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The Google Pixel Tablet is down to $359 right now for the 256GB version, the lowest price it’s been so far, according to price trackers. Originally priced at $499, this $140 discount puts it in a good spot for anyone who wants a tablet that pulls double duty.

Google Pixel Tablet

$359.00
at Amazon

$499.00
Save $140.00

$359.00
at Amazon

$499.00
Save $140.00

The Pixel Tablet is designed to be a solid Android tablet first, but it also works as a smart display when you’re not using it. If you grab the speaker dock, you get a stand that charges the tablet and gives it a serious upgrade in sound quality.

The tablet itself is clean and straightforward. It has an 11-inch display with 2,560 by 1,600 resolution, a 60Hz refresh rate, and can hit 500 nits of peak brightness—plenty for reading, streaming, or casual browsing even in brighter rooms. Battery life is reasonable for the price range. In PCMag’s tests, it ran about five hours and 25 minutes of HD video playback at full brightness, which could stretch longer under less demanding use. The cameras—both front and rear—are 8MP with a wide 84-degree field of view and can shoot 1080p video at 30fps: fine for video calls and casual snaps, but nothing you’d replace your phone camera with.

The Pixel Tablet runs Android well, with many popular apps optimized for the larger screen. And like other Pixel devices, Google promises at least five years of security updates, which isn’t something every mid-range tablet can guarantee. If you want a tablet that doesn’t gather dust when you’re not actively using it, the Pixel Tablet’s ability to turn into a smart display gives it more reason to stay in sight—and the current price makes it a lot easier to justify.

Google’s self-driving taxi service Waymo has surpassed 10 million total paid rides, marking a significant milestone in the transition of autonomous vehicles from novelty to mainstream transportation option. The company’s growth trajectory, WSJ argues, shows clear signs of exponential scaling, with weekly rides jumping from 10,000 in August 2023 to over 250,000 currently. Waymo is on track to hit 20 million rides by the end of 2025. The story adds: This is not just because Waymo is expanding into new markets. It’s because of the way existing markets have come to embrace self-driving cars.

In California, the most recent batch of quarterly data reported by the company was the most encouraging yet. It showed that Waymo’s number of paid rides inched higher by roughly 2% in both January and February — and then increased 27% in March. In the nearly two years that people in San Francisco have been paying for robot chauffeurs, it was the first time that Waymo’s growth slowed down for several months only to dramatically speed up again. Waymo currently operates in Phoenix, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, with expansion planned for Austin, Atlanta, Miami, and Washington D.C. The service faces incoming competition from Tesla, which plans to launch its own robotaxi service in Austin this month. Waymo remains unprofitable despite raising $5.6 billion in funding last year.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For too long, the AI hardware landscape has felt like a one-horse race, with NVIDIA’s H100 GPUs dominating the field. But here in Bend, Oregon, where a healthy dose of competition keeps everyone sharp, AMD is increasingly proving that not only are they in the race, but they’re making a strong bid for the lead. Their recent MLPerf Training submission, highlighting the prowess of the AMD Instinct MI300 and the upcoming MI325X GPUs, signals a significant shift in the AI training arena. In an era of hardware availability constraints, all AMD has to be is “good enough” – and they are clearly outperforming that bar, pushing the boundaries and offering compelling alternatives.

A Major Milestone: AMD’s MLPerf Training Debut

AMD’s recent entry into the MLPerf Training v5.0 benchmarks marks a pivotal moment. This wasn’t just a quiet submission; it was a loud declaration of intent, showcasing the strength of their platform with competitive performance on both the Instinct MI300X and the Instinct MI325X GPUs. The chosen workload, fine-tuning the Llama 2-70B-LoRA model, is no lightweight; it’s a widely adopted and critical task for customizing large language models in today’s generative AI landscape. This highlights AMD’s focus on real-world, highly relevant AI workloads rather than abstract benchmarks.

