Director Andy Muschietti’s two-film adaptation of Stephen King’s bestselling horror novel IT racked up over $1 billion at the box office worldwide. Now Muschietti is back with a nine-episode prequel series for HBO, IT: Welcome to Derry, exploring the origins of Pennywise the Clown (Bill Skarsgård), the ancient evil that terrorized the fictional town every 27 years. And now we have an official trailer a month before the prequel’s October debut.
(Some spoilers below for IT and IT: Chapter Two.)
As previously reported, set in 1989, ITessentially adapted half of King’s original novel, telling the story of a group of misfit kids calling themselves “The Losers Club.” The kids discover their small town of Derry is home to an ancient, trans-dimensional evil that awakens every 27 years to prey mostly on children by taking the form of an evil clown named Pennywise. Bill (Jaeden Lieberher) loses his little brother, Georgie, to Pennywise, and the group decides to take on Pennywise and drive him into early hibernation, where he will hopefully starve. But Beverly (Sophia Lillis) has a vision warning that Pennywise will return on schedule in 27 years, and they must be ready to fight him anew.
Google’s AI Mode is continuing its rapid global growth. Today, the company announced that this addition to Google Search is rolling out in Spanish. The new option is available in all countries that support AI Mode. The move will allow Spanish speakers around the world to engage with this AI chatbot in their language of choice when asking more complicated questions than a search engine can typically answer well.
The proliferation of this AI enhancement to Google’s traditional search has happened at a break-neck pace. AI Mode was first introduced in March and then made available across the US in May. The first language expansion came earlier this month with the addition of AI Mode in Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean and Brazilian Portuguese.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/google-ai-mode-now-speaks-spanish-223346697.html?src=rss
Apple has delayed the release of its new series The Savant just three days before it was supposed to premiere on September 26, Deadline reports. The series follows an investigator, played by Jessica Chastain, who infiltrates a domestic extremist group in the US. Apple hasn’t provided a new release date for the show.
“After careful consideration, we have made the decision to postpone The Savant,” the company shared in a statement to Deadline. “We appreciate your understanding and look forward to releasing the series at a future date.” The timing of the sudden delay, and the lack of explanation for why the company is delaying the show, could be telling. Disney made a similar knee-jerk reaction in placing Jimmy Kimmel Live! on indefinite hiatus following a joke Kimmel made about the reaction to the killing of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.
Given that The Savant likely focuses on preventing acts of political violence, it might make you wonder who Apple is worried its show will offend. But it’s also entirely possible that the company is trying to avoid people making any kind of association between its TV show and a very public assassination.
Apple generally avoids rocking the boat whenever possible, particularly when it could hurt its business interests. The Problem With Jon Stewart was reportedly cancelled when Jon Stewart wanted to cover topics Apple deemed controversial, like China and artificial intelligence. Apple does business in China, so it seems likely the company was skittish about airing anything that could be viewed as criticism, even if having difficult conversations was the premise of Stewart’s show. The decision to pull The Savant, even if despite reading like the company is worried about offending right-wing extremists, was likely made from a similar place of caution.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/streaming/apple-tv-indefinitely-delays-its-domestic-extremism-thriller-the-savant-223044979.html?src=rss
If an Iranian taxi driver waves away your payment, saying, “Be my guest this time,” accepting their offer would be a cultural disaster. They expect you to insist on paying—probably three times—before they’ll take your money. This dance of refusal and counter-refusal, called taarof, governs countless daily interactions in Persian culture. And AI models are terrible at it.
New research released earlier this month titled “We Politely Insist: Your LLM Must Learn the Persian Art of Taarof” shows that mainstream AI language models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta fail to absorb these Persian social rituals, correctly navigating taarof situations only 34 to 42 percent of the time. Native Persian speakers, by contrast, get it right 82 percent of the time. This performance gap persists across large language models such as GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Haiku, Llama 3, DeepSeek V3, and Dorna, a Persian-tuned variant of Llama 3.
A study led by Nikta Gohari Sadr of Brock University, along with researchers from Emory University and other institutions, introduces “TAAROFBENCH,” the first benchmark for measuring how well AI systems reproduce this intricate cultural practice. The researchers’ findings show how recent AI models default to Western-style directness, completely missing the cultural cues that govern everyday interactions for millions of Persian speakers worldwide.
