Last week, the athlete training platform TrainingPeaks launched GPXplore, a new feature that lets you import any GPX route and ride it virtually. If you can pull a GPX from Strava, Garmin Connect, Komoot, or anywhere else that exports standard GPS files, then you could be pedaling through its real elevation profile in your TrainingPeaks Virtual account. Whether you’re a triathlete scouting race courses, a cyclist chasing that Strava segment you’ve been dreaming of, or a coach building specific workouts tied to real terrain, this is a nifty feature to have.

How GPXplore works

This feature takes GPS coordinate data to give you real-world elevation and curvature, while also attempting to blend satellite imagery as your basemap. TrainingPeaks Virtual then layers 3D graphics on top to simulate the surrounding landscape, so that you can experience the gist of that route’s real-world scenery. And hey, I’d imagine seeing a 3D-rendered approximation of Tuscany while you grind through a 12% ramp is more motivating than staring at a power graph. 

GPXplore offers two modes, each aimed at a different kind of athlete motivation.

• World Routes: These are pre-loaded rides from around the globe, allegedly with accurate topography so you can experience legendary climbs and famous races from your living room.

• My Routes: Your own GPX files, on demand. Import from Strava, Garmin, Komoot, or any platform that exports GPX. 

In short, whether you’ve already ridden a road and saved it on Strava, or you’re eyeing a race course halfway around the world on Komoot, you can now pull it straight into TrainingPeaks Virtual, clip in, and go. For triathletes and cyclists prepping for a specific event, this is a great way to train with the actual elevation profile and sequence of climbs on the real course. Want to know exactly how punishing the bike leg of Ironman Arizona feels at kilometer 140? Load the course GPX and find out before race day. 

How to use the GPXplore feature

It looks like GPXplore’s real value is functional, not aesthetic: Your smart trainer responds to the route’s actual grade changes in real time, simulating resistance on every climb and letting you spin out on the descents.

Download the TrainingPeaks Virtual app to your desktop or mobile device, then log in with your existing TrainingPeaks credentials. If you’re new to TrainingPeaks entirely, you can create an account directly inside the Virtual app and access a free trial of TrainingPeaks Premium features. Check out this video from TrainingPeaks for a step-by-step guide.

Who needs Half-Life 3 or Beyond Good & Evil 2? Roku, in an attempt to gamify content discovery on its platform, has cooked up a gaming announcement for the ages. Behold: Roklue. Yes, that’s a real name that someone with a job title and (likely high) salary came up with.

Roklue (shudder) will quiz players on “the movies and TV shows that everyone is talking about,” along with classic “beloved favorites.” When it references a movie or show, it will provide a link for you to tune in on your device. The initial version is an Oscar season tie-in (“Roklue: Awards Season”) that debuts on Saturday. This inaugural version is produced by B17 Entertainment, a Sony-owned company.

Roku says it will rotate thematic content throughout the year. Variety reports that those will center around music festivals, the Emmys and holidays.

Apart from that name, which should come with a gag-reflex warning, Roklue sounds harmless enough. You play a trivia game to find new stuff to stream; Roku grows its engagement. Win-win. But with corporate schemes like this, it’s always worth wondering where further monetization might eventually come into play. Think something like linking to series on platforms you don’t yet subscribe to. (Hello, kickback.)

On March 7, you’ll find the free Roklue (ick) game on your Roku home screen, no download required.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/streaming/roku-is-launching-a-trivia-game-called-roklue-190000386.html?src=rss

OpenAI today released GPT-5.4, an upgraded ChatGPT model designed to be faster, cheaper, and more accurate for workplace tasks. The update also introduces tools that let ChatGPT work directly inside Excel and Google Sheets. Axios reports: GPT-5.4 is designed to be less error-prone, more efficient and better at workplace tasks like drafting documents, OpenAI said. The new model can create files in fewer tries with less back-and-forth than prior models, the company said. GPT-5.4 outperformed office workers 83% of the time on GDPval, an OpenAI benchmark measuring performance on real-world tasks across 44 occupations.

The model can also solve problems using fewer tokens, OpenAI says — which can translate to faster responses and lower costs. The company is also debuting OpenAI for Financial Services, a set of new tools that includes the version of ChatGPT that runs inside spreadsheets and new apps and skills within ChatGPT. Partners include FactSet, MSCI, Third Bridge and Moody’s.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Prime Video has dropped the full trailer for the fifth and final season of The Boys, teeing up the final confrontation between Antony Starr’s Homelander and Karl Urban’s Butcher—one seeking the original V compound that will make him immortal, the other seeking to commit Supe-genocide with the release of a Supe-specific virus that will kill them all.

