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Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge After chief twit Elon Musk made good on his promise to remove Twitter accounts’ legacy verification blue ticks last week , numerous high-profile accounts now appear to be re -verified — including a number of dead celebrities. It’s likely that the re-appearance of their blue ticks is part of a wider (but unannounced) scheme by Twitter to restore verification to users with over one million followers . But hover over the blue ticks of the accounts of dead celebs, and Twitter will tell you they’re verified “because they are subscribed to Twitter Blue and verified their phone number.” Michael Jackson, Chadwick Boseman, Kobe Bryant, Barbara Walters, Anthony Bourdain, and Paul Walker are just a few of the many deceased stars to have regained... Continue reading… from The Verge - All Posts https://ift.tt/akvJ5Gt

See inside a few of our favorite things — retro, modern, you name it. Continue reading… from The Verge - All Posts https://ift.tt/c40SAgs

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Tesla has won a lawsuit that tried to blame the company’s Autopilot driver assist software for a 2019 crash, Reuters reports . The jurors in the case found that the software wasn’t at fault in a crash where the car turned into a median on a city street while Autopilot was engaged. The jury awarded plaintiff Justine Hsu, who sued Tesla in 2020, no damages. The trial is believed to be the first regarding Autopilot, and could prove to be an important case if Tesla faces future lawsuits over the technology. While Reuters reports that the result of the trial “is not legally binding in other cases,” Tesla is under intense scrutiny for its Autopilot and its Full Self-Driving driver assistance features, which don’t make its cars fully autonomous... Continue reading… from The Verge - All Posts https://ift.tt/ezV9jMh

Valve’s Steam Deck and its carrying case. | Image: Valve Catch up on our coverage of PC gaming handhelds, starting with Valve’s category-defining Steam Deck. Continue reading… from The Verge - All Posts https://ift.tt/hlRd1Pj

With a few steps, you can put live sports scores on your iPhone lock screen and stay on top of your team’s race to the playoffs. | Samar Haddad / The Verge With iOS 16, Apple added a feature called Live Activities as part of a broader update to notifications and the lock screen. Live Activities are a little different from a standard push notification or widget — they offer a way for apps to put real-time information in a persistent notification bubble on your lock screen. They’re especially useful for sports scores if you want to keep tabs on a game without committing your full attention to it (there are, after all, 162 games in a baseball season). Better yet, if you have an iPhone 14 Pro or Pro Max, you’ll see live scores in the Dynamic Island when you’re following a game. Enabling Live Activities to follow a game on your lock screen isn’t hard, but it’s not exactly intuitive, either. The... Continue reading… from The Verge - All Posts https://ift.tt/i3G6TnE

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Back in early 2020, as the covid pandemic drove classrooms online, school districts found themselves needing to bulk purchase affordable laptops that they could send home with their students. Quite a few turned to Chromebooks. Three years later, the US Public Interest Research Group Education Fund concludes in a new report called Chromebook Churn that many of these batches are already beginning to break. That’s potentially costing districts money; PIRG estimates that “doubling the lifespan of Chromebooks could result in $1.8 billion in savings for taxpayers.” It also creates quite a bit of e-waste. One of the big problems is repairability. Chromebooks are harder to upgrade and repair, on average, than Windows laptops. That’s in part,... Continue reading… from The Verge - All Posts https://ift.tt/fqsmXbr

AMD’s Ryzen 7000 series will apparently add some lower power chips for handhelds. | Image: AMD via Aokzoe You’ve obviously heard of the Steam Deck , and perhaps Asus drew your attention to the upcoming ROG Ally with its not-an-April-Fools’-joke . But that’s apparently just the tip of the iceberg for AMD-powered Steam Deck rivals, which have at least four handhelds based on slivers of silicon the chipmaker has yet to reveal. One of the reasons we got so excited about the Asus ROG Ally is that Asus hinted it might be the first handheld since Steam Deck to offer a custom part specifically tuned for portables — and a growing body of leaks suggests that collaboration with AMD is called the Ryzen Z1. pic.twitter.com/Mu6kcCxXmi — Hifihedgehog (@hifihedgehog) April 18, 2023 And today, Geekbench leaks (which should always be taken with a grain... Continue reading… from The Verge - All Posts https://ift.tt/6hMdoD3

