NASA satellites spotted five tropical cyclones churning in the Indian and Pacific Oceans late this month, revealing different points in the storms’ developments.
There’s a Surprisingly Large Crowd of Cyclones in the Southern Hemisphere Right Now
Category Archives: Technology
Salty game dev comments, easier mods are inside Command & Conquer’s source code
EA doesn’t always treat its classic library with respect, as evidenced by its recent barely touched-up The Sims Legacy Collection. But the folks shepherding Command & Conquer, a vanguard series in the bygone genre of real-time strategy (RTS) games, are seemingly fueled by a different kind of Tiberium.
After releasing a reverential remaster of the first two games in 2020 with 4K upscaling and behind-the-scenes looks at their full-motion video scenes, EA is now opening up the series even more to its fans. Source code for the original C&C, Red Alert, Renegade (the first-person one), and Generals/Zero Hour has been dropped on GitHub. Along with Steam Workshop support for most of the series, that should enable a new generation of mods for the games. Given the extent of the code available, mods could include the kinds of modern updates, like higher and wider resolutions or beefed-up textures and refresh rates, that all good games deserve.
Building and working with this code will not be a plug-and-play affair. The namesake 1995 game and its hugely popular 1996 Red Alert sequel require some older dependencies, like DirectX 5 and the Greenleaf Communications Library (for a full build and tool access) and the Borland Turbo Assembler (TASM 4.0) to compile. Renegade and Generals, however, call for a whole lot more nostalgia: STLport 4.5.3, the SafeDisk API, the GameSpy SDK, the RAD Miles Sound System SDK, and at least eight more.
Does Ozempic Raise Suicide Risk? Probably Not
A new study is the latest to find no evidence that GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic increase the risk of suicide.
Europol arrests 25 users of online network accused of sharing AI CSAM
Europe is cracking down on AI-generated sex images of minors. So far, Europol has arrested 25 people in a large-scale ongoing probe called Operation Cumberland and confirmed that more arrests are expected in the coming weeks.
In a press release, Europol said that the 24 arrests occurred simultaneously on February 26 after Danish law enforcement arrested a main suspect in November. That suspect is accused of running “an online platform where he distributed the AI-generated material he produced” for others willing to pay to “watch children being abused,” Europol alleged. The network was hidden from casual lurkers and required a “symbolic payment” to access, Europol said.
While fully AI-generated images may not depict real kids, at least one AI model (now scrubbed) has been trained on actual CSAM and images of real kids, so child safety experts fear outputs could potentially depict or resemble a known victim or actual child. And there’s growing consensus globally that, in general, AI-generated CSAM harms kids by normalizing child sex abuse through the increased prevalence of CSAM online.
Anker Solix C300’s Massive Portable Power Bank for the Minimal Price of Just $150
This ultra-compact 6-pound power bank is USB-C chargeable and delivers 300 watts and 90,000mAh of power wherever and whenever you need it most.
These Prehistoric Drag Marks Might Be the Earliest Evidence of Human Transport
Apparent 23,000-year-old tracks may have been left by Paleoindians pulling wooden vehicles carrying resources—and possibly even children.
President Trump: UK Encryption Policy ‘Something You Hear About With China’
President Trump has directly criticized the UK government’s approach to encryption, comparing recent actions to those of China. Speaking to The Spectator, Trump said he confronted UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer about the Home Office’s request for “backdoor access” to encrypted iCloud data, which led Apple to remove its Advanced Data Protection feature from British services entirely.
“We told them you can’t do this… That’s incredible. That’s something, you know, that you hear about with China,” Trump said after his meeting with Starmer. The remarks come as the Trump administration has directed Treasury and Commerce officials to examine UK tech regulations, including the Online Safety Act, for potential free speech violations and discrimination against US companies.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
“It’s a lemon”—OpenAI’s largest AI model ever arrives to mixed reviews
The verdict is in: OpenAI’s newest and most capable traditional AI model, GPT-4.5, is big, expensive, and slow, providing marginally better performance than GPT-4o at 30x the cost for input and 15x the cost for output. The new model seems to prove that longstanding rumors of diminishing returns in training unsupervised-learning LLMs were correct and that the so-called “scaling laws” cited by many for years have possibly met their natural end.
An AI expert who requested anonymity told Ars Technica, “GPT-4.5 is a lemon!” when comparing its reported performance to its dramatically increased price, while frequent OpenAI critic Gary Marcus called the release a “nothing burger” in a blog post (though to be fair, Marcus also seems to think most of what OpenAI does is overrated).
Former OpenAI researcher Andrej Karpathy wrote on X that GPT-4.5 is better than GPT-4o but in ways that are subtle and difficult to express. “Everything is a little bit better and it’s awesome,” he wrote, “but also not exactly in ways that are trivial to point to.”
Yes, it turns out you can make a Tesla Cybertruck even uglier
There’s a saying about putting lipstick on a pig, but what if it’s not lipstick? That’s the question the universe set out to answer when it aligned in such a way that famed (or perhaps infamous) car customizer Mansory got itself a Tesla Cybertruck. The Mansory Elongation—a name that must have taken ages to think of—offers exterior, interior, and wheel and tire upgrades for the straight-edged stainless steel-wrapped pickup.
