Instagram is rolling out a feature that could help users have more fun with Stories. Starting today, you’ll have the ability to create Add Yours templates. “People will be able to develop and share their own custom, meme-able Add Yours templates by pinning GIFs, text and gallery images to a Story template,” Instagram says.
To create an Add Yours template, add GIFs, text and images that you want to include to your story. Then, go to your Sticker Tray and select Add Yours templates. After that, pick the elements (text, images and GIFs) that you want to include in the template. Here's the kicker: once you share an Add Yours template in a Story, anyone else can use it and add their own touches.
If you want to riff on someone else's template, tap on the Add Yours prompt when you see one in their Story. This will take you to the Camera, where you can see all the elements that are part of the template and play around with them, add your own and so on. If you tap the faces that appear on the left side of the sticker, you can see who else has put their own spin on a template.
As for what you can do with the Add Yours templates, it's really your call. You might create an either/or quiz, start a trend of showing followers around your workspace or encourage folks to share the most ridiculous photos they have of their pets. Livening such prompts up with images and GIFs could help them stand out and get your template seen and riffed on by thousands of other users. Instagram rolled out templates for Reels last year.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/instagram-rolls-out-new-customizable-story-templates-150246935.html?src=rss
So long E3, we knew you weren’t long for this world. This week, Cherlynn and Devindra are joined by Engadget Senior Editor Jessica Conditt to talk about the death of E3 and what it means for the gaming industry. We also explore some of the highlights (and low points) of last week’s Game Awards, which couldn’t quite balance celebrating video games and functioning as a marketing tool. We’re particularly excited for Light No Fire, the next ambitious game from the folks behind No Man’s Sky, as well as Arkane Lyon’s Blade.
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 podcast, Engadget News!
Topics
We mourn E3 and break down everything announced at the Game Awards with Jess Conditt – 00:40
Beeper Mini, Sunbird, and the endless quest to spoof iMessage – 37:57
Apple ads theft protection in iOS 17.2 beta – 54:12
EU set to hand Apple a huge loss in its legal fight with Spotify – 58:04
Google loses antitrust trial against Epic games – 59:30
Executives fired after Sports Illustrated tries to publish generative AI articles (with fake writers behind them) – 1:06:32
Netflix engagement report reveals its most popular shows and movies of the first half of 2023 – 1:07:23
Space lasers, once a mere futuristic joke, have become a real tool in building technology up there and making improvements for all of us down here. There's been NASA's use of space lasers to study plankton, plans to blast space junk and, now, a satellite network courtesy of Amazon. The company has announced that its Project Kuiper has built up its optical inter-satellite links (OISLs) capabilities to create a substantial mesh network of high-speed laser cross-links. This technology could result in faster data transmission to even the most remote places back on earth.
In October, Amazon launched two prototype satellites and reported successful tests one month later, with the pair dispatching and retrieving data at speeds of up to 100 gigabits per second. "These tests demonstrated our ability to establish a single bi-directional link between two satellites, and initial data indicates that our design will be able to maintain cross-links between multiple satellites at once—the critical feature of a next-generation mesh network in space," the company stated.
To successfully use OISLs, laser links had to maintain contact at a distance up to 1,616 miles while also contending with spacecrafts moving at a speed of 15,534 miles per hour. Plus, Amazon had to minimize light spreading in order to maintain the signal and account for any additional dynamics of all these moving pieces — something it says has been successfully done.
Amazon also claims the mesh network moves data about 30 percent faster than terrestrial fiber optic cables can. "Amazon's optical mesh network will provide multiple paths to route data through space, creating resiliency and redundancy for customers who need to securely transport information around the world," Ricky Freeman, vice president of Kuiper Government Solutions, explained in a statement. "This is especially important for those looking to avoid communications architectures that can be intercepted or jammed, and we look to forward to making these capabilities available to public sector customers looking to move and land data from remote locations to their desired destination." Basically, anyone from a cruise ship passenger to a multi-day hiker should be able to get a connection if this is successful.
