Apple is weighing price increases for its fall iPhone lineup, a step it is seeking to couple with new features and design changes, according to WSJ, which cited people familiar with the matter. From the report: The company is determined to avoid any scenario in which it appears to attribute price increases to U.S. tariffs on goods from China, where most Apple devices are assembled, the people said. The U.S. and China agreed Monday to suspend most of the tariffs they had imposed on each other in a tit-for-tat trade war.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
If you’re wondering what your computer’s BIOS or UEFI is, and whether or not you need to update it, you’ve come to the right place. I’ll explain what these terms mean, what these pieces of software do, and why it might (or might not) be a good idea to install updates for them.
The BIOS (Basic Input/Output System) or UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) is something every computer has, though unless you’re running an ancient computer, you’ll have a UEFI installed rather than a BIOS.
And we’re dealing specifically with Windows computers here: Macs take their own custom approach to this, as Apple is in control of the operating system and the underlying motherboard and chipset in a way that Microsoft and PC makers aren’t. On Apple computers, all you need to do is make sure macOS is up to date.
Your PC’s BIOS or UEFI represents the lowest level of software, the most fundamental and foundational code running on your machine, often known as firmware. It runs from the motherboard, ensures all the various components of your computer are talking to each other, and makes the necessary preparations for Windows to boot up.
BIOS is the older technology; computers sold today use UEFI instead. In simple terms, UEFI improves on the basics of BIOS, adding support for more modern security standards and internal components. However, both BIOS and UEFI are essentially doing the same job.
With the advent of UEFI, we got some helpful upgrades in terms of user interface, too: Nowadays you can access the firmware using a mouse, whereas before you were limited to keyboard operation. There’s now provision for accessing the internet too, before you get into the Windows operating system.
As often happens with computing terms, BIOS and UEFI can sometimes be used interchangeably. If you see talk about a BIOS with a modern computer, it’s almost certainly talking about the UEFI, reflecting that the latter has effectively replaced the former. There are some rather detailed technical differences, too, but most of us don’t need to know about them.
That’s the big question—and you’ll find a variety of answers online. A good general approach is to not worry too much about BIOS/UEFI updates unless you’re experiencing problems, or you’ve been told to run an update by your PC manufacturer. These updates aren’t quite as crucial as Windows updates for performance and security.
That said, BIOS/UEFI updates can absolutely bring security and performance improvements with them. As Dell puts it, updates can enhance “performance, stability, and compatibility with new software and hardware.” Meanwhile, HP recommends updates if you need to support new hardware or fix known bugs and issues.
There’s no doubt you can completely brick your computer with a firmware upgrade, but then that’s true of a Windows update or a hard drive upgrade. As long as you follow the instructions provided by the maker of your PC or your PC’s motherboard, you shouldn’t run into any problems—though maybe double-check all your backups are current.
I’d recommend keeping an eye open for updates from whichever company made your PC or manufactured the motherboard inside it (find and run System Information from the Start menu to identify your motherboard). If an urgent BIOS/UEFI upgrade is needed, or if an update will add some major new functionality, you should then hear about it.
The exact method for updating your PC’s BIOS or UEFI will depend on the make and model of motherboard you have installed. Traditionally, BIOS/UEFI updates have been done by running a utility from a USB drive and rebooting your PC, but nowadays you’ll most likely have a variety of options to pick from.
If you’ve got a Dell PC, for example, you’ve got no fewer than seven different update options to pick from. The easiest options are to use Dell’s SupportAssist utility or to look out for firmware patches in Windows Update: In both cases you can take care of everything through Windows, without any extra software.
I’ve got an Asus motherboard, which means the MyAsus utility for updating the BIOS/UEFI and the latest updates themselves are available via the Asus Download Center. Other motherboard makers have similar portals, enabling you to search for the model you’ve got and find the most recent utilities for them.
As for getting to the BIOS/UEFI itself, the process for this varies by PC too: Typically, when your PC boots up, it’ll tell you the key you need to press to head to the BIOS/UEFI instead of Windows. From Windows itself, you can open Settings then choose System > Recovery and click Restart now next to Advanced startup. When your PC reboots, pick Troubleshoot > Advanced options > UEFI Firmware Settings.
It doesn’t mean much to anyone with a job, but summer’s coming in quick, and only grade-grubbers are still paying attention in school. The other kids are wasting their time exactly how you’d expect: watching kitten body horror videos, discovering 20-year-old RPGs, and throwing bowling balls into helicopter blades. Here’s what’s shaping (and warping) young minds this week.
If you have younger kids, summer can mean more screen time, and I wanted to check out what kids are watching when their guardian hands them that tablet, so I spent some time on YouTube looking at animated videos that seem geared to children. The place is lousy with algorithmically generated kitten torture videos where little cats with big eyes are injured, operated upon, beset by monsters, and otherwise horribly abused in videos like “Cat’s Belly Contains Countless Worms!”
and “Kitten Abused by it [sic] own mother Cat“
and my personal favorite, “Kitten Belly has Spiders, Rats, Worms, Alien Parasites” (I’m a fan of Oxford commas.)