As previously reported, things were not looking good for our antiheroes after the S4 finale. They managed to thwart the assassination of newly elected US President Robert Singer, but new Vought CEO/evil supe Sister Sage (Susan Heyward) essentially overthrew the election and installed Senator Steve Calhoun (David Andrews) as president. Calhoun declared martial law, and naturally, Homelander swore loyalty as his chief enforcer. Butcher and Annie (Erin Moriarty) escaped, but the rest of The Boys were rounded up and placed in re-education—er, “Freedom”—camps.

The second season of spinoff series Gen V was set after those events, and the finale concluded with Annie recruiting the main cast members to join the fight against Homelander and the Supes. Season 5 of The Boys picks up where the Gen V finale left off. Per the official premise:

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Netflix has acquired an AI filmmaking startup called InterPositive, according to a report by Variety. This is a company that was founded by actor Ben Affleck back in 2022. Don’t worry if you haven’t heard of it. Affleck has been operating the company in stealth mode for the past few years, so this is pretty much it’s big coming-out party.

The terms of the acquisition haven’t been disclosed, but Affleck will remain on as a senior advisor to Netflix. Additionally, the entire staff will be absorbed into the streaming platform.

Affleck says he started the company after “observing the early rise of AI in production” and realizing how the “models came up short.” The company makes tools that generate AI models based on an existing production’s dailies. This lets filmmakers use the model in the post-production process to do stuff like mix and color, relight shots and add visual effects.

Affleck adds that this tech is “not about text-prompting or generating something from nothing.” Netflix says the company will keep “filmmakers at the center of the process.” The company recently used generative AI tools to whip up a VFX shot in a show called The Eternaut. It’s also been using AI to make ads more intrusive. We’ll have to wait and see if creators do indeed remain at the center of things. Netflix will offer access to InterPositive’s tech to creative partners but has no plans to sell it commercially.

To Affleck’s credit, he seems to have a nuanced understanding of modern AI tools. “We also need to preserve what makes storytelling human, which is judgment,” he said. “The kind that takes decades to build, experience to hone and that only people can have. I knew I had a responsibility to my peers and our industry, to protect the power of human creativity and the people behind it.” However, it’s worth reiterating that the company is no longer in Affleck’s hands, as he is now just an advisor.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/netflix-just-bought-an-ai-startup-founded-by-ben-affleck-184536640.html?src=rss

On Wednesday, the Trump administration announced that a large collection of tech companies had signed on to what it’s calling the Ratepayer Protection Pledge. By agreeing, the initial signatories—Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle, and xAI—are saying they will pay for the new generation and transmission capacities needed for any additional data centers they build. But the agreement has no enforcement mechanism, and it will likely run into issues with hardware supplies. It also ignores basic economics.

Other than that, it seems like a great idea.

What’s being agreed to

The agreement is quite simple, laying out five points. The key ones are the first three: that the companies building data centers pledge to pay for new generating capacity, either building it themselves or paying for it as part of a new or expanded power plant. They’ll also pay for any transmission infrastructure needed to connect their data centers and the new supply to the grid and will cover these costs whether or not the power ultimately gets used by their facilities.

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Apple’s MacBook Neo is exactly the laptop many budget-conscious people have been looking for. It’s priced under $500 for students ($599 for everyone else), and has decent enough specs to be a great starter laptop for most users. To make it a ‘budget laptop,’ though, a few corners had to be cut. As a result, the MacBook Neo is lacking a few features that you might have come to expect from a MacBook. Here are the biggest trade-offs Apple is making to hit the Neo’s lower price point.

No Touch ID in the base model

The MacBook Neo’s base model doesn’t have a Touch ID sensor, which means you’ll have to type out your passwords every time you need to enter them. Some people might prefer this over using a fingerprint sensor, but I’d rather pay the extra $100 for it. This variant also comes with 512GB of storage, while the base model only has 256GB.

It lacks a backlit keyboard

Traditionally, Apple’s MacBooks have come with backlit keyboards to help you see what you’re typing while you’re in low light. Unfortunately, the MacBook Neo has cut this feature to help save costs, but it won’t make much of a difference in bright environments or to those who don’t look at their keyboards while typing.

You won’t get a True Tone display

Apple’s True Tone display feature automatically adjusts the color and intensity of the display to match the ambient light wherever you are. This means that your display won’t be blindingly bright in low light, and colors will appear more natural across a number of lighting conditions. The MacBook Neo doesn’t ship with an ambient light sensor, though, so don’t expect True Tone support here.

There are no RAM upgrade options

My daily driver laptop is still the M1 MacBook Air with 8GB of RAM. I have no complaints about this laptop, but a couple of times, it has slowed to a crawl while running many apps at once. Sometime, I wish I’d spent a bit more to get 16GB of RAM. Unfortunately, there’s no such option for the MacBook Neo. 8GB should be adequate for now, so long as you stick to light use, but it could become an issue in the long run.

Fast charging is missing

Unlike most other MacBooks, the Neo doesn’t support fast charging, and ships with a 20W USB-C adapter. However, that should be good enough to charge the 36.5-watt-hour battery, which is smaller than the M5 MacBook Air’s 53.8-watt-hour battery.

You won’t get any Thunderbolt ports

The MacBook Neo has two USB-C ports (one USB 3, and one USB 2), but neither of these support Thunderbolt. This won’t be a problem for most people, but if you use any Thunderbolt-exclusive accessories such as docks or external displays, they won’t work with the MacBook Neo.

The Force Touch trackpad has been removed

The MacBook Neo’s trackpad doesn’t have Force Touch. This means that the trackpad isn’t pressure sensitive like those on other MacBooks. It won’t support pressure sensitive drawings, multi-touch gestures, or Force clicks.

Other missing features

While I’ve covered the missing features average users are most likely to notice above, there are a few additional cuts that might impact power users especially. Here are the remaining features the MacBook Neo is missing:

• Center Stage for the front camera

• Wide Color (P3) display

• Neural Accelerators

• Four-speaker sound system (the Neo has two speakers)

• Three-mic array (the Neo has a two-mic array)

• The 3.5mm jack doesn’t support high-impedance headphones

• Wi-Fi 7

• Dynamic head tracking support with AirPods

Meta is facing a class action lawsuit for false advertising related to its AI glasses following reports about the company’s use of human contractors to review footage captured from users’ glasses. The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in federal court in San Francisco, alleges that Meta’s claims about the devices’ privacy features have misled users. 

The lawsuit comes after a Swedish newspaper reported that subcontractors in Kenya have raised concerns about viewing footage recorded via Ray-Ban Meta glasses. According to Svenska Dagbladet, workers have reported witnessing “intimate” material, including bathroom visits, sexual encounters and other private details as part of their job labeling objects in videos captured on users’ smart glasses.

“This nationwide class action seeks to hold Meta responsible for its affirmatively false advertising and failure to disclose the true nature of surveillance and its connection to the company’s AI data collection pipeline,” the lawsuit, filed by Clarkson Law Firm, states. The filing names two individuals who live in California and New Jersey who purchased Meta’s smart glasses. It says that both “relied” on Meta’s marketing claims about the glasses’ privacy protecting features and that they would not have purchased them if they knew about the company’s use of contractors. The lawsuit seeks monetary damages and injunctive relief.

A spokesperson for Meta confirmed to Engadget that data from its smart glasses can be shared with human contractors in some cases. The company declined to comment on the claims in the lawsuit.

“Ray-Ban Meta glasses help you use AI, hands free, to answer questions about the world around you,” the spokesperson said. “Unless users choose to share media they’ve captured with Meta or others, that media stays on the user’s device. When people share content with Meta AI, we sometimes use contractors to review this data for the purpose of improving people’s experience, as many other companies do. We take steps to filter this data to protect people’s privacy and to help prevent identifying information from being reviewed.”

What the company doesn’t explicitly say there is that there is no way to use the smart glasses’ “multimodal” features without sharing the captures of your surroundings with the company. As I noted in my review of the second-generation Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses last year: “images of your surroundings processed for the glasses’ multimodal features like Live AI can be used for training purposes (these images aren’t saved to your device’s camera roll).” 

So while Meta claims that users’ own recordings are kept private, footage that is captured but not stored locally for users — like video when Live AI is in use — can be sent to contractors who help train the company’s AI models. Meta’s privacy policy doesn’t specifically mention the use of human contractors, though it states that such data can be used for training purposes. 

