Tech

Last week I asked: “Will Valve really sell a Steam Deck plugin that helps bring Epic Games to the handheld?”

Turns out the answer is no. As far as I’m aware, Junk Store will still be available to sideload through Decky Loader, though.

Remember that nightly parade of honking robotaxis captured by Sophia Tung? The resolution is even more nerdy that you could hope.

Motorola loves a concept, and its latest is a large action model: AI capable of taking action for you. I got a demo of the model on a Razr Plus, where a simple text prompt cued it to open the Uber app and call a ride. Neat! It’s not shipping anytime soon, but Moto has a few other AI features that might.

While it might be fun to interact with Character.AI’s user-created chatbots, a report from Wired shows the challenges of taking down chatbots that impersonate people without their consent, including a teen who was murdered in 2006:

Given that Character.AI can sometimes take a week to investigate and remove a persona that violates the platform’s terms, a bot can still operate for long enough to upset someone whose likeness is being used. But it might not be enough for a person to claim real “harm” from a legal perspective, experts say.

Though Supermassive’s Until Dawn was already plenty cinematic as a video game, Deadline reports that Screen Gems plans for its big screen adaptation of the horror classic to hit theaters on April 25, 2025.

The feature comes from director David F. Sandberg and writer Gary Dauberman. Ella Rubin, Michael Cimino, Ji-young Yoo, Belmont Cameli, Odessa A’zion, Maia Mitchell and Peter Stormare are set to star.

A Reddit user spotted a Microsoft Surface Laptop outfitted with Intel’s next-gen ARM competitor on a Chinese website called Goofish, Windows Central reports.

The outlet says its sources confirmed that Microsoft is testing the chip in a Surface, but that it’s not clear if it’s the Surface Laptop 7 or a future version of the machine.

Mastodon is selling a plushie version of its elephant mascot, and it’s adorable. You can buy it now for $45. (It comes in “Federation Beige,” lol.)

It turns out the $2 billion Las Vegas Sphere was never meant to be a one-off. Sphere Entertainment has announced that it’s working with Abu Dhabi’s Department of Culture and Tourism to build another one.

Although an exact location and timeline weren’t revealed, Abu Dhabi’s Sphere will be as large as the Vegas one, which is wrapped in a 580,000-square-foot screen.

Could be a helpful way to for creators to more easily reply to comments from their audience. The test is small right now and available only on the mobile app, according to a post about the test.

Riot Games’ Marc Merrill announced the layoffs, and spokesperson Joe Hixson shared the number affected with The Verge. The layoffs are focused on the League of Legends team.

“While team effectiveness is more important than team size, the League team will eventually be even larger than it is today as we develop the next phase of League,” Merrill says. Riot announced cuts affecting more than 500 people in January.

I will never get over this clip of Al Pacino laughing somewhat sinisterly while revealing his phone case to an interviewer. Enjoy.

Google’s been absorbing Fitbit at a steady rate over the 18 months or so and now, it’s also retiring the OG Fitbit Twitter — er, X — account. It’s not at all surprising, but something about this really underscores that Fitbit is Google now.

You can now upload YouTube Shorts that can be as much as three minutes long.

They won’t immediately show up as Shorts, though, according to YouTube’s Rene Ritchie — the full rollout for that across YouTube will take a bit.

Last week, Judge Donato ruled that Google would have to open up Android to third-party app stores starting November 1st — but Google immediately filed an appeal and asked for an emergency stay.

Now, the judge will hear Google’s motion on October 18th. If he grants it, it could be years until Google makes changes, even if higher courts agree with his ruling.

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger is at Lenovo’s Tech World conference announcing a partnership with... AMD? We’ll hear more about the “x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group” that they’re founding, but for now he’s assuring us that rumors of the x86’s demise have been greatly exaggerated.

After joking about “AI” being a drinking game trigger at MAX, Adobe’s chief product officer Scott Belsky said the company is moving away from the “prompt era” of the tech — which “cheapened and undermined the craft of creative professionals” by generating anything from text descriptions.

Instead, the new “control era” aims to improve creative workflows with AI in more specific ways within Creative Cloud apps.