Years after presenting Dunkirk in IMAX as “virtual reality without the goggles” Christopher Nolan is again visiting World War II with Oppenheimer.
He’s said part of the filming process included recreating the first nuclear weapon detonation test in New Mexico without computer graphics.
And if you still need more Nolan:
This podcast was recorded before Elon Musk’s Twitter ban extravaganza reached its peak, but we dug into the @ElonJets mess. From Apple, we’ll check out the report that it will allow outside app stores on iOS as well as the hole left by a missing M-series Mac Pro in its desktop lineup.
I tried to recap Sam Bankman-Fried’s transition from media tour to handcuffs, and then we talked more about the golden age of streaming and why David Zaslav’s biggest problem might be in his presentation.
One of the services we mentioned in our article about the race to build a better Twitter was Hive Social; however, at the time, you couldn’t use it after the operators shut down to fix a few security flaws.
Hive is now back online, with an updated app available for iOS, and an update coming for its beta app on Android.
Still, it’s not a great sign that the best place to find updates on Hive’s service status is its Twitter account.
So good that nothing weird happened last night, right?
Anyway, in recent non-Elon news:
Here’s what you need to know about nuclear fusion.
Will the Death Stranding movie have as many big stars in its cast as the game did?
Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 has a launch window.
Valve hints at what could be in a second-gen Steam Deck, and Steam Controller 2.
And Instagram can help if your account gets hacked.
If you’re old enough to remember the words “via Hiptop,” then you’ll recognize that instead of being tweet-like, the new Instagram Notes feature takes inspiration from Twitter’s predecessor — AOL Instant Messenger away messages.
The pop-up statuses are hidden away (for now) in the Instagram messages window, but for the Elder Millennial / Young Gen X generation, it’s a return to the days of flirting via vague but also specifically targeted song lyrics.
If the Elf on the Shelf isn’t enough to keep the kids in line, this Yule log tied to the horror movie Smile should be a serviceable reminder that someone is creepily watching to see who’s been naughty or nice.
(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.)
Today’s news has everything from smart home standards to nuclear fusion (and we’ll have more to say about the latter in a moment.
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.
The Verge policy reporter Makena Kelly gets us up to speed on what’s going on with FTX and its co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried.
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.
December’s Google Pixel Feature Drop brought “speaker labels” to transcriptions made by its Recorder app.
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.
The system mainly consists of three components: a speaker turn detection model that detects a change of speaker in the input speech, a speaker encoder model that extracts voice characteristics from each speaker turn, and a multi-stage clustering algorithm that annotates speaker labels to each speaker turn in a highly efficient way. All components run fully on the device.
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.
