The former New York Post employee who hijacked the outlet’s content management system and Twitter account to post a series of racist and sexist headlines last week has apologized for his actions. “I deserved to get fired for a very volatile, irresponsible, and disgusting action and an utmost betrayal of the New York Post,” Miguel Gonzalez told the Daily Beast, revealing his identity to the outlet and public.
The 25-year-old claims he went on his publishing spree after suffering an “emotional tantrum,” further claiming his actions weren’t politically motivated. Among the things Gonzalez posted on October 27th were fake headlines calling for the murder of President Joe Biden and House Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “I let my own stupidity get the best of me,” he told the outlet.
Gonzalez began working for The Post in 2019. It was his first job out of journalism school. When the incident first occured, The Post said it was the victim of a hacking attack, before later sharing that an employee had been the one to gain access to its systems. As a digital producer at the outlet, Gonzalez used his credentials to access The Post’s publishing tools with “relative ease,” and did so from his home in New Jersey. Gonzalez says he hopes to stay in journalism and he has started applying for jobs at outlets like Gothamist.
YouTube is bringing premium streaming services into its main app with a new feature called Primetime Channels. You'll see TV shows, movies and sports the likes of Showtime, Starz, Paramount+ and AMC+ alongside videos from your favorite creators.
Folks in the US can sign up for Primetime Channels starting today through the Movies and TV section. There are more than 30 services you can subscribe to at the jump, with more on the way. NBA League Pass is among those that will be available soon.
Primetime Channels homepages will include trailers, cast interviews and behind-the-scenes footage alongside episodes and movies. You'll be able to search for films and shows from channels through the main YouTube search panel. As The Verge notes, if a movie or show is available on a service you're signed up to, you'll see a green "watch now" icon. Otherwise, the icon will read "pay to watch."
YouTube
Your YouTube recommendations will include films and shows from Primetime Channels as well. So, if you search for a trailer for something you're interested in, and the series or movie is available on a channel you're subscribed to, it might pop up in your recommendations to help you start watching it right away. You'll be able to like or dislike a movie or episode and leave comments, but content from Primetime Channels won't have view counts.
There are some catches, according to The Verge. If you already have a subscription to Paramount+, Shudder or one of the other Primetime Channels, you can't simply link your accounts. You'll need to cancel your membership and sign up through YouTube. However, services you've signed up to through YouTube TV will carry over. However you slice it, that seems overly convoluted.
YouTube is clearly attempting to become the hub for all your streaming needs to help it better compete with the likes of Netflix, Hulu and HBO Max. It aims to bring more things for you to watch to Primetime Channels, along with more features. The platform is also planning an international rollout of the feature.
One thing that Primetime Channels doesn't seem to offer, at least for the time being, is live TV. You may still need to go to YouTube TV for that. Given that YouTube TV has a fraction of the number of subscribers Netflix has (albeit more than Hulu's live TV option), it seems smart to try another tactic as the battle for consumers' attention and dollars rages on.
When Twitter Blue began rolling out in the US last fall, the company positioned ad-free articles as one of the main reasons to subscribe. A little more than a year later, it looks like Twitter will discontinue that feature. According to The Wall Street Journal, the company plans to stop offering Twitter Blue customers the ability to access ad-free articles from publishers.
The Journal did not state how soon Twitter plans to implement the change. However, based on recent reporting that the company’s new owner Elon Musk wants to raise the price of Twitter Blue as early as November 7th, it’s likely to come sooner rather than later. It would also appear to be one among a handful of changes Musk wants to make to the service. Most notably, he reportedly wants to make verification a Twitter Blue perk.
Dropping ad-free articles from the service is unlikely to affect publishers. The Journal reports the program never attracted enough users to make a meaningful difference to their revenue. What it may do is make Twitter Blue less compelling to those who already pay for the service. Before completing his takeover of the company, Musk said his plan was to improve the service so that Twitter could reduce its reliance on advertisers. Without knowing more, it’s hard to see how removing features from Twitter Blue while also increasing how much it costs will accomplish that goal.
Epic Games' Star Wars collaborations didn't end with Darth Vader. The gaming giant has added Luke, Leia and Han skins to Fortnite as part of "Skywalker Week," complete with appropriate accessories such as Luke's Landspeeder glider and Leia's R2-D2 back bling. Lightsabers are back if you can either open Imperial Chests or defeat Darth Vader, and fans of wildly inaccurate soldiers can pick up Stormtrooper blasters.
All the new Star Wars skins and accessories are available through the Fortnite Item Shop. Skywalker Week also revives the pulse rifle and "Junk Rifts" that can drop the Landspeeder. The event runs until November 8th at 9AM Eastern, and offers special quests to boost your XP.