YouTube’s parent company, Alphabet, said it will reinstate creators previously banned for spreading COVID-19 misinformation and false election claims, citing free expression and shifting policy guidelines. The Hill reports: “Reflecting the Company’s commitment to free expression, YouTube will provide an opportunity for all creators to rejoin the platform if the Company terminated their channels for repeated violations of COVID-19 and elections integrity policies that are no longer in effect,” the company said in a letter to Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), chair of the House Judiciary Committee. “YouTube values conservative voices on its platform and recognizes that these creators have extensive reach and play an important role in civic discourse. The Company recognizes these creators are among those shaping today’s online consumption, landing ‘must-watch’ interviews, giving viewers the chance to hear directly from politicians, celebrities, business leaders, and more,” it added in the five-page correspondence.
Alphabet blamed the Biden administration for limiting political speech on the platform. “Senior Biden Administration officials, including White House officials, conducted repeated and sustained outreach to Alphabet and pressed the Company regarding certain user-generated content related to the COVID-19 pandemic that did not violate its policies,” the letter read. “While the Company continued to develop and enforce its policies independently, Biden Administration officials continued to press the Company to remove non-violative user-generated content,” it continued. Guidelines were changed after former President Biden took office and urged platforms to remove content that encouraged citizens to drink bleach to cure COVID-19, as President Trump suggested in 2020, or join insurrection efforts launched on Jan. 6, 2021, to overthrow his 2020 presidential win. But the company said the Biden administration’s decisions were “unacceptable” and “wrong,” while noting it would forgo future fact-checking mechanisms and instead allow users to add context notes to content.
While mired in controversy from all sides, the Walt Disney Company has unveiled price hikes for Disney+ and its other streaming services today.
As of October 21, Disney+ will cost up to 20 percent more, depending on the plan you have. Disney+ with ads is increasing from $10 to $12 per month, while the ad-free plan is going from $16 to $19 per month. The annual, ad-free plan will go from $160 to $190.
Acquisitions have enabled Disney to own multiple streaming services, so it’s not just Disney+ subscribers who will be impacted. Subscriptions for Hulu and ESPN Select will also increase, as will all Hulu + Live TV plans and bundles of Disney’s three subscription-based streaming services.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: While many vibe-coding startups have become unicorns, with valuations in the billions, one area where AI-assisted coding has not yet taken off is on mobile devices. Despite the numerous apps now available that offer vibe-coding tools on mobile platforms, none are gaining noticeable downloads, and few are generating any revenue at all. According to an analysis of global app store trends by the app intelligence provider Appfigures, only a small handful of mobile apps offering vibe-coding tools have seen any downloads, let alone generated revenue.
The largest of these is Instance: AI App Builder, which has seen only 16,000 downloads and $1,000 in consumer spending. The next largest app, Vibe Studio, has pulled in just 4,000 downloads but has made no money. This situation could still change, of course. The market is young, and vibe-coding apps continue to improve and work out the bugs. New apps in this space are arriving all the time, too. This year, a startup called Vibecode launched with $9.4 million in seed funding from Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six. The company’s service allows users to create mobile apps using AI within its own iOS app. Vibecode is so new, Appfigures doesn’t yet have data on it. For now, most people who want to toy around with vibe-coding technology are doing so on the desktop.
Some Gigabyte customers were under the impression that all Gigabyte Aorus GeForce RTX 5090 and 5080 GPUs feature a liquid metal thermal interface material, while it was only officially mentioned on marketing materials for the liquid-cooled Waterforce cards. Still, the confusion spread an expectation among Gigabyte GPU owners and popular YouTuber
The MX Linux team announced today the general availability of the beta version of the upcoming MX Linux 25 distribution based on the recently released Debian 13 “Trixie” operating system series.
Next year, baseball reasons will have one less reason to rage at the umpire. Major League Baseball announced today that it will introduce the Automated Ball Strike challenge system in the 2026 season for all spring training, championship season and postseason games. In other words, next year there will be a way for the players to attempt to overturn an umpire’s call about whether a pitch counts as a strike or a ball if they disagree with the initial decision.
ABS uses a network of a dozen camera to record every pitch thrown. The umpire will still call the pitch a ball or strike as usual, but under the new system, the pitcher, catcher or batter can immediately challenge that decision. Coaching staff and other players cannot offer input on whether or not a challenge is initiated. If the cameras show any part of the ball touching the batter’s strike zone, the pitch will be counted as a strike. All teams will begin a game with two challenge opportunities, and only lose them if they challenge unsuccessfully. For games that go into extra innings, a team will get an additional challenge if it has none remaining at the start of the additional gameplay.
