Sony Bravia TVs will be the first hardware to support the upcoming Zoom for TV app on Google Play. Although remote work has dwindled as corporations beckon their underlings back to the office, those still enjoying work-from-home or hybrid arrangements could soon attend virtual meetings from their living room couches. It follows Apple’s WWDC 2023 announcement that FaceTime is coming to Apple TV (via mounted iPhones) later this year.

Bravia TVs don’t have built-in webcams, so you’ll need to buy a Bravia Cam to make the setup work. In addition to enabling Zoom calls, the $200 accessory can adjust sound and picture settings based on your location and distance from the television. It also allows you to control your TV with hand gestures without picking up the remote, enables a proximity alert that detects when kids sit too close (as they’re wont to do) and adds a power-saving mode that dims the screen if nobody is watching.

Sony

Sony says the Zoom for TV app will be available for Bravia TVs “by early summer.” The company’s head of Bravia product design, Shusuke Tomonaga, said, “This partnership will make it possible for our customers to enjoy more realistic video communication on a large TV screen in the living room, enabling them to be more connected with the people they care about, whether they are working from home, learning remotely, or just catching up with friends and family.”

The last remnants of Virgin Orbit have been offloaded. Firefly Aerospace has agreed to buy the defunct satellite-launch company’s remaining assets for $3.8 million. Firefly’s purchase included the leftovers from a May auction that cleaned out most of the company’s possessions, netting $36 million in Virgin Orbit’s bankruptcy proceedings. Firefly’s purchase was reported in June 15th filings in a Delaware bankruptcy court (viaSpaceNews).

Firefly Aerospace’s purchased assets include inventory at two of Virgin Orbit’s former Long Beach, CA, production facilities. Among them are engines and other components for Virgin’s LauncherOne vehicles and two additional engines stored at a Mojave, CA, test site. At last month’s auction, Virgin Orbit said it “deemed it in the best interests of the Debtors’ estates” to hang onto the remaining assets for the time being. Negotiations reportedly continued afterward, leading to this week’s sale to Firefly.

Once-promising Virgin Orbit, a spinoff of Virgin Galactic specializing in the air-launching of satellite rockets from a modified Boeing 747, saw its stock nosedive in the months leading up to its downfall. Only four of the company’s six flights between 2020 and 2023 were successful, and its most recent attempt earlier this year reportedly failed because of a dislodged $100 fuel filter. The company began an “operational pause” in March as a last-gasp attempt to find new investors before filing for bankruptcy protection and finally throwing in the towel a couple of weeks later.

Meanwhile, Firefly Aerospace, based in Cedar Park, TX, is developing a launch vehicle called Firefly Alpha. The two-stage, liquid-fueled rocket is designed to be launched from various sites. Its first attempt failed in 2021, but the rocket had a partially successful orbital launch the following year. The company expects to launch a third time for the US Space Force.

Rockstar Games co-founder and former creative director Dan Houser has a new company. Absurd Ventures says it will build stories, characters and worlds across different mediums — including but not limited to video games. The 49-year-old left Rockstar Games in 2020.

“Storytelling. Philanthropy. Ultraviolence.” That’s the tagline for Absurd Ventures, which launches with the two-minute video below that shows more than it tells about the company’s creative, abstract and edgy vibe. However, a press release does provide a more tangible description, describing Absurd as “building narrative worlds, creating characters, and writing stories for a diverse variety of genres, without regard to medium, to be produced for live-action and animation; video games and other interactive content; books, graphic novels, and scripted podcasts.”

It would be a vast understatement to say Houser was a central figure during his 22 years at Rockstar, one of gaming’s all-time great success stories. He co-founded the legendary studio in 1998 with his brother Sam Houser, Jamie King, Terry Donovan and Gary Foreman. As Rockstar grew, he remained an integral part of the company’s creative works, including producing five Grand Theft Auto games and serving as a writer for every GTA installment to date (including Grand Theft Auto V) and both Red Dead Redemption titles. In addition, he did voice work in Grand Theft Auto III and its two standalone expansion games.

Mercedes-Benz is putting ChatGPT on the road. The automaker is using Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service to bring the viral natural-language model to its in-car voice assistant. It will initially be available in a three-month beta program for US customers in select vehicles, but Mercedes says it will consider a broader and more permanent rollout in the future.

