Karissa Bell, Engadget:

Several of Meta’s VR studios have been affected by the company’s metaverse-focused layoffs. The company has shuttered three of its VR studios, including Armature, Sanzaru and Twisted Pixel. VR fitness app Supernatural will no longer be updated with fresh content.

Employees at Twisted Pixel, which released Marvel’s Deadpool VR in November, and Sanzaru, known for Asgard’s Wrath, posted on social media about the closures. Bloomberg reported that Armature, which brought Resident Evil 4 to Quest back in 2021 has also closed and that the popular VR fitness app Supernatural will no longer get updates.

“Due to recent organizational changes to our Studio, Supernatural will no longer receive new content or feature updates starting today,” the company wrote in an update on Facebook. The app “will remain active” for existing users. [...]

The cuts raise questions about Meta’s commitment to supporting a VR ecosystem it has invested heavily in.

Raises questions, indeed! It was only four years ago that Mark Zuckerberg renamed the company from Facebook to Meta and proclaimed the entire company would now be “metaverse-first”.

A reader told me today that a friend of his who works (well, worked) at one of Meta’s now-shuttered VR studios was vaguely concerned just last weekend because he suspected “about 20 percent” of the company to be laid off. Not him, but probably some people he was required to stack-rank. Turns out he was correct to be worried but his “about 20 percent” guess was off by ... checks with calculator ... about 80 percent. People within Meta who believed Zuckerberg’s public statements have clearly been caught flat-footed by the fact that he’s clearly lost all interest in VR and the so-called metaverse.

The workout app Supernatural is a perfect example. Meta announced their intention to acquire Supernatural in 2021, at the start of their all-in-on-the-metaverse phase, for $400 million. They battled the FTC for approval and it finally went through in February 2023. Now, less than three years later, they’re shutting it down. Devoted Supernatural users are, unsurprisingly, not happy.

It really does raise questions about Meta’s commitment.

Josh Woodward, VP of Gemini and AI Studio, on the Google blog:

The best assistants don’t just know the world; they know you and help you navigate it. Today, we’re answering a top user request: you can now personalize Gemini by connecting Google apps with a single tap. Launching as a beta in the U.S., this marks our next step toward making Gemini more personal, proactive and powerful.

Personal Intelligence securely connects information from apps like Gmail and Google Photos to make Gemini uniquely helpful. If you turn it on, you control exactly which apps to link, and each one supercharges the experience. It connects Gmail, Photos, YouTube and Search in a single tap, and we’ve designed the setup to be simple and secure. [...]

Starting today, access is rolling out over the next week to eligible Google AI Pro and AI Ultra subscribers in the U.S. Once enabled, it works across Web, Android and iOS and with all of the models in the Gemini model picker. We’re starting with this limited group to learn, but we will over time expand to more countries and to the free tier.

In the small print on the Gemini Personal Intelligence product page, they say “In the coming months, and with your permission, Gemini will be able to draw context from even more of your Google apps and services.” Gmail, Photos, YouTube, and Search are obvious services to start with. Calendar, surely, is forthcoming. But a big one for me — an inveterate note-taker — would be my notes app. I’d rather have an AI assistant know everything in my notes app than everything in my email. For Google, I presume, that will be Google Keep (which I consider a serviceable, but overall crummy app that never seems to have gotten much attention).

This is nicely honest, and sets expectations:

We’ve tested this beta version of Personal Intelligence extensively to minimize mistakes, but we haven’t eliminated them. You may encounter inaccurate responses or “over-personalization,” where the model makes connections between unrelated topics. When you see this, please provide feedback by giving the response a “thumbs down.”

Gemini may also struggle with timing or nuance, particularly regarding relationship changes, like divorces, or your various interests. For instance, seeing hundreds of photos of you at a golf course might lead it to assume you love golf. But it misses the nuance: you don’t love golf, but you love your son, and that’s why you’re there. If Gemini gets this wrong, you can just tell it (“I don’t like golf”).

I feel like it’s unlikely a coincidence that Google announced Personal Intelligence a few days after the short joint announcement that Apple is licensing Gemini technology to power the models for Apple Intelligence. What Google is making available today — in beta, to paid personal users only — is basically the feature set that Apple promised back in June 2024 but had to postpone for an entire additional year last March.

It turns out that one of my favorite new features in OmniFocus 4.7 is the Catch Up Automatically option for repeating actions: With this setting turned off, completing an item will create the next occurrence following the schedule you have set, even when the next occurrence is in the past. With this setting turned on, […]

Tim Hardwick (Hacker News): Apple and other smartphone manufacturers are resisting an Indian government proposal that would require them to hand over source code for security review, reports Reuters. […] Apple, Google, Samsung, Xiaomi, and industry group MAIT have all reportedly objected, citing a lack of global precedent and concerns about revealing proprietary details. […] […]

Jacob Krol, reporting for Techradar:

While Verizon had a good few months, with the last major outage occurring in October 2024, it seems that the popular United States wireless carrier is having some issues. So, if you’re on Verizon and seeing ‘SOS’ in place of network bars, you’re not alone.

Countless users have taken to social platforms like X (formerly Twitter) and Threads to shout issues, but reported problems with Verizon have spiked on Down Detector to over 46,000.

This outage matters, because I’m on Verizon my phone hasn’t had a signal for two hours.

T-Mobile, on Twitter/X:

T-Mobile’s network is keeping our customers connected, and we’ve confirmed that our network is operating normally and as expected. However due to Verizon’s reported outage, our customers may not be able to reach someone with Verizon service at this time.

AT&T, in such a hurry to pile on that their punctuation was slapdash:

Our network? Solid. If you’re experiencing issues, it’s not us.....it’s the other guys. Some things are just out of our hands! - BUT if you’re interested in giving us a try — https://att.com/wireless/free-trial/

Full point awarded to T-Mobile for the better, colder, burn.