Álvaro Bernis / The Verge How we use the internet is changing fast, thanks to the advancement of AI-powered chatbots that can find information and redeliver it as a simple conversation. Continue reading… from The Verge - All Posts https://ift.tt/f0wDGJj

Image: CNBC A new video obtained by CNBC gives us a first look at the fire that engulfed a set of Ford F-150 Lightnings in a Dearborn, Michigan, holding lot earlier this year. This heavily edited version of the video shows police arriving on the scene as smoke billows from a group of electric trucks tucked in the back of the lot. “Let’s hope it doesn’t blow up,” one police officer says during the video. “The smoke is clear as day.” In February, Ford suspended production the production of and recalled some of its Ford F-150 Lightnings after one of the vehicles caught fire while charging and spread to two neighboring trucks. Ford eventually traced the cause of the fire to a “rare” issue affecting the vehicle’s battery , which is made by South Korean... Continue reading… from The Verge - All Posts https://ift.tt/s2qWjS4

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Twitter has started getting rid of legacy blue checks for those who don’t pay up. Well, unless you’re LeBron James. The Verge has confirmed that an employee at Twitter emailed James, who has previously said he wouldn’t pay for verification, to “extend a complimentary subscription to Twitter Blue for your account, @kingjames, on behalf of Elon Musk.” We contacted James’ longtime media advisor, Adam Mendelsohn, who confirmed that James hasn’t paid to be verified. James has perhaps been the most famous hater of paid verification on Twitter, insisting that, like Martin Lawrence’s TV show character, “ I ain’t paying the $5 .” But if you check his profile right now , he still has a verified badge. Once you hover over the badge, it says that... Continue reading… from The Verge - All Posts https://ift.tt/NwcDviC

Image: Blizzard Wouldya look at that, Diablo IV is getting one more beta before launch. During today’s D4 livestream event , the developers announced that they’ll be holding a third beta. Join the #DiabloIV Server Slam weekend 5.12.23 ⚔️ Reach lvl 20 Beat Ashava Claim the unique Cry of Ashava Mount Trophy pic.twitter.com/V99eZi61HA — Diablo (@Diablo) April 20, 2023 Dubbed the “Server Slam,” the open beta will take place May 12th–14th and is designed to have as many players log in as possible to test server durability in preparation for the live game launch in June. As with the other events, progress made during previous betas will not carry over to this one, nor will progress here carry over to the live game. The level cap is still 20, the beta... Continue reading… from The Verge - All Posts https://ift.tt/HX0dwau

The Apple Watch Series 8 isn’t a massive step up from the prior model, but it does offer a few new features. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge In September, Apple launched its latest batch of smartwatches, introducing the first-ever Ultra ($799) alongside the Series 8 ($399) and a new Apple Watch SE ($249). Each wearable has its own pros and cons associated with it, but the introduction of the high-end Ultra also means there are now more Apple Watch models on the market before than ever before — and a lot more deals to be had. But with all of those options, which one should you pick? Generally speaking, you want to buy the newest watch you can afford so that it continues to receive software updates from Apple. The latest update, watchOS 9 , launched on the Apple Watch Series 4 and newer models in September, though no one can say with certainty whether the Series 4 will get the... Continue reading… from The Verge - All Posts https://ift.tt/B6jh3kn

Classic city-building with a fun, interactive twist. | Image: Codebrew Games Did you play SimCity on a floppy disk ? Are you uncomfortable with the “theft” part of Grand Theft Auto but you love running around and playing mini-games? Did you quit checking Twitter and suddenly find yourself looking for things to do on your phone? Boy, do I have a game recommendation for you. I’d like to introduce you to my newest guilty pleasure: Pocket City 2 . I’m actually not a big mobile gamer. And despite semi-regularly spending $7 on a single cup of coffee, I’m pretty stingy when it comes to paying for apps. But when I read the description of everything you could do in Pocket City 2, I couldn’t pay for it fast enough. I have not regretted this $5 purchase since. It’s a mobile city-building game of the classic SimCity genre :... Continue reading… from The Verge - All Posts https://ift.tt/VTHK4pC

Chief Twit Elon Musk has chosen 4/20 as the date to purge the blue checkmarks. We’ll see what happens! Continue reading… from The Verge - All Posts https://ift.tt/zu5lAHY

