Said Donald Trump, speaking to reporters today about Jeff Bezos and Amazon’s response quickly disavowing any suggestion that it might tell customers how much Trump’s tariffs have increased the prices on their products. “Jeff Bezos is very nice... He solved the problem very quickly.”
It looks like we have our answer to Nilay’s question.
Today, a Flappy Bird game launched in the Epic Games Store on Android (and nowhere else, so far), but is it the Flappy Bird? It’s from the same “Flappy Bird Foundation” that said it acquired the trademark last year, and also seems to have some kind of crypto / Web 3 tie-in ambitions.
However, its clone is being released without any involvement or arrangement with the game’s creator, Dong Nguyen, who pulled it from app stores more than a decade ago, saying the game was “too addictive.” He tweeted about it last September:
The newsletter-turned-more platform has been experiencing an outage for about an hour. However, the status page now says that “Substack publications, the publisher dashboard, and other functionality are fully recovered,” with work continuing on getting the app and webpage back up and running.
[substack.statuspage.io]
Trump’s interview with The Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg (on purpose, this time) is now out. If you choose to use Signal, we have some advice on how, but here’s the president’s take:
Goldberg: But is there any policy lesson from that, that you’ve derived and have talked to Pete Hegseth about, and Mike Waltz?
Trump: I think we learned: Maybe don’t use Signal, okay? If you want to know the truth. I would frankly tell these people not to use Signal, although it’s been used by a lot of people. But, whatever it is, whoever has it, whoever owns it, I wouldn’t want to use it.
In response to US restrictions on chip exports, Chinese companies have been trying to develop their own hardware to power generative AI, but so far, have trailed behind. Now the Wall Street Journal reports that Huawei is not only preparing to ship more of its existing Ascend 910B and 910C chips, but also to start testing a new 910D AI processor.
It’s reportedly aiming to surpass the popular H100 chip Nvidia launched in 2022, although the 910D is reportedly “less power-efficient.”
[wsj.com]
Signed on Wednesday, it establishes an AI task force directing funding for various “resources for K-12 AI education.” It also outlines the creation of a “Presidential Artificial Intelligence Challenge” to “encourage and highlight student and educator achievements in AI.”
It’s described as an effort to “solidify our Nation’s leadership in the AI-driven future.” Still, so far, the AI-driven present has involved disturbing deepfake images and an arms race over cheating on exams and homework.
As reported earlier by The Information, data shown in court during the remedies portion of Google’s search antitrust trial says that as of last month, Google’s internal data counted 35 million daily active users for Gemini.
Those numbers show it trailing the Google analysts’ estimates for ChatGPT (160 million daily active users, with an additional one million users added in an hour at the end of March, according to Sam Altman), but ahead of other tools from Microsoft, Perplexity, and Anthropic.
Android Central and leak hunter Assemble Debug point out that the feature has started to appear, as shown in this Reddit post. Beyond just displaying lyrics for certain songs, it allows users to highlight specific ones to create a social media-friendly sharing card, just like Spotify does.
Let us know if you’re seeing this in your app.
After the September Pixel Watch update to Wear OS 5 ran into issues, Google released a fix in November and said its wearables would have to wait until March for another update.
However, that March update and Google’s first attempt at an April update introduced some bugs of their own, and now it’s rolling out the April update again (version BP1A.250305.019.W8) to hopefully get Pixel Watch owners on Wear OS 5.1 without all of those problems.
[support.google.com]
After the success of Sonic, Mario, and (most recently), Minecraft, Deadline and The Hollywood Reporter say that Universal has found its next videogame-to-movie adaptation: OutRun.
Yes, the arcade racer with little more than a convertible driving down a road scrolling into infinity reportedly has Michael Bay attached to direct and produce, along with actress Sydney Sweeney as a producer, and Jayson Rothwell (Polar) writing the script.
[hollywoodreporter.com]
