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Best Buy allegedly leaks what Joker will look like in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate https://ift.tt/2TJk0Ha Joker from Persona 5 will soon be making his way to Super Smash Bros. Ultimate as a DLC fighter, and Best Buy may have leaked what the leader of the Phantom Thieves of Hearts will look like in the Nintendo Switch exclusive. One of the featured items in the Video Games section of the weekly ad of Best Buy for March 31 to April 6 is the Fighters Pass for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, which will grant players access to five new fighters that will be added to the brawler’s already massive roster. The ad features an image of Joker, which was revealed at The Game Awards 2018 as the first DLC character for the game. 
Joker’s image on the Best Buy ad, however, has never been seen before, and there is speculation that it may be his render for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. Joker’s pose in the allegedly leaked image also looks like a possible amiibo pose, so it may be his Nintendo figurine that was revealed. Until now, Nintendo has not revealed gameplay information for Joker. If the leaked image by Best Buy is indeed his render for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, it would seem that there will be no delay in the character’s expected addition to the game’s roster this April. Another clue on the imminent arrival of Joker in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate was spotted by twitter user SomeKidNick.
The change from “Approaching: April” to “Approaching” has some players concerned that Joker’s addition will be pushed back, but the more likely explanation is that Nintendo made the change to avoid redundancy, as April is finally here. A Reddit thread that discusses the change also contains speculation on when in April Joker will arrive to Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. In Persona 5, there are a few significant dates in April in the in-game calendar, including Joker moving in to Cafe LeBlanc on April 9 and awakening his first Persona on April 11. Atlus is also set to reveal more information about the mysterious Persona 5 The Royal on April 24. In other rumors, the remaining four DLC fighters for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate will allegedly be Erdrick from the Dragon Quest series, Ryu Hayabusa from Ninja Gaiden, Steve from Minecraft, and The Marine, also known as Doomguy, from the Doom series.
Digital Trends via Digital Trends https://ift.tt/2p4eJdC March 31, 2019 at 10:47PM
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New Facebook tool answers the question “Why am I seeing this post?” https://ift.tt/2WAtaY7 Facebook announced today that it is adding a feature called “Why am I seeing this post?” to News Feeds. Similar to “Why am I seeing this ad?,” which has appeared next to advertisements since 2014, the new tool has a dropdown menu that gives users information about why that post appeared in their News Feed, along with links to personalization controls. Meant to give users more transparency into how Facebook’s News Feed algorithm works, the update comes as the company copes with several major events that have highlighted the platform’s shortcomings, including potentially harmful ones. These include its role in enabling the dissemination of a video taken during the shooting attacks on New Zealand mosques two weeks ago, which were originally broadcast using Facebook Live; a lawsuit filed by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development that accuses Facebook’s ad-targeting tool of violating the Fair Housing Act and its role in spreading misinformation and propaganda (after years of complaints and criticism, Facebook recently announced plans to downrank anti-vaccination posts and ban white nationalist content. Facebook’s announcement says this is the first time its “built information on how ranking works directly into the app.” Users will be able to access “Why am I seeing this post?” as a dropdown menu in the right hand corner of posts from friends, Pages and Groups in their News Feed that displays information about how its algorithm decided to rank the post, including:
The same menu will also include links to personalization options, including See First, Unfollow, News Feed Preferences and Privacy Shortcuts. The company’s blog post said that “during our research on ‘Why am I seeing this post?,’ people told us that transparency into News Feed algorithms wasn’t enough without corresponding controls.” “Why am I seeing this ad,” a similar feature that launched in 2014, will be updated with to include more information. For example, it will tell users if an ad appeared in their News Feed because a company uploaded their contact lists, like emails or phone numbers, or if they worked with a marketing partner to place the ad. Digital Trends via TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com March 31, 2019 at 10:34PM
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Atari VCS production-ready design unveiled after another delay https://ift.tt/2V4dkVo   
The team behind the Atari VCS has unveiled the production-ready design of the retro console, albeit after the announcement of another delay in its release. Renders for pre-production units of the Atari VCS were uploaded in a Medium blog post, which the team said was the result of a complete overhaul of the retro console’s construction. The biggest visual change compared to previous designs is the revised silhouette, which creates a “floating effect” with the device’s main body. “We think the VCS now visually-references the classic Atari 2600 design even more than before,” the team wrote in the blog post, and it resulted in other tweaks to the retro console’s construction. Two of the four USB 3.0 ports were moved from the back to the front, granting easier access for plugging in USB drives and controllers, while the two remaining ports at the back may be used for external hard drives. However, with the addition of USB ports to the front, the team decided that the SD card port was redundant and decided to remove it from the device. Another important change to the Atari VCS design was with the “ribbed-sandwich” aesthetic. The original design required 16 individual layers, plus the front and rear housings, and needed at least 10 unique tools for molding the parts. In order to lower the complexity of the assembly and construction of the retro console, the team decided to simplify the components into four pieces, namely a top housing, a bottom housing, and front and back panels. The new construction keeps the unique aesthetic, but with better strength, usage of far less material, and shorter assembly times. There is also the additional advantage of more space inside the device, for internal parts and thermal management. The unveiling of the final Atari VCS design comes just a couple of weeks after it was revealed that the retro console will be powered by a 14nm AMD processor, with high-performance Radeon Vega graphics architecture and two Zen CPU cores, upgraded from the originally planned Bristol Ridge processor. The upgrade will result in better overall performance and a cooler and quieter device. However, with the change, the release date of the Atari VCS has again been pushed back to the end of 2019 for Indiegogo backers, from the previous target of spring 2019 when preorders opened about a year ago. The retro console was initially expected to ship in 2018.