This certainly isn't the first such team up. Epic held a Fortnite Star Wars event in December 2019 to mark the premiere of The Rise of Skywalker, and introduced both Darth Vader and a young Obi-Wan this spring. It may be one of the more important, though. This is the largest nod yet to the original movie trilogy (i.e. the most beloved trilogy) in the battle royale brawler, and may do more to reel you in if you're uninterested in Marvel heroes and game character crossovers.
Frictions exerted during atmospheric reentry are enough to rend spacecraft into comets of glowing slag if not properly mitigated — that’s a good thing, when intentional, but otherwise nearly always very bad. The Space Shuttle, when it was still in service, was designed to hit the outermost edges of Earth’s atmosphere traveling at around Mach 25 (~17,000 MPH), then ride a wave of superheated plasma — generated because frictional forces are so great that they literally tear the surrounding air apart at the molecular level — down into the atmosphere until aerodynamic surfaces regain their effectiveness.
“Utilizing atmospheric drag is the most mass-efficient method to slow down a spacecraft,” NASA notes. To survive those intense 3000-degree F temperatures, the Shuttle relied on layers of ablative heat shielding tiles that would melt and slough off, carrying extra heat away with them, but for tomorrow’s reusable spacecraft, NASA has something better in mind, something inflatable.
“One of the biggest differences is before we were doing suborbital tests, coming in at roughly 5,600 miles per hour or 2.5 kilometers per second, which is already difficult,” Steve Hughes, LOFTID aeroshell lead at NASA's Langley Research Center said in a press release. “But with LOFTID, we’ll be coming in at nearly 18,000 miles per hour, or 8 kilometers per second. That is about three times as fast, but that means nine times more energy.”
NASA
The LOFTID heatshield offers four layers of protection against all that energy. The outermost layer is made from ceramic and silicon carbide yarn woven into cloth on the same sorts of industrial weavers that make denim. The second and third layers are two kinds of insulation, they’re there to protect the fourth layer — the actual inflatable bits. Everything is stacked into a series of concentric rings — themselves constructed from a woven polymer ten times stronger than steel by weight — that will help guide the shield’s expansion.
NASA has been developing Hypersonic Inflatable Aerodynamic Decelerator (HIAD) technology for more than a decade. LOFTID (Low-Earth Orbit Flight Test of an Inflatable Decelerator) is the latest iteration of that tech, a new kind of heat shield that potentially avoids many of the issues NASA has with the current generation of rigid aeroshells. These hard shields have a hard limit on their size, dictated by the diameter of the rocket’s shroud. Soft aeroshells don’t face that limitation and can be extended far past the shroud’s edge, enabling NASA to protect larger and heavier payloads as they enter atmo.
This is especially important to our future solar system exploration plans, because the other issue with current heat shields is that they only work in Earth’s atmosphere. You try to set something the size of the Space Shuttle down on the surface of Mars and that exercise is going to end with your spacecraft a very long streak smeared across the Red Planet — or one very short crater if you’re especially unlucky. Mars’ atmosphere simply isn’t thick enough to generate sufficient friction against modern-sized heat shields to safely slow the Shuttle’s descent. So, NASA is testing out an inflatable one that is.
When it begins its descent, LOFTID will be traveling at more than 25 times the speed of sound. NASA hopes that by the end, LOFTID will be crawling along at a relatively pokey 609 MPH. Throughout its flight, the test shield’s onboard data recorder will transmit the most pertinent sensor and video data while storing as much as possible onboard in an ejectable recorder. Should everything go according to plan, the LOFTID shield will slow sufficiently to deploy a landing chute before setting down in the Pacific Ocean ahead of retrieval by the ULA.
It seems that those of us clamoring to see HBO's adaptation of The Last of Us won't have to wait too much longer to start watching the series. According to the show's page on HBO Max, it will debut on January 15th. For those keeping count, that's 75 days away.
With The Last of Us slated to arrive in early 2023 and the brilliant Succession not returning until the spring, the January timing makes sense. Even though the supposed release date appeared on an official HBO platform, it's worth taking with a grain of salt until there's a splashier formal announcement.
In any case, the first season of The Last of Us will run for 10 episodes. It's an adaptation of Naughty Dog's all-time great game of the same name, which the studio recently remade for PlayStation 5.
The Last of Usstars Pedro Pascal (The Mandalorian) as Joel and Bella Ramsey (Game of Thrones) as Ellie, with Gabriel Luna, Anna Torv and Nick Offerman also featuring. Ashley Johnson and Troy Baker, who played the main characters in the game, will appear as well. HBO released the first trailer in September and, from everything we've seen so far, the show is staying very faithful to the original game's story and visuals.
