Hasta La Gadget!

Today’s Nintendo Direct Mini: Partner Showcase featured a bunch of third-party games that are coming to Switch, including a bunch of big hitters. For one thing, three Persona games are coming to the hybrid console. Persona 5 Royal is the only one with a confirmed release date (October 21st) for now, but more details about Persona 4 Golden and Persona 3 Portable are coming soon.

It recently emerged that Atlus’ games are also coming to Xbox Game Pass, as well as Steam, PlayStation 4 and (in P5 Royal‘s case) PS5. Persona 3 Portable and Persona 4 Golden were ports of PlayStation 2 titles Persona 3 and Persona 4. They were released on PlayStation Portable and PlayStation Vita, respectively.

Nintendo confirmed Nier: Automata is bound for Switch too. Nier: Automata The End of YoRHa Edition will arrive on the console on October 6th. It includes all previously released DLC expansions, as well as some exclusive costumes.

Leaks had suggested Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope will debut on Switch on October 20th and that turned out to be the case. Even though the game stars Mario, Nintendo technically stuck to its claim that the showcase would only feature third-party titles, since Ubisoft’s Paris and Milan studios co-developed it.

Meanwhile, a cloud version of A Plague Tale: Requiem will be available for Switch on October 18th, the same date that the game will hit other platforms. Focus Home Interactive brought the first game in the series, A Plague Tale: Innocence,to Switch last year, also as a streaming-only version.

You can find out more about all these announcements, as well as other third-party games that are coming to Switch, by checking out the Nintendo Direct Mini: Partner Showcase below:

Russia has fined Airbnb, Twitch and Pinterest for violating the country’s personal data legislation, Reuters reports. On Tuesday, a court in Moscow ordered all three companies to pay fines of 2 million roubles (approximately $37,700) for not storing the data of Russian citizens within the country. The decision came after Russia’s Roskomnadzor internet commission opened administrative cases against the three platforms in May. Airbnb, Twitch and Pinterest did not immediately respond to Engadget’s request for comment.

In the years to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24th, US tech firms would sporadically attract the attention of Russian regulators, leading to conflicts over the country’s approach to content, censorship and local data representation. Since the war began, those disputes have intensified in both frequency and severity as the west has moved to punish Russia for the war. In May, for instance, Google’s Russian division filed for bankruptcy after authorities seized its bank account. The search giant said the move had made it “untenable” for the office to pay employees and suppliers.

Last year, hurricanes hammered the Southern and Eastern US coasts at the cost of more than 160 lives and $70 billion in damages. Thanks to climate change, it’s only going to get worse. In order to quickly and accurately predict these increasingly severe weather patterns, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced Tuesday that it has effectively tripled its supercomputing (and therefore weather modelling) capacity with the addition of two high-performance computing (HPC) systems built by General Dynamics.

“This is a big day for NOAA and the state of weather forecasting,” Ken Graham, director of NOAA’s National Weather Service, said in a press statement. “Researchers are developing new ensemble-based forecast models at record speed, and now we have the computing power needed to implement many of these substantial advancements to improve weather and climate prediction.”

General Dynamics was awarded the $505 million contract back in 2020 and delivered the two computers, dubbed Dogwood and Cactus, to their respective locations in Manassas, Virginia, and Phoenix, Arizona. They’ll replace a pair of older Cray and IBM systems in Reston, Virginia, and Orlando, Florida.

Each HPC operates at 12.1 petaflops or, “a quadrillion calculations per second with 26 petabytes of storage,” Dave Michaud, Director, National Weather Service Office of Central Processing, said during a press call Tuesday morning. That’s “three times the computing capacity and double the storage capacity compared to our previous systems… These systems are amongst the fastest in the world today, currently ranked at number 49 and 50.” Combined with its other supercomputers in West Virginia, Tennessee, Mississippi and Colorado, the NOAA wields a full 42 petaflops of capacity. 

With this extra computational horsepower, the NOAA will be able to create higher-resolution models with more realistic physics — and generate more of them with a higher degree of model certainty, Brian Gross, Director, NOAA’s Environmental Modeling Center, explained during the call. This should result in more accurate forecasts and longer lead times for storm warnings.

“The new supercomputers will also allow significant upgrades to specific modeling systems in the coming years,” Gross said. “This includes a new hurricane forecast model named the Hurricane Analysis and Forecast System, which is slated to be in operation at the start of the 2023 hurricane season,” and will replace the existing H4 hurricane weather research and forecasting model.

While the NOAA hasn’t yet confirmed in absolute terms how much of an improvement the new supercomputers will grant to the agency’s weather modelling efforts, Ken Graham, the Director of National Weather Service, is convinced of their value. 

“To translate what these new supercomputers will mean for for the average American,” he said during the press call, “we are currently developing models that will be able to provide additional lead time in the outbreak of severe weather events and more accurately track the intensity forecasts for hurricanes, both in the ocean and that are expected to hit landfall, and we want to have longer lead times [before they do].”

AI capable of rapidly learning and interacting with interfaces humans usually use is taking over the world. Luckily for us, this particular world is virtual.

Facebook is experimenting with a new audio feature for Groups. The company is testing audio channels, which will bring Discord-like voice chats to Groups, Facebook shared in a blog post.

Facebook has already had audio features for Groups with rooms. But unlike that feature, which is meant for one-time audio chats, audio channels are dedicated spaces where group members can speak with each other at any time, much like Discord.

The change is one of several updates the social network is testing. The company is also experimenting with other types of “channels,” essentially sub-groups within each Facebook Group, where members can discuss specific topics. There are community chat channels, which organize group message threads around topics relevant to a given group; as well as community feed channels, which are topic-based spaces within the group.

Facebook is also testing a new sidebar that will make all users’ Groups more prominent in its app (and have dedicated shortcuts for creating new channels). For now, all of these features are tests that will only be available to a small subset of users, but the company intends to roll out the changes more broadly over time.

The updates come as Facebook is eyeing bigger changes for its main app. The company is working on a broader redesign that would reorient users’ feeds around AI-driven recommendations more than their existing social graphs. At the same time, the new sidebar is meant to ensure that Groups remain prominent and easily accessible once the app’s main feed changes.