After months of incremental price increases, Tesla appears to be reversing course with some massive price cuts. With Tesla having dissolved its PR department, no official reason for the cuts was given, but the company’s recent disappointing financial performance could provide some clues.
Elsewhere, British postal service Royal Mail is continuing to deal with an ongoing cyber incident, which now appears to be a ransomware attack. The carrier says it’s currently unable to send deliveries abroad, and is warning customers to hold onto their packages for now.
And finally, Nvidia has released an interesting new feature for use with its graphics cards that can make it look as though you’re looking into your camera when your eyes are actually pointed elsewhere. It’s beta software and a little buggy in our experience, but for the low, low price of “free” (well, I guess technically “included with the price of an Nvidia GPU”) it’s worth having a play around with.
For now, here’s a silly tweet:
Example: Stay tuned, as we continue to update this list with the most important news of today: Friday, January 13th, 2023.
What can we expect if Apple adds touchscreens to the MacBook Pro?
On the Vergecast we discuss the possibility of touchscreen Macs, and what it all really means for pressing confirmation buttons, zooming in on maps, or maybe using an iPad app or two.
Twitter’s “open source” algorithm could be revealed next month.
According to its owner, without commenting further on API issues, Tesla pricing, or the new “for you” look for timelines.
Adi Robertson has explained the potential issues already:
Twitter’s algorithm also won’t explain how any given tweet was prioritized unless Twitter releases a huge amount of supplementary data, nor would it necessarily illuminate the rationale behind any human moderation that intersects with it. And it would be incredibly vulnerable to people who want to make bad-faith claims by taking pieces of it out of context, willfully misinterpreting them or sowing conspiracy theories about them.
From “Popeyes kid” meme to Popeyes NIL athlete.
At nine years old, Dieunerst Collin entered meme immortality via this 2013 Vine clip comparing the side-eyeing youth to Lil Terrio, and since he was at a Popeyes, he became the “Popeyes Kid.”
Now Collin is a redshirt freshman at center on the football team for Lake Erie College, and — with a little pressure from social media — has signed a “Name, Image and Likeness” (NIL) sponsorship deal with Popeyes.
Some good Snap juice.
As Ash Parrish describes this interview with Marvel Snap project lead and former lead designer of Hearthstone, Ben Brode.
Other than commenting on item prices and the upcoming PvP mode, he also discussed its rank system and how it delevels players every four weeks:
You know… I’ve never worked on a game that did not completely redo the rank system multiple times during live development. I imagine we will continue to tweak our rank system.
The touchscreen Mac, and other Rumours.
With Nilay roaming the wilderness of upstate New York, I talked to Alex and Dan as we imagined the possibility of Macs with OLED screens that you can touch and tried to figure out what MicroLED would do for us.
We also previewed Samsung’s next Unpacked event and attempted to use unlicensed music with some help from Siri.
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Richard Lawler