No more headlines on X
When it comes to Elon Musk’s X, the last thing we care about is aesthetics. We’re there to keep tabs on his daily shitposts and let our audience know when we publish articles (which you can follow here) – that’s about it. In a move that nobody asked for, Musk has removed headlines and snippets from links posted to the platform, following through on a promise he made back in August.
The idea, apparently, is to make the platform’s home page look a little cleaner and potentially lessen some instances of clickbait, forcing articles to rely less on a shocking headline than the content. Unfortunately for Musk, Twitter is a text-based platform and allows posters to just… post the headline anyway. We’ll admit the change does tidy things up rather nicely, though.
Musk’s real reason for the change might not have anything to do with clickbait or a more appealing aesthetic. Under the billionaire’s reign, X has added a 25,000-character limit for Premium subscribers, with Musk attempting to lure more journalists towards the future with promises of “more freedom to write and a higher income.” His words.
The change has already gone live on the desktop site, though it doesn’t appear to have infected the app’s mobile versions just yet.
Meta’s making its AI-generated stickers boring now
As if making Snoop Dogg a dungeon master in Meta’s web of AI wizardry wasn’t enough, Meta’s involvement with AI-generated stickers across Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram isn’t working out exactly as it might’ve hoped.
The algorithm, known as Emu (expressive media universe) allows users to input a short prompt and have the algorithm spit out a sticker that resembles the prompt. After having played with the feature for all of five minutes, it works great. Maybe a little too great.
And that’s the issue. Meta does employ safeguards across its AI generators that stop people from creating anything rude or lewd. It’s just… not that good at its job. @Pioldes on X was one of the first to publicly exploit Meta’s AI stickers, and create some rather unsavoury images we probably can’t post here.
It looks like Meta’s gone back to the drawing board and given its censorship tool a much-needed bump in sophistication, though it’s not able to stop everything just yet. We’ve since attempted to get around Meta’s censorship ourselves, to some avail. We had no trouble generating Mario brandishing a revolver, nor when creating New York’s favourite plumber sharing a cigarette with the famed blue hedgehog. It won’t, however, recreate Gizmodo’s “elon musk mammaries” prompt which… is probably for the best.
We give it another week at most before Meta’s got it’s AI sticker generation locked down to only share stickers of ‘cupcakes with a party hat’ or whatever the company is pushing users to create.
Praise be! The iPhone 15 is fixed
Apple, in response to reports of overheating iPhone 15s, just released a minor update to iOS 17 (17.0.3) that should fix the bug for everyone. It’s still too early to tell if Apple’s efforts were worth it or all for nought.
Despite reports of overheating being confined to iPhone 15 models, Apple has pushed iOS 17.0.3 – a 400MB update – to every device that supports iOS 17. It apparently fixes the software bug causing the overheating and also sorts out a kernel exploit found in iOS 16.6, which could allow an attacker to gain local access to your phone through libvpx.
And for users concerned about Apple slowing the performance of their A17 Pro chip to accommodate the fix (and for good reason), you’ll probably be okay here. When Apple first acknowledged the issue, it said that the issue had nothing to do with the chipset and it wouldn’t require a nerf to keep things flowing smoothly. It’s still too early to verify the big fruit’s claims, but we’re willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.
The Astronaut wears Prada
NASA, which is gearing up for its first crewed mission to the Moon since 1972, wouldn’t be caught dead by the aliens up there wearing last year’s rags. Instead, the crew will be heading up there in some of the latest swag from the luxury Italian brand, Prada.
Technically, it’ll be Axiom Space – the company that was chosen to create NASA’s Extravehicular Activity Services (xEVAS) spacesuits for the incoming Artemis III mission – that’ll be doing the actual team-up with Prada.
“Prada’s technical expertise with raw materials, manufacturing techniques, and innovative design concepts will bring advanced technologies instrumental in ensuring not only the comfort of astronauts on the lunar surface but also the much-needed human factors considerations absent from legacy spacesuits,” Axiom Space CEO Michael Suffredini said in a statement (via Engadget).
The partnership has yet to bear any fruit, meaning we won’t be getting a look at NASA’s new suits until closer to the Artemis III launch, currently pencilled in for a 2025 takeoff, if all goes to plan.