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Beyond Meat starts direct sales of its plant-based patties and sausages

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Beyond Meat’s plant-based products have expanded through various restaurants and grocery chains, but now fans of its product can order directly. Its competitor Impossible Foods launched direct-to-consumer sales back in June, as both companies pitch their faux-meat to customers who may be avoiding those same restaurants and grocery stores as much as possible.

Their offerings are fairly similar, with several “family size” bundles that start around $50 — enough to defray the cost of free two-day shipping in the continental US and likely high enough that they don’t directly compete with local grocery stores.

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Google Assistant Snapshot can now be summoned with a voice command

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You can now summon Google Assistant’s Snapshot by saying “Hey Google, show me my day.” The tech giant introduced the feature as a way to view your tasks for the day in one place back in 2018, and up until recently, you can only access it by tapping on the icon in the Assistant window’s bottom left corner. Now, you can use the new voice command to bring up Snapshot, as long as English is your default language. Google says the feature will roll out for additional languages in the coming months.

In addition, you’ll now see more information on the Snapshot card, including upcoming birthdays and holidays. When you tap on a birthday notification, it’ll show you a new card with actions you can take, such as calling or texting the celebrant or sending them a personalized birthday song.

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Watch the best trailers from Gamescom 2020’s opening night in 15 minutes

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With conferences still on hold, the gaming world is enjoying Gamescom 2020 together online instead of in person. The first night of the event already gave us looks at Fall Guys season two and a new Dragon Age game, but there was so much more to see. Awards, trailers and more, it’s all here in this fifteen minute video that will get you quickly caught up on some of the latest news in gaming.

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Google Fiber adds Philo streaming as an option next to YouTube and fubo

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After years of offering TV service along with its high-speed internet package, Google Fiber announced in February that it will only offer new customers options to sign up for streaming services. At the time, it supported YouTube TV and fuboTV, and now it’s adding Philo’s 61-channel $20 package as an option. The Philo lineup mostly focuses on entertainment, educational and lifestyle channels like AMC, Discovery, MTV, Nickelodeon and Vice.

Google also noted it’s seen a 35 percent increase in traffic over the last few months as more people work and study from home. Over the last year Google has done more than just go all-in on internet TV for Fiber, as it announced the first expansion in several years and dropped the slower 100Mbps package. Now today’s blog post is talking about the “future” of Google Fiber, so it doesn’t appear to be done making big changes.

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A US teen wrote 27,000 Wikipedia entries in a language they don’t speak

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Before Ultach discovered the teen, who had gone by the username AmaryllisGardner, they had been prolific. By 2018, the 19-year-old had written more than 20,000 entries and committed approximately 200,000 edits. They were able to write so much by starting at the age of 12. The majority of entries AmaryllisGardner penned feature the occasional Scots word, often misspelled, and they include no Scots grammatical constructions. It seems AmaryllisGardner used an online translator to graft Scots words onto sentences written in American English. 

Part of the reason no one noticed or stopped the vandalism is that there wasn’t much interest in the Scots Wikipedia before this week. “Nobody cared about maintaining [the Scots Wikipedia],” said Wikipedian MJL, one of the website’s administrators. “Someone stepped up because no one else did. That person was never given any guidance. Articles ended up being very poorly mistranslated.”

The issue is twofold. Scots is an endangered language, and the Wikipedia community now needs to decide what to do with all the entries. Some have said the website should delete AmaryllisGardner’s contributions, arguing that they do more harm than good. But Michael Dempster, the director of the Scots Language Centre in Perth, says it would be better to salvage the contributions. 

“We know that this kid has put in an incredible amount of work, and he has created an editable infrastructure,” he told The Guardian. “It’s a great resource but it needs people who are literate in Scots to edit it now. It has the potential to be a great online focus for the language in the future.”

Another unfortunate outcome of all this is that people have taken to harassing the teen, despite the fact it seems like they had good intentions in contributing to the Wiki. “I was only a 12-year-old kid when I started, and sometimes when you start something young, you can’t see that the habit you’ve developed is unhealthy and unhelpful as you get older,” they said on Wikipedia.  

As the AV Club points out, the entire episode is a reminder that Wikipedia is not a perfect resource. The website and all the information you can find on it wouldn’t exist without the tireless work of countless unnamed volunteers, but those people can make mistakes. The Scots example is an extreme case, but every entry you read on the website (and any other website, for that matter) is worth scrutiny.

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Here’s seven minutes of ‘Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart’ gameplay

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At Gamescon 2020, Insomniac Games and Sony shared an uninterrupted demo of Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart that showed off more of the PlayStation 5 exclusive’s gameplay.

The trailer didn’t reveal anything we hadn’t already seen when Sony first showed off the game during its PS5 showcase in June, but it did give us a better look at the title’s mechanics. For example, one of the tools we got to see Ratchet use more of is the Rift Tether. Some combat stages will feature portals that allow the Lombax to lasso a portal his way. In effect, this allows Ratchet and Clank to quickly traverse the stage and stay mobile against their enemies.

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Steam lets you choose words to filter from chat

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Steam now lets you make a custom list of words you want filtered from your chat experience, Steam owner Valve has announced. The Steam Text & Chat Filtering feature already removes commonly used strong profanity and slurs, but now you can add specific words that you want to be replaced with symbols across Steam chat and supporting games. The feature is available through the Steam Labs beta program, but may be universal in the near future.

You can customize your filters by visiting your Steam account preferences, where you will find Community Content Preferences and the new Text & Chat Filtering settings. From there, you can enter words to always or never filter, either individually or through uploading a list of words. You can also opt out of filtering altogether.

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‘Fall Guys’ season two will indulge in medieval fantasy

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We knew it was coming, but we finally got our first sneak peek at Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout season two during today’s Gamescom livestream. Unlike its inaugural run scheduled to wrap up next month, the game will take on a theme this fall: medieval fantasy.

That means knights, wizards, Vikings and even colorful dragons for the costumes. And new games “inspired by epic quests from the Middle Ages” that incorporate elements like castles, drawbridges and swinging axes. We don’t know any of the new rules yet, but some of the boards will have blocks and ramps that can be moved around. Hopefully none of the new levels will be as infuriating as Slime Climb.

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Facebook sues man who sold fake Instagram likes

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Facebook has filed a number of similar lawsuits against developers who misuse data or otherwise violate its terms of service. Earlier this year, the company sued a Spanish developer for selling fake Instagram likes, and sued a New Zealand company for its fake Instagram engagement service in 2019. The lawsuits are part of the social network’s pledge to take more aggressive action against rogue developers following Cambridge Analytica.

In addition to the action against Nakrutka, Facebook also sued MobiBurn, a developer that used malicious software to collect Facebook data from users. Security researchers had previously alerted Facebook that the developer “collected information from the devices and requested data from Facebook, including the person’s name, time zone, email address and gender,” when users installed apps with MobiBurn’s software. Facebook said the developer “failed to fully cooperate” with an audit. 

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‘Twelve Minutes’ gets an all-star cast including Daisy Ridley

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Twelve Minutes, the upcoming thriller from Annapurna Interactive, is getting an all-star cast including Daisy Ridley, James McAvoy, and the (always great) Willem Dafoe. In the game’s new trailer, which premiered on the Gamescom opening night stream today, Dafoe delivers some wonderfully creepy narration to set up the concept: A man trapped in a time loop. The footage isn’t different from the top-down gameplay we’ve seen before, but the narration adds a new layer of intrigue. Twelve Minutes is headed to the Xbox Series X, Xbox One and Steam later this year.

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