Digital Trends via Digital Trends https://ift.tt/2p4eJdC March 31, 2019 at 09:50PM Gimlet's Union Drive Twisted Graphene and Psychedelic Mice: Best Gizmodo Stories of the Week3/31/2019
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Gimlet's Union Drive, Twisted Graphene, and Psychedelic Mice: Best Gizmodo Stories of the Week https://ift.tt/2FFKQLa Well, folks, it’s just a few hours shy of the turn of the month, and you know what that means: April Fool’s Day. Yes, it’s that special time of year when insipid brands, mean-spirited teens, and tech titans compete to be the first to trick you into thinking they released Skittle’s... For Men, that it’s a good idea to eat an entire pod of datura seeds, or that they’re releasing a new app that’s like Uber but with riding lawnmowers, respectively. Well, the team here at Gizmodo is above that. Instead of planning a dumb joke, we’ve spent the last week reporting out stories on everything from Gimlet Media’s attempts to suppress a staff unionization effort and Silicon Valley’s slow-but-steady pivot to militarism to experiments with mice and psychedelics. We wrote about a wave of disease and mental health crises in southeastern Africa following the devastating impact of Cyclone Idai, as well as how Superfund sites stateside were hit by this month’s bomb cyclone. Elsewhere, we looked back at sci-fi classic The Matrix for its 20th anniversary, explored advancements in graphene, and continued our series on 30 years of the web. Finally, Gizmodo would like to announce that all of our readers, and especially Kinja commenters, have won one free rocket trip to definitely not directly into the Sun!* Be sure to get to the G.M.G. Sunmodo bright and early tomorrow, because you’ll be launching at noon! And keep your ears open for a “surprise announcement†during the trip... Let’s just say this trip is going to be the hottest tech and science experience of 2019! ? *Rocket will be launched directly into the Sun. Digital Trends via Gizmodo https://gizmodo.com March 31, 2019 at 09:12PM
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Future Jaguar Land Rover models could help stop the spread of superbugs https://ift.tt/2HRlFJd 
Being in the car puts a barrier between you and the outside world, but germs and bugs can still slip in through the air. Jaguar Land Rover wants to kill them off before they can even get to the cabin. The company put forward a concept that would use ventilation systems to neutralize superbugs and pathogens that cause infections like the flu and the common cold. The idea put forth by Jaguar Land Rover would equip future vehicles with ultraviolet light technology (UV-C). It’s the same kind that has been used by the medical community for more than 70 years. UV-C is utilized to disinfect water by filtering air and sterilizing surfaces. It uses wavelengths of light between 200 and 280 nanometers to accomplish this, which disrupts the DNA of different pathogens and leaves them unable to perform their most basic cellular functions. Jaguar Land Rover wants to install that UV-C technology into the air conditioning systems in its vehicles. By doing so, the cars could potentially neutralize pathogens from the outside world as they enter the car and kill them off before they ever reach the cabin. That not only leaves the people inside the car with cleaner air to breathe, but it also could help to kill off drug-resistant superbugs that would otherwise spread through the air. Some studies suggest UV-C can cut the transmission of four different superbugs by up to 30 percent. “The average motorist spends as much as 300 hours per year behind the wheel. There is a clear opportunity to better utilize cars for administering preventative healthcare,” Dr. Steve Iley, Jaguar Land Rover Chief Medical Officer, said in a statement. “The implementation of individual wellbeing measures as part of our ‘tranquil sanctuary’ research promises to not only improve quality of life for our customers but in this case, offers clear advantages in reducing pathogen spread — protecting the overall population from the threat of disease; particularly as we move towards shared mobility solutions.” According to Jaguar Land Rover, it is already using pathogen-neutralizing technology in some of its latest Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems, including those found in the all-electric Jaguar I-PACE and Range Rover Sport. However, the UV-C system could prove to be even more effective and have a bigger impact on killing off the germs that spread things like the cold and flu.
