The Meta Quest Pro is a classic case of the early adopter’s dilemma. Although the headset offers a wealth of potential for virtual reality enthusiasts, it also requires a $1,500 investment for something that — at least for now — doesn’t have the software to justify its price. Although today’s v47 update doesn’t fix that problem, it does take a small first step by adding mixed reality (MR) capture and background audio playback.

The first update since Quest Pro’s launch lets you record your real-world environment combined with virtual elements. Previously, you could only capture in-game action and the real-world elements would be reduced to a black background.

The feature doesn’t appear to require any settings changes. After installing the update, you can record MR video by pulling up the headset’s Quick Action Bar, navigating to Camera and tapping “Record Video.”

Background audio is another addition. While playing any game, you can stream audio from the headset’s browser or any 2D panel app (progressive web apps optimized for Quest), and you’ll still hear it when you jump into a game. The feature lets you listen to your favorite music or podcast while playing an otherwise serene VR game (fishing, golf and meditation experiences come to mind).

Meta also added several feature updates for its entire Quest lineup (also including the Quest 2 and the original Quest). Horizon Home, the cozy hub you see when you first put on the headset, now makes it easier to change your avatar’s appearance. It also includes a virtual mirror to check out your avatar’s makeovers in real-time. Additionally, the Meta Quest mobile app received a few updates. You can now make your game wish lists public to send to friends and family as a not-so-subtle holiday gift nudge. The mobile app also makes it easier to see friend activity and adds widgets for starting a Cast, including viewing your headset and controller’s battery life.

Finally, a Kindle you can write on! This week, we dive into Cherlynn’s review of the Kindle Scribe, Amazon’s first e-reader that can also capture handwritten notes. The hardware is great, but as usual, Amazon’s software feels half-baked. Also, Devindra and Cherlynn discuss the rise of new Twitter alternatives like Hive Social and Post. It looks like many communities are already splintering off to these services, but unfortunately, they can’t yet replicate the magic of Twitter.

Listen below or subscribe on your podcast app of choice. If you've got suggestions or topics you'd like covered on the show, be sure to email us or drop a note in the comments! And be sure to check out our other podcasts, the Morning After and Engadget News!

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Topics

• Kindle Scribe review – 1:13

• Rise of the Twitter clones: Hive Social, Post, and Mastodon – 19:28

• Amazon will lose $10 billion on its Alexa division this year – 34:12

• We’ve got a new trailer for the Super Mario Bros. animated movie – 38:01

• Working on – 43:58

• Pop culture picks – 45:30

Livestream

Credits
Hosts: Cherlynn Low and Devindra Hardawar
Producer: Ben Ellman
Music: Dale North and Terrence O'Brien
Livestream producers: Julio Barrientos
Graphic artists: Luke Brooks and Brian Oh

Twitter has given Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, a 12-hour suspension after he tweeted a photo of the Star of David merged with the swastika. In a public exchange on Twitter, website owner Elon Musk told the rapper that tweeting a photo of him being hosed down on a yacht is fine, but tweeting the antisemitic image is not. After that, Ye posted a screenshot of his account on Truth Social, the social media platform backed by Donald Trump, showing that his account has been limited for 12 hours for violating Twitter's terms of service. 

Ye also shared a screenshot of his private exchange with Musk, wherein the executive said: "Sorry, but you have gone too far. This is not love." In a couple of follow-up tweets, Musk said he tried his best to communicate with Ye, but the rapper still chose to violate Twitter's rule against inciting violence. Twitter suspended Ye in October for posting antisemitic messages that said he would go "death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE." His account was reinstated in November, along with other controversial personalities', such as former President Donald Trump's and Marjorie Taylor Greene's.

Shortly after he was suspended on both Twitter and Instagram in October, Ye entered a deal to acquire the "free speech" social media app Parler. "In a world where conservative opinions are considered to be controversial we have to make sure we have the right to freely express ourselves," Ye said back then. Yesterday, however, Parlement announced that the acquisition will no longer push through. While Parler said that they had mutually agreed to "terminate the intent of sale" in mid-November, the news came out after Ye's guesting on Alex Jones' podcast InfoWars. During the interview, Ye went on an antisemitic tirade, wherein he denied that the Holocause had happened while praising Nazis and Hitler.

Mandalorian fans, you can now fire up your calendars and add a very important reminder for March 1st, 2023. The third season of The Mandalorian will premiere that day and will be available for streaming on Disney+, the show's official Twitter account has revealed. Disney was originally aiming for a February 2023 release date, as Ars Technica notes, but a short delay isn't too bad. 

The company released its first teaser trailer for the show at this year's D23 Expo in September, showing Grogu (formerly known as baby Yoda on the internet) and Mando (or Din Djarin) reunited. If you'll recall, the Grogu left with Luke Skywalker by the end of season 2 to finish his Force training at the latter's Jedi Temple. The trailer also gives us a glimpse of Mando dealing with the consequences of removing his helmet and showing his face to other people, which is a huge no-no for members of his religious sect. 

