It's Thursday, December 29, 2016. Hey, good morning!  It’s December 29th and we’re looking back on Twitter’s rough 2016, Tesla’s Autopilot avoiding accidents and another Amazon sale day. ESP, AI or something else?
 Like many other driver assists, Tesla’s Autopilot feature bounces radar off the road to see what’s happening two cars ahead. That’s information a human driver wouldn’t have otherwise, and as you can see in this video, it helped a Model X avoid joining an accident in the Netherlands. Whether or not they’re ready for full self-driving tech, this may at least sell drivers on the effectiveness of Forward Collision Warning systems.
| | Laziness, activate
 The next step after having a robot clean up after you is adding voice commands for the full Jetsons experience. The VR7000 doesn’t have a video display, humanoid appearance or snappy retorts, but now it can start cleaning whenever you say it should. That feature comes thanks to a connection with Amazon’s Alexa system unless you’d prefer to take control directly via an app on your phone.
| | Ultra / Ultra
 CES doesn’t start until next week, but we’re already seeing new gadgets revealed, like the “Ultra High Quality” (UHQ) Hi-Fi system and soundbar Samsung just unveiled. It’s claiming that upconverting audio to 32-bit brings a new level of qualit and that it can provide decent bass without a subwoofer. On the video side, Samsung’s second-gen Ultra HD Blu-ray player will put movies on your phone (somehow), and configure tricky HDR settings automatically.
| | | | | Sponsored Content by Verizon | | The trouble with trolls
 Twitter has a dedicated user base, so why is it in this year’s losing column? A failure to deal with harassment and hate speech on its platform leads the list of reasons and is likely why it failed to find a buyer. Now CEO Jack Dorsey gets a chance to save Twitter as a standalone company -- if he can fix the problems instead of making them worse.
| | 20 years of click-spamming
 Blizzard is marking the 20th birthday of Diablo (the game, not the monster), adding themed events and extras to several of its games. The third (and latest) Diablo game, unsurprisingly, gets the most lavish treatment. It's going to get a Darkening of Tristram event that lets you visit a "reimagined" version of the original game's cathedral, including some familiar pick-ups. Overwatch, Hearthstone and more titles will also have something to commemorate the influential online RPG series. | | Smarter and sleeker.
 Ford has revealed the first images of its new self-driving Fusion Hybrid, with a more powerful computer and improved sensors. It also packs lower-profile LIDAR units that appear to be the "Puck" models from Velodyne, a company in which it recently invested $150 million, making it look less like some gadget-strapped prototype auto.
| | Up to 50 percent off apps, e-books, games, movies and music.
Amazon’s next big sale day is December 30th at 3AM ET, and it’s centered around that digital content that we all love. It’s the ideal secondary sale: filling those new phones and games consoles with enough content to take you through the early months of 2017. Amazon is promising breaks on games like Destiny: Rise of Iron, Rocket League and Titanfall 2, but you’ll have to shop around on the 30th to see the full selection.
| | But wait, there's more... | | |
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