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Today — 7 January 2025Tech News

Zuckerberg says he’s moving Meta moderators to Texas because California seems too ‘biased’

7 January 2025 at 10:32
Graphic collage of Mark Zuckerberg.
Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge; Getty Images

As part of Meta’s sweeping changes to content moderation announced today, CEO Mark Zuckerberg says that the company will also be moving its content moderation teams from California to Texas to “help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content,” he wrote on Threads.

“We’re going to move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our US-based content review is going to be based in Texas,” Zuckerberg says in a video about the changes. “As we work to promote free expression, I think that it will help us build trust to do this work in places where there’s less concern about the bias of our teams.”

Meta’s decision to move its content moderation teams to Texas follows Elon Musk bringing X and SpaceX to the state, though Musk’s move was driven in part by his opposition to a California law that’s intended to support LGBTQ+ students. (Employees who work for Meta in Texas will be subject to bans on gender-affirming care for transgender minors along with one of the country’s most stringent abortion bans.)

Meta’s other moderation changes include ditching its independent fact-checking program in the US in favor of an X-inspired Community Notes feature, removing restrictions on topics like immigration and gender, and bringing back civic content to Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.

The company’s blog post about the updates was written by Joel Kaplan, Meta’s new Trump-friendly policy chief.

HR software startup OnPay was inspired by the founder’s family payroll business

7 January 2025 at 10:24

In 2007, Jesse Burgess joined his family’s payroll business. He quickly noticed that the business’ six payroll clerks were getting bogged down by repetitive, monotonous tasks — and so he sought to streamline those tasks by creating workflow automation tools. Several years later, Burgess sensed an opportunity to bring the tools he developed for his […]

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BMW’s new UI puts widgets on the windshield

7 January 2025 at 10:22

BMW is totally revamping its in-car user interface, starting with the Neue Klasse sedan later this year and ultimately spreading to all models, the company announced at CES 2025. Some of it looks and feels familiar, but the big change is a widget-based system that lets users customize the layout — including on the car’s […]

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Samsung opens up free reserve slots for the Galaxy S25 series; how to sign up

7 January 2025 at 10:30

Samsung is starting to get things rolling for the release of the Galaxy S25 series. This year, the Galaxy S25 lineup should offer some really nice enhancements and improvements to a line that has proven it’s a strong Android option. With the reserve campaign live, here’s how you can sign up.

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MediaTek and Google partner to develop dedicated smart home chipset

7 January 2025 at 10:30

Smart home devices are getting a lot smarter, thanks to improvements in standards like what Matter has introduced to the industry. To facilitate that, Google and MediaTek are partnering up to introduce a new Filogic chip dedicated to smart home products.

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Satechi unveils new essential OntheGo collection for 2025 [Hands-on]

7 January 2025 at 10:12

As someone who’s been using Satechi products for years, I’ve always admired their sleek designs and focus on functionality. At this year’s Pepcom event, I had a chance to go hands-on with their latest OntheGo collection — a lineup of premium travel chargers that make staying powered up on the move easier than ever. From power banks with built-in stands to versatile wireless chargers, Satechi continues to deliver practical, beautifully crafted tech accessories.

Here’s everything you need to know about the new OntheGo lineup:

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NVIDIA's Reflex 2 predicts milliseconds into the future of competitive games

7 January 2025 at 10:22

NVIDIA’s Reflex technology just got a massive upgrade, as announced at CES 2025 in Las Vegas. The company’s Reflex 2 kicks things up several notches, thanks to some software wizardry. The end result? A promise to further reduce gaming latency by up to 75 percent. In this case, latency refers to how quickly a game displays the reaction from a player's inputs.

Here’s how it works, and it’s pretty wild. Reflex 2 combines the pre-existing Low Latency mode with something called Frame Warp. This tech tasks the CPU to calculate the position of the next frame as the current frame is being rendered by the GPU. The CPU uses player input, typically via mouse, to calculate the upcoming camera position.

The tools then sample the upcoming camera position and graft it onto the current frame, waiting until the “very last moment to ensure the latest input is shown on screen.” This glimpse into the near future should “allow players to improve their aim and tracking of enemies.”

But how can a pre-rendered image exist on top of the current frame without creating all kinds of visual inaccuracies? NVIDIA developed a “latency-optimized predictive rendering algorithm” that uses data from prior frames to fill in any obvious gaps, so players will see a new frame with the updated camera position without any weird holes. It is, quite literally, warping the frame (thus the name.)

The company showcased this technology with Embark Studio’s The Finals, which will be one of the first games to support the toolset. The proof is in the pudding. With the game running on an RTX 5070 GPU at 4K with max settings, the latency was 56ms. The first iteration of Reflex reduced the latency to 27ms, while Reflex 2 dropped it all the way down to 14ms.

In addition to The Finals, NVIDIA says that Valorant will soon support the tech. The company notes that it has used Reflex 2 with Frame Warp to reduce the latency to an average of under 3ms. Reflex 2 will debut as part of the forthcoming GeForce RTX 50 series GPUs, with support for other RTX GPUs coming sometime in the future.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/pc/nvidias-reflex-2-predicts-milliseconds-into-the-future-of-competitive-games-182213650.html?src=rss

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© NVIDIA

The tool in action.