Countless YouTube (and Instagram, and TiktTok) channels with names like Kittens Kitten, and QQ Meow churn out these videos by combining frequently searched keywords like “cute cat” or “kitten” with scenarios that are shocking or scary to children, like going to the doctor or being abused by a parent. Videos that get views, like “The betrayal of the cat father and the revenge plan of the kitten” (this has been viewed 72 million times in the last three months) or “The kitten suddenly encountered a mutated big-eyed school bus“(63 million views) are ripped off endlessly, and AI hones and iterates them into a nightmare feedback loop that children stare at for hours.
It’s not art made for kids. It’s art made at kids.
But on the other hand—whenever things can be boiled down to “won’t someone, please, think of the children?” it’s time to look a little deeper. Adults tend to view children’s world through rose-colored glasses, but that’s how we want childhood to be. In reality, children are nearly powerless in a world they can’t understand or contextualize, so of course they’re going to deal with their fears through art; that’s why we have art.
Well-meaning adults have spent decades sanitizing children’s media, excising disturbing and horrific elements under the guise of protecting kids, but judging by the 19 million views of “Abusive Cat Father,” kids clearly want it and, more importantly, they’re getting something from it. Death, betrayal evil, horror, and abuse are time-honored staples of children’s literature. Is there any theme more classic than “evil mother (or stepmother) abuses innocent child?”
I only wish it wasn’t all so poorly made. Grimm’s fairy tales and their ilk were written by talented people, not the kind of real-life ghouls who use AI to game YouTube’s kids’ video algorithm. I never had a problem with my own kid watching movies society said were too mature for him, but only if they were good. I draw the line at bad art.
As a greybeard from way back, I love when a new generation of nerds discovers something awesome from the past. On April 22, developer Bethesda surprised the video gaming world by stealth-releasing a 20-year-old role-playing game, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. And the kids are into it; the nerdy ones, anyway. Some quality-of-life issues with the original game have been addressed, but the quirky, buggy, batshit Oblivion fun was left intact. They even left most of the glitches intact. I’ve been playing it since it was released, and it plays differently than modern games in the genre. There’s less handholding and funneling players toward a specific experience. There’s less of a feeling that a corporate board approved every decision and more of a feeling of freedom, and kids are into it. They’re making memes and posting videos of funny glitches. It’s like the old days. As RiceLife659 put it on Reddit, “Finally able to play Oblivion now and I’m in love. More in depth in terms of systems than Skyrim and the jank is hilarious. 20 hours in and every minute I wish I was born earlier.” .
I feel like saying, “gather ’round, young ‘uns, and let me tell you the story of the cursed Oblivion horse armor…”
The slang term “deriod” combines “dick” and “period” and is used to refer to a man’s (hypothetical) period. Here’s even more Gen Z and Gen Alpha slang, if you’re interested.
“0.5 GPA Activities” (or “0.3 GPA Activities, or (WHATEVER) GPA Activities”) refers to videos that show what the kids who aren’t gunning for class salutatorian are doing in school. The genesis was a video called “4.0 GPA Activities” in which supposedly smart band-kids balance things precariously. In response, less, um, accomplished students started posting videos of themselves doing things like making sculptures from the cafeteria food:
stacking soda cans in lockers:
intentionally shorting out their school-issued Chromebooks:
and stealing fire extinquishers:
It’s the kind of trend that went from funny to a little harmful quickly, so check out these videos now, before TikTok bans the entire genre.
How can you not click a video called “Bowling Ball Vs 700kmh Helicopter Blades”? It’s the kind of content we all need as summer starts to roll in.
The bowling ball alone would have been enough, but the guys behind YouTube channel How Ridiculous also throw tomatoes, a hardhat, a phone, a baseball bat, a guy (a fake guy, anyway) and more through the spinning blades of a chopper. It’s all presented in super slow motion: exactly how you want to watch things get chopped apart by a helicopter propeller.
As for the video’s dramatic question, you might assume the answer is obvious: Blades win. But life is full of surprises. That’s why we do science.
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If you’ve been waiting for the right time to upgrade your Apple Watch, the Series 10 has quietly become one of the best-value picks around. It launched in September and has already dropped to $299 on Amazon—that’s $100 off the $399 sticker price.
This deal is for the 42mm GPS model with a Rose Gold Aluminum case and Plum Sport Loop, and according to price trackers, it’s the lowest price it’s hit so far. This is likely the Apple Watch sweet spot for most users, especially those still hanging onto an older SE model. And while it still shares some DNA with the Series 9, there are enough subtle upgrades to make it a solid step up. This Lifehacker review even called it the best Apple Watch for most people, which checks out considering how many core features it brings without fully diving into the Ultra pricing zone. Learn more about how it stacks up against other flagship smartwatches in our comparison post here.
