Month: July 2022

Enlarge (credit: SOPA Images / Contributor | LightRocket)

Hundreds of thousands of people recently signed a Change.org petition asking Instagram to stop eating up space in their feeds by recommending so many Reels from accounts they do not follow. Shortly after, Instagram-owner Meta confirmed that these users aren’t just imagining that there’s a sudden avalanche of Reels ruining their online social lives. The short videos currently make up about 15 percent of Instagram and Facebook user feeds—and soon, even more often, they'll be shoving to the side all the updates from friends that users choose to follow.

Despite all the negative feedback, Meta revealed on an earnings call that it plans to more than double the number of AI-recommended Reels that users see. The company estimates that in 2023, about a third of Instagram and Facebook feeds will be recommended content.

“One of the main transformations in our business right now is that social feeds are going from being driven primarily by the people and accounts you follow to increasingly also being driven by AI recommending content that you'll find interesting from across Facebook or Instagram, even if you don't follow those creators,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg says.

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Intel is slowly moving into the dedicated graphics market, and its graphics driver releases are looking a lot more like Nvidia's and AMD's than they used to. For its dedicated Arc GPUs and the architecturally similar integrated GPUs that ship with 11th- and 12th-generation Intel CPUs, the company promises monthly driver releases, along with "Day 0" drivers with specific fixes and performance enhancements for just-released games.

At the same time, Intel's GPU driver updates are beginning to de-emphasize what used to be the company's bread and butter: low-end integrated GPUs. The company announced yesterday that it would be moving most of its integrated GPUs to a "legacy support model," which will provide quarterly updates to fix security issues and "critical" bugs but won't include the game-specific fixes that newer GPUs are getting.

The change affects a wide swath of GPUs, which are not all ancient history. Among others, the change affects all integrated GPUs in the following processor generations, from low-end unnumbered "HD/UHD graphics" to the faster Intel Iris-branded versions:

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

Chrome's browser competitors Safari and Firefox have both been blocking third-party tracking cookies used by advertisers, by default, for over two years now. Google, the world's largest advertising company, totally wants to match its competition and reduce user tracking; it will just take a little longer to do it. Google's latest blog post details the second delay to the shutdown of third-party tracking cookies. Google says it will now support the tracking method until "the second half of 2024."

Google does around $200 billion per year in advertising revenue, so the company stands to lose a lot if it suddenly hobbles web tracking. Google's stated position is that it refuses to match the competition until it builds an alternative behavior-tracking system directly into Chrome; the company calls this system the "Privacy Sandbox."

Google has floated a few different tracking methods so far. First there was FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts), which saw widespread opposition from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other privacy advocates. Then Google moved on to the "Topics" API, which is currently in testing.

Enlarge / All four new color variants of Google's Pixel Buds Pro. (credit: Google)

Google announced the Pixel Buds Pro earlier this year as an apparent upgrade to Google's impressive 2020 earbud refresh. "If you liked Pixel Buds 2, you'll love Pixel Buds Pro" was likely music to the ears of anyone who had been charmed by Google's audio-redemption plotline.

Ahead of their retail launch today, with nearly a week of Buds Pro testing, I learned that these new $199 earbuds do not do what the AirPods Pro did for the original AirPods. While some aspects have improved, others have regressed—so it's tough to recommend Buds Pro over the competition.

At least the Bluetooth connectivity is better

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  The box. [credit: Sam Machkovech ]

When they debuted, Buds 2 stood out in an increasingly competitive portable-audio fray (and ran circles around Google's first stab at the segment in 2017). They're still my daily drivers thanks to their impeccable sound balance, attractive aesthetics, comfortable fit, solid battery life, and nifty egg-shaped case. I still recommend them to Android smartphone owners—or, in a pinch, the $99 Pixel Buds A, which nearly match the 2020 version in features and audio quality. (As a longtime Buds 2 owner, I'll continue to compare the new Pixel Buds Pro to those earbuds for the rest of this review.)

Enlarge / Charter Spectrum cable van in West Lake Hills, Texas, in April 2019. (credit: Getty Images | Tony Webster)

A Texas jury has ordered Charter Communications to pay $7 billion in punitive damages to the family of an 83-year-old woman murdered in her home by a Spectrum cable technician. The Dallas County Court jury returned the $7 billion verdict on Tuesday after previously finding Charter liable for $337.5 million in compensatory damages.

The damages could be reduced by a judge. Charter says it shouldn't be held liable for the murder and that it plans to appeal. The jury, which found in the earlier phase of the case that Charter's negligence was a major cause of the death, reportedly reached the $7 billion verdict after less than two hours of deliberation.

"This was a shocking breach of faith by a company that sends workers inside millions of homes every year," one of the family's lawyers, Chris Hamilton, said in a press release Tuesday. "The jury in this case was thoughtful and attentive to the evidence. This verdict justly reflects the extensive evidence regarding the nature of the harm caused by Charter Spectrum's gross negligence and reckless misconduct."

Enlarge (credit: Manchester City)

England's Manchester City soccer club wants to know how its fans really feel, and it has gone so far as to pilot The Connected Scarf, a "smart scarf" stuffed with sensors that the organization says enables it to gauge fan emotions.

According to Manchester City's page for the scarf, the club has been piloting the accessory with six fans thus far and has recorded "over 120 moments of interest across the 90 minutes of a match."

"The scarf records a range of physiological measures, including heart rate, body temperature, and emotional arousal—giving us concrete information to analyze how fans are feeling at different moments in the match," the page says.

I'll show that know-it-all community manager who's boss...

In video games, community management is all about listening to the concerns of the fans and communicating with them in a way that makes them feel that their concerns are being heard. But what happens when some of the concerned players become a cause for concern themselves?

That's the question two major gaming companies have faced in recent days, with community managers saying that harassment from customers is making it harder for them to do their jobs.

The first example comes from the Destiny 2 community on Reddit, where one member posted Wednesday lamenting the shrinking number of threads that receive an official reply from Bungie. Destiny 2 Community Manager Dylan "dmg04" Gafner responded to explain that he has taken some time off due to "some serious harassment towards me and my family," which has led to "an amount of reduced communications as the team plans future protections / strategies to help avoid these sorts of things."