Lightyear Frontier is “an open-world farming exploration” game that’s coming to the PC. You build a farm, you go exploring and you harvest resources, only instead of being an aww shucks innocent kid moving to a new town, you’re piloting a huge mech on an alien world.
Source: Kotaku – Lightyear Frontier Is Another Farming Game, Only This Time With Mechs
The official Shutter PPA has been revived! Since I was already maintaining a PPA for Shutter screenshot tool, and the tool’s developers were looking for someone to maintain the official Shutter PPA, they thought I’d maintain it.
Source: LXer – Official Shutter Screenshot Tool Launchpad PPA Revived
Cormac McCarthy, author of many a novel about dark, dark things, has never been on Twitter, but that hasn’t stopped other people from tweeting for him.
Source: Gizmodo – Guy Behind Fake Cormac McCarthy Twitter Account is Actually a California Gubernatorial Candidate
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: A Twitter image-cropping algorithm prefers to show faces that are slimmer, younger and with lighter skin, a researcher has found. Bogdan Kulynyc won $3,500 in a Twitter-organized contest to find biases in its cropping algorithm. Earlier this year, Twitter’s own research found the algorithm had a bias towards cropping out black faces. The “saliency algorithm” decided how images would be cropped in Twitter previews, before being clicked on to open at full size. But when two faces were in the same image, users discovered, the preview crop appeared to favor white faces, hiding the black faces until users clicked through. As a result the company revised how images were handled, saying cropping was best done by people.
The “algorithmic-bias bounty competition” was launched in July — a reference to the widespread practice of companies offering “bug bounties” for researchers who find flaws in code — with the aim of uncovering other harmful biases. And Mr Kulynyc, a graduate student at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne’s Security and Privacy Engineering Laboratory, discovered the “saliency” of a face in an image could be increased — making it less likely to be hidden by the cropping algorithm — by “making the person’s skin lighter or warmer and smoother; and quite often changing the appearance to that of a younger, more slim, and more stereotypically feminine person”.
Awarding him first prize, Twitter said his discovery showed beauty filters could be used to game the algorithm and “how algorithmic models amplify real-world biases and societal expectations of beauty.” Second prize went to Halt AI, a female-founded University of Toronto start-up Twitter said showed the algorithm could perpetuate marginalization in the way images were cropped. For example, “images of the elderly and disabled were further marginalized”, the company said. Taraaz Research founder Roya Pakzad won third prize for an entry that showed the algorithm was more likely to crop out Arabic text than English in memes.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Twitter Algorithm Prefers Slimmer, Younger, Light-Skinned Faces
IT automation benefits businesses and employees alike. See how you can automate rote tasks and shift your focus to more attractive projects.
The post By the numbers: Getting your team on board with IT automation appeared first on Linux Today.
Source: Linux Today – By the numbers: Getting your team on board with IT automation
Twenty-five years have passed since Warner Bros. Animation followed up its legendary Batman: The Animated Series the only way it could—with Superman: The Animated Series. Produced by Bruce Timm, Paul Dini, and Alan Burnett, the show debuted on September 6, 1996 and leaped tall buildings right into our hearts.
Source: Gizmodo – All of Superman: The Animated Series Is Coming to Blu-ray
One of my favourite board games of all time is V-Commandos, a co-op World War Two game that’s all about stealth and covert warfare. Now, years later, the team behind that game have taken everything they’ve learned from 1945 and put it to work on something from around 1459 instead: Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood of…
Source: Kotaku – Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood Of Venice: The Kotaku Review
When I’m working on projects that require provisioning cloud infrastructure, my workflow has two disparate components: one is infrastructure orchestration, which includes Terraform to bring up the infrastructure (for instance, new EKS clusters), and the second is the provisioning component, which includes Ansible or Bash scripts to instantiate and initialize that infrastructure to accept new deployments (for instance, installing Cluster Autoscaler, kube-state-metrics, and so on.)read more
Source: LXer – How I use Terraform and Helm to deploy the Kubernetes Dashboard
Enlarge / Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speaks during an event on August 10, 2021. (credit: Getty | Joe Raedle)
With the hypertransmissible delta variant on the rampage, Florida has become the epicenter of transmission in the US. The state is experiencing its largest surge of COVID-19 cases yet in the pandemic. Hospitalizations have reached record levels, and deaths are on the rise.
But instead of focusing on the response to the dire public health emergency, state officials appear to be squabbling over pandemic data and health measures.
On Monday night, Florida’s health department blasted media outlets for reporting the state’s most recent daily COVID-19 cases counts—as the counts were relayed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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Source: Ars Technica – Florida is ablaze with COVID-19—and its case data reporting is a hot mess
The Ascent is an isometric shooter, and a beautiful one at that, but I’m honestly surprised at how good it looks once you break the camera off and zoom it down to ground level.
Source: Kotaku – The Ascent Looks Fantastic In First-Person
Jellyfin is an open-source media streaming system that allows you to manage and stream your media. In this post, we will show you how to install Jellyfin media streaming server with Nginx as a reverse proxy on Debian 10.
Source: LXer – How to Install Jellyfin Media Server on Debian 10
Last year major VPN provider ExpressVPN announced “Lightway” as their new virtual private network protocol designed for speed, stability, and reliability. ExpressVPN announced today they are now making the protocol open-source…
Source: Phoronix – ExpressVPN Opens Up Its Lightway VPN Protocol
Enlarge / A study of “harmonic surprise”—points where the music deviates from listener expectations—in popular music over several decades found that Childish Gambino’s “This is America” had the most contrastive harmonic surprise. (credit: YouTube/Donald Glover)
Hip-hop artist Childish Gambino (aka actor Donald Glover) made a splash in 2018 with the release of his Grammy-winning hit single, “This is America.” With its stark, sudden shifts between choral melodies in major chords and menacing percussive elements drawn from the trap subgenre, the song constantly defies the listener’s expectations throughout.