The debut results are particularly impressive: the Instinct MI325X platform actually outperformed an average of six OEM submissions using NVIDIA’s H200 platform by up to 8% when fine-tuning Llama 2-70B-LoRA, a widely adopted workload for customizing large language models. This isn’t just “good enough”; this is superior performance in a crucial segment. The Instinct MI300X platforms also delivered competitive performance against NVIDIA H100 on the same workload, validating both GPU platforms in the Instinct MI300 Series as strong contenders across a broad range of training needs, from enterprise applications to cloud-scale environments.

Industry-Wide Validation and Ecosystem Strength

What truly amplifies AMD’s MLPerf debut is the industry-wide validation from its ecosystem partners. In addition to AMD’s own submission, six OEM partners submitted MLPerf Training results using AMD Instinct MI300 Series GPUs. This demonstrates that AMD Instinct performance is not just a lab benchmark; it’s reproducible and robust across a wide range of diverse platforms and configurations. These partner results reinforce the consistent performance of the MI300X and MI325X across various infrastructure environments, even setting new industry milestones in several cases.

A standout example comes from Supermicro, which became the first company ever to submit training results to MLPerf using a liquid-cooled AMD Instinct solution (Supermicro liquid-cooled MI325X MLPerf). Their liquid-cooled Instinct MI325X platform achieved an impressive time-to-train score of 21.75 minutes, not only showcasing top-tier performance but also highlighting the thermal efficiency and scaling potential of advanced cooling solutions in dense AI deployments. MangoBoost further raised the bar with groundbreaking multi-node submissions, demonstrating the scalability of the MI300X platform in distributed AI infrastructure. Dell, Oracle, Gigabyte, and QCT also contributed strong results, collectively proving the power, flexibility, and openness of AMD Instinct GPUs, which are clearly being embraced and pushed to new heights by innovators across the ecosystem.

ROCm Software: The Open-Source Secret Sauce

The remarkable performance gains showcased by AMD are significantly powered by the rapid evolution of AMD ROCm v6.5 software, AMD’s open software stack. Over the past year, ROCm has matured into a robust training platform. In the Llama 2-70B-LoRA fine-tuning task, ROCm was key to unlocking top-tier performance on Instinct MI325X and MI300X GPUs, with critical improvements like Flash Attention, Transformer Engine support, and optimizer-level tuning. AMD has even released optimized docker containers used in this work, along with easy-to-use reproduction instructions, empowering developers. These results provide strong evidence that an open software stack, backed by deep engineering optimizations, can indeed rival and, in some cases, outperform proprietary ecosystems. For customers scaling generative AI, ROCm software delivers the performance, flexibility, and developer support needed to move fast and efficiently.

A Significant Generational Leap

In AI infrastructure, staying current is essential. Organizations investing in AI expect meaningful performance gains with each new platform. The AMD Instinct MI325X GPU sets a new standard for what a generational leap can deliver. In platform (8-GPU) fine-tuning workloads like Llama 2-70B-LoRA, the Instinct MI325X offers up to a 30% performance uplift compared to the Instinct MI300X, a significant generational advancement that dramatically accelerates large-scale AI development and shortens training timelines.

Wrapping Up: The Future is Open and Accelerated with AMD

AMD’s debut MLPerf training submission marks a major milestone, signaling that their Instinct MI300 Series GPUs provide customers with compelling new options for scaling AI innovation. With competitive, and in some cases, superior performance on key AI workloads, and a robust, open ROCm software stack, AMD is rapidly closing the gap on NVIDIA’s long-standing dominance. In a market where hardware availability can often be a constraint, AMD’s ability to be “good enough” has now evolved into being a genuine leader in crucial AI training workloads. As models grow larger and AI use cases expand, AMD’s commitment to open, high-performance solutions promises to empower customers to train, fine-tune, and deploy AI faster and more flexibly than ever before. The momentum behind AMD Instinct is real, and it’s just getting started

Team Asobi is releasing five new levels for Astro Bot, and you can get all of them for free. The developer has announced that the brand new levels will drop on July 10 at 9AM Eastern time. Like the speedrun levels and the previous levels the developer released at no cost, the new ones will be part of the Vicious Void Galaxy. Four of the new levels are called Twin-Frog Trouble, Suck It Up, Handhold Havoc and High Inflation, but Team Asobi is keeping the last one a secret. Each one will come with its own Special Bot, including a “revengeful newcomer.” The developer also hinted that finishing all five levels will lead to “something really cool.”

