Startup Battlefield applications for Disrupt Berlin are now open. TechCrunch is hunting for innovative startups to launch on the famous Disrupt stage this December. Read More
HBO has finally pulled the trigger on True Detective Season 3, with Green Room director Jeremy Saulnier on board to helm multiple installments alongside series creator Nic Pizzolatto.
Pizzolatto once again penned the entirety of the season, with the exception of episode 4, which he co-wrote with Deadwood creator David Milch.
The next installment of True Detective sounds like a return to the anthology show's Season 1 roots, telling the story of a macabre crime in the heart of the Ozarks, and a mystery that deepens over decades and plays out in three separate time periods. Read more...
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Australia's own version of the Northern Lights has been cranking this week, with the Aurora Australis weaving its way across skies in Tasmania.
The Southern Lights, as they're more commonly known, have been appearing in the sky over Hobart for the past week, prompting a significant amount of Instagram posts and well-deserved smuggery from Tasmanians and New Zealanders.
It's a good time to live in Tasmania if you're into highly Instagrammable light phenomena — the Southern Lights made a cameo in the state, and also locations across New Zealand, in March 2017. Read more...
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Facebook wants you to post more 360-degree photos. Earlier this week, the company announced it would allow people to capture the spherical shots and set them as their cover photo right from the app.
Problem is, 360-degree photos are a lot trickier to capture than a regular photo. Because it can difficult to keep the camera straight while you capture the image, the photos often look crooked, which, well, doesn't look great on Facebook.
That's why the social network's researchers are working on a way to use Facebook's AI tech to automatically fix 360-degree photos. It's still in a research phase for now, but, judging by some of their early results the method looks pretty promising. Read more...
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"I’ve been waiting for this moment for a long time," Game of Thrones star Nikolaj Coster-Waldau says, when asked how it felt portray Jaime Lannister finally abandoning his sister (and lover) in the Season 7 finale.
"I think that he’s seen her do crazy things before, but this is lying to everyone, and lying to him. You’ve got to go, 'How much can this guy take before it becomes too much?' It was a great scene to shoot," he reveals in a new interview with Making Game of Thrones, the show's behind-the-scenes production blog.
Jaime had a rough season. He was belittled by Cersei, mocked by Euron, needled by Olenna and nearly roasted by Daenerys, but it wasn't until he was faced with the very real threat of the White Walkers — and realized that his sister would rather sit on the sidelines and let her enemies kill each other than honor her word — that he finally came to his senses. The woman he loves might just be beyond saving. Read more...
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Dating a comedian can come with some challenges. What may seem like a heartfelt gesture may eventually lead to a troll for all to see.
Comedian Mike Recine texted his girlfriend earlier this week, telling her that he had written her a poem. It was a little cheesy, sure, but heartfelt nonetheless.
Turns out the poem was actually just the lyrics to the theme song from the sitcom King of Queens.
I told my girlfriend I wrote her a poem but it was just the theme song to King of Queenshttp://pic.twitter.com/2B1H6n7XtX
— Mike Recine (@mikerecine) August 29, 2017 Read more...
Tom Calderone, Spotify’s head of video and podcasts, is departing the company amid a shift in content strategy. The news was first identified by Bloomberg. The digital streaming business, known for its music playlists, had expanded into other categories like original video, but the company has confirmed that it’s changing its approach. Said a spokesperson, going forward… Read More
After Hurricane Harvey made landfall last week it wasn't just the people scrambling to safety and away from rising flood waters — pets, farm animals, and wildlife needed help, too.
Stories and heartwarming images keep coming in of dogs gathered onto boats, horses freed from flooded paddocks, and pets reunited with their families. Good Samaritans are all about saving the furry creatures of Houston.
A load of 35 shelter dogs were flown from Texas to Seattle to make room in Texas shelters for displaced pets. The rescue transfer helps families find their pets amid the flooding and keeps shelter dogs out of the flood zone. Read more...
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Machine learning has turned out to be a very useful tool for translation, but it has a few weak spots. The tendency of translation models to do their work word by word is one of those, and can lead to serious errors. Google details the nature of this problem, and their solution to it, in an interesting post on its Research blog. Read More
Do you see it? Just below the surface, hiding in plain sight?
That's right: The invitation for the Sept. 12 Apple event contains 100 percent real and genuine clues about what is going to be revealed that day at the Steve Jobs Theater. And, if you only know how to look, it's beautiful.
First, let's cover what we already think we know about the big day. The company will likely unveil three new iPhones, including the much-hyped iPhone 8. Pretty amazing, right?
OK, now that we've got that out of the way, it's time to dive into the kind of super secret shit disguised in the above tricolor Apple logo that only your friends who live and breathe that #AppleLife will have been able to spot. Read more...
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Denny's learned the hard way that sometimes a meme, like its Honey Jalapeño Bacon Sriracha Burger, can burn you in unpleasant ways.
On Thursday, the Slam-centric restaurant chain reminded people to tip their waiters. Which sounds great! Of course you should tip them.
