any serious commitment — you'll still want to install apps for that. It gives Chromebooks some of the phone integration you find in macOS and Windows, though, and may help you stay focused while you work.

The M115 upgrade also lets you sign PDF documents and save signatures to use later. Google has also redesigned the keyboard-oriented Shortcut app with a new interface and easier in-app search.

Some Amazon employees will be forced to relocate to fulfill a company policy requiring three days per week of in-office work, according to sources speaking withBloomberg. Those affected will include workers hired for remote positions and those who moved during peak pandemic days.

Remote Amazon workers will have to report to “main hub” offices, including company headquarters in Seattle, New York and San Francisco (and possibly other locations), as The Wall Street Journalreported. However, decisions on who has to relocate, and where, will be decided on a departmental basis. The company reportedly hasn’t yet established how many employees will have to uproot themselves.

An Amazon representative told Bloomberg today that it observes “more energy, collaboration, and connections happening” since implementing the in-office mandate, which CEO Andy Jassy announced in February. Some of the company’s workforce viewed the policy as adding insult to injury, as it arrived around the same time as widespread layoffs starting in late 2022 that affected around 27,000 employees. Hundreds of workers staged a walkout in May, protesting the return-to-office policy and the company’s climate shortcomings.

“We continue to look at the best ways to bring more teams together in the same locations, and we’ll communicate directly with employees as we make decisions that affect them,” an Amazon spokesperson told Bloomberg.

OpenAI’s trust and safety lead, Dave Willner, has left the position, as announced via a Linkedin post. Willner is staying on in an “advisory role” but has asked Linkedin followers to “reach out” for related opportunities. The former OpenAI project lead states that the move comes after a decision to spend more time with his family. Yes, that’s what they always say, but Willner follows it up with actual details.

“In the months following the launch of ChatGPT, I've found it more and more difficult to keep up my end of the bargain,” he writes. “OpenAI is going through a high-intensity phase in its development — and so are our kids. Anyone with young children and a super intense job can relate to that tension.”

He continues to say he’s “proud of everything” the company accomplished during his tenure and noted it was “one of the coolest and most interesting jobs” in the world.

Of course, this transition comes hot on the heels of some legal hurdles facing OpenAI and its signature product, ChatGPT. The FTC recently opened an investigation into the company over concerns that it is violating consumer protection laws and engaging in “unfair or deceptive" practices that could hurt the public's privacy and security. The investigation does involve a bug that leaked users’ private data, which certainly seems to fall under the purview of trust and safety.

Willner says his decision was actually a “pretty easy choice to make, though not one that folks in my position often make so explicitly in public.” He also states that he hopes his decision will help normalize more open discussions about work/life balance. 

There's growing concerns over the safety of AI in recent months and OpenAI is one of the companies that agreed to place certain safeguards on its products at the behest of President Biden and the White House. These include allowing independent experts access to the code, flagging risks to society like biases, sharing safety information with the government and watermarking audio and visual content to let people know that it’s AI-generated.

As it promised, Reddit has been taking over control of subreddits that shut down to protest changes to the platform's API. The admin account u/ModCodeofConduct has taken sole charge of r/malefashionadvice, a community with more than 5.4 million subscribers.

The subreddit joined thousands of others in closing shop in mid-June to show opposition to the new API rules. Other subreddits started allowing users to post porn in protest.

Third-party developers used the API to build thousands of apps that hook into Reddit. Many of their apps helped with moderation or accessibility. However, Reddit decided to start charging for the formerly free API, forcing the developers of many popular apps to abandon their projects. A transcription community also closed over a "lack of trust" in the platform.

Reddit saw a sizable drop in traffic after the protest started, according to third-party data. The company warned moderators that kept their subreddits private or in read-only mode that it would replace them.

One of the former r/malefashionadvice mods told The Verge that Reddit removed their privileges on Thursday, something they'd been expecting to happen. In a pinned post, u/ModCodeofConduct sought volunteers to take over the subreddit. The admin account has posted similar messages on other subreddits for which it's the only current moderator, including r/AccidentalRenaissance (which has more than 925,000 subscribers) and r/ShittyLifeProTips (1.7 million subscribers). 

"We are, and have been, enforcing the moderator Code of Conduct. This is not new because of the protests," a Reddit spokesperson told Engadget. Under its guidelines, Reddit considers a public community that has indefinitely been made private to be "abandoned," and it seeks "new mods who want to reinvigorate it." The spokesperson added that "we have a practice of reactivating private, high-subscriber communities that are being 'camped' on." 

Meanwhile, Reddit this week revived r/place, a communal art project that allows each user to place a single pixel onto a large mosaic once every few minutes. Unsurprisingly, redditors are using it to call out the company and CEO Steve Huffman (aka u/spez). "Never forget what was stolen from you," reads a message on the mosaic that directs viewers to the r/Save3rdPartyApps community.

Amazon’s Starlink rival, Project Kuiper, is moving closer to liftoff. The company announced today that a new $120 million satellite-processing facility for the initiative is under construction at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Amazon plans to launch its first satellites “in the coming months,” followed by the first customer pilots next year.

Like Elon Musk’s Starlink, Project Kuiper aims to provide fast and affordable satellite broadband to areas “unserved or underserved by traditional internet and communications options.” (It’s an Amazon initiative but should enjoy a cozy relationship with Blue Origin, owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.) Project Kuiper kickstarted in 2018, receiving FCC satellite licensing two years later. The company plans to create a constellation of 3,236 satellites to provide seamless broadband coverage for rural users. Amazon hasn’t yet announced consumer pricing, but it hints at budget-friendly plans, saying, “affordability is a key principle of Project Kuiper.” The company also intends to offer multiple speed / pricing tiers.

Kuiper’s satellites will be assembled at a new “state-of-the-art manufacturing facility” in Kirkland, Washington, by the end of 2023. The new Florida installation will receive the satellite shipments, perform final preparations ahead of their commercial deployment. Amazon says it’s secured launches from Blue Origin, Arianespace and United Launch Alliance (ULA). Most units will deploy from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, near the new processing facility.

Amazon touted Project Kuiper’s anticipated job creation. It says over 1,400 people are already working on it, and the company expects the initiative to eventually support thousands of suppliers and highly skilled jobs — especially in Alabama, Florida and Colorado.