Gizmodo

Is this a product review or a fever dream? For reasons that will become abundantly clear shortly, I’m not sure. But what I do know is that this post is for rich people ONLY. Poor friends, middle-class pals: Avert your non-rich eyes! You cannot afford to read this article. As a freelancer journalist, neither can I,…Read more...

The news outlet Insider announced to staff via email Thursday morning that the company lay off 10% of its workforce, including staff writers.

Google questioned Australia’s copyright laws in an open letter to the government last month, asking it to relax the law so it doesn’t restrict the use of artificial intelligence. The company asked if the Australian government has considered if its copyright legislation has “the necessary flexibilities” to support AI…Read more...

Spider-Man: No Way Home made all of the previous Spider-Man live-action films canon to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and now those movies are finally starting to join the rest of the MCU on Disney+.Read more...

$329 is asking a lot for a headset, especially for an active noise canceling headset that doesn’t come from the likes of Apple or Sony. But the Turtle Beach Stealth Pro headset lives up to its name by offering a clean look that gives it universal appeal, but also dedicated gaming features that other ANC competitors…Read more...

The stage is finally set for SpaceX to launch its much-anticipated Starship. The two-stage rocket may or may not reach orbit during its maiden voyage, but SpaceX says “excitement guaranteed.”

Fox News’s $787.5 million settlement agreement with Dominion Voting Systems is a hefty chunk of change. It’s one of the largest defamation payout ever for a defamation suit representing more than half of its total profit from last year, though the right-wing media company will likely sustain the blow. But the payout…Read more...

Darrington Press, in it’s first-ever State of the Press, announced multiple new projects and plans to attend GenCon 2023 via a YouTube video released today. Matthew Mercer, the longtime DM of Critical Role and chief creative officer, hosted the event alongside Mica Burton, an actress and actual play performer who has…Read more...

RHESSI’s time in orbit officially came to an end on Wednesday as NASA’s defunct Sun-observing satellite plunged through Earth’s atmosphere, likely burning up in a fiery flame.Read more...

Next month, your Peloton bike is going to take you to a galaxy far, far away. On May 4, the popular fitness brand will release its first-ever Star Wars ride to members everywhere. Officially called the May the 4th Be With You Ride, it’s 30 minutes of fitness set exclusively to the music of iconic composer John…Read more...

A team of scientists studying lensed ‘Einstein rings’ of light from the distant universe have found that signatures in the rings indicate the kind of dark matter that inhabits the background galaxies.

Six animal coffins from Egypt—impressively still sealed after about 2,500 years—have been opened virtually by a team of researchers using a unique imaging technology.

Ever since Marvel Comics’ mutants founded the island nation of Krakoa in the pages of House/Powers of X, they’ve thrown an annual party celebrating their own excellence: the Hellfire Gala. The yearly one-shot is never not eventful for the mutants in some way, whether that’s a change to the core X-Men team, or maybe …Read more...

A frozen valve forced a postponement on Monday, but Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX is now ready for the do-over. It’s the most anticipated launch of the year, and we’ve got you covered for what will hopefully be the dramatic debut of Starship. Update on the launch: SpaceX’s Starship rocket successfully…Read more...

The Guardians of the Galaxy, and their actors, really are hyping up the end of an era arc and I better see some real nail-in-the-coffin storytelling or I will be deeply disappointed. We’ve also got some incredible horror incoming and if Jenny Slate’s Mindful doesn’t find it’s way onto all the meditation girlies radar…Read more...

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Imgur has announced a new policy on NSFW content—and you should say goodbye to all of it. The image, GIF, and video hosting platform familiar to Redditors everywhere has announced that beginning May 15 it will be forbidding all future (and purging all pre-existing) NSFW content posted by users.

TikTok responded to the death of a 13-year-old Ohio boy who overdosed while participating in the “Benadryl challenge” on its platform, stating that it had “never seen this type of content trend” and had blocked searches on the topic for years.Read more...

Kate Welch, when introducing her Lord of the Rings-inspired game to an audience, says that she hopes she doesn’t disappoint any book purists–she’s going to be inventing some new canon tonight. Welch’s game—sponsored by Lost Odyssey and benefiting the charity Extra Life—takes place after the War of the Rings, and she…Read more...

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Military tech executives and experts speaking before the Senate Armed Services Committee Wednesday said growing calls for a “pause” on new artificial intelligence systems were misguided and seemed “close to impossible” to enact. The experts, who spoke on behalf of two military tech companies as well as storied defense…Read more...

Okay, we know. That’s not actually a Death Star in the latest trailer for Fast X. It’s a bomb that sort of looks like a Death Star. But as we watched it bounce around the streets of Rome, as Vin Diesel bats it around making his car into a pinball flapper, only to have it explode as Jason Momoa basks in the fallout, we…Read more...

Turns out spewing conservative vitriol across your social media platforms can make you a few enemies. Right-wing personality Matt Walsh’s Twitter account was hacked, and the alleged culprit has now said that it was because he had nothing better to do.

BeReal is jumping on the Spotify bandwagon by integrating the music streaming service as a feature on its platform. The app was released in 2020 and marketed itself as an authentic alternative to other social media platforms by prompting users at a random time to post about what they’re doing at that exact moment.Read more...

NASA’s quest to return rocky samples from the surface of Mars to Earth in 2033 is already running up the bill, with the project needing a lot more money than what was allocated to the mission for 2023.Read more...