Life on Earth would not exist as we know it, if not for the protein molecules that enable critical processes from photosynthesis and enzymatic degradation to sight and our immune system. And like most facets of the natural world, humanity has only just begun to discover the multitudes of protein types that actually exist. But rather scour the most inhospitable parts of the planet in search of novel microorganisms that might have a new flavor of organic molecule, Meta researchers have developed a first-of-its-kind metagenomic database, the ESM Metagenomic Atlas, that could accelerate existing protein-folding AI performance by 60x.
Metagenomics is just coincidentally named. It is a relatively new, but very real, scientific discipline that studies "the structure and function of entire nucleotide sequences isolated and analyzed from all the organisms (typically microbes) in a bulk sample." Often used to identify the bacterial communities living on our skin or in the soil, these techniques are similar in function to gas chromatography, wherein you're trying to identify what's present in a given sample system.
Similar databases have been launched by the NCBI, the European Bioinformatics Institute, and Joint Genome Institute, and have already cataloged billions of newly uncovered protein shapes. What Meta is bringing to the table is "a new protein-folding approach that harnesses large language models to create the first comprehensive view of the structures of proteins in a metagenomics database at the scale of hundreds of millions of proteins," according to a TK release from the company. The problem is that, while advances of genomics have revealed the sequences for slews of novel proteins, just knowing what those sequences are doesn't actually tell us how they fit together into a functioning molecule and going figuring it out experimentally takes anywhere from a few months to a few years. Per molecule. Ain't nobody got time for that.
"The ESM Metagenomic Atlas will enable scientists to search and analyze the structures of metagenomic proteins at the scale of hundreds of millions of proteins," the Meta research team wrote on TK. "This can help researchers to identify structures that have not been characterized before, search for distant evolutionary relationships, and discover new proteins that can be useful in medicine and other applications."
Like languages, proteins are made up of their constituent atoms (think, words) which can all be smashed together as you wish but will only make a functional molecule (ie a coherent thought) if assembled in a specific order (a molecular sentence). Meta's system drastically accelerates our capabilities to uncover organic chemistry's syntax and grammar, however the analogy isn't perfect. "A protein sequence describes the chemical structure of a molecule, which folds into a complex three-dimensional shape according to the laws of physics," the team explained. "Protein sequences contain statistical patterns that convey information about the folded structure of the protein."
Specifically, Meta's Evolutionary Scale Modeling AI treats gene sequences like a Mad Libs for O-Chem using a self-supervised learning called masked language modeling. "We trained a language model on the sequences of millions of natural proteins," the research team wrote. "With this approach, the model must correctly fill in the blanks in a passage of text, such as 'To __ or not to __, that is the ________.' We trained a language model to fill in the blanks in a protein sequence, like 'GL_KKE_AHY_G' across millions of diverse proteins."
The resulting "protein language model" is named ESM-2 and operates across 15 billion parameters, making it the largest model of its kind to date. The "new structure prediction capability enabled us to predict sequences for the more than 600 million metagenomic proteins in the atlas in just two weeks on a cluster of approximately 2,000 GPUs." So much for months and years.
There’s a reason that, month after month, Vampire Survivors has been the most-played game on Steam Deck: it’s a blast. Your character auto-fires weapons as thousands of enemies invade the screen. All you have control over in the heat of the moment are the character’s movement and their weapon and item loadout (there are persistent powerups you can unlock as well). It’s one of those games that you have to play to really get the appeal, and it’ll soon be far easier for many people to check it out.
Vampire Survivors will make its console debut on November 10th, when it will hit Xbox One and Xbox Series S/X. The game will also be available on Xbox Game Pass. While it only costs $5, this will lower the barrier to entry even further.
The fact that Microsoft is bringing one of this year's biggest breakout hits to Xbox Game Pass isn’t a big surprise. Vampire Survivors was already available to PC Game Pass members.
Also coming to Xbox consoles and Game Pass this month is Return to Monkey Island. The revival of the adventure series landed on PC and Switch in September. It’ll be available on Xbox, PC Game Pass and Xbox Cloud Gaming on November 8th.
The console edition of Football Manager 2023 will hit cloud, console and PC on the same date. The full-blown PC version of the game will land on Game Pass then as well. On the flip side, Football Manager 2022and Football Manager 2022 Xbox Edition will leave Game Pass on November 8th.