By the time season 3 comes out, it would've been over two years after the release of the show's second season. That said, Mando and Grogu were featured in The Book of Boba Fett, which was a spin-off of The Mandalorian released last year. Grogu also got the Hayao Miyazaki treatment for the Lucasfilm-Studio Ghibli animated short Zen - Grogu and Dust Bunnies that was released for streaming in November. 

Meta's election integrity efforts on Facebook may not have been as robust as claimed. Researchers at New York University's Cybersecurity for Democracy and the watchdog Global Witness have revealed that Facebook's automatic moderation system approved 15 out of 20 test ads threatening election workers ahead of last month's US midterms. The experiments were based on real threats and used "clear" language that was potentially easy to catch. In some cases, the social network even allowed ads after the wrong changes were made — the research team just had to remove profanity and fix spelling to get past initial rejections.

The investigators also tested TikTok and YouTube. Both services stopped all threats and banned the test accounts. In an earlier experiment before Brazil's election, Facebook and YouTube allowed all election misinformation sent during an initial pass, although Facebook rejected up to 50 percent in follow-up submissions.

In a statement to Engadget, a spokesperson said the ads were a "small sample" that didn't represent what users saw on platforms like Facebook. The company maintained that its ability to counter election threats "exceeds" that of rivals, but only backed the claim by pointing to quotes that illustrated the amount of resources committed to stopping violent threats, not the effectiveness of those resources.

The ads wouldn't have done damage, as the experimenters had the power to pull them before they went live. Still, the incident highlights the limitations of Meta's partial dependence on AI moderation to fight misinformation and hate speech. While the system helps Meta's human moderators cope with large amounts of content, it also risks greenlighting ads that might not be caught until they're visible to the public. That could not only let threats flourish, but invite fines from the UK and other countries that plan to penalize companies which don't quickly remove extremist content.

Google’s interactive Doodle today celebrates the life and accomplishments of video game pioneer Gerald “Jerry” Lawson on what would have been his 82nd birthday. The Doodle lets you play five retro pixel-art platformers in your browser — with two even letting you play as Lawson. The Doodles’ creators want to inspire young people to follow in his footsteps, and it includes a built-in level editor and creator to nudge them on that path.

Lawson was known as the “father of the video game cartridge,” which he developed as Director of Engineering and Marketing at Fairchild Semiconductor. In 1976, the company released the Fairchild Channel F home console, with Lawson serving as lead developer. The Channel F (the “F” stood for “fun”) was the first system with interchangeable game cartridges, a novel concept in an era when games were permanently coded into hardware. Interchangeable ROM-based cartridges were a massive breakthrough that let users build entire libraries rather than playing one game ad nauseam.

Google

Today’s Doodle includes games from guest artists and game designers Davionne Gooden, Lauren Brown and Momo Pixel. “The concept starts with the player as a little Jerry Lawson,” explained Brown. “This takes us through anecdotes about Jerry’s life, parts of his journey that he went about to create the cartridge. Once you complete the level, you then get to create your own game with an editor that allows you to reimagine the level design and innovate like Jerry Lawson did.”

Along with the cartridge advancement, Lawson’s Channel F was the first console with an eight-way joystick and a pause menu. Although it wasn’t a commercial success, Channel F’s innovations would influence later systems that dominated home gaming over the following decades — it was a predecessor to platforms like the Atari 2600 and the Nintendo Entertainment System. Even in today’s world of always-online digital games, the top-selling console — the Nintendo Switch — still (optionally) uses a form of cartridges.

Lawson faced considerable challenges during his early years at Fairchild as an African-Amercan man in a field that wasn't known for being racially diverse. He noted that working as an engineer as a 6-foot-6-inch Black man would surprise people, with some reacting with “total shock” when they saw him for the first time. Additionally, he was one of only two Black members of the Homebrew Computing Club. This group included Apple co-founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, along with other Silicon Valley pioneers.

The Estate of Jerry Lawson

After his innovations at Fairchild, Lawson left in 1980 to start his own company, VideoSoft, one of the first Black-owned video game development firms. VideoSoft closed five years later, and Lawson consulted engineering and video game companies for the rest of his career. He passed away in 2011 at 70 from diabetes complications.

“When people play this Doodle, I hope they’re inspired to be imaginative,” said Anderson Lawson, Jerry’s son. “And I hope that some little kid somewhere that looks like me wants to get into game development. Hearing about my father’s story makes them feel like they can.”