“The undisclosed human review pipeline renders the Meta AI Glasses’ privacy features materially misleading, transforms the product from a personal device into a surveillance conduit, and exposes consumers to unreasonable risks of dignitary harm, emotional distress, stalking, extortion, identity theft, and reputational injury,” the lawsuit says. “Indeed, Meta employees and contractors have described viewing credit card numbers, nudity, sexual activity, and identifiable faces in the footage they reviewed, and reported that Meta’s purported anonymization safeguards do not reliably function.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/meta-hit-with-a-class-action-lawsuit-over-smart-glasses-privacy-claims-182846817.html?src=rss

If your Playdate wishlist is anything like mine (endless), here’s a good excuse to actually go ahead and free some of those games from limbo: Panic is running a two-week-long sale on the Playdate Catalog to celebrate its three-year anniversary. Sure, the majority of Playdate games are pretty cheap as is, but they can still add up when you’re on a wild purchasing spree. Ask me how I know! The sale will be running from March 5 until March 19 at 1PM ET (10AM PT), so take advantage of the discounts while you can. 

There are 423 games available in the Catalog now, according to Panic, so if you’re having trouble deciding on which you should go for, I’ve got you covered with a few recommendations right here. 

Season Two

If $39 felt like too much to drop on Season Two when it came out last summer, now’s the time to get it. Playdate’s second season had only half the number of games as its first, but it still felt like a much stronger collection. Each of its 12 games is really solid, and there’s plenty of variety in terms of genre and style, from puzzles and hours-long adventures to fast-paced action games that are great for bursts of intense play. And, it comes with Blippo+ — an oddball cable TV simulator that’s unlike anything out there right now. 

All of these games are worth playing, but there were definitely some standouts from the bunch: The Whiteout, a post-apocalyptic adventure that’ll surely hit even harder now considering the winter we’ve had; the puzzle platformer Taria & Como; the arcade action game Fulcrum Defender; the climbing adventure, Tiny Turnip. I also really enjoyed Dig! Dig! Dino! for something on the chiller side. 

Outside Parties

I have not been able to shut up about this game since it came out. It’s unique, it’s creepy, it’s completely engrossing and it really pushes the limits of what the Playdate can do. Outside Parties is a horror scavenger hunt, presenting you with one massive picture to scrutinize and find hidden scenes within, using the crank to adjust the brightness constantly so you can find anything that may be buried in shadow. As you find these targets, more and more of the game’s story comes to light through eerie audio clips. It is such a cool experience and the atmosphere of it all is incredible. You’ll get many hours of playtime out of this one too, with over 150 targets to find and lots of lore to uncover. 

Crankstone

A full-blown western for the Playdate! Crankstone is a gallery shooter with minigames mixed throughout, and between the aesthetic, the music and the activities, it’s a lot of fun. You can choose the story mode to get right into the shooting and defending the town from outlaws, or head to the saloon to pick from the handful of mini games individually, including some fast-paced “spot the correct card” deck shuffling games and a few mimicry games involving the crank. It’s like a wild west theme park crammed into the Playdate, which is to say, it’s wonderful. 

Other games to try

These are just the games I’ve been enjoying lately, but there are tons of other Playdate games worth checking out during the sale, like these cheese games and Spilled Mushrooms. And if you need even more recommendations, take a look through our list of the best Playdate games, where you’ll find gems like Echo: The Oracle’s Scroll, Summit and Bwirds. There are quite a few I’m planning to finally spring from my wishlist too, including The Shape That Waits, Xeno Escape and Loona Landa. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/the-playdate-catalogs-3-year-anniversary-sale-is-here-181500105.html?src=rss

Later this evening—Friday morning local time—the new 1.6 L V6 engines that power this year’s crop of Formula 1 machinery will roar into life as practice for the first race of the year gets underway in Melbourne, Australia. After several years in which the teams’ performances converged so much that the sport was determined by finer margins than ever, 2026 sees a comprehensive reset.

The cars are smaller and lighter, and they have different aerodynamic configurations for the corners and the straights. The hybrid systems are more powerful, and each runs on its own bespoke sustainable fuel. There’s even a new way to watch as F1 makes a $750 million move from ESPN to Apple. Over the offseason, throughout the preseason shakedown in Barcelona, and then two three-day tests in Bahrain, plenty of questions have arisen: Are the new technical regulations a mistake? Can we still watch F1TV? And just what the heck is going on, Aston Martin?