You’re getting a thinner design and a slightly larger OLED display, which might not sound like a game changer—but does make everything feel roomier and more responsive. Apple also improved audio playback, so now you can actually listen to Spotify or podcasts straight from the watch’s speakers (no AirPods needed in a pinch). The updated sleep tracking also got smarter, with the watch nudging you if it notices signs of sleep apnea. That’s something you didn’t get before unless you were splurging on the Apple Watch Ultra. Same with the new depth and water temperature sensors—they now auto-activate underwater, a nice addition for swimmers or divers, notes this PCMag review. The Vitals app with Watch OS 11 gives you an energy score, too, which is basically a daily report card for your body based on multiple health metrics.
That said, it’s not perfect. The blood oxygen sensor still hasn’t made a return, which might be a letdown for folks who used it regularly on older models. Battery life stays in the 18–36 hour range, depending on how many features you have running. It’s good enough for a day or so, but it’s not exactly a multi-day performer. Still, the Series 10 earned PCMag’s Editor’s Choice and their Best Apple Smartwatch of the Year 2024 award, which says something. If you’re not chasing Ultra-level features but want something smarter, faster, and more capable than the SE, this is worth considering, especially now that it’s hit its lowest price.
While apples and broccoli have become basic—constantly on the grocery store shelves year-round—rhubarb is a vegetable unicorn. It only appears for a very short and magical window. I’ll spot it in the market for maybe a month and before I know it, I’ve missed it. That’s why I buy bundles of it when I do happen to catch it, and I get right to work. Not cooking it down in a pot with a cup of sugar, no: My favorite way to prepare rhubarb for pies and cakes is roasting.
My first time working with rhubarb was right out of culinary school, making dozens of miniature strawberry and rhubarb tarts. It was actually my first time eating it too. We would roast the rhubarb together with strawberries to make these tarts; the filling tasted like nature’s sour candy. I was hooked on the stuff and I assumed all rhubarb desserts would have the same bright pink shade and puckering bite as those tarts. This was not the case.
I’ve eaten some soggy rhubarb cakes and mushy pies since then, and I’ve wondered why rhubarb could be giving everyone so much trouble. Upon talking to a friend recently, I realized that a lot of folks are cooking their precious spring crop in pots, essentially making compotes or jams, and then adding them to cakes and pies. While still delicious, cooking rhubarb this way leads to color loss (muted pinks and browns) and, because it doesn’t have much natural pectin, it turns a bit gloopy. But you can avoid that fate with a simple, and relatively quick, roast in the oven.
There are a few different ways to do it depending on your preference.
My favorite way, and the same way we did it in the bakery, is to chop up rhubarb into half-inch to full inch chunks, and add them to a bowl with cut strawberries. Add a couple tablespoons of sugar and toss it all together. (You can do this without the berries too.) Pour this mixture straight onto a baking pan and spread it out into a single layer. Bake this for 20 to 25 minutes at 350°F, or until the strawberries and rhubarb have little puddles of juice around them and slightly browned edges. Allow them to cool completely before scraping them off.
Toss chopped rhubarb with sugar again, but this time, pour it all into a casserole dish or another type of deep baking dish. Cover the top with foil and bake for 20 minutes at 350°F. Allow the dish to cool with the foil in place.
I prefer the open roasting method because this allows some of the moisture to escape, and so the flavors become more concentrated. The lack of moisture also allows the bright pink color to stay true, and even deepen, rather than leech away into the moisture. Personally, I think the biggest boon of this method is that the chunks of rhubarb do not turn to absolute slush. The plant cooks and softens within but also dries out slightly on the edges, creating a bit of support. You can toss the bits into a pie or cake batter and still discern the pieces on the other side.
Whether or not you decide to roast, rhubarb is in season right now, so make the most of this festive plant while you can.
Jonathan Goldstein’s Heavyweight, where he helps people confront things from their past, is one of the most beloved podcasts of all time. In 2023 when Spotify was making huge cuts, it was one of them. But earlier this year, Malcolm Gladwell’s Pushkin Industries picked it back up, and episodes will be returning soon. If you want more Heavyweight-ish stuff now, this list of podcasts will keep you satisfied. They share Heavyweight’s ethos—curiosity, empathy, a sense of humor, and beautiful audio.
Wiretap is Jonathan Goldstein’s earlier CBC show, and it’s the spiritual ancestor of Heavyweight—weird, warm, and moving. Each episode blends scripted monologue with real-life moments and absurd sketches, all wrapped in Goldstein’s signature self-deprecating wit. It’s looser and more surreal than Heavyweight, but the emotional core is the same: people trying to make sense of themselves and each other. You’ll hear stories that feel like confessions told late at night, or voicemails from someone who knows you better than you know yourself. Listening to Wiretap is like reading Jonathan’s diary—and discovering it’s somehow yours, too.