Pokémon Scarlet and Violet launched with plenty of glitches, to put it mildly, but the developers are at least trying to make amends. Alongside an update, Nintendo said it was aware of performance problems and was taking player feedback "seriously" as it planned fixes. The patch both introduces Season 1 of Ranked Battles and addresses numerous bugs, including inconsistent music playback during key events.

The creature-collecting game routinely suffers from poor frame rates, particularly in busy areas like cities. It's also common to encounter crashes, visual flaws and showstopping bugs like getting stuck in the terrain. Autosaves lessen the sting, but this still isn't the polished experience you expect from first-party Switch titles. The sometimes mediocre graphics don't help, either.

Not that Nintendo is likely worried about the flaws affecting sales. As IGNnotes, Nintendo recently boasted that Pokémon Scarlet and Violet sold a combined 10 million copies worldwide in their first three days. The feat made them the fastest-selling Nintendo game on any of the company's platforms. Japan's Pokémon fandom played a major role, as domestic sales topped 4 million in those early days.

Those numbers also suggest Nintendo is still faring well against its biggest console rivals. Sony's fastest-selling PlayStation game, God of War: Ragnarok, 'only' managed to move 5.1 million copies during its first week. That's not completely shocking given the brutal brawler's narrower audience, and Sony is unlikely to complain much when third-party releases like the Call of Duty series routinely sell well. However, it's telling that the Switch can still rally massive demand five years later.

I don’t know about your LinkedIn experience, but each time I visit the website I find my inbox flooded with messages. Most aren’t even worth reading, but a few inevitably promise new career opportunities and the chance to work with interesting people.

LinkedIn wants to make it easier to find those messages quickly. Starting today, the social network is rolling out a new feature called Focused Inbox. It separates your inbox into two tabs titled “Focused” and “Other.” A machine learning algorithm will then do its best to flag messages that include the most relevant outreach to you and push them to the top of the Focused tab. If you don’t find the feature useful, you can switch to the old interface at any time.

LinkedIn’s hope is that the feature helps people be more productive. The Focused Inbox comes at a time when the company says more of its users are turning to its instant messaging feature to communicate. In the last year, LinkedIn says it has seen a 20 percent increase in those types of chats.

Starting next year, a lot more Netflix viewers will reportedly be able to watch its originals before they become available for streaming. According to The Wall Street Journal, the streaming service is expanding its pool of preview viewers early next year to include as many as tens of thousands of subscribers around the world from its current group of around 2,000 people. 

When Variety reported about the company's focus group earlier this year, the publication said that Netflix has been asking subscribers if they want to join "a community of members to view and give feedback on upcoming movies and series" since at least May 2021. "It's simple, but an incredibly important part of creating best-in-class content for you and Netflix members all around the world," the email reportedly said. Apparently, Netflix asks members of the group to watch several unreleased shows and movies over the course of six months. They then have to fill out a survey form to tell the company what they liked and what they didn't. 

In The Journal's newer report, it said the streaming service calls the group the "Netflix Preview Club" and that the Leonardo DiCaprio/Jennifer Lawrence starrer Don't Look Up was one of the movies that benefited from its feedback. The movie was initially too serious, the preview group's members reportedly told Netflix, and the film's creators chose to listen to them and ratcheted up its comedic elements. 

As The Journal notes, Netflix is known for giving creators a lot of creative freedom — even if it doesn't always lead to great content — so running a preview group has been tricky. The company has apparently been careful when it comes to sharing feedback with creators and has not been forcing changes. It's still the creators' decision whether to incorporate changes based on the previewers' response. 

YouTube has revealed its top videos and creators of 2022. At the top of the US trending video list is the final video from Technoblade, a Minecraft creator who died after a battle with cancer. Technoblade wrote a farewell message to fans that his father read in the video, which has more than 87.6 million views.

In second place is The Guardian's uncensored version of Will Smith slapping Chris Rock during the Oscars ceremony, which has 103 million total views. Another popular Minecraft creator, Dream, revealed his face for the first time in a video that racked up 47 million views. The list also includes the Super Bowl LVI halftime show, the culmination of Mark Rober's anti-porch pirate glitterbomb series and that Try Guys mess.

The trending video list is based on US video views, which explains why MrBeast's recreation (and giveaway) of Willy Wonka's chocolate factory is in fifth place despite having 126 million total views. YouTube also excludes Shorts, music videos, trailers and children's videos from this list.

Speaking of MrBeast, he was the top creator based on the number of subscribers gained in the US. That's not too surprising, since he has the most subscribers of any individual creator (Indian music label T-Series has the most overall). YouTube says that list doesn't take into account artists, brands, media companies or children's content.

Elsewhere, YouTube revealed the top songs in the US for 2022 (featuring tracks released this year or older ones that saw a significant uptick in views). "We Don't Talk About Bruno" from Disney's Encanto topped the list with 503 million views. Bad Bunny and Karol G each had two songs on the list.