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Scott Carney and Taylor Lorenz posted on Substack about downward subscriber trends they’re seeing. Carney pins it on subscription fatigue and feeling like “The only way to grow is to pillage the paid subscribers from other creators.” Lorenz questions Substack’s direction, saying “more and more like this app is becoming another social media feed.”

After suspending freeway routes in May because of safety concerns in construction zones, Waymo announced that freeway routes coming back in Phoenix and “soon” in Los Angeles, Miami, and San Francisco.

I’ve heard Steam Remote Play is finally reaching parity with Moonlight when streaming games to your Steam Deck. Now, Steam Remote Play is getting AV1 for theoretically even better compression, and HDR for the Steam Deck OLED’s screen. I like streaming, but I’d also like more devs to embrace Dynamic Cloud Sync…

The satellite radio company is rolling out a $5 / month (or $49 / year) Sports Pass that offers access to “every live game and event SiriusXM carries,” including all home and away NFL, MLB, NBA, and NHL broadcasts. It will also include 24 local sports talk stations when the plan launches on September 1st.

After adding widgets to the browser’s new tab page last month, Mozilla updated mine to add a mini crossword puzzle widget. There’s one puzzle per day.

This time around, Jumanji’s avatars, played by Dwayne Johnson, Karen Gillan, Kevin Hart, and Jack Black, escape the game in “demo mode,” before a family jumps into their bodies to fix things. The trilogy’s final film is set to release in theaters on December 25th.

In addition to Reuters, WSJ, CNN, Fox News, and USA Today, Meta now has an AI content partnership to “…draw upon Newsmax’s significant current reporting as well as archived content across its platforms to support AI queries across Meta’s apps and devices.”

Using the in-car screens, you can access Gemini for things like changing the temperature in your Waymo or getting a recommendation for a good coffee shop, Waymo says. The feature is in beta, and Gemini operates “independently from the Waymo Driver.”

Google is teasing its upcoming smartphone again ahead of the August 12th launch event. The company has already shown off the glowy orb in the camera bar that’s visible in this new ad, and while Google still hasn’t said what the light is for, it might be called Pixel Glow.

AI data center projects are continuing to pop up across the US, with frequent opposition from locals concerned about their impact. Here are a few recent articles about the projects:

Elon Musk’s X Corp and the World Federation of Advertisers are ending their long-running legal fight. In 2024, Musk accused the industry group of illegally boycotting X through its Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) initiative, which set standards to prevent ads from appearing next to harmful content. GARM has since been disbanded. A judge dismissed Musk’s lawsuit in March.

With the update, you can hold the Fn key in any window to interact with Gemini by talking aloud. You can also opt into a feature that allows Gemini to “see” what’s on your screen and perform tasks within your open windows. This update is rolling out in English to all Gemini app users on macOS.

The new extended trailer for the first wave of Pokopia DLC gives us a much better look at all the water type monsters you’ll be able to befriend in Bubbly Basin beginning August 5th. It also looks like building underwater houses is about to get much easier.

A new Google Workspace update lets Gemini summarize and respond to comments, like highlighting all the unresolved changes in a document, Android Authority reports. You can also ask Google’s AI to draft new comments and replies and add suggested edits based on comments.

In the ongoing battle for control of the messaging platform that claims over 1 billion active users, Durov has been charged with facilitating terrorism by failing to remove information “actively used by Ukrainian special services, terrorist organizations and extremist organizations to prepare and coordinate sabotage and terrorist acts, mass killings and cyber fraud activities” in Russia, according to the New York Times. Durov responded like Durov.

Katalyst says the Link spacecraft it launched on July 3rd to push the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory back up to a higher orbit has been in a “multi-axis spin” over the last 72 hours, resulting in sporadic communications. Having identified the cause, Katalyst is working to recover the mission and believes Link still has “a viable path to rendezvous with Swift.”

XAI has filed a lawsuit in response to a law taking effect on Saturday that bans apps and websites from generating non-consensual sexualized imagery. The Musk-led company responsible for the Grok chatbot said the law will impact free speech and visual expression “in a clumsy attempt to prohibit ‘nudification.’”

Poor SK Hynix. Despite the memory-chip maker posting record net profit of about $64.64 billion, the stock fell by as much as 18 percent (down 9 percent at market close) when its revenue haul (also a record) failed to meet the lofty expectations set by the AI hype cycle. The results won’t help investors worried that the AI bubble’s about to pop.

The ultra-long range Airbus A350-1000ULR operated by Qantas took off from Melbourne, Australia and flew for 24 hours and 24 minutes, covering 23,075km (14,338 miles) before landing at the plane’s factory in Toulouse, France. The new aircraft will debut on the carrier’s nonstop Sydney-London route starting in 2027. ​

“The last thing we need is a loud, water thieving, light polluting, data center anywhere near our town (or any others for that matter),” Nelson says.

Developer Nik Samokhvalov created a SimCity-inspired model that demonstrates how the database system PostgreSQL works, as reported earlier by Gizmodo. You can click around “PGSimCity” to learn more about each component, all while watching streams of data zip across your screen.

Arizona State has a degree for that. According to the description of the “Content Creation” program:

“Only the survival of our studio would ever make us consider such a painful action,” Double Fine founder Tim Schafer says in a statement. “Our transition to becoming an independent company also means becoming a size that we can sustain.”

Zuckerberg argues that bringing “superintelligence” to more people is better than centralizing who controls AI: