Kyle Rowley, the director of Alan Wake II, snuck in the mention of the new mode at the end of Sam Lake’s acceptance speech for the Best Game Direction award. Rowley promised it will have “new story content.”

Alexa is still Alexa. I just reviewed the $389.99 Carrera Cruiser version of the Amazon Echo Frames. As far as smart glasses go, this is definitely an upgrade on the style front and it’s got better battery life than before. However the audio improvements and Alexa improvements are really minor when you consider the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses start at $299 and do a lot more.

The industry legends will be on a livestream to talk about the 30th anniversary of Doom, and I’m guessing it will be a fascinating conversation.

The livestream, which will be on Romero’s Twitch channel, kicks off on December 10th at 3PM ET. If you want to learn some of the history between the two, check out Romero’s autobiography — which we have an excerpt of that you can read right now.

If somebody has turned an emoji into a tag, you’ll be able to click on that emoji to see other people talking about it.

In other news, please join my waffle club.

Google added a “Save Parking” toggle you’ll see at the end of your trip, and it pins the spot on Google Maps and adds it to reminders, reports 9to5Google. It seems easier than the conventional method.

iPhones have been able to automatically save your parking location in Apple Maps after you exit your car since 2016.

Moises, the audio tech app behind it, officially launched Music.AI today. It offers a mix of proprietary AI models and third-party tools for commercial use. The APIs also include one for vocal extraction, downbeat detection, and a tool that can transform a song into a video (complete with synchronized lyrics) — among others.

Amazon is going to stop letting you pay for things on its marketplace using Venmo as of January 10th, CNBC reports. You also can’t add Venmo as an Amazon payment option anymore, according to a Venmo support page.

The Venmo integration on Amazon was barely a year old; it started rolling out in October 2022.

Ganesh Venkataramanan left Tesla in November, Bloomberg reports. The project is now being overseen by Peter Bannon, who has designed chips for Intel and Apple.

Tesla said earlier this year that it has started production of the supercomputer, which will be used to help train its self-driving technology.

Bloomberg takes a look at the enterprise software-maker that bought Slack:

Earlier this year, Salesforce’s top 100 sellers were sipping Champagne in a luxury hotel on the Adriatic coast booked by the company. It was the annual celebration for top performers, with Millham as the keynote speaker. But everyone was seeing text messages and LinkedIn posts from colleagues who’d been let go. “It was a little awkward,” one attendee recalls.

Salesforce is, in some ways, the microcosm of the tech economy, the story suggests — and its growth mirrored that of the tech ecosystem, too.

We talked earlier this year about what the change in the interest rate environment meant for VC-funded tech companies. Now The New York Times is taking stock of the carnage:

Carta, a company that provides financial services for many Silicon Valley start-ups, said 87 of the start-ups on its platform that raised at least $10 million had shut down this year as of October, twice the number for all of 2022.

Helen Toner, one of the board members who fired Sam Altman and then ousted herself when Altman returned, has given an interview to The Wall Street Journal. She is unable to give a specific reason for Altman’s firing beyond “Our goal in firing Sam was to strengthen OpenAI and make it more able to achieve its mission.”

Listen, babe, I am fully happy to hear you out, but if being full of shit is a firing offense for CEOs, everyone in the Fortune 500 would be looking for a new job.

Sea of Thieves players have long been asking for the ability to set sail in private without disruptions from other pirates. Rare is delivering that today with a new mode called Safer Seas. You can now play truly alone or with up to three other friends, and no other players will be there in the world to sink your ship and steal your loot. The existing shared world is now known as High Seas, and will include the best reputation rates and all the elements of the game that are focused on player vs. player.

Google mentioned the date in a support document about transferring your subscriptions away from Google Podcasts. You’ll have until July 2024 to migrate your subscriptions to another service.

20th Century Fox’s original Mr. & Mrs. Smith only showed a bit of its titular operatives’ secretive backstories before the film’s plot sent them off running for their lives.

But the latest teaser for Amazon’s upcoming adaptation starring Donald Glover and Maya Erskine makes it seems like the series is going to dig way deeper into the couple’s interiority as they mow down fleets of fellow trained killers.

First spotted by Podnews, new SEC filings indicate that Spotify chief financial officer Paul Vogel and general counsel Eve Konstan exercised options and sold stock worth $9.38 million and $1.15 million, respectively.

On Tuesday, the day after the company announced a layoff of 17 percent of its staff, the stock price hit a high of $199.97, up 10.7 percent compared to its Friday closing price of $180.69. It is possible the sales were automatically triggered by the stock price hitting a certain level. Spotify did not immediately return request for comment.

Code was spotted in Spotify’s iOS app suggesting the service might re-enable in-app payments, but the company says they’re not coming back.

“We have no plans to switch IAP [in-app payments] on at the moment,” Spotify’s global head of corporate and policy communications, Farshad Shadloo, tells The Verge.

Spotify removed the feature in 2016 to avoid Apple’s up to 30 percent commission on digital in-app purchases, and earlier this year migrated old subscribers off the payment method.

Amicus briefs in the big First Amendment case against the bad Texas and Florida social media laws are getting filed, and Public Knowledge’s submission contains a citation to Welcome to hell, Elon as support for the idea that the real product of any social platform is content moderation. I truly hope Clarence Thomas reads this thing.