Following Google Meet and Microsoft Teams, Zoom is now letting you make AI-generated backgrounds with its AI Companion tool (which is included with paid plans). AI Companion will also be able to take things people say in the chat and incorporate them into its AI-generated meeting summaries.
That’s what Ted Lasso co-creator Bill Lawrence told Collider when asked about what’s next for the series following its season 3 finale:
Whatever Jason [Sudeikis] feels like doing and whatever his decision is, we’re all down with it… Not only is he the star, he’s the head writer, and he’s also the dude whose life just has to be completely overhauled and moved to a foreign country with young children... As a partner, I’m down for whatever he wants to do.
The CNN media reporter announced today that he’s starting his own news outlet called Status — a nightly briefing covering the media industry, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley.
Darcy is the latest journalist to move from a big outlet to an independent enterprise. Status will be subscription-based, and will launch with an initial (as of yet unnamed) sponsor.
[The New York Times]
Visit the “Disney Horizons Live from D23” island in Fortnite (island code 7908-6413-2516) at 11:30PM ET on August 10th to catch the show. If you miss it live, the in-game island will be available until August 16th, where the presentation will be on a loop.
The Competition and Markets Authority says it has “sufficient information” to launch a merger inquiry into Amazon’s partnership with Anthropic. The regulator has until October 4th to launch a more in-depth probe.
Amazon told the Financial Times that its Anthropic deal “does not raise any competition concerns or meet the CMA’s own threshold for review.”
Invitations are going out for Google’s community-led pilot to moderate misinformation by letting users append highly-rated notes to confusing or inaccurate videos. Per 9to5Google, you can sign up to participate on mobile in the US by clicking your profile pic in the app, then selecting “help inform viewers” under general settings.
Let us know in the comments if you’re seeing notes on videos.
Asus is the first OEM to release BIOS updates for its range of Z790 motherboards. The latest beta BIOS includes Intel’s new microcode fix to address stability and crashing issues with its 13th and 14th Gen processors. This won’t fix chips that are already damaged, though. You’ll need to swap your CPU, with Intel or a PC maker, if it has degraded.
[rog-forum.asus.com]
After introducing the Arc brand a few years ago, Intel announced in China that cars with the GPUs could arrive “as soon as 2025.”
While it hasn’t specified which cars, a demo showed it running AAA games and a “new generation cockpit user interface (UI) that transforms vehicles into immersive mobile hubs supporting seven high-definition screens rendering 3D graphics and six-in vehicle cameras and interactive features.”
The vulnerability deals with how browsers deal with queries to the IP address 0.0.0.0, as reported by Forbes and the security startup Oligo. Apple tells Forbes that it is making changes to the macOS Sequoia beta to fix the issue, while Google has plans to fix it in Chrome.
Byron Bernstein had six livestreamed conversations with Alok Kanojia, a psychiatrist. Then Bernstein died by suicide. Were those conversations ethical?
[The New York Times]
That’s what WBD CEO David Zaslav said during an earnings call on Wednesday, referencing the company’s $9.1 billion goodwill impairment charge linked to the value of its legacy TV networks and “uncertainty” about sports rights now that the NBA is headed to streaming:
It’s fair to say that even two years ago, market valuations and prevailing conditions for legacy media companies were quite different than they are today, and this impairment acknowledges this and better aligns our carrying values with our future outlook.
Panasonic resurrected the legendary Technics 1200 turntable eight years ago, but Tamás Borján’s version will appeal to both nostalgic DJs and Lego fans.
This 2,215-piece Technics SL-1200 MK2 won’t actually play records but it’s got a motorized platter that spins, a movable tone arm with an adjustable counter balance, and a sliding pitch fader.
With Simultaneous Opposing Cardinal Directions (SOCD) features like Wooting and Razer’s new Rappy Snappy / Snap Tap enabled, FPS players don’t have to let go of one key to press another, enabling near-instant changes of direction. Some players have called it “basically cheating.”
Now SteelSeries says a beta update for its GG software (68.0.0) adds the same thing for all Apex Pro keyboards.
⭕ If you’ve got USB-C on a reference design GPU, you may not need the adapter at all. Some report you can plug the headset right into certain cards once you install the app.
❌ Sony’s dongle doesn’t have Bluetooth; I’ve spent hours trying to get PS VR2 controllers to work well on desktop, despite using a Sony-approved Bluetooth dongle.
Price of Persia: The Lost Crown is one of my favorite games of this year — my colleague Ash Parrish loved it, too — so if you’ve been holding out for the game to come to Steam, I strongly encourage you to check it out. It’s playable on Steam Deck, too!