Baseball has taken a gradual path to introducing this tech. ABS has been tested at the Triple-A level since 2022, and it finally got a chance in the majors during spring training and in the All-Star Game this year. Other sports have also been leveraging electronics to ensure that gameplay rules and scoring are consistent. Football/soccer has implemented a video assistant referee (VAR) system in several leagues, including FIFA and the UK’s Premier league. Tennis is also adopting electronic line calls at Wimbledon and other tournaments. Even the electronic systems are not infallible, but considering how much any high-level athletic endeavor can be won or lost by millimeters, having a backup for the human eye seems like a net positive.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/major-league-baseball-will-adopt-an-automated-challenge-system-in-2026-205023531.html?src=rss
Curious to see if those Forza Horizon 6 rumors are true? You may not have long to wait. Xbox’s presentation at the Tokyo Game Show 2025 is fast approaching. You can watch the event live right here on September 25 at 6AM ET.
Forza Horizon 6 is rumored to have a Japan setting, making this week’s event a logical venue for its announcement. That’s not the only thing to go on. Windows Centralreported last month that it had seen official documentation suggesting the game would be announced at the Tokyo Game Show. An Xbox executive producer even posted earlier this month that it would be an event “you don’t want to miss.” (Am I sadistic for hoping he was hyping up something like a new Xbox dashboard feature?)
The Xbox brand could use some positive mojo. Last week, Microsoft announced that it would raise console prices for the second time in less than five months. The increase, which begins on October 3, was “due to changes in the macroeconomic environment.” (That sounds like a copywriter’s answer to “How do you say ‘tariffs’ without actually saying ‘tariffs?'”) It’s all the more reason the company would love to shift your focus to something fun.
You can stream Microsoft’s event below on September 25 at 6AM ET.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/xbox/how-to-watch-xboxs-tokyo-game-show-livestream-204657743.html?src=rss
The iPhone Air and Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge are getting most of the attention this year thanks to their ultra-thin designs and powerful hardware. Though, those looking for the ultimate smartphone experience will still need to pick up either the iPhone 17 Pro Max or the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra. Here’s what both devices bring to the table.
With the launch of the ROG Xbox Ally only a few weeks away on October 16, the fantasy of a portable Xbox is about to be a lot more real. As a recent video from YouTuber James Channel shows, though, with a first-generation Xbox and the right components, you can make your own version of an Xbox handheld right now. Just don’t expect it to be pretty.
James’ “portable monstrosity” strips away the original Xbox’s large plastic casing and thick internal cables and preserves the bare essentials: a motherboard and the console’s disk drive, with a new flash drive and a display from an iPod video accessory. All those components are precariously mounted between the left and right halves of an Xbox controller, for a complete package that seems less easy to hold than ASUS’ current handheld PCs, but only marginally so. It’s a quick and dirty assembly with a surprising amount of super glue — a far cry from the polished Xbox 360 handheld created by YouTuber Millomaker — but it gets the job done.
You can already stream Xbox games to a multitude of screens, or play their PC versions on a growing number of handheld PCs. You don’t need to turn an original Xbox into a portable device, but considering Microsoft and ASUS have yet to announce pricing for their new handhelds, maybe keep this cheaper alternative in your back pocket.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/xbox/theres-more-than-one-way-to-make-an-xbox-handheld-201503415.html?src=rss
It’s not exactly hard to find politically conservative content on YouTube, but the platform may soon skew even further to the right. YouTube parent Alphabet has confirmed that it will restore channels that were banned in recent years for spreading misinformation about COVID-19 and elections. Alphabet says it values free expression and political debate, placing the blame for its previous moderation decisions on the Biden administration.
Alphabet made this announcement via a lengthy letter to Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio). The letter, a response to subpoenas from the House Judiciary Committee, explains in no uncertain terms that the company is taking a more relaxed approach to moderating political content on YouTube.
For starters, Alphabet denies that its products and services are biased toward specific viewpoints and that it “appreciates the accountability” provided by the committee. The cloying missive goes on to explain that Google didn’t really want to ban all those accounts, but Biden administration officials just kept asking. Now that the political tables have turned, Google is looking to dig itself out of this hole.
An analysis of a literature database finds that text-generating AI tools — including ChatGPT and Gemini — can be used to rewrite scientific papers and produce ‘copycat’ versions that are then passed off as new research. Nature: In a preprint posted on medRxiv on 12 September, researchers identified more than 400 such papers published in 112 journals over the past 4.5 years, and demonstrated that AI-generated biomedicine studies could evade publishers’ anti-plagiarism checks.
The study’s authors warn that individuals and paper mills — companies that produce fake papers to order and sell authorships — might be exploiting publicly available health data sets and using large language models (LLMs) to mass-produce low-quality papers that lack scientific value.
“If left unaddressed, this AI-based approach can be applied to all sorts of open-access databases, generating far more papers than anyone can imagine,” says Csaba Szabo, a pharmacologist at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, who was not involved in the work. “This could open up Pandora’s box [and] the literature may be flooded with synthetic papers.”