Astro Bot is a 3D platformer, wherein you control a small robot named Astro across levels set in different galaxies and planets. It features unique and creative uses of the DualSense controller, such as having to hold down the analog triggers and physically tilting the device in order to move Astro’s spaceship. Team Asobi has released several free levels before these new ones since the game launched in late 2024, and so far, Astro Bot has over 90 levels that you can play. 

In addition to announcing the freebies at PlayStation State of Play, Team Asobi has also revealed that it’s launching an updated version of the Astro Bot Limited Edition DualSense wireless controller later this year. The developer promised more details in the future, but for now, you can see that the controller will come with Astro’s smiling eyes on its touchpad. 

Team Asobi / Sony

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/playstation/astro-bot-is-getting-five-new-and-free-levels-this-july-123008291.html?src=rss

I’ve written before about why hill repeats are an excellent thing to add to your run training, and how to get started. But one of the trickier aspects is finding the perfect hill, or even knowing how steep the incline of that hill is. A tool I recently started using makes this super easy. 

The tool is officially called On the Go Map, but you can easily search for it by its nickname, “How Far Did I Run?” To use it, click the start and end points of your hill. (I use the walking icon, which snaps the path to walkable roads and paths, but you can also draw straight lines if you prefer.) 

You can use this tool to measure the distance and elevation of any running route—like a free version of MapMyRun—but when it comes to your favorite hill, all you have to do is create that mini route that goes up your hill, and then click the elevation icon in the bottom left corner of the screen. (It looks like a mountain.) Then a pane opens up at the bottom of the screen, showing the overall grade of the hill as a percentage. 

This percentage is the same as what you’ll see when you select the incline on a treadmill. 1% or 2% would be a very mild hill, a gentle rolling grade. My favorite “I would like to die doing hill repeats today” hill is 8%, and anybody going over 10% on a regular basis is a certified maniac. Most gym treadmills top out around 12%. 

In the example picture at the top of this article, I’ve selected a portion of hill in a local park. On the Go Map helpfully tells me how long that segment is (0.17 miles, so a little less than a lap of a quarter-mile track) and how much elevation I’ll gain going up it (85 feet). To find the percent grade, look in the upper right hand corner of the elevation pane. This hill is a 9.5% grade. 

If you haven’t found the perfect hill to measure yet, tap the menu icon and choose “terrain” as your map style. Any road that crosses multiple contour lines is going to be a steep one. Pan around until you find a promising looking hill, and then measure it. 

Giant Squid has announced that it’s latest game, Sword of the Sea, will come to PlayStation 5 and PC on August 19. It’ll also appear on PlayStation Plus from day one for Extra and Premium Subscribers. The fantasy adventure game marries surfing mechanics with the atmospherics of the developer’s previous games like Abzû and Journey. 

Giant Squid showed off more gameplay in a new trailer as part of PlayStation’s June 4 State of Play. “At its core, Sword of the Sea is all about surfing,” the developer wrote. “You’ll be carving your way across mysterious moving waves of sand on the ancient and powerful hoversword.” Other scenarios include dreamy ice-scapes and oceans full of flying dolphins. 

Giant Squid again teamed with creative director Matt Nava and composer Austin Wintory, who also worked on Abzû and Pathless. “As a surfer and snowboarder myself, I have felt the rush of movement and seen the beauty of nature in a way that only these extreme sports can deliver,” Nava wrote about Sword of the Sea. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/sword-of-the-sea-launches-august-19-120037636.html?src=rss

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Welcome to “Cookbook of the Week.” This is a series where I highlight cookbooks that are unique, easy to use, or just special to me. While finding a particular recipe online serves a quick purpose, flipping through a truly excellent cookbook has a magic all its own. 

