Richard Lawler

(If you prefer a stable heart rate over jump scares, there are always other Yule log options like this one from Hades, five hours of Darth Vader’s burning corpse, or a relaxing 45 minutes with Nick Offerman.)

Otherwise, here are a few stories you may have missed:

Fubo TV says its ill-timed outage was due to a cyberattack.

Researchers recorded the sound of a Mars dust devil.

Amazon Prime greenlit production for a God of War TV show.

And Universal Studios Hollywood will open its Super Nintendo World area in February.

Last but not least, don’t miss the massive upgrade for GTA V that added ray-traced reflections on new-gen consoles.

This week both the Senate and the House of Representatives had hearings about the failed crypto exchange. They did not include live testimony from Mr. Bankman-Fried, who has been arrested in the Bahamas ahead of extradition to the US to face a number of criminal and civil charges.

Now a post on Google’s AI blog (via 9to5Google) takes a deeper dive into exactly how the machine learning tech works while running solely on the phone’s hardware.

It also mentions features in development, like moving more processing from the CPU to the TPU to use less power, and expanding it to support more languages.

The NYT cites six people who said Musk was unhappy with some of Spiro’s moves, including holding over Twitter deputy general counsel James A. Baker. This became an issue when Musk apparently realized the former FBI lawyer was a part of reviewing the documents in his prized Twitter Files leak.

As a side note, the NYT reports Musk’s cost-cutting continues. More execs are out, the kitchen staff was laid off, items like office supplies and electronics are going up for auction and Musk isn’t paying the rent for its HQ, where some engineers sleep.

So, maybe consider tossing Elon the $8 for Blue? He might need it.

Meanwhile, Sam Bankman-Fried is in custody, and today we’ll learn more about how much trouble he’s in from the charges filed and testimony in front of Congress that starts in a few minutes.

Finally, clean fusion might be closer to becoming a real thing? We’ll also find out more about that in just a moment.

Oh, and there’s one other video preview set for noon ET that you may want to watch.

The Star Wars YouTube channel is filling out a playlist of selections, and Starkiller Base Holiday is good enough to make the cut on any Bandcamp Friday. Disney isn’t the first media company to make the leap, though, Riot launched a lo-fi League of Legends album last year.