Yowei Shaw is trying to help people. With her beautiful show Proxy, Yowei (who refers to herself as an emotional journalist) solves niche emotional conundrums, investigated by proxy—finding people with unresolved relationships and linking them up with a stranger who can help them better understand their problems. (Recently she connected a man whose wife left him for another woman with another woman who left her husband for a woman.) Yowei comes from the massively popular podcast NPR Invisibilia, so you can trust her to deliver a good story that is tender and professionally structured. There is nothing like Proxy, making it a space for unique conversations never heard before.
Selected Shorts is like a mixed bag for audio lovers, a magazine and time capsule all in one. Every month, executive producer and host Mitra Kaboli releases curated audio documentaries, interviews, and discussions made by and with the best people in the business. This is the stuff from the past that has inspired some of the best things you’re listening to now. There is free content on the feed (I recommend “Call Now” by Sean Cole, a hilarious piece about lawyer ads) but you need a subscription to get all the goodies.
In episodes of Family Ghosts, host Sam Dingman starts with a personal mystery—an old family rumor, a missing person—and digs until he finds gold. It’s the mystery that snags your attention, but it’s Sam’s thoughtful meditation on what it means that will keep you adding these episodes to your queue. These are stories about identity, legacy, and truth that often lack a tidy resolution, like so many of our relationships. It’s tender and comforting to hear about the complications that are happening in other people’s families. It’s why we peek into windows at night; it makes us feel less alone.
Phoebe Judge’s This is Love has the same soulful curiosity and emotional depth that makes Heavyweight so beloved. It’s almost like Phoebe is painting a mural of the theme of love, and she is using human stories about love in all forms (friendship, romance, love for animals) to do it. Her voice is famously calm and steady, the kind that makes you want to sit still and really listen to what she has to say as she unspools stories of connection, devotion, and the unexpected ways love shows up in people’s lives. The show isn’t afraid of melancholy, but always offers a sense of awe rather than despair.
On Snap Judgment, Glynn Washington is your emcee for a poetry slam of stories, starting out each episode with one of his own, told with such energy that you can feel it pulsing through your body. Then he hands the mic to his storyteller and you hear their story, expertly assembled with killer beats. The result? Movies for your ears. These stories—a foreign negotiator attempts to free an American journalist being held captive, someone experiences a glitch in the universe, an underwater photographer is saved by harp seals—will stick with you. Listen to just one story (I recommend starting with “The Border Hacker”) and join the huge community of Snappers who sit at the altar of storytelling master Glynn Washington, waiting for him to drop new beats.
Like Heavyweight, Articles of Interest is a meticulously crafted show that finds profound meaning in unexpected places. Host Avery Trufelman investigates the hidden histories behind clothing and fashion with the same mix of curiosity and narrative perfection that Jonathan Goldstein brings to his show. Both shows make the small feel big, unearthing emotional depth in things most of us overlook. There’s a gentle wit and generosity in the storytelling, making you feel smarter and more connected by the end of every episode. If Heavyweight is about people trying to understand their past, Articles of Interest is about understanding the past stitched into what we wear.
Episodes of Beautiful / Anonymous (short for Beautiful Stories from Anonymous People) take you to unexpected, human places. Every episode is a phone call to a stranger—host Chris Gethard sets his stop watch to 60 minutes and has a conversation with them, letting them take the conversation however they see fit. Chris Gethard brings a tender curiosity to every anonymous call, allowing space for the sometimes strange, sometimes funny, always heartfelt conversations that, like Heavyweight, often unlock a human mystery about someone. Chris has talked to a witch, a man whose wife is dying of cancer, a funeral director, someone who opens up about their heroin addiction, and many more.
The Memory Palace and Heavyweight are kindred spirits, both obsessed with the weight of the past. But with The Memory Palace, the stories are quieter and a little bit more mysterious. Nate DiMeo tells true, often forgotten tales with the rhythm of a lullaby and the punch of a good short story, slipping history into your ears like a secret. Episodes don’t need resolutions or jokes to get you to feel all the feelings, but episodes will stick in your head for a while. “The House of Lowe” is an evocative story about a pioneering woman in fashion, “Below, from Above” is an account of the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, and “I’m Still Alive” explores the history of premature burials.
Most Endless Thread stories begin with something strange found on Reddit and evolve from there into a story about people IRL. Using storytelling, interviews, and discussions, hosts Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson find the people involved in the stories and bring their threads to life. What makes it like Heavyweight is the mixture of mysteries and personal experiences that will give you a glimpse into the lives of people around the world, both online and off.