You’ve mastered roast chicken, crushed barbecue pork, perfected your homemade biscuits, and your grandma’s recipe for tortellini is immaculate. Some folks think a good main dish is the ticket to a perfect meal, but they’re not seeing the big picture. One of the most crucial components to a stellar meal is none other than using the right sauce—but sauce from scratch is a skill set unto itself. 

Sauce making takes a keen palate for balancing flavor, consideration for texture, sometimes careful emulsification, and awareness for proportions. It’s no wonder we often reach into the condiment shelf of our fridge door, no one wants to screw up a sauce. I think having a helpful sidekick with reliable sauce recipes might be just what we need. That’s why I chose Saucy for cookbook of the week. 

A bit about the book

Written by Ashley Boyd, Saucy is a tantalizing book of a wide variety of sauce recipes—herby, tangy, sweet, and umami. This cookbook is made to complement, not take over your diet. Even the petite dimensions of the book signal that it’s a team player; the backup dancer that elevates your main book of recipes.

The chapters are organized by flavor profile, texture, and sometimes by ingredient, like creamy or tomato-based. One of my favorite features of this cookbook is the section in the front that gives you sauce pairings based on what your main dish is. When I set out to make lunch or cook dinner, I’m thinking of my main meal first. Am I eating dumplings tonight or salad? How should I finish off that roast chicken? Once I have that all figured out, I can flip through this cookbook and mosey over to the Chicken and Fish section of pairings and decide which of the 15 suggested sauces sounds good to me.

After you get through the multiple chapters of flavor-packed sauces and drizzles, Boyd goes a step further and supplies you with a few classic recipes in case you don’t actually have that main dish part figured out. There are recipes for pancakes, bread pudding, roast chicken, steak, and a few others. 

The sauce (and dish) I made this week

I fully believe a well-matched sauce can take a meal to the next level. However, I rarely make them from scratch. (Unless it’s gravy for mashed potatoes, obviously.) So that leaves me chronically buying sauces and tending to my library of condiments in the fridge. I’ll be honest, homemade sauce always tastes better but I settle for the bottled stuff for ease. 

I took this cookbook review as an opportunity to break out of my comfort zone and make myself some fresh sauce. It wasn’t easy to start; I was interested in almost every sauce I saw in this book. I had leftover rotisserie chicken to eat so I decided a sandwich would be nice. I landed on the Lebanese Garlic Sauce, and thought of all the delicious wraps and pitas I’ve had with that sort of punchy garlic sauce. Lunch was decided.

Part of the deciding factor was that this garlic sauce only required four ingredients—garlic cloves, salt, canola oil, and lemon juice—and I already had them all. To make life even easier, I used my Vitamix Ascent X5 to take care of all that finicky emulsification business. This sauce is a true aioli and meant to be bright white, thick, and spreadable like mayo, but a vampire’s nightmare. An aioli can take patience lest it break, like all emulsions. If you don’t have a high-powered blender, I recommend using an immersion blender to make life easier.

Credit: Allie Chanthorn Reinmann

I tossed all of the garlic cloves into the blender along with the salt and pulsed it together until it was finely minced. Then I started the process of drizzling in oil and alternating with lemon juice, scraping the sides, and repeating as the cookbook directions indicated. 

I may not have picked the funnest nor the fastest sauce, but I do believe I picked the most complementary sauce for my rotisserie chicken wrap. Alone, this garlic sauce is way too strong. It’s almost harsh with raw garlic. A bad recipe? No, friends. This is exactly why sauce-making is an art. Sauce is meant to support the main dish. It needs to be strong in small doses. You wouldn’t eat hot sauce as a bowl of soup. I hope.

Credit: Allie Chanthorn Reinmann

I smeared thin swipes of the creamy garlic sauce along one side of my Lebanese pita bread and piled chicken, tomato, lettuce, pickles, yogurt, and harissa onto the other. I was a little worried the garlic would be too sharp, too raw, and ruin my lunch, but instead every bite was a victory lap. It’s the best version of that pita that I could have made. The Lebanese Garlic Sauce saved my lunch from being just OK. The only reason I don’t have post-lunch-sadness right now is because that recipe made about 12 ounces of sauce and I can’t wait to use it again.