Project Kuiper started in 2019 but has seen a real boost in the last few months. With these successful tests completed, Amazon states that Project Kuiper is starting satellite production, with "full-scale deployment" beginning in the first half of 2024. It also predicts that early customer pilots will begin in the second half of the year. Notably, Amazon signed a deal with SpaceX to launch more Project Kuiper satellites at a faster rate.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/amazon-boosts-its-satellite-internet-network-with-the-help-of-space-lasers-123535946.html?src=rss
Just a week after AMD revealed its own Ryzen 8040 hardware, Intel has entered its own AI PC era. The company’s new Core Ultra notebook chips, codenamed Meteor Lake, are Intel’s first processors to include an NPU, or neural processing unit, for accelerating AI tasks.
Intel claims the Core Ultra chips use up to 79 percent less power than AMD’s last-gen Ryzen 7840U while idling in Windows, and they’re also up to 11 percent faster than AMD’s hardware for multithreaded tasks. Intel, however, didn’t have the upcoming Ryzen 8040 chips to test against. They use the company’s new Intel 4 (7nm) process and should be “the most efficient x86 processor for ultrathin systems.”
As for AI workloads, Intel says Core Ultra chips can reach up to 34 TeraOPS when combining performance across the NPU, GPU and CPU. The big difference is the NPU: It’ll enable features like Windows 11’s Studio Effects, which can blur backgrounds and improve video lighting without hurting your battery life much. With more creative AI workloads, Intel says the Ultra 7 165H is 70 percent faster than the rival Ryzen 7 7840U in Adobe Premiere Pro.
Check out the rest of the specs and benchmark tests from Intel over here, and expect to hear more “AI PC” bluster in 2024.
Oh, and nothing to do with Intel’s chips, but be ready for everyone to be playing with AI-generated backgrounds on Instagram this week.
Meta finally rolled out searchable tags for all users on Threads, its microblogging Instagram offshoot, and users are taking advantage of a design quirk for a bit of dumb fun. Threads’ “topic tags” are a lot like hashtags, but not entirely the same. For one, there’s no hash (#). It’s pretty basic stuff… which makes the effectiveness of a new prank feel all the more absurd.
Someone can create a Threads post, ideally with a lot of text, then slap a “Show more” tag at the end, seemingly in the middle of a word or sentence. You, the unwitting victim, will then click “Show more” expecting to see the rest of the post, but — surprise! — it’ll direct you to the page for that tag instead.
Ah, pranks. Just in time for Thread’s awaited Europe launch…
Other features, such as audio descriptions, are also delayed.
When Insomniac Games launched Spider-Man 2, it didn’t yet have features like New Game+ and audio descriptions. Community and marketing director, James Stevenson, shared that New Game+ “should” arrive before the end of 2023. But Insomniac has now released a statement explaining it’s targeting the next Spider-Man 2 update for early 2024. Insomniac went on to explain it’s adding more “highly requested features” to the game, such as replaying missions and changing the time of day.
Gaming laptops have been some of the most intriguing portable PCs for the past few years. They’ve gotten thinner and lighter, but also vastly more powerful and efficient, thanks to advanced CPUs and GPUs. Gaming laptops are where PC makers can get adventurous, with things like rotating hinges and near desktop-like customizability. We lay out the specs that matter, the price you can expect to pay and some of our standout favorites.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-morning-after-intel-unveils-its-first-chips-built-for-ai-work-121504827.html?src=rss
The Hugo Award-winning The Murderbot Diaries books from Martha Wells are becoming a 10-episode Apple TV+ series starring Alexander Skarsgård, Apple announced. It will follow a self-aware "SecUnit" robot that must hide its free will in order to complete a dangerous assignment and comes from About a Boy creators Chris and Paul Weitz.
"Murderbot is an action-packed sci-fi series, based on the award-winning books by Wells, about a self-hacking security android who is horrified by human emotion yet drawn to its vulnerable 'clients,'" Apple wrote. "Murderbot must hide its free will and complete a dangerous assignment when all it really wants is to be left alone to watch futuristic soap operas and figure out its place in the universe."