That’s why “This is America” also tops the list of pop songs rich in so-called “harmonic surprise,” or points when the music deviates from listener expectations. This is according to a recent study published in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience that analyzes Billboard hits from 1958 to 2019. And it’s no coincidence that the tune is among the most recent: the study also found that harmonic surprise in popular music has been increasing over the decades—a phenomenon the authors have dubbed “inflationary surprise.”
“Music is culture. Culture evolves over time, so the content of music needs to evolve as time goes by, just to have the same success as previously released music,” said co-author Scott Miles, a neuroscientist specializing in how music preference forms in the brain. “This study gets to the heart of what is a dynamic effect within popular culture, in a very concrete and measurable way. These findings [also] help further our understanding of how music is processed in the brain.”
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Source: Ars Technica – Hit songs rely on increasing “harmonic surprise” to hook listeners, study finds
In a new deal with mega-cinema chain AMC Theatres, Warner Bros. has agreed to return to an exclusive, 45-day theatrical window in 2022. From a report: AMC CEO Adam Aron unveiled the pact Monday during an earnings call. “We’re especially pleased Warner Bros. has decided to move away from day-and-date,” Aron said. “We are in active dialogue with every major studio.” WarnerMedia enraged cinema operators when deciding to open its 2021 slate simultaneously on HBO Max and in theaters. The company has since said that the move was in response to the ongoing pandemic, and not permanent. Insiders add that the AMC arrangement was agreed to in March.
The audacious Aron said it was “no secret” that AMC was “not at all happy” when WarnerMedia made its move after launching HBO Max. “An exclusive window is an important way to build big and successful franchises.” Before the COVID-19 pandemic struck, the traditional theatrical window was as long as 90 days. Studios had tried for years to collapse that period, but faced boycotts if doing so.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Warner Bros., AMC Strike 45-Day Exclusive Theatrical Window Deal for 2022
Because there are multiple Batman books released by DC Comics in any given week, there’s always something going on with the Bat-family. Events might include a devastating death, the introduction of a new member, or, as is the case in this week’s Batman: Urban Legends #6 from writer Meghan Fitzmartz, artist Belén…
Source: Gizmodo – DC’s Batman Family Just Got a Little More Queer
In this article we take you through the basics of manipulating files from the shell. Some of these file manipulations are more conveniently done using a graphical file manager. But manipulating files from the shell offers both flexibility and power.
Source: LXer – Linux for Starters: Your Guide to Linux – Manipulating Files – Part 13
Enlarge / Unity unites with Parsec in a $320 million deal. (credit: Aurich Lawson)
The parent company of Unity, one of the most popular game development engines in the world, has made arguably its biggest acquisition of another gaming company yet. The deal, announced on Tuesday, sees Unity taking control of Parsec, a peer-to-peer game-streaming protocol. The acquisition is valued at $320 million.
In the years since Unity’s 2005 inception, its tools have been used to make games for pretty much every console, smartphone, and VR platform imaginable. It’s similar to other publicly available game engines like Unreal, as it revolves around a general toolset that can be used to build video games from scratch or expanded upon as developers see fit. Unity users can then nimbly port finished games across a variety of weaker and stronger platforms.
A recent stock market IPO by Unity Technologies infused the company with cash, which it has used to, among other things, move ahead with company acquisitions. However, Parsec may not immediately seem like a good fit for Unity’s reputation. How does peer-to-peer game streaming tie into someone trying to make video games?
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Source: Ars Technica – Game engine, meet game streaming: Unity acquires Parsec for 0M
Amazon has announced a new policy to pay customers directly for claims of property damage or personal injury under $1,000 caused by defective products. The new policy begins on September 1st and will apply to all products sold on Amazon.com regardless of who sells them. From a report: Previously, if you wanted to file a similar type of claim, you had to work with the seller — which has raised questions of who’s really at fault for defective problems sold on the platform. But when this policy kicks in, Amazon customer service will help facilitate claims between a customer, the seller, and the seller’s insurance provider.
The $1,000 figure accounts for “more than 80 percent of cases,” according to Amazon. The company won’t ask sellers for reimbursement for these payouts, though Amazon says it will keep sellers “informed at every step.” And in some situations, the company could pay more; Amazon “may step in to pay claims for higher amounts if the seller is unresponsive or rejects a claim we believe to be valid,” it says.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Amazon Will Pay Up To ,000 in Damages Caused By Defective Products
One of the biggest new features of elementary OS 6 “Odin” is the highly and long-anticipated Dark Style or Dark Mode, finally allowing you to turn down the lights on your elementary OS desktop. And, the devs made it super easy to enable, right from the Welcome screen (on new installations) or from System Settings > Desktop > Appearance.
If you thought elementary OS was beautiful before, wait until you enable the Dark Style, which can be complemented with 10 new accent colors that are applied to the entire system. Of course, the Light Style is also there, and you can control whether Dark Style is permanent or only from sunset to sunrise.
The post elementary OS 6 “Odin” Officially Released, This Is What’s New appeared first on Linux Today.
Source: Linux Today – elementary OS 6 “Odin” Officially Released, This Is What’s New
The legacy and standards that drive the Linux operating system make it impeccable and unique among other operating system distributions in terms of achieving certain user-critical functionalities.
Source: LXer – How to Clone and Restore Linux Partition Using dd Command