There's a lot of other stuff for Game Pass members to look forward to this month. A 2D metroidvania game called Ghost Song, which sees you exploring a distant moon,will arrive on cloud, console and PC on November 3rd. Obsidian's Pentiment, one of the few remaining first-party Xbox exclusives for this year, will land on all three platforms on November 15th. Somerville, from a studio cofounded by Inside and Limbo executive producer Dino Patti, will debut on the same day.
Meanwhile, you can play the full seasons of The Walking Dead: A New Frontier and The Walking Dead: Michonne on PC Game Pass as of today. Sidescrolling beat-'em-up The Legend of Tianding just landed on console, cloud and PC as well.
Elsewhere, Halo Infinite'swinter update will arrive on November 8th. That will finally bring online campaign co-op and Forge mode to the game, along with new maps, a fresh game mode and (at last) a way to earn XP just by playing multiplayer games. On November 11th, Microsoft Flight Simulator 40th Anniversary Editionwill be available as a free update. Helicopters, gliders and a true-to-life airliner are among the additions.
There’s a reason that, month after month, Vampire Survivors has been the most-played game on Steam Deck: it’s a blast. Your character auto-fires weapons as thousands of enemies invade the screen. All you have control over in the heat of the moment are the character’s movement and their weapon and item loadout (there are persistent powerups you can unlock as well). It’s one of those games that you have to play to really get the appeal, and it’ll soon be far easier for many people to check it out.
Vampire Survivors will make its console debut on November 10th, when it will hit Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S. The game will also be available on Xbox Game Pass. While it only costs $5, this will lower the barrier to entry even further.
The fact that Microsoft is bringing one of this year's biggest breakout hits to Xbox Game Pass isn’t a big surprise. Vampire Survivors was already available to PC Game Pass members.
Also coming to Xbox consoles and Game Pass this month is Return to Monkey Island. The revival of the adventure series landed on PC and Switch in September. It’ll be available on Xbox, PC Game Pass and Xbox Cloud Gaming on November 8th. According to publisher Devolver Digital, Return to Monkey Island will hit Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5 then, but not Xbox One or PS4.
The console edition of Football Manager 2023 will hit cloud, console and PC on November 8th as well. The full-blown PC version of the game will land on Game Pass then too. On the flip side, Football Manager 2022and Football Manager 2022 Xbox Edition will leave Game Pass that day.
There's a lot of other stuff for Game Pass members to look forward to this month. A 2D metroidvania game called Ghost Song, which sees you exploring a distant moon,will arrive on cloud, console and PC on November 3rd. Obsidian's Pentiment, one of the few remaining first-party Xbox exclusives for this year, will land on all three platforms on November 15th. Somerville, from a studio cofounded by Inside and Limbo executive producer Dino Patti, will debut on the same day.
Meanwhile, you can play the full seasons of The Walking Dead: A New Frontier and The Walking Dead: Michonne on PC Game Pass as of today. Sidescrolling beat-'em-up The Legend of Tianding just landed on console, cloud and PC as well.
Elsewhere, Halo Infinite'swinter update will arrive on November 8th. That will finally bring online campaign co-op and Forge mode to the game, along with new maps, a fresh game mode and (at last) a way to earn XP just by playing multiplayer games. On November 11th, Microsoft Flight Simulator 40th Anniversary Editionwill be available as a free update. Helicopters, gliders and a true-to-life airliner are among the additions.
Update 11/1 11:40AM ET: Noting that Return to Monkey Island isn't coming to last-gen consoles for the time being.
Now that Elon Musk owns Twitter, he's officially taking the reins as CEO — for the moment, anyway. Twitter has made an amended filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission indicating that Musk is "the Chief Executive Officer" of the social network. This comes alongside the entrepreneur's moves to dissolve the company board, become sole director and fire many of the company's veteran executives, including former CEO Parag Agrawal. He's clearing house, in other words.
It's not clear how long Musk will remain in the CEO position. He states that his sole director status is "just temporary," but hasn't elaborated. Musk already runs Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company and Neuralink, so there's only a limited amount of time to helm yet another firm. Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has rolled over his shares (that is, transferred them to the new company), indicating his support for Musk.
Musk has already made or proposed sweeping changes in the first week of owning Twitter. On top of the leadership overhaul, he has reportedly ordered layoffs and unveiled plans for a "moderation council" that will make key content decisions. The new CEO has also floated a number of potential changes, including charging for verification as part of a Blue subscription and even resurrecting Vine.
The management shakeup is poised to be expensive, with The Guardianreporting that it could lead to a minimum $120 million in "golden parachute" exit payments. The figure pales in comparison to what Musk paid to buy Twitter in the first place, though.