Evidence is mounting for “a vast reservoir of liquid water” on Mars, according to a new article by Australian National University professor Hrvoje TkalÄiÄ and geophysics associate professor Weijia Sun from the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences, announcing their recently published paper.
“Using seismic data from NASA’s InSight mission, we uncovered evidence that the seismic waves slow down in a layer between 5.4 and 8 kilometres below the surface, which could be because of the presence of liquid water at these depths.”
Mars is covered in traces of ancient bodies of water. But the puzzle of exactly where it all went when the planet turned cold and dry has long intrigued scientists… Billions of years ago, during the Noachian and Hesperian periods (4.1 billion to 3 billion years ago), rivers carved valleys and lakes shimmered. As Mars’ magnetic field faded and its atmosphere thinned, most surface water vanished. Some escaped to space, some froze in polar caps, and some was trapped in minerals, where it remains today. But evaporation, freezing and rocks can’t quite account for all the water that must have covered Mars in the distant past.
Calculations suggest the “missing” water is enough to cover the planet in an ocean at least 700 metres deep, and perhaps up to 900 metres deep. One hypothesis has been that the missing water seeped into the crust. Mars was heavily bombarded by meteorites during the Noachian period, which may have formed fractures that channelled water underground. Deep beneath the surface, warmer temperatures would keep the water in a liquid state — unlike the frozen layers nearer the surface.
In 2018, NASA’s InSight lander touched down on Mars to listen to the planet’s interior with a super-sensitive seismometer. By studying a particular kind of vibration called “shear waves”, we found a significant underground anomaly: a layer between 5.4 and 8 kilometres down where these vibrations move more slowly. This “low-velocity layer” is most likely highly porous rock filled with liquid water, like a saturated sponge. Something like Earth’s aquifers, where groundwater seeps into rock pores. We calculated the “aquifer layer” on Mars could hold enough water to cover the planet in a global ocean 520-780m deep.
InSight’s seismometer captured vibrations between the crust of Mars and its lower layers from two meteorite impacts in 2021 and a Marsquake in 2022. “These signatures let us pinpoint boundaries where rock changes, revealing the water-soaked layer 5.4 to 8 kilometres deep.”
It’s an exciting possibility. “Purified, it could provide drinking water, oxygen, or fuel for rockets.” And since microbes thrives on earth in deep rocks filled with water, “Could similar life, perhaps relics of ancient Martian ecosystems, persist in these reservoirs?”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
It’s taken a while, but I’ve finally found the thing I want generative AI to do for me: program a damn fine cup of coffee.
Program, that is, but not make—that’s the job of the Fellow Aiden, a coffee maker that crafts automated, precision pour-overs in a countertop-ready cube. Thanks to other folks who love their Aidens, as well as API tweaking and large language model training, I can hand this mechanical robot a GPT-generated recipe and get impressive coffee out of it.
Strictly speaking, absolutely none of this is necessary. Humans can make great coffee with fresh beans, decent gear, time, patience, and experience. Experiments will reveal the differences in light and dark roasts, Ethiopian and Venezuelan, washed and honey-processed beans, or how often one agitates the grounds. But faced with something brand new, even an experienced brewer can be stumped and spend a good deal of time and none-too-cheap beans trying to get everything just right.
It’s been a mobile-only game for decades. Then a little more than a week ago Infinity Nikkireleased its 1.5 update (which introduced multiplayer and customization options) and launched the game on Steam.
But it “didn’t go over as planned,” writes the worker-owned gaming site Aftermath, citing some very negative reactions on Reddit. (Some players say that in response the game’s publisher is now even censoring the word “boycott” on its official forums and community spaces…)
Infinity Nikki players were immediately incensed by a bevy of bugs and general game instability, and made even more angry by several baffling changes to both the story and its monetization structure… Players globally are vowing to stay off the game until Infold Games addresses their concerns, including at least one Infinity Nikki creator who is part of the game’s partner program… [T]he Chinese Infinity Nikki community — as well as others — has been flooding Steam with negative reviews of the game… [T]he complaints are also impacting Infinity Nikki’s review score on the Google Play Store… The company said it’s working to fix the patch’s performance issues, which have caused game-breaking bugs for some players….
[T]he Infinity Nikki team also gave players some free currency, but there’s been problems there, too: Players say Infold had a bug in this distribution, which awarded players too much free currency. Instead of letting players keep that — it was Infold’s mistake, after all — they deducted the currency, some of which players had already spent, putting them in the negative. But the community is looking for more from the studio; it wants an acknowledgement of the “dumpster fire” of a situation, as one Infinity Nikki player told Aftermath, but also wants some of the biggest problems reversed… Beyond the problematic monetization strategy, players Aftermath spoke with said they’re also pissed off at a major change to the start of the game… Infold Games removed the game’s original start with the update; the new intro drops players into Infinity Nikki with little context and a new, unexplained character who is supposed to be a guide as Nikki is dropped into intergalactic limbo.
