X users will soon no longer be able to make posts viewable only to a smaller group of friends. The website formerly known as Twitter has announced that it's deprecating Circles on October 31st. Users won't be able to add people to their Circles anymore or create new posts limited to a tight-knit group. They will, however, retain the capability to remove people from the group if they no longer want certain accounts to be able to see their old limited posts.

In April this year, users discovered a bug that exposed Circle tweets to outsiders. Turns out their posts were exposed due to a security incident, which was only one of the technical issues the website faced since Elon Musk took over. 

The company launched Circles in August 2022 after nearly four months of testing. Similar to Instagram's "close friends" feature, it gives users a way to share their thoughts with people they trust or people with the same interests without having to make it visible to the rest of the world. It's for those worried about getting harassed on the platform and those who don't want accounts that are fully public. X previously said that users with Circles posted more overall during its testing period, but it looks like the feature didn't quite get enough interest to become an indispensable part of the website.

YouTube has new AI features for creators on the way. AI-powered features the company announced at its Made on YouTube event on Thursday include a green screen feature, insights to stimulate ideas, automatic dubbing to other languages and a soundtrack search.

Dream Screen gives YouTube Shorts creators an AI-powered green screen, similar to a popular feature on TikTok. YouTube’s tool will automatically remove backgrounds from your videos, replacing them with AI-generated images or videos based on your prompts.

Although it’s yet to be seen how professional and convincing the generated content appears in practice, the idea is for Dream Screen to make it easier to illustrate fantasy scenarios or simply liven up otherwise ho-hum backdrops. YouTube suggests trekking through an enchanted forest or riding shotgun as your pug drives you to school as two oddball scenes Dream Screen can craft. The company says it will start to test the tool with “select creators” later this year before a broader rollout in 2024.

YouTube

YouTube Studio will get a new feature that brainstorms for you. Similar to asking ChatGPT for video ideas, the “insight recommendations” feature can draft outlines and help creators conceptualize projects. Similarly, assistive search in Creator Music will make it easier to find background tunes for your videos. “Simply type in a description of your content and AI will suggest the right music at the right price,” YouTube VP Toni Reid wrote today. Both Insights and assistive music search will be available for creators next year.

YouTube also showcased the AI-powered dubbing feature it began testing earlier this year. Developed at Google’s Area 120 incubator, it can generate a text-based translation into the selected target language. The company says it gives you a chance to double-check the output before choosing from different virtual narrators to read your content. The feature is currently being tested with select creators in English, Portuguese and Spanish.

The company is also launching a YouTube Create app to help video makers produce content on their mobile devices. It includes standard features like editing, trimming, automatic captioning, voiceovers, filters, effects and royalty-free music with beat matching. The free app is currently in beta for Android in select markets.

This year’s Razercon event held a couple of surprises for those who love the computer accessory company and luxury lifestyle brands. Razer has partnered up with Lamborghini to create a beefed up Blade 16 laptop that draws plenty of aesthetic inspiration from the sports car maker. It boasts a customized chassis with orange highlights that’s “infused with the spirit of Lamborghini.” The price tag is also infused with the spirit of Lamborghini, as this thing costs $5,000.

It looks pretty cool, but the actual components also got some Lambo love. The CNC-milled chassis is made from a single block of aluminum, adding durability, with a finish inspired by Lamborghini’s signature orange and matte black. The design on the lid echoes the headlights of the recently-announced Lamborghini Revuelto hybrid vehicle. So now you can race down the information superhighway in your Lambo computer as you race down the actual highway in your Lambo car. It’s an ouroboros of unnecessary speed.

The specs here are on-point, as there are some significant improvements over the base-level Blade 16 laptop. This is a highly-souped up edition, with a 13th Gen Intel Core i9 HX processor that boasts 24 cores and 32 threads. It also features a GeForce 4090 GPU, a 4TB SSD, 32GB of DDR5 RAM and a dual-mode mini-LED 4K 16” display. This thing is a beast, but remember that $5K price tag. Despite the cost, the Razer Blade 16 x Automobili Lamborghini Edition could become a collector’s item some day, as the company is only making 150 units.

Razer

Razer has also teamed up with fashion icons Dolce & Gabbana to create a gold-emblazoned edition of its popular Barracuda wireless headphones. The fashion brand’s signature design has even been applied to a Razer Enki gaming chair and a bunch of clothing items to celebrate the partnership, like hoodies and t-shirts. Let’s hear it for corporate synergy!

Meta announced on Thursday that Facebook users can now create multiple profiles. The company will let you add an @username for up to four additional personal profiles attached to your main account. After creating a new alias, you won’t need to log out and back in to switch between them. Facebook first began testing the feature last July.

