Square Enix’s strategy game is out now for Meta’s Quest headsets. Based on a trailer, VR seems like an interesting way to take in the battlefield.
And if you were wondering, the game’s developers know it has a weird name.
Forbes reports that advertisers have paid Meta more than $1 million to place hundreds of ads promoting lies about the upcoming presidential election. The ads are running despite Meta’s own rules against election misinformation, including posts that “call into question the legitimacy of an upcoming or ongoing election.”
Researchers at Meta have revealed the Meta Digit 360, an artificial fingertip with “human-level” touch capabilities. Meta says it uses on-device AI to respond to different inputs, like the prick of a needle or the flex of a tennis ball.
Jay Parikh, who built Meta’s engineering culture when it was Facebook, is joining Microsoft. Parikh will report directly to CEO Satya Nadella and join Microsoft’s senior leadership team. In a memo to staff, Nadella says Parikh’s expertise will “bring valuable perspective to Microsoft.” It’s not clear what Parikh’s official title will be, nor what he’s directly working on. I’m sure it’ll have something to do with AI, though.
[The Official Microsoft Blog]
Some stats from the company’s third-quarter earnings:
Revenue was $919.0 million, up 29% year-over-year.
Average Daily Active Users (“DAUs”) were 88.9 million, up 27% year-over-year.
Average monthly unique payers were 19.1 million, up 30% year-over-year
And Matthew Ball has a good post about Roblox’s growth.
But there are some child-safety concerns about the platform right now, though the company is making some changes for pre-teen users.
He asked the Commerce Department to strengthen rules designed to prevent repressive regimes from using US-made surveillance technology to spy on dissidents, journalists, and Americans.
The proposed export controls will make it harder for regimes to engage in human rights abuses ranging from mass surveillance of their citizens to hacking into the phones of dissidents and independent journalists. However, I am concerned that the draft rules contain gaps that would allow autocratic governments to continue buying technologies and services from American companies to commit human rights abuses.
I missed this last week, but it’s really interesting. Genmoji technically aren’t emoji, apparently:
Genmojis are not based on any standardized text-based encoding or font system. Instead, they are images with an emoji-like aesthetic generated based on users’ descriptions being fed into an AI art model managed by Apple.
As such, they aren’t emojis but stickers - just like Apple’s previously released Animoji and Memoji features.
Our friends Casey Newton and Kevin Roose at Hard Fork make the obvious point.
After shedding its bulky hydraulics, the new all-electric version of the humanoid robot Atlas is now small enough to wear Halloween costumes. In a follow-up to a video demonstrating the robot’s autonomous capabilities, Atlas — dressed up as a hot dog — manages to avoid being tricked when the dolly it’s loading with car parts is moved without the robot realizing.