Amazon is pivoting its grocery operations in the UK, announcing that it will close 14 of its Amazon Fresh stores in the country. The remaining five Amazon Fresh locations in the UK will be converted to the Whole Foods Market brand. Rather than the brick and mortar shops, Amazon said it will focus on online grocery deliveries within the region. In 2026, the company said it expects to add perishables to its Same-Day Delivery orders for UK customers, which was just introduced in the US last month.
The move echoes a similar contraction in 2023, where Amazon said it would shutter both some Fresh supermarkets and some Go convenience stores. Many of these shops highlighted the Just Walk Out tech from Amazon, which it introduced in the US in 2018 and in the UK in 2021. Just Walk Out eliminated cashiers in those stores and instead charged customers by using a network of cameras, sensors and human observers to calculate the tab for a person’s purchase and then charge them afterwards. However, the approach turned out to have problems with cost, accuracy and privacy to the point of being unsustainable; Amazon stopped using Just Walk Out in the US last year.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/amazon-is-closing-all-fresh-grocery-stores-in-the-uk-195200222.html?src=rss
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr wants you to know that he never threatened to revoke TV licenses if Disney refused to suspend Jimmy Kimmel. The problem for Carr is that lots of people heard him do exactly that last week.
“There’s a lot of Democrats out there that are engaged in a campaign of projection and distortion,” Carr said during an on-stage interview at the Concordia Summit yesterday. “The distortion is they’re completely misrepresenting the work of the FCC and what we’ve been doing. I saw there’s a letter from some Senate Democrats that said the FCC threatened to revoke the license of Disney and ABC if they didn’t fire Jimmy Kimmel, and that did not happen in any way, shape, or form.”
While Carr complained that Democrats interpreted his comments as a threat to Disney, he didn’t mention that his comments were also interpreted as a threat by several prominent Senate Republicans. Disney suspended Kimmel’s show last week after Carr said ABC affiliates could have licenses revoked for “news distortion,” but reinstated Kimmel yesterday after facing backlash from the public. Kimmel will be back on the air on many ABC-affiliated stations, but not those run by Nexstar and Sinclair, which have replaced Jimmy Kimmel Live! with news and other programming.
Long-time contributor Ellen Davis steps down after GitHub access shake-up and governance disputeA decade-long RubyGems maintainer, Ellen Davis (also known as duckinator), has resigned from Ruby Central following what she described as a “hostile takeover” of the open source project.…
AI is an enormous energy drain, contributing to greenhouse gas emissions at a time when the planet desperately needs progress in the opposite direction. Although most of that comes from running GPUs, cooling them is another significant overhead. So, it’s worth noting when a company of Microsoft’s stature claims to have achieved a breakthrough in chip cooling.
Microsoft’s new system is based on microfluidics, a method long pursued but hard to implement. The company claims its approach could lead to three times better cooling than current methods.
Many data centers rely on cold plates to prevent GPUs from overheating. Although effective to a degree, the plates are separated from the heat source by several layers of material, which limits their performance. “If you’re still relying heavily on traditional cold plate technology [in five years], you’re stuck,” Microsoft program manager Sashi Majety is quoted as saying in the company’s announcement.
In microfluidics, the coolant flows closer to the source. The liquid in Microsoft’s prototype moves through thread-like channels etched onto the back of the chip. The company also used AI to more efficiently direct the coolant through those channels.
Microsoft
Another aspect separating this prototype from previous attempts is that it drew inspiration from Mother Nature. As you can see in the image above, the etchings resemble the veins in a leaf or a butterfly wing.
Microsoft says the technique can reduce the maximum silicon temperature rise inside a GPU by 65 percent. (However, that number depends on the workload and chip type.) This would enable overclocking “without worrying about melting the chip down,” Microsoft’s Jim Kleewein said. It could allow the company to place servers closer together physically, reducing latency. It would also lead to “higher-quality” waste heat use.
Although this sounds good for the environment in a general sense, Microsoft’s announcement doesn’t lean into that. The blog post primarily discusses the technique’s potential for performance and efficiency gains. Green benefits are only alluded to briefly as “sustainability” and reduced grid stress. Let’s hope that’s only a case of a cynical observer overanalyzing framing. Our planet needs all the help it can get.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/microsoft-claims-a-breakthrough-in-ai-chip-cooling-193106705.html?src=rss
Let it never be said that tariffs don’t work. In a bid to avoid tariffs and satisfy customer requirements for “made in the USA” parts, MediaTek is purportedly pondering a deal with TSMC to have some of its chips created in TSMC’s fabs right here in the US of A. This news comes to us from Nikkei Asia, who reports that the $74.3B chipmaker hasn’t