A great cookbook to elevate everything you make

Saucy is a great cookbook for any home cook that’s ever had the feeling like something’s missing. That feeling that your burger, chicken wing, or salad is on the brink of perfection but it’s falling flat for indescribable reasons. You need a sauce. 

The recipes in this book are largely straightforward with four to 10 ingredients and most of them are easy to find in major grocery stores. Each one gives you short procedural steps, followed by instructions on how to store that particular sauce. Sauces are powerful, so you often only need a little bit. The rest of the recipe can be sealed up in a jar to live in the fridge for at least five days and some for up to three months. 

If you see yourself becoming a sauce maven, I suggest saving some jam jars so you can keep your collection organized in the fridge. Actually, a nice jarred sauce might make a great gift for Father’s Day. And why not throw in a copy of Saucy too?

How to buy it

Saucy is available as an ebook, but I insist on grabbing the hardcover if you can. It’s wonderfully compact with some really mesmerizing photography. If you have a bookstore nearby, leave the computer behind and see if they have Saucy in the cookbook section. If not, maybe they can order it for you.

Saucy: 50 Recipes for Drizzly, Dunk-able, Go-To Sauces to Elevate Everyday Meals

$9.99
at Amazon

$9.99
at Amazon

A bitter fight over alleged corporate espionage involving two of Silicon Valley’s hottest startups took a new twist on Tuesday, after $12 billion HR software company Deel claimed arch-rival Rippling had directed one of its employees to “pilfer” the company’s assets by posing as a customer. From a report: The latest claim comes after Rippling alleged earlier this year that a staff member had been spying on behalf of Deel. The employee locked themselves into a bathroom and smashed their phone with an axe when confronted with allegations, according to their own testimony.

In new legal filings seen by the Financial Times, Deel has countered by arguing that: “Rippling has been actively engaged in a carefully co-ordinated espionage campaign, through which it infiltrated Deel’s customer platform by fraudulent means and pilfered the company’s most valuable proprietary assets.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sony has just unveiled the first wireless fight stick designed by the company itself. It doesn’t have an official product name yet, but it’s currently codenamed Project Defiant. The arcade-style controller uses the PlayStation Link wireless technology to connect to the PS5 and the PC. Sony says the technology provides an ultra-low latency connection that enables “precise in-game response” to every press on its buttons and every movement on its joystick. Players can also plug the device into their PC or their console via a USB-C connection if they want to ensure that there’s no lag 

The company said it custom designed its controls and used “toolless interchangeable restrictor gates (square, circle, and octagon),” as well as mechanical switches for its buttons. Sony also used the same touch pad on the fight stick as the one found on the DualSense wireless controller. In addition to being able to control the action on screen, the stick has the ability to wirelessly wake up the PS5 by pressing the PS button in the same way a DualSense controller can. 

The fight stick has a storage compartment for its restrictor gates and the PS Link USB adapter. It also sounds like the device will ship with a sturdy carrying case, so you can take it safely with you when needed. Sony has yet to announce Project Defiant’s pricing and release date, but it’s planning to make the fight stick available for purchase sometime in 2026, perhaps in time for players to be able to use it to play Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls. The tag fighting game, which is also coming out next year, was developed by the studio behind the Guilty Gear franchise.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/playstation/project-defiant-is-sonys-first-wireless-fight-stick-for-ps5-and-pc-113009444.html?src=rss

Under the Trump administration, the Food and Drug Administration is eagerly embracing artificial intelligence tools that staff members are reportedly calling rushed, buggy, overhyped, and inaccurate.

On Monday, the FDA publicly announced the agency-wide rollout of a large language model (LLM) called Elsa, which is intended to help FDA employees—”from scientific reviewers to investigators.” The FDA said the generative AI is already being used to “accelerate clinical protocol reviews, shorten the time needed for scientific evaluations, and identify high-priority inspection targets.”

“It can summarize adverse events to support safety profile assessments, perform faster label comparisons, and generate code to help develop databases for nonclinical applications,” the announcement promised.

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