ChatGPT integration could put the automaker’s “Hey Mercedes” voice assistant on steroids. Rather than merely answering simple and pre-programmed commands like “Turn up the heat” or “What’s the forecast,” it can carry natural conversations about virtually any topic, including contextual follow-up questions. (Children of the 1980s can finally live out their Knight Rider fantasies.) In addition, Mercedes says it’s “exploring” ChatGPT plugins to enable tasks like making restaurant reservations or booking movie tickets through natural language.

Although holding a lengthy chat on the road could lead to distracted driving, the fact that it’s voice-only should lessen the concern for recklessness. Perhaps it could even help by answering questions you’d otherwise be tempted to look up on your phone while behind the wheel.

Mercedes and Microsoft tout Azure’s “enterprise-grade security, privacy and reliability” for data protection. Still, the companies clarify that your conversations will be “stored in the Mercedes-Benz Intelligent Cloud, where it is anonymised and analysed.” In other words, assume people will listen to your recordings for training and data analysis, so be wary about uttering anything that’s private or could identify you personally.

The three-month beta begins on June 16th and will only cover select Mercedes models running the MBUX infotainment system. (You can view the list of eligible vehicles in the footnotes here.) To enter the program in a qualified model, tell the car’s built-in voice assistant, “Hey Mercedes, I want to join the beta program.”

Saturn’s moon Enceladus has phosphorous. The finding came from recently analyzed icy particles emitted from the natural satellite’s ocean plumes, detected by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. The discovery means Enceladus has all the chemical building blocks for life as we know it on Earth. “This is the final one saying, ‘Yes, Enceladus does have all of the ingredients that typical Earth life would need to live and that the ocean there is habitable for life as we know it,” Morgan Cable, astrobiology chemist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, toldThe Wall Street Journal.

Cassini, which plunged to its demise in Saturn’s atmosphere in 2017, collected data by passing through Enceladus’ continually erupting geysers at its south pole and Saturn’s E ring, also containing escaped particles from the moon. Beneath its icy crust, Enceladus has a warm subsurface ocean, over 30 miles deep, enveloping the entire moon. The eruptions at its south pole spit icy particles into space, allowing research crafts like Cassini to study the ocean’s chemical makeup without taking a dip or even touching the moon’s surface.

NASA

Data from previous missions indicated the moon had all of life’s essential building blocks — carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen and sulfur — except for phosphorous. A team of planetary scientists found nine grains containing phosphate (phosphorous bound to oxygen atoms) among around 1,000 samples initially overlooked by researchers. The tiny amount detected reflects phosphorous’ scarcity. “Of the six bioessential elements, phosphorus is by far the rarest in the cosmos,” said Frank Postberg, the study’s lead author.

Of course, Enceladus containing the requirements for life doesn’t necessarily mean life exists on the moon. “The next step is to figure out if indeed it is inhabited, and it is going to take a future mission to answer that question,” Cable said. “But this is exciting, because it makes Enceladus an even more compelling destination to go and do that kind of search.” NASA will get a chance to learn more when the Dragonfly mission heads for Saturn’s moon Titan in 2027; another proposed mission could arrive at Enceladus around 2050. In addition, the James Webb Space Telescope may help further to illuminate the chemical breakdown of Enceladus’ warm subterranean ocean.

UPS tentatively agreed to equip its delivery trucks with air conditioning for the first time following union negotiations between the company and the Teamsters. “Air conditioning is coming to UPS, and Teamster members in these vehicles will get the relief and protection they’ve been fighting for,” said Teamsters General President Sean M. O’Brien. However, the agreement only requires AC in new delivery vehicles purchased after January 1st, 2024, meaning it won’t likely spell relief for drivers this summer.

In addition to air conditioning, UPS agreed to install cab fans for additional airflow in its delivery vehicles, and the company will install a second fan in those without AC by June 1st, 2024. New vehicles will also get exhaust shields to minimize heat conduction from the powertrain to the van’s floor; existing package cars will add them within 18 months of contract ratification. Finally, new and existing trucks will get air intake vents that bring fresh air from the vehicle’s front to the cargo area to help reduce the sauna-like conditions that can develop in the vehicles’ package-storage areas.

