Month: November 2022

Enlarge (credit: SOPA Images / Contributor | LightRocket)

Confidence in Twitter has hit what might be an all-time low just two weeks into Elon Musk’s tenure as owner. Yesterday on a call, Musk told Twitter staff that bankruptcy is a real possibility, as next year Twitter could face billions more in losses.

The Verge posted a full transcript of Musk’s staff meeting, where different employees attempted to find out what their priorities should be to help Musk keep Twitter afloat as the economy remains unstable. Musk kept his responses brief and said top priorities included growing Twitter’s user base by 1 billion (while critically monetizing more users), compensating creators on the platform, and improving Twitter search. In short, he asked his remaining team members to go “hardcore” to make Twitter “more compelling,” so he can sell that product to users, or else resign. One of his biggest and out-there ideas, which he says is "definitely happening," is tweaking Twitter to become a digital payments platform.

“If you have a compelling product, people will buy it,” Musk told staff. “That has been my experience at SpaceX and Tesla.”

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  The Leica Leitz Phone 2. [credit: Leica ]

Meet the Leica Leitz Phone 2, a phone from the famous German camera manufacturer that is exclusive to... Japan? If smartphones are eating into the camera market, it makes sense that some camera companies would try to go the other way.

Leica is not a smartphone company, though, so the company actually building this phone is Sharp! Now the Japan exclusivity makes sense. If you have to base your branded smartphone on somebody else's hardware, it's hard to go wrong with using the Sharp Aquos R7, a stunningly unique Android phone that dumps a lot of the dumb phone trends other manufacturers mindlessly stick to. The R7 went out the door with Leica-branded optics, so this is apparently the other half of that deal.

Sharp is no stranger to unique smartphone designs, and the Leica and its R7 sister phone make a lot of good decisions. Instead of a bunch of questionably useful tiny rear cameras, you get one giant camera: a 1-inch Sony IMX989 sensor. That's the biggest currently available on a smartphone. Normally the IMX989 is 50 MP, but Leica is cropping it a bit and lists a "47.2-megapixel effective pixel count." The display is flat, a great change from the senselessly curved and distorted screens that companies typically put on flagship Android phones. The curved screen gimmick is driven by Samsung, display supplier to most of the world's smartphones, but here the display is made by Sharp, a 6.6-inch 2730×1260 OLED with a definitely overkill 240 Hz refresh rate.

Enlarge / Advocates held a vigil in September 2019 outside of Eli Lillys' offices in New York City, honoring those who have lost their lives due to the high cost of insulin and demanding lower insulin prices. (credit: Getty | Erik McGregor)

Social media platform Twitter has been mired by uncertainty and disorder in the few, yet lengthy days since billionaire Elon Musk took the helm. But above the din of fake accounts and capricious policy changes, a fury-fueled dialogue has erupted on the platform over what is, perhaps, an unexpected topic—the exorbitant price of insulin.

Early Thursday afternoon (EST), an account posing as pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly, with the Twitter handle @EliLillyandCo, the company's logo, and blue checkmark by its name—which formerly only signaled verification of the account's identify, but has since marked accounts of those who simply paid an $8 subscription fee—tweeted the enticing, but false claim: "We are excited to announce insulin is free now."

The tweet, which stayed publicly viewable up for at least four hours, began a viral spread, garnering at least 1,798 retweets and 12,800 likes before the account was set to protected, meaning that only approved followers can see its tweets. The account currently shows zero followers.

Enlarge (credit: Razer)

Mice for MMO games have a special appeal. These button-laden peripherals are intended to make laying down combos in games a breeze. But their high programmability gives them great potential for much more, including heavy-duty productivity. One of the most popular MMO mice, the Razer Naga series, received an update on Thursday. Offering up to 20 customizable buttons is still the Naga's main prize, but Razer has also made the scroll wheel much more interesting.

The Razer Naga V2 Pro is similar to the wired Razer Naga X since it comes with three side plates, granting the bank of inputs by the thumb with two, six, or 12 programmable buttons.

Like Naga mice before it, the new Naga V2 Pro X has interchangeable side plates. (credit: Razer)

Combined with other buttons on the mouse, like the scroll wheel and button south of that, there are 22 programmable inputs total— you just have to download Razer's Synapse app to make the most of them.

Enlarge (credit: Boston Dynamics)

Will robots take over the world? Will our new machine overlords be generous gods or cruel taskmasters? A new research project isn’t going to answer these questions, but it aims to highlight how humans perceive and interact with some of our automatons in public.

Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin recently received expanded funding from the National Science Foundation to continue their work studying human-robot interactions. To do this, the team plans to release four-legged robots around the university campus and collect data on what it finds. The project will begin in 2023 and run for five years.

“When we deploy robots in the real world, it's not just a technical problem, it's actually a socio-technical problem,” Joydeep Biswas, assistant professor of computer science in the College of Natural Sciences and member of the research team, told Ars.

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There's not much new to the Surface Pro 9 on the outside, as our review points out. Inside, however, there is evidence of a lot of work by Microsoft to make the device more repairable, as shown in an iFixit teardown.

iFixit has consulted with Microsoft's hardware teams for a while now, providing advice on making devices more repairable. As evidence of this, Microsoft claims in a statement that it will:

• Make repair guides available for the Surface Pro 9's components by the end of the year
• Work with "a major US retailer" to build out an authorized (in-store) repair network by early 2023
• Offer parts to individuals and repair shops by the first half of 2023

All these factors improve repairability, both in practice and in iFixit's (and French, European, and potentially other nations') repair scores.