Hawkeye charted a mid-point in the arc of Marvel’s various MCU TV offerings when it landed on Disney+ back in late 2021: Not as formally groundbreaking as WandaVision, but less obsessed with bluntly moving pieces around the board than Falcon And The Winter Soldier, the series was a surprisingly funny vehicle for Jeremy Renner’s least-superpowered of Avengers, while also giving a lot of room for Hailee Steinfeld and Florence Pugh to show off their skills as a double act. And while none of those shows have gotten second seasons on the air to date (only Loki ever managed that feat), Hawkeye could have been a decent candidate for a revisit, at least once Renner was more fully recovered from his nearly life-ending snowplow accident in early 2023. And it might have been… if Disney hadn’t pretty clearly pissed the actor off with its offer for a second season.

Renner was talking to High Performance when he revealed that Marvel had approached him to do another season of Hawkeye… at half of what he was paid for the first one. Here’s Renner, running the math: “Well, it’s going to take me twice the amount of work for half the amount of money, and eight months of my time, essentially, to do it for half the amount.” While emphasizing that he doesn’t blame anyone he’s worked with at Marvel for any of this—”It’s just the penny pinchers, the accountants”—he still sounds pretty genuinely pissed off at the “insult offer.” “I’m like, ‘I’m sorry? Why? Did you think I’m only half the Jeremy because I got ran over? Maybe that’s why you want to pay me half of what I made on the first season.’”

Renner—whose post-accident resumé has mostly been taken up with Mayor Of Kingstown, and writing a memoir, My Next Breath, that’s out this week—goes on to note that he wasn’t asking for anything except what he got paid for the show’s first season. “Sadly, I still love the character,” he adds, calling the situation “disheartening.” “I’d still love to do it, but I had to defend myself.”

[via Variety]

Meta's Reality Labs posted a $4.2 billion operating loss in Q1 2025. According to CNBC, cumulative losses since 2020 now exceed $60 billion. From the report: Meta's Reality Labs unit is responsible for the company's Quest-branded virtual reality headsets and Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses. It's the key business unit that anchors CEO Mark Zuckerberg's plans to build a new computing platform involving digital worlds accessible via VR and augmented reality devices. [...] Wall Street has questioned Meta's big spending on the metaverse, which Zuckerberg has said could take many years to turn into a real business. The company must now also contend with sweeping new tariffs from President Donald Trump and the likely increase in costs that will follow, potentially leading to higher-priced devices. Last week, Meta said that an unspecified number of Reality Labs employees were laid off. Those workers were part of the Oculus Studios unit, which creates VR and AR games and content for Quest VR headsets.

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Meta has eliminated key privacy protections for Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses users in a policy update that took effect April 29th. The company now permanently enables Meta AI with camera functionality unless "Hey Meta" voice commands are completely disabled, while simultaneously removing users' ability to opt out of having their voice recordings stored in the cloud. These recordings are kept for up to a year for Meta's product development, with the company only deleting accidental voice interactions after 90 days. Users can manually delete individual recordings but cannot prevent the initial collection.

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Multiple staff laid off

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from PCWorld: Windows 7 came onto the market in 2009 and put Microsoft back on the road to success after Windows Vista's annoying failures. But Windows 7 was not without its faults, as this curious story proves. Some users apparently encountered a vexing problem at the time: if they set a single-color image as the background, their Windows 7 PC always took 30 seconds to start the operating system and switch from the welcome screen to the desktop. In a recent blog post, Microsoft veteran Raymond Chen explains the exact reason for this. According to him, a simple programming error meant that users had to wait longer for the system to boot. After logging in, Windows 7 first set up the desktop piece by piece, i.e. the taskbar, the desktop window, icons for applications, and even the background image. The system waited patiently for all components to finish loading and received feedback from each individual component. Or, it switched from the welcome screen to the desktop after 30 seconds if it didn't receive any feedback. The problem here: The code for the message that the background image is ready was located within the background image bitmap code, which means that the message never appeared if you did not have a real background image bitmap. And a single color is not such a bitmap. The result: the logon system waited in vain for the message that the background has finished loading, so Windows 7 never started until the 30 second fallback activated and sent users to the desktop. The problem could also occur if users had activated the "Hide desktop icons" group policy. This was due to the fact that such policies were only added after the main code had been written and called by an If statement. However, Windows 7 was also unable to recognize this at first and therefore took longer to load.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Raspberry Pi boards have a combination of surface-mount devices (SMDs) and through-hole bits. SMDs allow for far more tiny chips, resistors, and other bits to be attached to boards by their tiny pins, flat contacts, solder balls, or other connections. For those things that are bigger, or subject to rough forces like clumsy human hands, through-hole soldering is still required, with leads poked through a connective hole and solder applied to connect and join them securely. The Raspberry Pi board has a 40-pin GPIO header on it that needs through-hole soldering, along with bits like the Ethernet and USB ports. These require robust solder joints, which can't be done the same way as with SMT (surface-mount technology) tools. "In the early days of Raspberry Pi, these parts were inserted by hand, and later by robotic placement," writes Roger Thornton, director of applications for Raspberry Pi, in a blog post. The boards then had to go through a follow-up wave soldering step. Now Pi boards have their tiny bits and bigger pieces soldered at the same time through an intrusive reflow soldering process undertaken with Raspberry Pi's UK manufacturing partner, Sony. After adjusting component placement, the solder stencil, and the connectors, the board makers could then place and secure all their components in the same stage. Intrusive reflow soldering this way involves putting solder paste on both the pads for SMD bits and into the through-hole pins. The through-hole parts are pushed onto the paste, and the whole board then goes into a reflow oven, where the solder paste melts, the connectors fall in more fully, and joints are formed for all the SMD and through-hole parts at once. You can watch the process up close in this mesmerizing video from Surface Mount Process. Intrusive reflow soldering is not a brand-new process, but what it did for the Raspberry Pi is notable, according to Thornton. The company saw "a massive 50% reduction in product returns," and it sped up production by 15 percent by eliminating the break between the two soldering stages. By removing the distinct soldering bath from its production line, the company also reduced its carbon dioxide output by 43 tonnes per year (or 47.4 US tons).

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