Among those who mod cars, there are tuners, who focus on adding power and (one hopes) performance, and then there are the customizers, who concentrate more on aesthetics. Once upon a time, the entire luxury car industry worked like that—a client would buy a rolling chassis from Bugatti, Rolls-Royce, or Talbot and then have bodywork added by coachbuilders like Gurney Nutting, Touring, or Figoni et Falaschi.
At least the rear winglets don’t entirely compromise access to the bed.
Credit:
Mansory
Modern homologation requirements have mostly put an end to that level of coachbuilding, but for the ultra-wealthy prepared to spend telephone numbers on cars, brands like Rolls-Royce will still occasionally oblige. More common now are those aftermarket shops that spiff up already luxurious cars, changing normal doors for gullwing versions, adding flaring fenders and bulging wheel arches, and plastering the interior in any hue of leather one might imagine.
64 New Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror Books Beaming Down in March
New releases from Adrian Tchaikovsky, M.R. Carey, Arkady Martine, Seanan McGuire, Peter S. Beagle, Stephen Graham Jones, John Scalzi, Terry Brooks, Mary Robinette Kowal, Gregory Maguire, and more.
AquaSonic Ultra Whitening Toothbrush Drops to Just $30, Amazon’s Best-Selling Electric Toothbrush
Fight plaque and get whiter teeth with this electric toothbrush with multiple brush heads.
Microsoft Plans to Kill Skype, but Did It Ever Truly Live?
Microsoft will take Skype offline on May 5 and plans to force everybody to Teams.
Mozilla’s Updated ToS: We Own All Info You Put Into Firefox
New submitter SharkByte writes: Mozilla just updated its Terms of Use and Privacy Policy for Firefox with a very disturbing “You Give Mozilla Certain Rights and Permissions” clause: When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox. H/T to reader agristin as well, who also wrote about this.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
SEC Drops Charges Against Chinese Billionaire After He Pumps $30 Million Into Trump’s Crypto Scheme
Justin Sun is celebrating avoiding a fraud investigation by posting handshake emojis on X.
The Asus ROG Strix 27″ Gaming Monitor Just Dropped Below $200, Even Cheaper Than Last Holiday Season
Save yourself $70 on this 27” QHD gaming monitor from Asus over at Amazon.
Google Tweak Creates Crisis for Product-Review Sites
Google changed its rules around how product-review sites appear in its search engine. In the process, it devastated a once-lucrative corner [non-paywalled source] of the news media world. From a report: Sites including CNN Underscored and Forbes Vetted offer tips on everything from mattresses and knife sets to savings accounts, making money when users click on links and buy products.
They depend on Google to drive much of their traffic, and therefore revenue. But over the past year, Google created stricter rules that dinged certain sites that farm out articles to freelancers, among other things. The goal, Google has said, was to give users higher-quality search results. The outcome was a crisis for some sites. Traffic for Forbes Advisor, a personal-finance recommendation site, fell 83% in January from the same month the year before, according to data firm Similarweb.
CNN Underscored and Buy Side from WSJ, which is operated by Wall Street Journal parent Dow Jones, were both down by more than 25% in that period. Time magazine’s Time Stamped and the Associated Press’s AP Buyline, powered by Taboola Turnkey Commerce, ended their efforts in recent months. Taboola closed the commerce operation.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Details on AMD’s $549 and $599 Radeon RX 9070 GPUs, which aim at Nvidia and 4K
AMD is releasing the first detailed specifications of its next-generation Radeon RX 9070 series GPUs and the RDNA4 graphics architecture today, almost two months after teasing them at CES.
The short version is that these are both upper-midrange graphics cards targeting resolutions of 1440p and 4K and meant to compete mainly with Nvidia’s incoming and outgoing 4070- and 5070-series GeForce GPUs, including the RTX 4070, RTX 5070, RTX 4070 Ti and Ti Super, and the RTX 5070 Ti.
AMD says the RX 9070 will start at $549, the same price as Nvidia’s RTX 5070. The slightly faster 9070 XT starts at $599, $149 less than the RTX 5070 Ti. The cards go on sale March 6, a day after Nvidia’s RTX 5070.
AMD’s FSR 4 upscaling is exclusive to 90-series Radeon GPUs, won’t work on other cards
AMD’s new Radeon RX 90-series cards and the RDNA4 architecture make their official debut on March 5, and a new version of AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) upscaling technology is coming along with them.
FSR and Nvidia’s Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) upscalers have the same goal: to take a lower-resolution image rendered by your graphics card, bump up the resolution, and fill in the gaps between the natively rendered pixels to make an image that looks close to natively rendered without making the GPU do all that rendering work. These upscalers can make errors, and they won’t always look quite as good as a native-resolution image. But they’re both nice alternatives to living with a blurry, non-native-resolution picture on an LCD or OLED display.
FSR and DLSS are especially useful for older or cheaper 1080p or 1440p-capable GPUs that are connected to a 4K monitor, where you’d otherwise have to decide between a sharp 4K image and a playable frame rate; it’s also useful for hitting higher frame rates at lower resolutions, which can be handy for high-refresh-rate gaming monitors.
Severance Answered One of Its Biggest Questions With a Truly Mind-Melting Episode
“Chikhai Bardo,” the seventh episode of Severance season two, may be one of the show’s best.
The Samsung 990 Pro Internal SSD Is at Its Lowest Price of the Year on Amazon for a Limited Time
With 1TB of storage space, you’re covered no matter what it is you need to do.