Digital Trends via Digital Trends https://ift.tt/2p4eJdC March 31, 2019 at 08:46PM
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Alexa’s chief scientist wants to give the voice assistant a robot body https://ift.tt/2OBpRgJ 
Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant is learning new things and adding new skills all the time, but there’s only so much it can learn bottled up in the smart speakers and other devices that come equipped with the artificial intelligence (A.I.). According to Rohit Prasad, the head scientist in Amazon’s Alexa division, to truly understand the world and how the people Alexa is designed to help interact with it, the disembodied voice needs a body. Speaking at The EmTech Digital A.I .Conference held by MIT Technology Review in San Francisco, Prasad raised the idea of letting Alexa learn about the world by experiencing it like a human might. “The only way to make [a]smart assistant really smart is to give it eyes and let it explore the world,” he said. That would include giving Alexa a physical form. While the idea might seem a little out there, we’re already closer to the possibility than one might imagine. In some cases, Alexa already has access to “eyes” of sorts, as some devices with Alexa installed include cameras that the A.I. can access. A body would be a considerable jump in progression, of course, but it is a possibility. That said, Prasad didn’t confirm whether Amazon is already working on building a body for its voice assistant. According to Alexa’s chief scientist, putting the A.I. in a body would allow the voice assistant to collect more data about the world around it. Simple as that might seem, it would provide more context as to how humans interact with the world, which would, in turn, give the voice assistant a better idea of how to answer certain questions or provide information. It would also potentially improve its ability to perform complex tasks that the human brain can process. The idea of Alexa getting a body isn’t new around Amazon, either. Last year, Bloomberg reported that Amazon was working on a robot designed for use around the home. The project, codenamed Vesta, is rumored to be an effort to design a mobile Alexa that could navigate around a person’s home and provide them with information and complete simple chores.
Digital Trends via Digital Trends https://ift.tt/2p4eJdC March 31, 2019 at 08:38PM
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Skyrim Grandma will appear in The Elder Scrolls 6 through photogrammetry https://ift.tt/2FLFhvS Shirley Curry, the 82-year-old gamer who is affectionately known as the Skyrim Grandma, will appear as a non-playable character in The Elder Scrolls 6 with the help of photogrammetry technology. Curry, who currently has more than 500,000 subscribers on her YouTube channel, earned her nickname through her videos of playing The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim. She does quests in her sessions, but she mostly acts like a traveling merchant, as she traverses the game’s lands to sell treasure that she discovered while exploring. A petition was created on Change.org to immortalize Curry in The Elder Scrolls 6, either as a character, item, or location, after she expressed concerns that she may no longer be around for the upcoming game. It appears that the signatures have worked, as Bethesda has agreed to add Skyrim Grandma to the next installment in the series. To create Curry’s character, Bethesda will use photogrammetry technology, which the studio talked about at the Elder Scrolls 25th Anniversary Panel in PAX East. The technology scans real-world objects and creates highly detailed 3D models out of them. “This means a lot to me,” Curry said in the video presentation. “Because I would be extremely happy to know that somebody else was playing with my character in a future Elder Scrolls game.” Curry also tweeted her appreciation for being invited by Bethesda to appear in The Elder Scrolls 6, while taking home the souvenir of a photo with the studio’s director, Todd Howard.
It will likely be a long while before Curry’s fans see her character in action in The Elder Scrolls 6 though. Howard said at PAX East that the game, along with its other next big RPG Starfield, are “not something we’re going to be talking about” at this year’s E3. The Elder Scrolls 6 was announced at E3 2018, though the game’s teaser trailer did not reveal a subtitle or gameplay details. Bethesda has reportedly decided on the region that the game will explore, as it was the first thing that was decided on in the early stages of planning. The studio will be keeping it a secret, giving fans lots of time to speculate on where the franchise is heading next.
Digital Trends via Digital Trends https://ift.tt/2p4eJdC March 31, 2019 at 08:38PM
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Shazam’s Director Got a Delightful Memento of the Production https://ift.tt/2VahriC  I’m always interested to see what objects from a film’s production get a second life in the real world, becoming personal mementos, auctionable collectibles, or being re-used in some other way. For Shazam, director David F. Sandberg got a costume—but not in the way you might expect. Celebrating the premiere of Shazam, Sandberg took to his Instagram to post a picture of himself in a special suit, one created by the movie’s costume department entirely out of the same material used to create Zachary Levi’s Shazam suit.
