Since Elon Musk took control of Twitter, the overriding theme has been job cuts. Thousands were fired directly, while others were let go after declining to sign up for Musk’s “extremely hardcore” Twitter 2.0. Now it seems the social media company is changing its tune, and staffing back up to replace at least some of the employees it’s shed.
New hires include George Hotz, a notable hacker who jailbroke the iPhone and PlayStation 3, and who has a pretty interesting history with Tesla and its advanced driver assistance technology. He’s just an intern mind, and it sounds like he’s only committing to 12 weeks, so far.
Also, I was off work yesterday, which meant that I didn’t get to write the news that Mario Kart 8 Deluxe’s third wave of DLC tracks has a release date. From the trailer it doesn’t look like these are a huge step up graphically from the last two releases (which is a shame), although I spotted at least one underwater section in the trailer, which suggests a little more variety this time around.
Stay tuned, as we continue to update this list with the most important news of today: Tuesday, November 22st, 2022.
For now, here’s a silly tweet:
Job cuts are coming to a Silicon Valley original.
HP, one of the world’s largest PC vendors, according to data from Gartner, announced in an earnings report that it’ll lay off 4,000 to 6,000 employees by the end of 2025. According to numbers cited by CNBC, that’s between seven and 11 percent of its workforce.
This is just the latest in a series of large tech layoffs, not to mention that the PC market has also had an especially rough year following a pandemic boom.
Twitter’s rebranding Super Follows.
The feature that lets you charge followers to access extra content is now called “Subscriptions,” the same name as a similar feature on Twitch.
It’s not the first feature to get a rebrand since Elon Musk took over the company — Birdwatch was turned into Community Notes, which former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey called “the most boring Facebook name ever.” I wonder what he thinks of Subscriptions.
Facebook’s top-performing page is no longer a rule-breaking meme site.
Meta just released its quarterly transparency report, including some detail on Facebook’s top-performing content. While it’s relatively dry reading, I was interested in one note from a condensed version given to reporters:
This quarter’s top content did not contain any policy violating content, and we’re cautiously optimistic of the progress we’ve made as we work to improve the quality of content within Facebook.
The note is an implicit callback to earlier this year, when reporter Ben Collins noted that Facebook’s most widely viewed page — probably a meme site called That Ain’t Right — had been deleted for violating its community standards. Meta seems to have been interested enough in the criticism to call out the fact that it’s been fixed… and now the top-performing pages are still meme-oriented, but they’re rule-abiding groups like LadBible.
Twitter will let you send crypto to accounts alongside “normal” money, Elon Musk says.
“We will also make it easy to do crypto,” Musk told employees during an internal Q&A yesterday, a recording of which I obtained. “You should be able to easily send money to anyone in Twitter with one click,” he said. “The payments side of things will probably be more valuable than all the rest of Twitter combined.”
Spotify’s expanding its audiobooks to more countries.
After coming to the US in September, Spotify’s audiobook service has finally arrived in other English-speaking countries, including the UK, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand.
There are over 300,000 audiobook titles available — but you can’t purchase them from Spotify’s iOS app due to Apple’s App Store restrictions.
Watch as around $66,000 worth of drones plummet from the sky during a light show.
Around 50 of the 500 drones used in the “City of Light” Christmas performance in Perth, Australia malfunctioned and plunged into the river below.
According to Australian news outlet WAtoday, each drone cost about $1,300. “I am trying not to think about it, but it was an expensive show for us,” Joshua Van Ross, the managing director of the show told WAtoday.
UK watchdog investigates iOS-Android browser duopoly.
It’s only an investigation for now, but the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has shown it’s got teeth with the recent ruling against Meta that’s forcing it to sell Giphy. Now, the CMA is worried about Google and Apple’s control of mobile browsers and Apple’s restrictions on cloud gaming on iOS. One to watch.