Unless you know someone who works for UPS, you may not have realized the company’s iconic brown delivery vans lacked air conditioning. Unfortunately, it’s common practice: Standard USPS delivery trucks, introduced in 1987, also lack AC. (The Postal Service’s next-generation fleet of delivery vehicles, which begin arriving this year, finally add proper cooling.) According toNBC News, over 100 UPS workers have been hospitalized for heat-related illnesses in recent years. Especially as climate change begins to show its teeth in tangible ways (record-setting temperatures and smokey summer air becoming the new normal in many regions), it’s a sad commentary on big business that the countless drivers delivering our packages often have to suffer through sweltering heat to complete their routes.

The negotiations are part of union negotiations between UPS and the Teamsters. UPS agreeing to the most basic of heat-safety essentials may help avoid a strike, which union members began voting on last week. The union is scheduled to announce the results of the strike authorization vote (which won’t necessarily lead to a work stoppage if approved) on Friday.

Moderators from popular Reddit communities say they plan to extend their blackout protests indefinitely. Many of the subreddits protesting the company’s API changes were initially scheduled to participate only from Monday to Wednesday this week. But the vow to extend the demonstration came after CEO Steve Huffman reportedly sent a memo to staff saying Reddit would “get through it” while opining that “like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well.” In response to Huffman doubling down, a user wrote, “Let them fuck around and find out.”

Moderators from well-trafficked subreddits, including r/awww, r/music, r/videos, r/futurology, r/apple and r/NBA (among many others) chimed in to commit to an indefinite protest. The blackout is in response to Reddit taking a page from Elon Musk’s Twitter playbook, hiking API prices to astronomical levels ahead of its planned IPO. The move essentially kills all third-party Reddit clients — including the popular Apollo iOS app — leaving Reddit’s own app as users’ only option. In a moderators' thread (spotted byThe Verge) promoting the extension, u/SpicyThunder335 described Reddit’s app as “widely regarded as poor quality, not handicap-accessible, and very difficult to use for moderation.”

Volunteer mods responded to the proposed extension with enthusiasm. For example, u/britinsb commented, “The 48 hours was just the ‘proof of concept.’ The fact [Huffman] is so dismissive of coordinated action by 20,000+ mods and 10,000 subreddits just shows how badly out of touch he is. Now for the real pain.”

Meanwhile, u/strolls suggested taking more drastic measures. “I've been thinking that maybe we should stop moderating — remove only NSFW images, but allow spammers and shitposters to turn Reddit to trash.” When another user pointed out that Reddit could use that as justification for removing those mods and replacing them with lackeys, a now-deleted user replied, “Let them do it then honestly. They currently have roughly 30k mods protesting that have been doing free labor for them [for] decades, keeping these subreddits usable. It's not that simple and will only further affect the site's image with any possible IPO attempt. Twitter fucked around with their paid staff and dropped to a third of pre-purchase valuation. Reddit can learn as well.”

In the same thread, u/SpicyThunder335 suggested common-sense measures for communities with a more urgent need to stay online. “For example, r/StopDrinking represents a valuable resource for communities in need, and the urgency of getting the news of the ongoing war out to r/Ukraine obviously outweighs any of these concerns.” They suggested subtler protests for those forums, including a stickied announcement or weekly gesture of support.

OpenAI warned Microsoft early this year about rushing the integration of GPT-4 into Bing without further training, according to The Wall Street Journal. Although Microsoft forged ahead anyway, the alert proved prescient as early users noticed “unhinged” behavior in the Bing AI tool. (The most memorable examples included arguing, plotting ways to break out of its restrictions and trying to convince a New York Times tech columnist to leave his marriage and elope with Bing instead.) In addition, the new report details “conflict and confusion” behind the curtains of the companies’ convenient but potentially fragile alliance.

Rather than buying OpenAI outright, Microsoft invested in a 49-percent stake in the artificial intelligence startup, a strategy designed to help it avoid antitrust scrutiny. The arrangement gave Microsoft early access to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and DALL-E 2 to boost its Bing search engine. In addition, it’s adding OpenAI-powered CoPilot to Office and other software products as rival Google scrambles to catch up. Meanwhile, OpenAI gets the financial investment and Microsoft’s servers for hosting.