The suit, with red coat and pants and a bowtie apparently made from the suit’s cape fabric, is entirely in keeping with the goofy spirit of Shazam, though, as Sandberg notes in his post, it’s not exactly comfortable to wear—”too rubbery”, he said. It’s a great look, though. Next time Shazam needs to go to a gala, someone at DC should put him in this outfit. Billy Batson would rock it. For more, make sure you’re following us on our new Instagram @io9dotcom. Digital Trends via Gizmodo https://gizmodo.com March 31, 2019 at 08:36PM
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Scientists Say Climate Change Might Turn Denali Into a Literal Mountain of Shit https://ift.tt/2OAFmFC  Look at that mountain. Isn’t it pretty? Isn’t what you see in the above picture a pretty mountain? “Sure is, Rebecca, you dumb idiot!” you say. “I can recognize a beautiful mountain when I see one, you stupid blogger!” But what if I told you that beneath that pristine snow lies decades worth of hikers’ frozen feces? And that, thanks to climate change, that feces will likely soon be set free from its ice prison, sending tons of human sludge down its slopes? Still see a pretty mountain, or just a big pile of doo-doo? USA Today reports that Alaska’s Denali, the tallest mountain in North America, beholds 66 tons of frozen human shit left behind by decades worth of hikers. Unfortunately, thanks to our ever-warming planet, the glacier holding much of that shit is expected to start melting, potentially creating a fun river of poop surfacing farther down the mountain. Scientists expect this melt to happen in the next few decades, but some speculate it could start as soon as this summer. Apparently, hikers have been aware of Denali’s impending poop problem for some time now. The shit’s been amassing since the 1970s, and not all of it is even frozen. Last year, a hiker told The Verge that a campsite at 17,200 feet was “like a cat box,” which sounds almost as unpleasant as hiking up 17,200 feet. In 2007, the National Park Service started requiring hikers to gather and keep their shit in Clean Mountain Cans, but they were permitted to dump the cans atop the Kahiltna glacier if they were below 15,000 feet. When that glacier melts, another shit river begins. “We have lost more glacier cover in the Alaskan national parks than there is area in the whole state of Rhode Island,” Michael Loso, a National Park Service glaciologist, told USA TODAY. “One of the consequences of warming temperatures is that the surface of the glacier is melting more quickly,” he said. The good(ish?) news, Loso says, is that hikers are now voluntarily carrying their crap off the mountain, thanks in part to a National Park Service policy mandating hikers below 14,000-feet keep their waste with them until they’ve completed their climb. “Climbers and particularly guide services are really embracing the new policy and are even exceeding it. It has become kind of an informal badge of merit to carry off all your waste,” Loso said. That doesn’t spare us the 40-plus years of shit already buried up there, though, so if you’re planning to summit Denali anytime in the next few years, maybe bring some Febreze with you. Digital Trends via Gizmodo https://gizmodo.com March 31, 2019 at 07:54PM
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We Regret to Inform You Elon Musk Has Released a Rap Single About Harambe https://ift.tt/2CPY07L  If there’s something absolutely no one other than Elon Musk woke up this weekend thinking, it is “Elon Musk should release a rap single about Harambe, the tragically slain gorilla that became a meme nearly three years ago, after which said meme subsequently got treaded into the ground.” Unfortunately, that is what he did, because Elon must. Released under the fictional rap label “Emo G” (sigh), Musk tweeted out a link to an auto-tuned song about the late gorilla hosted on Soundcloud, which thus technically makes him a Soundcloud rapper now. I don’t know a lot about music, but I can safely say I am confident after listening to this song that Elon is not going to be headlining the next Super Bowl halftime show. Musk does drop such bars as “RIP Harambe/Sipping on some Bombay/We on our way to heaven/Amen, Amen” and “RIP Harambe/Smoking on some strong/In the gorilla zoo/And we thinking about you.” I note this so that no matter whether you choose to listen to this track, as I did, you will not be able to escape this entirely and share some of my suffering.
As of late Sunday evening, Musk’s track has earned him feedback on Twitter including “2015 ass reddit bacon boy bitch,” “WARNING: if you listen to that elon musk harambe track you will be cursed with bad luck for the next twenty years and you will deserve it,” “Elon musk is both in 3019 and also 2016 at the same time,” and, just to top it off, “most people would be content just being rich, but elon musk also wants to be cool and funny, and he will never be cool or funny, and that satisfies me.” This outpouring of distaste is almost certainly what Musk intended on some level, but also very much not in any way that redeems it on the rating scale I just made up in my head. In conclusion, I rate this at two out of five enraged fanboys yelling “I’m Pickle Rick!” in a McDonald’s. In other Musk-related news, his ongoing fight with the Securities and Exchange Commission over his habit of tweeting out inaccurate information about Tesla even after signing a settlement agreement is scheduled to escalate yet again this week. The court hearing where a judge will decide whether to hold Musk in contempt for allegedly violating the agreement is scheduled for April 4, according to CBS News. Possible consequences if he fares poorly there could include further fines, new court-ordered limitations on his social media use, or possibly even his removal as Tesla CEO. Digital Trends via Gizmodo https://gizmodo.com March 31, 2019 at 07:36PM |
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