400 kW + 350 kW = headaches?

After more than a decade with the same power units—and the same few manufacturers—the sport wanted to attract some new blood. Drawing in more car companies, which have boards and shareholders to answer to, required acknowledging road relevance and some commitment to sustainability and decarbonization. Since OEMs are all about electrification, that meant a greater emphasis on the hybrid side of the power units. And the veneer of environmental responsibility arrives in the form of heavily audited, fully sustainable fuels.

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OpenAI is releasing a new model today, and like GPT-5.2 before it, GPT-5.4 is all about professional work. OpenAI is calling GPT-5.4 its most capable frontier model for tasks like coding and data analysis. OpenAI claims the new model produced presentations with stronger, more varied aesthetics and made more effective use of its image generation tools.

It’s also the first model from OpenAI built with native computer-use capabilities, making it better at carrying out tasks across several apps at the same time. When it comes to computer use, one noticeable improvement OpenAI has recorded is the way GPT-5.4 issues mouse and keyboard commands. It’s significantly better at navigating a desktop environment than its predecessor.  

When users turn to GPT-5.4 in ChatGPT, where it will now be the default model for the chatbot’s Thinking mode, the system will outline how it plans to tackle a request, giving people the opportunity to tell it to adjust course as it’s generating a response. At the same time, the new model offers better web research capabilities, especially when it comes to “highly specific” queries, according to OpenAI. 

“Together, these improvements mean higher-quality answers that arrive faster and stay relevant to the task at hand,” the company states. Separately, OpenAI claims GPT-5.4 is its most factual model yet, noting, relative to GPT-5.2, it’s 18 percent less likely to generate a response with any errors. Here’s hoping it knows not to turn to Grokipedia for information, something its predecessor was known to do.    

As mentioned, GPT-5.4 will be available in ChatGPT when users select the chatbot’s Thinking mode, and as GPT-5.4 Pro from the model picker. As such, this isn’t a release for Free and Go users — or even Plus subscribers, for that matter. It’s more for enterprise customers, and developers who rely on the company’s Codex app. On that note, for API customers, OpenAI claims GPT-5.4 is its most token efficient reasoning model to date, though those tokens will cost more than their GPT-5.2 counterparts. For instance, OpenAI is pricing one million input tokens at $2.50, up from $1.75 with GPT-5.2.   

The fact that OpenAI has increasingly shifted its strategy to focus on professionals shouldn’t be surprising. When Microsoft announced last September it would add Anthropic’s models to Copilot 365 (where previously it depended exclusively on OpenAI’s systems), there were reports that suggested the company made the decision because it found Claude was better at tasks like generating spreadsheets and presentations. Reporting from The Information suggests OpenAI is generating about $25 billion in annualized revenue. However, the company is still far from being profitable, and with more than $1.4 trillion in data center commitments on the books, it’s reliant on funding from investors to keep the lights on. Seen in that context, productivity represents a place where it might have a chance to build a sustainable business. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/i-hope-you-like-spreadsheets-because-gpt-54-loves-them-180000444.html?src=rss

As part of Epic’s settlement with Google over the Play Store, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney agreed to stop criticizing Google’s app store practices until 2032 and even publicly support the revised policies. The deal also prohibits Epic from pushing for further changes to Google’s platform rules. The Verge reports: On March 3rd, he not only signed away Epic’s rights to sue and disparage the company, he signed away his right to advocate for any further changes to Google’s app store polices. He can’t criticize Google’s app store practices. In fact, he has to praise them. The contract states that “Epic believes that the Google and Android platform, with the changes in this term sheet, are procompetitive and a model for app store / platform operations, and will make good faith efforts to advocate for the same.”

He may even have to appear in other courts around the world to defend this deal with Google, and Google gets to make sure his public statements are supportive of the deal from here on out. And while Epic can still be part of the “Coalition for App Fairness,” the organization that Epic quietly and solely funded to be its attack dog against Google and Apple, he can only point that organization at Apple now. “Google is opening up Android all the way with robust support for competing stores, competing payments, and a better deal for all developers. So, we’ve settled all of our disputes worldwide. THANKS GOOGLE!,” Sweeney wrote in a post on X on Wednesday.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.