Image: Getty Tesla will have a delivery event for its long-delayed Cybertruck in the third quarter of 2023, Elon Musk said during an earnings call with investors Wednesday. After more than three years since its initial announcement, Cybertruck production is expected to start this summer — though Musk has said that volume production won’t begin until next year. “It takes time to get the manufacturing line going, and this is really a very radical product,” Musk said Wednesday. “It’s not made in the way that other cars are made.” Image: Tesla Asked for updated specs, such as range or unique features, Musk demurred, noting that those details would be revealed during the hand-off event. “One thing I am confident of saying is that... Continue reading… from The Verge - All Posts https://ift.tt/amBVIzQ

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Stability AI, the company behind the AI-powered Stable Diffusion image generator, has released a suite of open-source large language models (LLMs) collectively called StableLM. In a post shared on Wednesday , the company announced that its models are now available for developers to use and adapt on GitHub . Like its ChatGPT rival, StableLM is designed to efficiently generate text and code. It’s trained on a larger version of the open-source dataset known as the Pile , which encompasses information from a range of sources, including Wikipedia, Stack Exchange, and PubMed. Stability AI says StableLM models are currently available between 3 billion and 7 billion parameters, with 15 to 65 billion parameter models arriving later. ... Continue reading… from The Verge - All Posts https://ift.tt/WQ7i2TU

Illustration: Nick Barclay / The Verge If you’re a US Facebook user who had an active account between May 24th, 2007, and December 22nd, 2022, you may be able to receive a portion of a multimillion-dollar class action settlement related to user privacy. Facebook parent company Meta agreed to pay $725 million to resolve a lawsuit accusing it of granting Cambridge Analytica and other third parties access to private user data, which a judge has tentatively approved. The tech giant also faced accusations it misled users about how much control they had over their private information. Meta, however, denies it did anything wrong. If you’d like to make a claim, you can do so online by August 25th, 2023. After answering a few questions, you’ll then be able to choose how you’d like to... Continue reading… from The Verge - All Posts https://ift.tt/5fjuhFl

Lego Sonic can spin. | GIF: Sean Hollister / The Verge, video by Lego Lego has made another fan toy dream come true: its new Sonic The Hedgehog sets actually let you send Sonic spinning through an entire miniature level. This isn’t the first time Sonic has been recreated in Lego form — we got a picture-perfect recreation of Green Hill Zone in 2021 that’ll look great on a bookshelf and a tie-in for the Lego Dimensions video game in 2016. But if you want a playset like Lego’s Mario line, that’s just now happening for the very first time. Each set has excellent references to the games: the flagship $100 Sonic’s Green Hill Zone Loop Challenge has classic fish and tree lizard foes, a two-part Dr. Robotnik boss that can float or stand on legs, forest creatures to rescue after he’s “defeated,” and a table where... Continue reading… from The Verge - All Posts https://ift.tt/czWBjYb

Image: Meta Meta is opening up its Horizon Worlds social VR platform to teens in the US and Canada in the coming weeks, the company announced on Tuesday . For teen players, which Meta defines as between the ages of 13 and 17, Meta will have some extra features in place to help provide a safer experience on the platform. Teen profiles will be private by default, for example, and Meta won’t show a teen’s online status unless they choose to flip that on. Its “voice mode” feature that turns voices of people you don’t know into “quiet, friendly sounds” and garbles your own voice will also be on for teens by default. Meta won’t show any adults that a teen player doesn’t know in the “people you might know” tab. And the company says it has expanded its VR... Continue reading… from The Verge - All Posts https://ift.tt/jP0Fg1O

Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge This is Hot Pod , The Verge ’s newsletter about podcasting and the audio industry. Sign up here for more. Hello, Hot Podders! We’re kicking off the week with a big announcement. This won’t come as a surprise to anyone who attended Hot Pod Summit in February, but I am very pregnant. Like baby-keeps-kicking-the-laptop-out-of-my-lap pregnant. This is my last week at The Verge before I go on leave. I will be back in September with what will likely be a lot of catching up to do on the audio business since my plans for the next five months mainly entail diapers and not sleeping. So if you see a frizzy, bedraggled new mom pushing a sage green UPPAbaby around Ditmas Park this summer, feel free to say hi! It might be me or one of the dozens... Continue reading… from The Verge - All Posts https://ift.tt/BWeHuJ2