Author: easyfilo

Enlarge / Whoa, there are cards at the bottom of the Google homepage! (credit: 9to5Google)

Check out this totally wild Google homepage experiment spotted by 9to5Google: the search page suddenly has a row of cards at the bottom. If this design is widely adopted, it would easily be the biggest google.com design change ever.

In the experiment, Google.com has a row of six cards at the bottom of the page. There’s weather, trending searches, “what to watch,” a stock card, local events, and COVID news. Clicking on a card will either expand it or load a search-results page. There’s also a “hide content” switch, which will turn the cards off. All of this seems very similar to the Google.com app, which has a scrollable list of “discover” cards.

One of the reasons Google Search initially became popular was because the search page was plain and easy to use. The competition at the time included search engines like Yahoo and Alta Vista, which presented users with a massive wall of ads and content. Google’s starkness was a major differentiator in the early days, and it’s interesting to see the company toy with moving a little closer to the days of Yahoo, even if it’s presenting a more modern take on the idea.

Enlarge / The future is now. (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

Anyone who has been on Twitter in recent weeks is probably intimately familiar with the grids of Wordle solutions clogging up everyone’s timelines. But those tweets give more information than it would seem. Collecting and analyzing data from millions of these Wordle result tweets can give us some interesting insights into aggregate play patterns and the relative difficulty of daily Wordle puzzles.

The Wordle Stats Twitter account has done a lot of the heavy lifting here. Since January 7, the bot account has used the Twitter API to sort through the public timeline for every tweet formatted as a Wordle result, tracking the total number of players and how many guesses each player needed to complete the puzzle. That account shared its underlying data with Ars to power a deeper analysis of daily play patterns.

#Wordle 242 2022-02-16
289,721 results found on Twitter.
10,740 hard mode players.

1: 1%
2: 🟩 4%
3: 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 20%
4: 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 31%
5: 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 26%
6: 🟩🟩🟩 15%
X: 🟩 3%#Wordle242

— Wordle Stats (@WordleStats) February 17, 2022

This isn’t a perfectly random sample of Wordle players, of course—it’s limited to the group of players who use Twitter and choose to share their results publicly. The vast majority of what The New York Times said were millions of daily players at the end of January are not reflected here.

Enlarge (credit: Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto)

Since filing whistleblower complaints against Facebook last year, Frances Haugen hasn’t been sitting still. A report today says the Facebook (now Meta) whistleblower has filed two new complaints with the Securities and Exchange Commission that allege the company internally acknowledged it was struggling with misinformation even while telling investors it had a handle on the problem.

Meta made “material misrepresentations and omissions in statements to investors” regarding its attempts to fight misinformation on its platforms, according to redacted complaints that a congressional staffer shared with The Washington Post and other news outlets.

“Some investors simply will not want to invest in a company that fails to adequately address such misinformation and then engages in misstatements and omissions on the topic,” one complaint says.

Enlarge / Intel Arc GPUs. (credit: Intel)

Intel’s Arc GPUs continue to creep closer to release. At an investor meeting yesterday, Intel reiterated that it would be shipping mobile Arc GPUs based on its Alchemist architecture in the first quarter of 2022 and that desktop GPUs would follow at some point in Q2. Workstation GPUs would follow afterward in the third quarter.

Intel has released few official details about any of the Arc GPU configurations or performance targets, though leaked specs and benchmarks have given us a very broad idea of what we can expect. Intel graphics VP Raja Koduri tweeted a picture of an Arc GPU in a “Beast Canyon” NUC enclosure running 2018’s Shadows of the Tomb Raider, which means at least one of the GPUs will be physically small enough to fit inside that case. But pricing, availability, and even what the cards will look like are unknown.

The company plans to ship at least 4 million GPUs across its desktop, laptop, and workstation product lines in 2022, but that would represent only a sliver of the dedicated GPU market. Data from Jon Peddie Research (as compiled by Tom’s Hardware) suggests that Nvidia and AMD sold some 47 million desktop GPUs in the calendar year between Q4 of 2020 and Q3 of 2021, and that’s before you count laptop GPUs. Having another viable option in the GPU market will be good, but this small number won’t put much of a dent in the current GPU shortage.

(credit: OtterBox)

OtterBox is replacing OtterSpot wireless charging battery packs for free after identifying a swelling issue.

The OtterSpot wireless charging system is driven by a 36 W charging pad base that can be used for Qi wireless charging, and you can stack up to two 10 W, 5,000 mAH OtterSpot batteries on top to charge them for on-the-go use.

Two battery packs on top of the charging base. (credit: OtterBox)

But you’ll want to double-check your battery packs’ serial numbers before using them.