The Denver Nuggets might end the Phoenix Suns’ season tonight with a win in Game 6 of their playoffs matchup. If they do, Kevin Durant will have plenty of time to play games as himself, once his store bundle is released tomorrow for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II & Warzone 2.0.
A dedicated Watch app for Facebook Messenger was important enough for Apple to highlight it in 2015, but it’s going away soon.
A Meta spokesperson confirmed the plan in a statement to Review Geek. While Watch wearers can see messages from notifications, they won’t be able to respond from their wrists anymore. It’s odd timing — yesterday, Meta announced a WhatsApp app for Wear OS 4 that will send messages and receive incoming calls.
We have a longer recap video too, of course, plus every update from the event and a list of the key highlights, but this is how it sounded for the most part.
Heather Armstrong, who started the Dooce.com blog in 2001, has died at the age of 47.
A 2019 Vox profile recounts that her blog grew into a business earning $40,000 per month from banner ads in 2009. It spawned an entire industry of influencer copycats.
Andy Baio writes about Armstrong on Waxy:
Heather was the consummate poster, sharp and hilarious, famously sharing her personal life on her blog, finding early fame getting fired (“dooced”) for writing about her coworkers, and later writing extensively about motherhood while raising her two children. She was a well-documented pioneer in how to make a living writing independently online.
Forget the leaks and the spec sheets; we went to Google I/O and got to use the company’s pricey (it starts at $1,799.99) new folding phone.
Dan Seifert can tell you more about the Pixel Fold’s hinge and show you what it looks like next to Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 4 — check out our entire writeup if you need even more details.
In just about 16 minutes, we cover the highlights of today’s I/O presentation, from the Pixel Fold to AI in everything.
Ahead of the big Google I/O keynote later today, we have this segment of The Vergecast, as Nilay, David, and Alex discuss some of the issues facing the tech giant (like setting a YouTube promo ad for the Pixel Fold to premiere at the correct time) and how it might address them with AI news revealed during today’s event.
Update: And now the full episode is available.
Ahead of the I/O keynote speech later today, Google shared this I/O Flip card game as an example of what its tools are capable of, using generative AI tools for the art and descriptions that say things like “Dash the Wizard lives in a castle with his pet dragon. He loves to cast spells and make people laugh.”
Images were pre-generated using two technologies pioneered out of Google Research: Muse, a text-to-image AI model from the Imagen family of models, and DreamBooth,
Card descriptions were prototyped in MakerSuite and pre-generated using the PaLM API which accesses Google’s large language models.
