I’m sufficiently old and grumpy to have resisted the use of emoji for a long time, wondering what was wrong with, you know, words – but I did find myself assimilated in the end.
The tiny colorful substitutes for vocabulary now make up a growing percentage of our communication, especially since Apple allowed any emoji to be used for tapback reactions ..
A new study suggests ancient wood floated into a cave far above the Colorado River when a meteorite-induced earthquake triggered a landslide, a dam, and an ancient lake.
Would you care if this sleek little thing was just a bit less little?
Sony's new RX1R III camera looks awesome. Hardcore photo enthusiasts have wanted an updated version of its full-frame compact camera, the RX1, for nearly a decade. I'm not surprised it costs a whopping $5,100 (cameras and lenses have been trending more expensive), but what I do find surprising, and quite egregious, is that the RX1R III lost the tiltable screen of its predecessor. Its rear LCD is fixed in place, which is a real blow to the street photographers and shooters who like the added convenience of easier from-the-hip or overhead angles.
The designers at Sony obviously went to great lengths to maintain similar dimensions to the last- …
Nothing Headphone (1) bucks a lot of trends in the audio space in terms of design, standing out on its own as unique. In a slight twist, though, Nothing turns out to have made a second Headphone (1) case that’s pretty familiar, because it’s just like the one from AirPods Max.
A chief economist at investment giant Apollo says the top ten AI stocks are more detached from reality than the tech titans of the 1990s were. His chart is a stark warning that history is about to repeat itself.
A24 is known for its prestige arthouse films, but in its early days as a distributor, it made most of its money from elevated horror films like Ari Aster's Hereditary and Midsommar. Over a decade in, the ambitions of A24 and Aster have expanded beyond genre film. But for both, the more recent results have been mixed.
Eddington, Aster's latest, feels like a continuation of the maximalist guilt-trip Beau Is Afraid. Joaquin Phoenix stars once again, though the concerns here are less Jewish and Oedipal and more wokeness and conspiracy theories. It's grounded in the contemporary: the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, specifically. The movie's …
In this example, you’d record yourself mimicking the sound of a rocket taking off. Have at it.
Adobe is launching new generative AI filmmaking tools that provide fun ways to create sound effects and control generated video outputs. Alongside the familiar text prompts that typically allow you to describe what Adobe’s Firefly AI models should make or edit, users can now use onomatopoeia-like voice recordings to generate custom sounds, and use reference footage to guide the movements in Firefly-generated videos.
The Generate Sound Effects tool that’s launching in beta on the Firefly app can be used with recorded and generated footage, and provides greater control over audio generation than Google’s Veo 3 video tool. The interface resembles a video editing timeline and allows users to match the effects they create in time with uploaded footage. For example, users can play a video of a horse walking along a road and simultaneously record “clip clop” noises in time with its hoof steps, alongside a text description that says “hooves on concrete.” The tool will then generate four sound effect options to choose from.
This builds on the Project Super Sonic experiment that Adobe showed off at its Max event in October. It doesn’t work for speech, but does support the creation of impact sounds like twigs snapping, footsteps, zipper effects, and more, as well as atmospheric noises like nature sounds and city ambience.
New advanced controls are also coming to the Firefly Text-to-Video generator. Composition Reference allows users to upload a video alongside their text prompt to mirror the composition of that footage in the generated video, which should make it easier to achieve specific results, compared to repeatedly inputting text descriptions alone. Keyframe cropping will let users crop and upload images of the first and last frames that Firefly can use to generate video between, and new style presets provide a selection of visual styles that users can quickly select, including anime, vector art, claymation, and more.
These style presets are only available to use with Adobe’s own Firefly video AI model. The results leave something to be desired if the live demo I saw was any indication — the “claymation” option just looked like early 2000s 3D animation. But Adobe is continuing to add support for rival AI models within its own tools, and Adobe’s Generative AI lead Alexandru Costin told The Verge that similar controls and presets may be available to use with third-party AI models in the future. That suggests that Adobe is vying to keep its place at the top of the creative software foodchain as AI tools grow in popularity, even if it lags behind the likes of OpenAI and Google in the generative models themselves.
This pink is one of the two new colors coming to OnTrac outer caps.
Dyson is expanding the range of ear caps and cushions it offers for its customizable OnTrac headphones, with two new colors launching today for each. That doesn’t change the four default designs you’re able to pick from when buying the $499.99 OnTracs, but it does give existing owners new options to mix up the design.
The cushions now come in “Sky Blue,” which was already available for ear caps, and “Caramel,” which is entirely new. Meanwhile, the caps are now available in “Ceramic Oyster Pink,” previously exclusive to the cushions, and an all-new “Ceramic Chalk White.” Replacement sets of caps and cushions are available from Dyson’s site for $49.99.
The OnTrac headphones launched in July 2024, a more practical follow-up to the ill-fated Zone, which combined over-ear headphones with a Bane-esque air purifying mask. The customizable design is the main way the OnTracs are differentiated from rivals like Apple’s AirPods Max or the Sony WH-1000XM6, and the new colors mean there are now ten different sets of ear caps to choose from, and nine pairs of cushions.
Automakers selling cars in the United States now have even less incentive to care about fuel economy. As Ars has noted before, the current administration and its Republican allies in Congress have been working hard to undermine federal regulations meant to make our vehicle fleet more efficient.
Some measures have been aimed at decreasing adoption of electric vehicles—for example the IRS clean vehicle tax credit will be eliminated at the end of September. Others have targeted federal fuel economy regulations that require automakers to meet specific fleet efficiency averages or face punishing fines for polluting too much. At least, they used to.
According to a letter seen by Reuters, sent to automakers by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the federal government has decided it will not levy any fines on companies that have exceeded the corporate average fuel economy limits dating back to model year 2022.
The European Commission has stalled one of its investigations into Elon Musk’s X for breaking the bloc’s digital transparency rules, while it seeks to conclude trade talks with the US.
Brussels was expected to finalise its probe into the social media platform before the EU’s summer recess but will miss this deadline, according to three officials familiar with the matter. They noted that a decision was likely to follow after clarity emerged in the EU-US trade negotiations. “It’s all tied up,” one of the officials added.
The EU has several investigations into X under the bloc’s Digital Services Act, a set of rules for large online players to police their platforms more aggressively.
