Tech

Why does the villain in this Knuckles series sneak peek look familiar to me? Is it because he was in Game of Thrones and Slow West? Nope, didn’t see those. Season of the Witch? No, he had a bit part.

It seems the only role I’ve seen Rory McCann play is Michael Armstrong, aka the “yarp” guy, in Hot Fuzz. Anyway, Knuckles starts streaming Friday on Paramount Plus.

You can update your console now to gain access to the feature, which offers community-generated hints for supported games like Granblue Fantasy: Relink and the upcoming Stellar Blade.

The app now has 150 million monthly users, Mark Zuckerberg said Wednesday during Meta’s earnings call. There were almost 100 million monthly Threads users in October.

The metric I’d really like to see, however, is daily users. Meta is juicing the visibility of Threads posts in the Instagram feed, and I’ve heard that a lot of user growth has been coming from that drive-by traffic. If it really wants to kill X, Meta still needs to build a sticky experience that more people come to daily.

Two months later, Asus says the framerate-boosting tech is nigh! There’s also a firmware update that lets you map triggers to back buttons.

AFMF can’t make its fake frames out of nothing; you’ll need a game that already runs at a decent clip to get best results. Here’s the Asus guide on how to use it.

Run:ai’s software lets users share computing power and easily manage GPUs running on cloud and on-premises data centers. It will be part of Nvidia’s DGX Cloud platform, which sells access to Nvidia’s GPUs for a monthly fee. TechCrunch reports the deal cost $700 million.

The Citizen Lab analyzed Chinese keyboard apps from Baidu, Honor, Huawei, iFlytek, Oppo, Samsung, Tencent, Vivo, and Xiaomi. It found that each of these apps — except for Huawei’s — has an exploit that can “reveal the contents of users’ keystrokes in transit.” The research group estimates these vulnerabilities impact up to 1 billion people.

In a filing on Tuesday, the DOJ says Changpeng Zhao’s alleged crimes “warrant meaningful prison time” and that the three-year term will “not just send a message to Zhao but also to the world.” Zhao’s lawyers followed up with a filing shortly after, saying he should just be sentenced to probation.

Ralph Nader complained that his favorite pens were drying out too fast. (Those of us who have favorite pens also have strong feelings about them.) Wirecutter sent him some of their recommended pens. “He was not a fan,” reports Annmarie Conte.

What’s it like to play Metroid Prime Hunters in an Apple-approved emulator for iOS — Delta, in this case — on a Vision Pro?

Well, since nobody asked, I’ll tell you: it’s unexpectedly playable. Emulated Nintendo DS touchscreen aiming works well if you pinch and hold while looking at the upper screen. Sure, you could use buttons to aim in Hunters, but why would you?

After expanding SNAP/EBT payments to more stores earlier this year, DoorDash has announced that users can now use their SNAP/EBT cards when ordering from Walgreens.

More delivery services and online retailers are adding support for SNAP/EBT. Amazon has launched an unlimited delivery program available to EBT customers, while Uber Eats will start accepting food stamps as payments sometime this year.

Some lucky early testers are starting to see Live Activities pop up while using Google Maps on iOS. In a few shots posted to X and reddit, Maps navigation appears in Live Activities on the lock screen and in the Dynamic Island. It seems to be in very limited testing and I, for one, can’t wait until I have glanceable transit directions on my lock screen.

One of the biggest residential solar companies announced today that it’ll lay off 1,000 people. It’s also shutting down its direct sales business and residential installation locations.

“We need to achieve financial viability, which includes simplifying our business structure, transitioning away from areas where we have been unable to sustain profitable operations, and improving financial controls,” SunPower Executive Chairman Tom Werner told employees.

Chew said that the bill, which requires China-based owner ByteDance to divest TikTok within a year to keep operating in the US, is in fact a ban.

“Rest assured, we aren’t going anywhere,” Chew says. “We are confident and we will keep fighting for your rights in the courts.”

Look, this is fine advice from Adam Mosseri — build an audience, not traffic, as we say so often around here — but it’s just so weird to lean this far into the idea of engagement for regular people. These platforms all feel like work now, and increasingly less fun work. No wonder everyone is going to the DMs!

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) in the UK has started gathering comments from third parties about the partnerships between Microsoft and Mistral AI, Amazon and Anthropic, and Microsoft’s hiring of Inflection AI staff. This is the first phase of gathering information to see whether these deals “fall within UK merger rules and the impact that these arrangements could have on competition in the UK.”