While the spend-to-upgrade-your-character model has always been inherently predatory, as one player put it, the new update pushed the system “much too far for a lot of players,” according to the article — “something made more egregious by the numerous bugs and strange gameplay changes.” The article now describes some players as “upset that the trust they’ve given Infold Games thus far has been broken.”
“Infold Games has not responded to a request for comment.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The United States and China said Monday they reached an agreement to temporarily reduce the tariffs [non-paywalled source] they have imposed on each other in an attempt to defuse the trade war threatening the world’s two largest economies. From a report: In a joint statement, the countries said they would suspend their respective tariffs for 90 days while they negotiate. Under the agreement, the United States would reduce the tariff on Chinese imports to 30 percent from its current 145 percent, while China would lower its import duty on American goods to 10 percent from 125 percent.
“We concluded that we have a shared interest,” said Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent at a news conference in Geneva where U.S. and Chinese officials met over the weekend. “The consensus from both delegations is that neither side wanted a decoupling,” he said. The agreement breaks an impasse that had brought trade between China and the United States to a halt. Many American businesses had suspended orders, holding out hope that the two countries could strike a deal to bring down the tariff rates while raising the spectre of price increases.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Business Insider tells the story in three bullet points:
– Big Tech companies depend on content made by others to train their AI models.
– Some of those creators say using their work to train AI is copyright infringement.
– The U.S. Copyright Office just published a report that indicates it may agree.
The office released on Friday its latest in a series of reports exploring copyright laws and artificial intelligence. The report addresses whether the copyrighted content AI companies use to train their AI models qualifies under the fair use doctrine. AI companies are probably not going to like what they read…
AI execs argue they haven’t violated copyright laws because the training falls under fair use. According to the U.S. Copyright Office’s new report, however, it’s not that simple. “Although it is not possible to prejudge the result in any particular case, precedent supports the following general observations,” the office said. “Various uses of copyrighted works in AI training are likely to be transformative. The extent to which they are fair, however, will depend on what works were used, from what source, for what purpose, and with what controls on the outputs — all of which can affect the market.”
The office made a distinction between AI models for research and commercial AI models. “When a model is deployed for purposes such as analysis or research — the types of uses that are critical to international competitiveness — the outputs are unlikely to substitute for expressive works used in training,” the office said. “But making commercial use of vast troves of copyrighted works to produce expressive content that competes with them in existing markets, especially where this is accomplished through illegal access, goes beyond established fair use boundaries.”
The report says outputs “substantially similar to copyrighted works in the dataset” are less likely to be considered transformative than when the purpose “is to deploy it for research, or in a closed system that constrains it to a non-substitutive task.”
“A day after the office released the report, President Donald Trump fired its director, Shira Perlmutter, a spokesperson told Business Insider.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
New episodes of season 2 of The Last of Us are premiering on HBO every Sunday night, and Ars’ Kyle Orland (who’s played the games) and Andrew Cunningham (who hasn’t) will be talking about them here every Monday morning. While these recaps don’t delve into every single plot point of the episode, there are obviously heavy spoilers contained within, so go watch the episode first if you want to go in fresh.
Andrew: We’re five episodes into this season of The Last of Us, and most of the infected we’ve seen have still been of the “mindless, screeching horde” variety. But in the first episode of the season, we saw Ellie encounter a single “smart” infected person, a creature that retained some sense of strategy and a self-preservation instinct. It implied that the show’s monsters were not done evolving and that the seemingly stable fragments of civilization that had managed to take root were founded on a whole bunch of incorrect assumptions about what these monsters were and what they could do.
Amidst all the human-created drama, the changing nature of the Mushroom Zombie Apocalypse is the backdrop of this week’s entire episode, starting and ending with the revelation that a 2003-vintage cordyceps nest has become a hotbed of airborne spores, ready to infect humans with no biting required.
This is news to me, as a Non-Game Player! But Kyle, I’m assuming this is another shoe that you knew the series was going to drop.
Kyle: Actually, no. I suppose it’s possible I’m forgetting something, but I think the “some infected are actually pretty smart now” storyline is completely new to the show. It’s just one of myriad ways the show has diverged enough from the games at this point that I legitimately don’t know where it’s going to go or how it’s going to get there at any given moment, which is equal parts fun and frustrating.
I will say that the “smart zombies” made for my first real “How are Ellie and Dina going to get out of this one?” moment, as Dina’s improvised cage was being actively torn apart by a smart and strong infected. But then, lo and behold, here came Deus Ex Jesse to save things with a timely re-entrance into the storyline proper. You had to know we hadn’t seen the last of him, right?
Ellie is good at plenty of things, but not so good at lying low.