It seems like everybody and their mother has a large language model these days. Stability AI, one of the companies that made a name for itself early in the AI rat race, was slower than its contemporaries to enter the realm of LLMs—until now, that is. On Wednesday, the company announced it was launching StableLM, a…Read more...

We live in the age of reboots and re-sequels, an era where the childhoods of people over 30 are reborn and regurgitated on screens big and small—old favorites return! Mantles are inherited! Merchandise is sold! Some of these projects have a lofty intent of trying to find weight and meaning in their history. Power…Read more...

As NASA inches closer to returning humans to the Moon and reaching Mars for the first time, the space agency has developed a comprehensive blueprint to establish a long-term human presence at both locations. In an important next step, the plan has passed its first internal review.Read more...

Meet the new hero of hustle culture: James Clarke, CEO of Clearlink, a Utah-based digital marketing company. This champion of capital had his grindset on lock in a video call with employees last week.

Pixel news is leaking left and right as Google’s developer conference fast approaches. Yesterday, we learned about the Pixel Fold and its apparent arrival date. Today, the delayed Pixel Tablet’s charging dock popped up on Amazon, complete with pricing and release date info.Read more...

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket delivered 21 Starlink V2 Minis to orbit on Wednesday, launching the company’s second batch of next-generation satellites shortly after the inaugural batch ran into some trouble.

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This week, Arkansas Governor Sarah Sanders signed into law a bill that requires parents or guardians to grant permission for their child to have a social media account. Last month, Utah passed a similar parental consent law that goes as far as requiring tech companies to give parents the passwords to their children’s…Read more...

Reusability is the key to 21st century spaceflight, with many launch providers now working to make their rockets as recyclable as possible. California-based Rocket Lab is ready to take an important next step in this direction by fitting a previously flown 3D-printed engine onto its Electron rocket.

Okay, sure. The Hollywood Reporter has sources that say that Lionsgate, the studio that brought all four of author Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight novels to life via five films, is now looking to make a Twilight TV series. According to those sources, it seems the show would retell the love triangle between Bella Swan,…Read more...

A team of scientists say they’ve figured out the cause of a devastating sea urchin die-off that occurred last year along the waters of the Caribbean Islands and Florida. The algae-eating sea urchins were likely wiped out by microscopic organisms known as ciliates. While the mystery has been solved, it’s not clear…Read more...

The first two seasons of The Mandalorian ended with some kind of big Star Wars twist. In season one, Moff Gideon pulled out the Darksaber. In season two, Luke Skywalker arrived to help Grogu. And the expectation of something on that level for the season three finale seemed completely reasonable. Instead, fans were…Read more...

Every season of Dropout’s Dimension 20 offers to shake things up in some kind of way. It’s what’s what made the show so fun to watch over the years, and now that the most recent season—season 15, Neverafter—has wrapped up, it’s once again time to shift to another setting, with the added bonus of Critical Role’s …Read more...

Meta has once again taken up the scythe and struck a wide swathe of staff from its field of developers. The first in what’s expected to be a total of 10,000 job cuts at the company is expected to impact teams for Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and in the company’s Reality Labs division working on its virtual reality…Read more...

In an energy-efficient future, homes may be heated and cooled by pumping from giant pools of water stored underground. A study published this month in Applied Energy looks at how underground aquifers could help significantly reduce reliance on fossil fuels and help store energy produced by renewables.

Children of New Zealand, lay down your arms and step away from the feral cats. The opportunity to fire on felines for a cash prize is no more.

Two legendary adversaries return to do battle once more, unleashing Titan mayhem on Earth when a new threat arises in Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire.Read more...

Though an eighth season may not be in the cards, the world of Adult Swim’s cult-beloved animated series The Venture Bros. will continue—and give us some closure on season seven’s ending—with a movie coming later this year. At long last, we know the (baffling, but sorta perfect) title, and have a first clip that…Read more...

JAXA is getting ready to visit Mars’s two moons, but Japan’s space agency is no longer going alone.Read more...

AI is sophisticated, but it’s not really intelligent. Today’s large language models used to power programs like ChatGPT, are amalgamations of scraped text found on the internet. So when Meta introduced its “state of the art” LLaMA AI back in February, eyes turned to some of the datasets used to train it, especially…Read more...

Sad there’s not going to be more Star Trek for a little while after this week? Don’t worry: Paramount has got you covered for those post-Picard blues with our first look at the return of Strange New Worlds.

Video games are a huge part of retro ‘80s nostalgia, which Lego has capitalized on with sets that recreate both classic gaming consoles, and classic retro games. The brickmaker has leaned heavily into Nintendo and Super Mario over the past few years, but it looks like it’s finally ready to give Sega its due with a new…Read more...

You hear about class-action lawsuits all the time, like this one filed against Apple (based on a Gizmodo story), or this other one against Apple (or this one or this one). Part of the reason is they’re so lucrative for lawyers; a “class” is a group of people who have the same grievance against a company, which means…Read more...

The AI-generated Drake and The Weeknd song was taken down from social media platforms including Apple Music, Spotify, YouTube, Amazon Music, SoundCloud, and others over the course of the last two days. The song calls into question existing copyright laws and whether they apply to songs created in the artist’s voice…Read more...

Insidious: The Red Door—the fifth in the horror series which began in 2010—has released a new trailer. This movie is the “final chapter” of the series that has followed the Lambert family across decades and various generations. Patrick Wilson, who has starred in four of the five films (including this one) makes his…Read more...