📂 people
└📁 non-tippers
└📁 heart
└⚠️ this folder is empty— Denny's (@DennysDiner) August 31, 2017
Buuut using a snarky meme to admonish customers for not tipping didn't rub everyone the right way. According to Glassdoor, most Denny's servers make around $5 and change in hourly wages. (The federal minimum wage for tipped employees is $2.13, although it's higher in some states like California, where it's $10.) Read more...
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All aboard! OK now everybody off!
That's about how it goes with the Angels Flight — the world's shortest incorporated railroad — a downtown Los Angeles landmark that reopened on Thursday, four years after it shut down following a derailment.
Built in 1901, the funky little funicular was originally meant to shuttle privileged Bunker Hill residents from their Victorian mansions down to the city's historic core, sparing them 200+ steps when they went shopping.
It instantly became a tourist stop, an identity amplified by its brief appearance in La La Land — something Angelinos chuckled at, since it wasn't yet running at the time of filming — and, finally, its grand reopening hosted by Mayor Eric Garcetti. Read more...
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When Hurricane Harvey approached the Texas coast for its first of two landfalls on Aug. 25, a new and advanced weather satellite watched its every move. The spacecraft, known as GOES-16, is still in an experimental phase, but the data it provides is available to National Weather Service (NWS) forecasters already.
As meteorologists test out the capabilities of this new platform, which launched last year, they are revealing new insights on storm systems. With Harvey, the satellite's lightning mapper — which tracks lightning over land and out to sea, where current observations fall short — revealed something fascinating. Read more...
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During an interview with the founders of theSkimm, Justin Trudeau managed to somehow not say anything good OR bad about Donald Trump.
After the founders of the daily newsletter asked what surprises him about Trump, the Canadian prime minister hemmed and hawed a bit before explaining, "He's authentic. In that the person he is on camera, in public, is very true to the person he is in private. There's a consistency there one can work with.
So all the off-the-wall things he says are "authentic," eh?
Later, after toasting with Labatt 50, they asked him if he could change Trump's mind on one issue, what would it be? Trudeau expertly evaded the question. Read more...
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Samsung's self-driving car project is now eligible to hit the road in the US.
The California DMV just gave the South Korean tech company permission to test autonomous vehicles on the state's public streets, signaling a new expansion of Samsung's self-driving program.
The agency keeps a running tally of all the companies with permission to test self-driving tech on its website, which has become a veritable who's who of the autonomous development space. Most major automakers are on the list, along with tech companies that are working on their own systems like Waymo, Apple, and Nvidia.
SEE ALSO: Apple is not building a car, duh Read more...
Okay, full disclosure, I never read any Babysitters Club book. But you know what I’m talking about, right? We all had some endless series we read where a few kids just like us navigated the vicissitudes of life, teaching us lessons along the way. I’m hoping that The Friendship Code, which aims to do that — but with tech and coding woven in — will become that series for… Read More
Lan Xuezhao has spent the last few months pulling together $136 million for her new machine intelligence-focused venture capital fund, Basis Set Ventures. I met Xuezhao for tea on a park bench in Potrero Hill earlier this week to chat about her strategy for the fund. Read More
Twitch today is introducing a suite of tools called Twitch Extensions that will allow its streamers to customize their channel pages with interactive features, including polls, leaderboards, tickers, schedules, overlays, and even virtual pets, among other things. Beyond simply personalizing their channel to make it more engaging to fans, the extensions in some cases will help streamers… Read More
Do you love your significant other enough to feed them chicken nuggets if ever they found themselves unable to feed themselves chicken nuggets?
If you answered yes, you have something in common with this person who got caught doing exactly that while his girlfriend got her nails done.
*Cue "Loyalty" by Kendrick Lamar*
Lea Adame, 19, happened to be at the nail salon when she noticed the beautiful act of companionship happening behind her, so naturally she tweeted it. "A guy at the salon is straight up feeding his girl chicken nuggets while she gets her nails done," she tweeted. "That's the kind of love and support I need." Read more...
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The costumes on Game of Thrones aren't just Emmy-winning works of art — they also give us insight into the mental states of our favorite characters, often offering clues about their narrative trajectories.
Take, for example, the subtle appearance of fur in Daenerys' clothing after she and Jon Snow started growing closer. Some fans may have blamed the approach of winter for the cozier ensemble, but considering that the new material appeared just before Dany set off to roast thousands of Lannisters in one of the show's hottest battles to date, that theory holds about as much water as a drowning Kingslayer. Read more...
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If you can make it in New York City, you can make it anywhere.
Living in the Big Apple is truly an indescribable experience that only other New Yorkers understand. From the Manhattan to Queens and every noisy, garbage-lined street in between, NYC is a rich, cultural city like no other.
But for those who don't have the good fortune of making their dreams come true in the city that never sleeps, we've found a few tweets that very accurately sum up what living in NYC is truly like.
Good or bad, it's just something you have to experience it for yourself. Read more...
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