Engadget - Zuckerberg v. Musk, the cage fight?

It's Friday, June 23, 2023.

Would you watch two billionaires tussle in a cage match? What if it was the owners of Facebook and Tesla? This all started when Elon Musk said he was "up for a cage match if he [Zuckerberg] is," in response to tweets about Meta’s incoming Twitter rival. Musk responded. Mark Zuckerberg posted a screenshot of the exchange as a story on his Instagram account with the note: "Send Me Location." Zuckerberg has been training in Brazilian jiu-jitsu for around a year now, and his efforts have been well documented – he even competed in a tournament back in May and won gold and silver medals. Musk: he said he has a great move called The Walrus. Hmm.

– Mat Smith

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E3 2024 and 2025 aren't canceled (yet)

An LA commission said the in-person shows were done, but the ESA says otherwise.

The Electronic Entertainment Expo hasn't been held in person since 2019. Now, it may not be returning for 2024 or 2025 – at least not at the Los Angeles Convention Center. According to an LA City Tourism Commission planning document shared on ResetEra, the video game trade show has canceled its live event for the next two years.

The Electronic Software Association (ESA) seems hesitant to confirm the entire event is canceled: "ESA is currently in conversation with ESA members and other stakeholders about E3 2024 (and beyond)," the group told Engadget. You can still catch up on everything not-E3 from this year at Summer Game Fest, including our first impressions of Sand Land.

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The next version of Stable Diffusion won’t produce spaghetti hands in AI images

It was a bit jarring.

The next version of the prompt-based AI image generator Stable Diffusion will produce more photorealistic images and be better at, well, making hands look less like a horror show. The announcement appeared in a since-deleted blog post. SDXL 0.9, a follow-up to Stable Diffusion XL, “produces massively improved image and composition detail over its predecessor,” the blog post read. SDXL can be run locally on your PC if you have a powerful enough machine. It requires a minimum of 16GB of RAM and a GeForce RTX 20 (or higher) graphics card with 8GB of VRAM.

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Sony plans to keep making smartphones for at least a few more years

Qualcomm has a deal to power Sony handsets in a multi-year deal.

Sony

You might not be buying them, but Sony will continue to make them. Sony has struck a multi-year deal with Qualcomm to use Snapdragon platforms to power its handsets. This is an extension of an existing agreement. Sony revealed its latest phone, the Xperia 1 V, just last month. The smartphone’s target audience is, once again, photographers and vloggers. Those are relatively niche use cases, though Sony can tap into its camera technology to offer something at least unique. The Xperia 1 V even works as a monitor for compatible Sony Alpha cameras.

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