The Weitz brothers will write, direct and produce the series, while Skarsgård will also serve as executive producer. Apple TV+ currently offers other sci-fi series including Silo, For All Mankind, Invasion and others. The streaming service needs to keep the content flowing as it has doubled Apple TV+ prices in just over a year. At the same time, Apple is looking for the right kind of content as it aims to avoid hot-button topics following the cancellation of The Problem with Jon Stewart.
Several Murderbot chapters have made Engadget's gift guides and recommended reading lists. We called the Fugitive Telemetry novella a "banger" with "space intrigue and robotic mysteries" and recommended the earlier novella series in our 2019 holiday guide.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apple-is-adapting-the-hugo-award-winning-sci-fi-book-series-murderbot-115559433.html?src=rss
Gift cards can get a lot of hate as being impersonal, but when it comes down to it, they're a great option for anyone who is unsure what to give. This is all the more true when they come with an extra incentive — as is currently the case for Apple gift cards purchased on Amazon. Right now, Amazon is offering $10 in-store credit with any Apple gift card purchase of $100 or more. All it requires is entering the code HOLAPP at checkout.
Apple's gift cards are available for standard amounts like $100 and $250 but can also be customized to any amount. Once purchased, Amazon can send the gift card to its recipient via email or text message with a personalized note attached. However, it doesn't have to be sent out immediately, with the ability to schedule it for any date. The specific time, though, is in Amazon's hands with a note stating it will arrive any time that day after 12 AM.
The deal is only available "while supplies last" and is limited to one per customer. The email field offers the ability to send gift cards to a maximum of 999 recipients, so this is an important stipulation. The credit should then arrive within 24 hours of your purchase.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/amazon-is-offering-10-credit-when-you-buy-a-100-apple-gift-card-103522609.html?src=rss
Google is creating a new, more sophisticated Android AI assistant called Pixie set to arrive with its Pixel 9 phone, according to a report from The Information. Based on the company's new Gemini large language model (LLM), it'll be able to perform "complex and multimodal tasks" like giving you directions to the nearest store to buy a product you photographed on your smartphone.
The assistant will be exclusive to Google's Pixel devices and use data from Google products like Gmail and Maps. That would help it "evolve into a far more personalized version of the Google Assistant," the report states. It appears to be a separate product from Google's Assistant with Bard showed off at Made By Google in October.
If accurate, the report on the update shows Google making whiplash changes to its AI roadmap to keep rival OpenAI in its sights. Google only just revealed its Gemini AI last week as an answer to GPT-4, calling it "the most capable model we’ve ever built." It also announced that Gemini would come to Android via a new product called Nano, giving your phone the capability to do things like summarize conversations and calls without the need to be online.
As a reminder, Gemini launched last week as an integrated multimodal AI, rather than multiple models stacked together. That will supposedly allow it to "seamlessly understand and reason about all kinds of inputs from the ground up, far better than existing multimodal models." With Pixie powered by Gemini, it could be a far more sophisticated personal assistant than, say, Google Assistant. Gemini will also power the next generation of Bard, Google's AI chat assistant.
As with past Google products, though, it's going to be hard for consumers to grok (see what I did there) all the different AI offerings. We've now got Pixie, Bard, Gemini, Gemini Nano (for smartphones), Gemini Pro (for Chrome, API calls and more) and Gemini Ultra, coming in 2024. By contrast, OpenAI has kept things relatively simple with GPT-4 being its LLM, ChatGPT being the chat assistant, and DALL-E the image generator. Most savvy consumers have at least heard of those things, but Google has once again made it hard for people to keep up with its own product family.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/googles-pixel-9-could-arrive-with-a-sophisticated-pixie-ai-assistant-094448458.html?src=rss
Alas, The Last of Us Online will never see the light of day. Naughty Dog has announced that it has "made the incredibly difficult decision to stop" its development. It explains that the online team had a clear vision of the project and had already refined its gameplay. However, it soon became clear when the company was ramping the game up to full production that it was going to bite off more than it can chew. If it releases an online game, it has to dedicate all its resources to supporting post launch content in the future. That means becoming a studio that exclusively offers live gaming services — one with no capacity to release more single-player narrative games like the original The Last of Us titles.