The company suggests picking profiles for your personal life, work and any specific interests or communities you want to spin out of your main account. “Whether you’re new to Facebook or a longtime user, you may want to keep your personal and professional relationships separate, or you may want to keep one profile tied to a community you’re a part of and another profile just for friends,” Meta wrote in its announcement blog post. “Creating multiple personal profiles lets you easily organize who you share with and what content you see for the various parts of your life.”

Meta says each profile will have its own unique feed with pertinent content based only on that profile’s interests. “Think one profile for the foodie scene you love and another one to keep up with your friends and family,” the company wrote. The company says Instagram’s success with a similar feature inspired the move, and beta testing the feature taught Facebook that many people like having a clearer organization of friends, groups and interests “to engage with the audience they believe is most relevant.”

Each new profile will start fresh with Facebook’s default privacy and notification settings, so you may want to change them manually for each one. In addition, your primary Facebook account won’t reveal that you have extra profiles.

The feature comes with some restrictions. First, Facebook’s Dating, Marketplace, Professional Mode and payments won’t be available to your secondary profiles at launch. In addition, messaging for extra usernames will only be available in the Facebook app and on the web. (Messenger support for additional profiles will arrive “in the coming months.”) Finally, only eligible adult accounts can make new profiles. Remember: Your new handles are bound by Facebook’s policies, meaning you can’t misrepresent your age or location.

The feature begins rolling out globally on Thursday and will continue over the coming months.

Build a Rocket Boy has unveiled a new trailer for Everywhere, an ambitious sandbox title that will enable players to build their own experiences and explore others. If that sounds a bit like Fortnite on the surface, just wait until you see the art style. It looks very much like Epic’s game, right down to the stylized character models.

The clip provides the first look at gameplay. It's clear Everywhere has much more to offer than shooting and driving around pretty landscapes — the trailer shows a skeeball game and one character dodging obstacles in a gauntlet. It puts a heavy onus on the building aspect too, via the narration and some of the creative tools it shows off.

Build a Rocket Boy, which is led by former GTA producer Leslie Benzies, says the trailer shows off some of the "scale and variety" of what Everywhere has to offer. It says the project “seamlessly blends gameplay, adventure, creativity and discovery in an all-new multi-world gaming experience that redefines how players connect with one another and the digital world around them," according to VGC.

The studio announced Everywhere at Gamescom 2022 and it said at the time that the game would arrive sometime this year. There's no release date as yet, but Build a Rocket Boy plans to host a closed alpha test soon. You can create an account and claim your username now to have a shot at taking part in the first PC test.

US Representative Deborah Ross (D-NC) has introduced an updated version of the Protect Musicians Act in an attempt to change the way independent artists bargain with major streaming platforms. Created in collaboration with The American Association of Independent Music (A2IM) and The Artists Rights Alliance (ARA), the updated bill aims to "level the playing field" for artists in the digital age and the world of AI-generated music.

"This legislation will help give small, independent music creators a level playing field, empowering them to stand together for fairer compensation and giving them a voice in important negotiations that will determine the future of the music industry,” Ross said.

As it stands, current laws leave many artists, whether signed to a major label or independently working, unprotected and at the mercy of major streaming platforms like Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube. And these companies don't always provide fair compensation to artists when their music is uploaded and streamed on the platforms. Independent artists are often forced to accept whenever rates are being offered without being able to collectively negotiate for better terms. Additionally, there is no real protection for artists against having their voice or music manipulated by AI without consent.

If passed, the Protect Working Musicians Act would allow working artists and independent musicians to come together and negotiate with dominant streaming platforms and artificial intelligence developers. It would also grant working artists and independent musicians the ability to collectively refuse to license their music to online music distribution platforms that refuse to pay fair market value.

It could be argued that many artists have always gotten a raw deal for decades when it comes to the sales and distribution of their music. Back in the day of album downloads and CD purchases, this money was usually split in many ways, leaving only a small amount for the artist. Unfortunately, unfair compensation being offered by streaming platforms is just a modern spin on a longstanding problem. And it's not just musicians that are being affected. For years, streaming giants like Netflix have been offering low wages to its writers, which has contributed to the strike of members of the Writers Guild of America.

Baby Steps, an indie game that generated a ton of buzz when it was announced in June, is coming out in summer 2024 for PC and PlayStation 5. This update is a smidgen better than the original reveal, which teased a general release window of 2024. It did so using a Death Stranding pastiche featuring a grown man in a onesie trying his hardest to put one foot in front of the other, and today's news comes alongside a new, silly video that ends in Star Wars-style font.