Credit:
HBO
Andrew: As with last week’s subway chase, I’m coming to expect that any time Ellie and Dina seem to be truly cornered, some other entity is going to swoop down and “save” them at the last minute. This week it was an actual ally instead of another enemy that just happened to take out the people chasing Ellie and Dina. But it’s the same basic narrative fake-out.
I assume their luck will run out at some point, but I also suspect that if it comes, that point will be a bit closer to the season finale.
Kyle: Without spoiling anything from the games, I will say you can expect both Ellie and Dina to experience their fair share of lucky and unlucky moments in the episodes to come.
Speaking of unlucky moments, while our favorite duo is hiding in the park we get to see how the local cultists treat captured WLF members, and it is extremely not pretty. I’m repeating myself a bit from last week, but the lingering on these moments of torture feels somehow more gratuitous in an HBO show, even when compared to similarly gory scenes in the games.
Andrew: Well we had just heard these cultists compared to “Amish people” not long before, and we already know they don’t have tanks or machine guns or any of the other Standard Issue The Last of Us Paramilitary Goon gear that most other people have, so I guess you’ve got to do something to make sure the audience can actually take the cultists seriously as a threat. But yeah, if you’re squeamish about blood-and-guts stuff, this one’s hard to watch.
I do find myself becoming more of a fan of Dina and Ellie’s relationship, or at least of Dina as a character. Sure, her tragic backstory’s a bit trite (she defuses this criticism by pointing out in advance that it is trite), but she’s smart, she can handle herself, she is a good counterweight to Ellie’s rush-in-shooting impulses. They are still, as Dina points out, doing something stupid and reckless. But I am at least rooting for them to make it out alive!
Kyle: Personality wise the Dina/Ellie pairing has just as many charms as the Joel/Ellie pairing from last season. But while I always felt like Joel and Ellie had a clear motivation and end goal driving them forward, the thirst for revenge pushing Dina and Ellie deeper into Seattle starts to feel less and less relevant the more time goes on.
The show seems to realize this, too, stopping multiple times since Joel’s death to kind of interrogate whether tracking down these killers is worth it when the alternative is just going back to Jackson and prepping for a coming baby. It’s like the writers are trying to convince themselves even as they’re trying (and somewhat failing, in my opinion) to convince the audience of their just and worthy cause.
The cordyceps threat keeps evolving.
Credit:
HBO
Kyle: “We killed Joel” team member Nora definitely would have preferred if Ellie and Dina were playing that more domestic kind of game. As it stands, Ellie ends up pursuing her toward a miserable-looking death in a cordyceps-infested basement.
The chase scene leading up to this mirrors a very similar one in the game in a lot of ways. But while I found it easy to suspend my disbelief for the (very scripted) chase on the PlayStation, watching it in a TV show made me throw up my hands and say “come on, these heavily armed soldiers can’t stop a little girl that’s making this much ruckus?”
Andrew: Yeah Jesse can pop half a dozen “smart” zombies in half a dozen shots, but when it’s a girl with a giant backpack running down an open hallway everyone suddenly has Star Wars Stormtrooper aim. The visuals of the cordyceps den, with the fungified guys breathing out giant clouds of toxic spores, is effective in its unsettling-ness, at least!
This episode’s other revelation is that what Joel did to the Fireflies in the hospital at the end of last season is apparently not news to Ellie, when she hears it from Nora in the episode’s final moments. It could be that Ellie, Noted Liar, is lying about knowing this. But Ellie is also totally incapable of controlling her emotions, and I’ve got to think that if she had been surprised by this, we would have been able to tell.
Kyle: Yeah, saying too much about what Ellie knows and when would be risking some major spoilers. For now I’ll just say the way the show decided to mix things up by putting this detailed information in Nora’s desperate, spore-infested mouth kind of landed with a wet thud for me.
I was equally perplexed by the sudden jump cut from “Ellie torturing a prisoner” to “peaceful young Ellie flashback” at the end of the episode. Is the audience supposed to assume that this is what is going on inside Ellie’s head or something? Or is the narrative just shifting without a clutch?
An anonymous reader shared this report from the Verge:
This morning, while summarizing an Apple “product blitz” he expects for 2027, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman writes in his Power On newsletter that Apple is planning a “mostly glass, curved iPhone” with no display cutouts for that year, which happens to be the iPhone’s 20th anniversary… [T]he closest hints are probably in Apple patents revealed over the years, like one from 2019 that describes a phone encased in glass that “forms a continuous loop” around the device.
Apart from a changing iPhone, Gurman describes what sounds like a big year for Apple. He reiterates past reports that the first foldable iPhone should be out by 2027, and that the company’s first smart glasses competitor to Meta Ray-Bans will be along that year. So will those rumored camera-equipped AirPods and Apple Watches, he says. Gurman also suggests that Apple’s home robot — a tabletop robot that features “an AI assistant with its own personality” — will come in 2027…
Finally, Gurman writes that by 2027 Apple could finally ship an LLM-powered Siri and may have created new chips for its server-side AI processing.