The studio first gave us a peek at concept art from the project in 2022, but it offered very little in terms of updates since. After the PlayStation Showcase in May, it admitted that it knows fans of the franchise are looking forward to hearing more about the game but that it realized that it needed more time to work on it and couldn't share details just yet. Bloomberg reported shortly after that, though, that the studio had already reassigned developers working on the project to other teams and was reconsidering its viability. Clearly, Naughty Dog has decided its path, and it doesn't lead to the release of an online title. The developer says it has "more than one ambitious, brand new single player game" in the works and will be sharing what's next when it's ready.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/naughty-dog-cancels-development-on-the-last-of-us-online-055333989.html?src=rss
Despite Elon Musk's earlier attempts to avoid further testifying for the Twitter-takeover investigation, his luck appears to have run out. Reuters reported that in a San Francisco hearing on Thursday, a federal judge shot down Musk's attorney's challenge on whether the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) officials had the power to issue subpoenas, thus ruling that the exec must therefore comply with the regulator and appear for testimony. US Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler was quoted saying, "you've got one more four-hour deposition, one more day of depositions to survive and it's over." Failing that, the judge would have to issue an order.
The SEC's ongoing probe dives into Musk’s late disclosure of his stake in Twitter — a publicly-traded company back then — which went against the requirements of US securities law. This 10-day delay on the paperwork, along with some potentially misleading information within, may have earned the exec as much as $156 million, according to The Washington Post. Former Twitter shareholders also filed a class-action lawsuit against Musk over his controversial $44 billion takeover of the social media platform, which has since been renamed X.
While it's unlikely that Musk can skip future testimonies for this case, he would be better off heeding Beeler's advice, regardless. "It seems unlikely there’s going to be any more hassle," the judge added, should the world's richest man "work it out" with the SEC. Whether that would help his case is a whole different matter, of course.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/elon-musk-will-have-to-testify-in-secs-twitter-probe-after-all-050742127.html?src=rss
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren is the latest public figure to question how Meta is moderating content during the Israel-Hamas war. In a letter addressed to Mark Zuckerberg, Warren raises several issues reported by Instagram users since October 7, and presses Meta for more information about its underlying policies and how much content the company has taken down related to the conflict.
In the letter, Warren cites reports from the media and human rights groups about inconsistencies in the company’s moderation practices since the start of the war. In particular, she notes that numerous Instagram users have accused the company of "shadowbanning" them for posting about the conditions in Gaza. She also references a third-party audit, commissioned by Meta and published last year, that found the company violated Palestinians’ right to free expression in 2021, the last time there was a major escalation in violence in the Gaza Strip.
“Reports of Meta’s suppression of Palestinian voices raise serious questions about Meta’s content moderation practices and anti-discrimination protections,” Warren writes. “Social media users deserve to know when and why their accounts and posts are restricted, particularly on the largest platforms where vital information-sharing occurs.”
The letter asks for detailed information about how Meta is enforcing its policies in the context of the war. For example, it asks Meta to disclose statistics about the number of posts that have been removed since October 7, and how many of those takedowns have been appealed. It also asks Meta to explain reports that the company hid numerous Instagram comments with Palestinian flags for being “potentially offensive.”
The letter gives Zuckerberg a January 5 deadline to respond to the questions. Meta didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Meta has come under increasing scrutiny for its moderation practices since October 7. The company has publicly blamed several issues on unspecified technical glitches and bugs, but has also acknowledged taking temporary emergency measures to slow the spread of potentially harmful content.
Meta’s independent Oversight Board is also fast-tracking two cases related to the Israel-Hamas war content, the first time the group has opted to expedite its usual months-long process. The board said at the time it had seen a surge in appeals from Facebook and Instagram users since the start of the conflict.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/elizabeth-warren-is-demanding-more-transparency-from-meta-on-how-its-handling-content-about-palestine-on-instagram-220226606.html?src=rss