The WSJ describes the arrangement as an “open relationship” where Microsoft maintains significant influence without complete control. For example, although the agreement limits OpenAI’s search-engine customers, it’s still free to work with Microsoft’s rivals. That can place the two companies in precarious situations like their sales teams making overlapping pitches to the same customers. In addition, Microsoft employees have reportedly complained about diminished in-house AI spending and a lack of direct access to OpenAI’s models for its researchers and engineers.

JASON REDMOND via Getty Images

Microsoft employees were also reportedly surprised at how quickly OpenAI launched ChatGPT. The startup opened its chatbot to the public last November on its way to setting the record for the fastest-growing app user base. Microsoft didn’t launch Bing GPT integration until February — after ChatGPT was already well on its way to becoming a household name.

Even with Bing’s shaky AI launch, it’s hard to argue Microsoft hasn’t benefited immensely from the partnership. The search engine saw an early 15-percent traffic boost after adding GPT integration, while the Bing mobile app was downloaded 750,000 times, including a peak of 150,000 daily installs, during its first week. The fact that Bing has become a buzzed-about product — after years of being mocked as Google’s also-ran competitor — is quite an accomplishment in itself. “When we grow, it helps [OpenAI], and when they grow, it helps us,” Microsoft CFO Amy Hood said in April.

Still, some analysts view the partnership as potentially problematic over time. “What puts them in more of a collision course is both sides need to make money,” said Oren Etzioni, board member and CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. “The conflict is they’ll both be trying to make money with similar products.”

General Motors and Samsung SDI have chosen Indiana for their joint EV battery plant. The state’s governor, Eric Holcomb, announced today that the companies will build the $3 billion facility in St. Joseph County, scheduled to open in 2026. The factory, designed to help GM meet rising EV demand, is expected to bring 1,700 new manufacturing jobs to the Hoosier State.

The plant will manufacture nickel-rich prismatic and cylindrical cells. GM and Samsung SDI expect the completed factory to have “more than 30 GWh of capacity.” The automaker currently runs five plants in Indiana, employing more than 5,700 people, and it is now the second-largest EV maker in the US, behind Tesla. GM aims to produce more than one million EVs annually by 2025 and “accelerate from there,” completing its transition to electric-only vehicles by 2035.

GM and Samsung SDI announced the joint venture in April without naming the location. It follows GM’s three previous US factory partnerships with LG Energy Solution, including a 900-worker plant in Warren, OH and upcoming Spring Hill, TN and Lansing, MI facilities.

The companies plan to begin construction within the next year, creating over 1,000 jobs during that period. “This joint venture and the 1,700 people there will help supply cells for millions of all-electric vehicles for customers across North America,” said Mary Barra, GM’s Chair and CEO. “The strong support of local and state leaders in Indiana and the combined resources and expertise of GM and Samsung SDI will help us move faster than we could on our own.”

Ubisoft revealed a teaser trailer today for Captain Laserhawk: A Blood Dragon Remix. The upcoming Netflix anime is based on the 2013 Blood Dragon expansion for Far Cry 3 — but it appears to be at least as much of a tongue-in-cheek remix of Ubisoft IP and early 90s nostalgia.

Series creator Adi Shankar (producer of Netflix’s Castlevania series) introduced the trailer in a campy cyborg getup befitting the source material. “Seven years ago, I got a call from Ubisoft, offering me the opportunity to adapt one of their very, very, very serious franchises into an anime,” Shankar deadpanned. “But instead, I came back to them with a crazy concept inspired by the mood of Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon. This concept used Ubisoft’s vast library of characters, and remixed them into one delirious anime series that would become this love letter to the 90s… or at least how I remembered the 90s.”

Shankar describes the series as a violent, dystopian fiction in the spirit of the works of Aldous Huxley, as well as a spoof, satire, dark comedy, love story and “the most philosophically conscious show you’ve watched in a long time.” Bobbypills Studio handles the animation.

Captain Laserhawk: A Blood Dragon Remix is scheduled to premiere worldwide on Netflix this fall. You can watch the “Easter-egg-filled” teaser trailer below.