Andrej Karpathy, Tesla's head of AI, has quit. He was on a 4-month sabbatical after 5-years at the company trying to make cars drive themselves with nothing but a low-res potato camera, but instead of coming back to work as planned, he peaced out with "no concrete plans for what's next". Seems like an amicable departure, with Elon wishing Andrej well on Twitter. Gotta wonder how far away Tesla is from "full self driving" when a bloke heavily invested in it leaves after a long break with nothing lined up. If Tesla was even remotely close to delivering on its FSD promise, wouldn't you stick around to bask in the glory?
Some gaming industry news for ya today. First up Niantic, the company responsible for Pokemon Go and hyped augmented reality gaming blockbuster factory is sacking around 8% of its staff and canceling four projects, including a Transformers AR game and recently shut down a Harry Potter AR game. Unity, an extremely popular game engine used by thousands of games, has merged with a company called ironSource. ironSource "is the leading business platform for the app economy" and is a "step further toward realizing our vision of a fully integrated platform that helps creators in every step of their RT3D journey".
If you're old, older than me, you might remember something called Viatel. It was kinda like the internet before the internet or before AOL/Compuserve/MSN. Viatel was a videotex service sold by Telecom in Australia that kicked off in February 1985 and was based on the British Prestel system. It worked in a similar to teletext (which I am old enough to remember!), but was two-way, unlike teletext. I recently stumbled across this delicious brochure for Viatel's introduction up on the Internet Archive. There's also a 1986 directory of Viatel services. You want to flick through these, trust me. The retro aesthetic is off the charts.
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