Amazon is going to stop letting you pay for things on its marketplace using Venmo as of January 10th, CNBC reports. You also can’t add Venmo as an Amazon payment option anymore, according to a Venmo support page.
The Venmo integration on Amazon was barely a year old; it started rolling out in October 2022.
Ganesh Venkataramanan left Tesla in November, Bloomberg reports. The project is now being overseen by Peter Bannon, who has designed chips for Intel and Apple.
Tesla said earlier this year that it has started production of the supercomputer, which will be used to help train its self-driving technology.
Update, December 8th, 11:14AM ET: Bloomberg now reports another key member of the team, Bill Chang, left the company in October.
Google mentioned the date in a support document about transferring your subscriptions away from Google Podcasts. You’ll have until July 2024 to migrate your subscriptions to YouTube Music or another service.
[support.google.com]
According to Google’s incident report about the two outages:
Google runs a core message processing system that is responsible for delivering, monitoring, queuing, and receiving email messages. The root cause of both incidents was an atypical pattern of email traffic, resulting in high resource utilization in this system and delays in email delivery.
The company says it plans to “implement rate limit mechanisms in our systems” to improve things moving forward.
[www.google.com]
Unsurprisingly, the theme of the event is focused around AI, according to an announcement on Samsung’s Newsroom: “AI for All: Connectivity in the Age of AI.”
The show kicks off at 5PM ET on January 8th and will be streamed live. Perhaps we’ll see the announcement of the Galaxy S24 lineup?
In his latest post on his personal blog, Martin says that he worked with House of the Dragon writers on the two seasons during a recent trip to London. Neither of the seasons have been officially announced, but given the huge numbers for the show’s debut last year and the quick renewal for season 2, I’m not surprised that there’s work being done on the far future of the show.
Season 2 is set to premiere on Max in summer 2024.
[Not a Blog]
Sony just published an interview on the PlayStation Blog with two of the game’s developers, and it’s packed with details about what you can expect and some ways the development team adapted the game to VR. This was one of my favorite tidbits:
This is also a small detail, but the camera for the first-person perspective is set a little lower than Leon’s actual eye level. If the camera is at the same eye level as Leon – who is quite tall himself – the Ganados (enemy villagers) will appear smaller. The Ganados approach and attack Leon from a low, forward posture, so if you get too close to them, you end up looking down at them which strips away the intensity.
Resident Evil 4’s VR mode launches for PSVR 2 on December 8th.
Bloomberg reports that Steve Hotelling is retiring from Apple. I had never heard of him, but this paragraph from Bloomberg underscores just how much he’s contributed to Apple’s products:
The executive is named on hundreds of patents, including ones related to the iPhone and iPad’s multitouch screen, and known for being one of the inventors of Touch ID — a key feature for authenticating users on Apple devices. “No one was more brilliant than Steve,” said a longtime peer at the company.
Some of chip chief Johny Srouji’s direct reports will be taking over Hotelling’s work.