Baby Steps comes from QWOP and Getting Over It creator Bennett Foddy, and Ape Out developers Gabe Cuzzillo and Maxi Boch. It's essentially a narrative-driven, 3D version of Foddy's original extreme walking simulator, where players control each of the main character's steps independently.

Baby Steps looks just as hilarious and strange as the creators' previous works, and the new trailer highlights the various moans, groans and mumbled curse words of the main character, Nate, as he struggles to learn to walk. Apparently, those sounds all came from the developers themselves, since they're handling voice-acting duties firsthand.

Here's how Boch described the recording process: "The developers themselves are handling voiceover duties, recording and experimenting until they discover the humor of each scene. This seat-of-our-pants approach comes through thanks to the unconventional editing, which leaves in giggles and breaks, as well as the playful rapport between Cuzziilo and Foddy, together lending Baby Steps a slacker-comedy feel."

Baby Steps is being published by Devolver Digital.

If you're a premium subscriber to the social media site X, formerly Twitter, you now can hide your likes tab from the public, the company said in a tweet.

When enabled, the tab for likes is supposed to disappear completely from an X Premium user’s profile. The new feature can be turned on when you change your preferences through the early access period.

This move is the latest appeal Musk’s X is making to paying patrons. It's a continuation of X’s galvanized effort to appeal to more subscribers, especially considering the company’s US advertising revenue is down 60 percent, and also a way for premium subscribers to hide the fact that they are liking hateful or otherwise questionable tweets. You can subscribe as a premium member for as little as $8/month or $84/year, which will also grant you early access to new features, and of course the verified blue check mark.

We may see more public figures and officials take up X on their premium offering after this announcement. Historically, we have seen PR crises ensue for politicians like Ted Cruz, who forgot his likes were public when in 2017, his account “hearted” a pornographic clip that left the internet howling.

You might see more sponsored recommendations when you fire up your Spotify app, now that the music streaming giant has started offering artists a new paid tool they can use to promote their music. "Showcase" gives artists a way to put their music in front of more people, whether their tunes are newly released or are something from deep in their catalog. They can create multiple campaigns for different content, and they can use Spotlight to promote not just singles, but also EPs and albums. 

These sponsored recommendations will appear under various headlines — succinct information about them designed to get your attention, really — provided by Spotify, depending on what the artist's team chooses. They can promote their stuff as "new music," for instance, or use the headline "on tour," if they're on the road and want to drum up more interest. In the image above, the single that's being promoted entitled White Winter Hymnal uses the headline "seasonal vibes." In addition, artists can choose the people they want to target and can go for both active listeners and previous ones. 

According to Spotify, Showcase ads will be shown in 30 markets. The streaming giant also claims that people who do see them are six times more likely to stream whatever it is being promoted. If you stream music you've seen through a particular Showcase ad, you won't see it again for 28 days. Musicians are charged per click, after all, with prices starting at 40 cents. Initially, though, Spotify will only offer Showcase to artists with at least 1,000 streams over the past 28 days and whose billing country is set to the US. It will roll out the tool within the Campaigns tab for eligible artists in the US over the coming weeks, but it says it will expand access to it worldwide over time. 

After September 29th, Netflix will no longer rent DVDs by mail and will be winding down that part of its business altogether. Most people might be surprised that the streaming giant is still even renting DVDs, but if you're one of its subscribers who'll be sad to see the service go, there's now another rent-by-mail option you can use anywhere you are in the US. Scarecrow, the largest independent video store in the US, has launched its own rent-by-mail service that will send DVDs and Blu-ray discs straight to your door. 

The store first piloted the service back in 2019 before it started working on making its library available to people across the country during the pandemic. As The Seattle Times reports, it launched a campaign in 2021 to raise funds for an overhaul of its aging website, making it more searchable and giving it a more modern look. Now, Scarecrow's rent-by-mail website is live, with step-by-step instructions on how to avail of the service and a searchable library divided by genres. 

To be able to rent from Scarecrow, you'll need to sign up for an account, which will have to be verified and approved by a staff member. After that, you can start adding DVDs to your cart. Titles are priced individually, but shipping will cost you $12 for up to six discs. That's discs, not titles, which means if one movie has six discs, you can't add more to the same shipment. The rental window is 14 days, including shipping, after that you can either renew by phone or pay late fees. 

Scarecrow has 140,000 titles in its collection — comparably, Netflix has around 5,000 titles in its US catalog, according to CordCutting — most of which you can rent by mail. There are exceptions, however, including rare and out of print videos that require a security deposit, newly released movies and adult titles. It also doesn't mail VHS tapes and laser discs, so you'll have to go elsewhere for those formats.