Earlier this week Bloomberg reported that Apple is also “actively looking at” revamping the Safari web browser on its devices “to focus on AI-powered search engines.” (Apple’s senior VP of services “noted that searches on Safari dipped for the first time last month, which he attributed to people using AI.”)
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
What’s a reformed villain gotta do to impress the Justice League? That’s the dilemma faced by John Cena’s titular antihero in the first teaser for S2 of Peacemaker, James Gunn’s Emmy-nominated series spun off from his 2021 film, The Suicide Squad. We’ve got the same colorful cast of characters, but the new season will serve as something of a “soft reboot” as part of the new DC Universe (DCU) franchise.
(Spoilers for S1 and The Suicide Squad below.)
The eight-episode first season was set five months after the events of The Suicide Squad. Having survived a near-fatal shooting, Peacemaker—aka Christopher Smith—is recruited by the US government for a new mission: the mysterious Project Butterfly, led by a mercenary named Clemson Murn (Chukwudi Iwuji). The team also included A.R.G.U.S. agent John Economos (Steve Agee) of the Belle Reve Penitentiary, National Security Agency agent and former Waller aide Emilia Harcourt (Jennifer Holland), and new team member Leota Adebayo (Danielle Brooks).
OpenAI is currently in “a tough negotiation” with Microsoft, the Financial Times reports, citing “one person close to OpenAI.”
On the road to building artificial general intelligence, OpenAI hopes to unlock new funding (and launch a future IPO), according to the article, which says both sides are at work “rewriting the terms of their multibillion-dollar partnership in a high-stakes negotiation….”
Microsoft, meanwhile, wants to protect its access to OpenAI’s cutting-edge AI models…
[Microsoft] is a key holdout to the $260bn start-up’s plans to undergo a corporate restructuring that moves the group further away from its roots as a non-profit with a mission to develop AI to “benefit humanity”. A critical issue in the deliberations is how much equity in the restructured group Microsoft will receive in exchange for the more than $13bn it has invested in OpenAI to date.
According to multiple people with knowledge of the negotiations, the pair are also revising the terms of a wider contract, first drafted when Microsoft first invested $1bn into OpenAI in 2019. The contract currently runs to 2030 and covers what access Microsoft has to OpenAI’s intellectual property such as models and products, as well as a revenue share from product sales. Three people with direct knowledge of the talks said Microsoft is offering to give up some of its equity stake in OpenAI’s new for-profit business in exchange for accessing new technology developed beyond the 2030 cut off…
Industry insiders said a failure of OpenAI’s new plan to make its business arm a public benefits corporation could prove a critical blow. That would hit OpenAI’s ability to raise more cash, achieve a future float, and obtain the financial resources to take on Big Tech rivals such as Google. That has left OpenAI’s future at the mercy of investors, such as Microsoft, who want to ensure they gain the benefit of its enormous growth, said Dorothy Lund, professor of law at Columbia Law School.
Lund says OpenAI’s need for investors’ money means they “need to keep them happy.” But there also appears to be tension from how OpenAI competes with Microsoft (like targeting its potential enterprise customers with AI products). And the article notes that OpenAI also turned to Oracle (and SoftBank) for its massive AI infrastructure project Stargate. One senior Microsoft employee complained that OpenAI “says to Microsoft, ‘give us money and compute and stay out of the way: be happy to be on the ride with us’. So naturally this leads to tensions. To be honest, that is a bad partner attitude, it shows arrogance.”
The article’s conclusion? Negotiating new deal is “critical to OpenAI’s restructuring efforts and could dictate the future of a company…”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Fusion energy “took one step closer to reality,” announced the University of Texas at Austin, as their researchers joined with a team from Los Alamos National Laboratory and Type One Energy Group and “solved a longstanding problem in the field” — how to contain high-energy particles inside fusion reactors.
When high-energy alpha particles leak from a reactor, that prevents the plasma from getting hot and dense enough to sustain the fusion reaction. To prevent them from leaking, engineers design elaborate magnetic confinement systems, but there are often holes in the magnetic field, and a tremendous amount of computational time is required to predict their locations and eliminate them. In their paper published in Physical Review Letters, the research team describes having discovered a shortcut that can help engineers design leak-proof magnetic confinement systems 10 times as fast as the gold standard method, without sacrificing accuracy… “What’s most exciting is that we’re solving something that’s been an open problem for almost 70 years,” said Josh Burby, assistant professor of physics at UT and first author of the paper. “It’s a paradigm shift in how we design these reactors….”
This new method also can help with a similar but different problem in another popular magnetic fusion reactor design called a tokamak. In that design, there’s a problem with runaway electrons — high-energy electrons that can punch a hole in the surrounding walls. This new method can help identify holes in the magnetic field where these electrons might leak.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