Meta's Fact-Checking Partners Say They Were 'Blindsided' by Decision to Axe Them

7 January 2025 at 10:20
Fact-checkers claim they had no idea the company was going to end their partnerships and are scrambling to figure out the financial implications of the move.

Tesla’s remote parking feature under investigation after over a dozen crashes

7 January 2025 at 10:00
Tesla actually smart summon
Image: Getty

The National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is investigating Tesla’s “Actual Smart Summon” remote parking feature after several crash incidents were reported.

NHTSA says it has received reports of 16 incidents involving Tesla’s smart summon feature in 2016-2025 Model S and X vehicles as well as 2017-2025 Model 3s and 2020-2025 Model Ys. The administration’s Office of Defects Investigation (ODI) is probing an estimated 2.6 million vehicles with the parking feature.

Tesla re-launched its remote parking Smart Summon as Actually Smart Summon (or ASS, get it?) last fall, after upgrading it to account for the company’s decision to remove radar and ultrasonic sensors in favor of a camera-only approach. Tesla owners control the vehicle by pushing a button in the Tesla smartphone app. The vehicle then uses cameras to navigate across a parking lot without anyone behind the wheel. Releasing the button on the app stops the vehicle’s movements.

But since the feature was reintroduced under the new moniker, a number of videos of alleged crash incidents have been uploaded on YouTube and other social media platforms. Tesla vehicles are seen scraping up against other vehicles, colliding with parking signs, or running into walls. In fairness, there are also a number of videos showing the remote summon feature working flawlessly, even in crowded parking lots.

But NHTSA is concerned with the incidents that didn’t turn out well. There have not been any injuries reported, but the agency is looking into “multiple crash allegations, involving both Smart Summon and Actually Smart Summon, where the user had too little reaction time to avoid a crash, either with the available line of sight or releasing the phone app button, which stops the vehicle’s movement.”

No ASS-related crashes have been reported through NHTSA’s standing general order that requires companies to report incidents involving automated or autonomous features.

Of course, the crash-reporting rule, and all of NHTSA’s safety investigations into Tesla, are headed into an uncertain future with Donald Trump set to retake the White House. Trump’s top donor and advisor is Elon Musk, who stands to benefit if the incoming administration decides to ignore or shut down all its various investigations into his companies.

Former Annapurna leads take charge of Take-Two’s discarded indie games

7 January 2025 at 09:57
Stray by Annapurna Interactive
Annapurna Interactive is known for its quality of indie titles including the cat adventure game Stray. | Image: Annapurna Interactive

The games published under Private Division, Take-Two Interactive’s former indie label, are under new management. Bloomberg reports that the former employees of Annapurna Interactive have formed a new, as-yet-unnamed company that will take over Private Division’s games portfolio.

Last year, Take-Two sold off the indie label to a then unnamed buyer that Bloomberg reports is Haveli Investments, a private equity firm based in Texas. Also last year, the staff at Annapurna Interactive, the games arm of the Annapurna Pictures media company, resigned en masse sparking questions about the fate of its own portfolio of games. The resignations came after negotiations to spin off Annapurna Interactive into its own independent company apparently broke down. Annapurna’s former employees have come together with Haveli Investments to form a new company and Bloomberg reports that Private Division’s existing employees will face layoffs but the details are currently unclear.

The new company will oversee Private Division’s existing and in-development titles including the Lord of the Rings-meets-Animal Crossing game Tales of the Shire, due out in March, and Pokémon developer Game Freak’s forthcoming game codenamed Project Bloom.

At CES 2025, Uber teams up with Nvidia to scale autonomous driving faster

7 January 2025 at 10:08

Uber will use Nvidia’s new generative world model simulation tool, Cosmos, and cloud-based AI supercomputing platform, DGX Cloud, to support the development of autonomous vehicle technology, the companies announced at CES 2025. Cosmos is being marketed to robotics and autonomy companies as a tool that generates physics-based videos from a variety of inputs, including 9,000 […]

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What the heck happened at fintech Bench?

7 January 2025 at 10:05

Welcome to TechCrunch Fintech! It’s good to be back.  This week, we’re looking at the wild ride that was Bench’s shutdown and acquisition; dozens of companies that are hiring in the fintech space; lawsuits against PayPal; an IPO update; and more! This edition is a bit longer than normal since we were on a hiatus […]

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Google puts $1M into 3D design app Rooms after more than 1 million ‘rooms’ created

7 January 2025 at 09:45

3D design app Rooms just landed more funding. Launched into beta in 2023, the app from ex-Google employees allows users to build and code interactive 3D rooms and mini-games using a library of more than 10,000 items, which can be further edited using the programming language Lua. Now, Google itself has invested $1 million into […]

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New settings for ‘Google Workspace smart features’ control how apps use your data

By: Abner Li
7 January 2025 at 09:51

Google will soon introduce a new settings page for “Google Workspace smart features” that better explains how your emails and other data in Workspace apps can be surfaced in Google products to provide a more personalized experience.

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