Cryptocurrency cleaned up its act this week as spot Bitcoin ETFs made their Wall Street debut in January. The digital tokens are looking almost unrecognizable from what the industry represented just a few years ago, leading to the question, is Bitcoin still crypto?
The Browser Company makes no effort to hide its gleeful disdain for the reigning King of Search, also known as Google. It is openly taking aim at the tech giant’s advertising business with new features for Arc, its AI-powered web browser.
It’s been 20 years since Mark Zuckerberg first brought thefacebook.com online from his dorm room. What happened next has been endlessly documented: the Harvard-only social network took over college campuses and, eventually, the world.
The social network occupies an increasingly awkward space in Meta’s “family” of apps. A majority of American adults still use the service, but three out of four believe Facebook — perhaps because it fueled a global misinformation crises and promoted genocidal hate speech — is “making society worse.” Facebook still generates billions of dollars in ad revenue for Meta, but user growth has slowed to the point where the company just announced it will no longer share how many people use it.
“Amen spam” regularly appears in Facebook’s list of most-viewed posts. The most prolific users on its game-streaming service are spammers. Faced with increased pressure from TikTok, Meta rejiggered its feed, yet again, to emphasize recommendations over posts from people you know. But the shift hasn’t made Facebook feel like TikTok as much as a strange window into what Meta’s algorithms deem most engaging and least offensive.
My own Facebook feed is inundated with posts from groups I don’t belong to dedicated to anodyne topics like home remodeling, cast iron pan enthusiasts and something called the “Dull Men’s Club.” I haven’t shared anything to my own page in more than a year, despite logging in almost daily. I’m hardly an outlier. A majority of adults now say they are “pickier” than they used to be about what they post on social media.
Unsurprisingly, teens have almost no interest in the social network of their parents and grandparents. Just 33 percent of US teens report “ever” using the service, compared with 71 percent in 2015. These dynamics, in which Facebook’s user base is aging faster than its product, has led some academics to conclude that the social network will one day have more profiles for dead people than alive.
Today, Facebook has more than 3 billion users and remains the workhorse of the Mark Zuckerberg cinematic universe, even if it’s no longer the title character. Instead, it’s just one of his company’s “family” of apps. In 2021, it was formally demoted when Zuckerberg rebranded the company as Meta. “Our brand is so tightly linked to one product that it can’t possibly represent everything that we’re doing today, let alone in the future,” Zuckerberg said of Facebook. “From now on, we’re going to be metaverse-first, not Facebook-first.”
Whether Meta has succeeded in becoming a “metaverse-first” company is, at best, debatable. But few would argue it’s anything close to “Facebook-first.” More recently, Zuckerberg has tried to pitch Meta as a metaverse company and an AI company, joining the race to create human-level superintelligence.
At the same time, the only reason Zuckerberg’s ambitions are even possible is because of Facebook’s success. Meta has lost tens of billions of dollars on its metaverse investments, and expects to lose even more for the foreseeable future. The company also plans to spend billions more on AI infrastructure (AGI doesn’t come cheap).
These investments will determine whether Zuckerberg’s bet on the future of social media is correct. And if he realizes his vision for an AI chatbot, metaverse-enabled future, it will have been possible largely because of the unparalleled financial success of the oldest and dullest part of his empire.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/20-years-later-facebook-is-a-supporting-character-in-the-mark-zuckerberg-universe-140044870.html?src=rss
Japan’s SLIM, the Smart Lander for Investigation Moon, has entered a dormant mode on the Moon’s Shioli Crater, facing a 14-day lunar night with temperatures dropping below -200 degrees Fahrenheit.
Gary Bowser loves video games, but Nintendo turned him into a villain. No, not just because he shares a name with Bowser, the actual villain of the Mario franchise. The human Bowser helped mod Nintendo’s gaming consoles so people could play free, pirated versions of its video games. Then one day, he woke up with three…
Against all odds, Japan’s SLIM lander managed to turn back on more than a week after it plopped upside down onto the surface of the moon — but now, it’s gone dormant for the duration of the lunar night, and it may not be able to wake up again. The SLIM team from the Japanese space agency, JAXA, on Thursday shared the last image the lander captured at the moon’s Shioli crater before dusk, as night encroached. Lunar night lasts the equivalent of two Earth weeks and can get colder than -200 degrees Fahrenheit.
Last night (1/31 ~ 2/1) we sent a command to switch on #SLIM’s communicator again just in case, but with no response, we confirmed SLIM had entered a dormant state. This is the last scene of the Moon taken by SLIM before dusk. #GoodAfterMoon #JAXA pic.twitter.com/V1iAUoxJFK
— 小型月着陸実証機SLIM (@SLIM_JAXA) February 1, 2024
The team has confirmed that the solar powered lander is in a dormant state that will last at least the duration of the lunar night. Its chances of resuming operations afterward aren’t great, but then again, it’s already surprised us once. “Although SLIM was not designed for the harsh lunar nights, we plan to try to operate again from mid-February, when the Sun will shine again on SLIM’s solar cells,” the team wrote on X. If this truly is SLIM’s last photo, it sure is a spooky one.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/japans-moon-lander-took-this-eerie-photo-before-being-enveloped-by-lunar-night-221438290.html?src=rss
You want your lawyer to be on your side. The more passionate they are, the better. If they’re so passionate they can’t control their emotions, though, you might be in trouble. That’s exactly what happened to Elon Musk in a recent court case. Todd Maron, former General Counsel for Tesla and the billionaire’s former…
You won’t be-leaf the shape of this ancient tree. A team of researchers found a 350-million-year-old fossilized tree species that looks like something out of Dr. Seuss.
Prolific actor John de Lancie—currently voicing Granamyr on Netflix’s Masters of the Universe: Revolution—will always be Q to Star Trek fans, who welcomed the delightfully antagonistic character’s return on Star Trek: Picard. In a new interview, he gave some insight into the Picard finale’s post-credits scene, and…
25 years ago, the internet was kludged together with duct tape and a dream. Sometimes typing in a URL brought up a website. Sometimes things were just broken. Google, then just a bizarrely named startup, would soon offer a solution. The company added “cache” links to its search results, which brought up a previously…
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