Cyberpunk 2077’s first (and only) DLC expansion, Phantom Liberty, was just recently released for Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5, and PC. But developer CD Projekt Red is already sharing more details about Cyberpunk 2077’s big-budget sequel, currently known as Project Orion. However, it sounds like it’s still years and…
Source: Kotaku – Cyberpunk 2077 Sequel In Early Development, Likely Years Away
theodp writes: With Microsoft President Satya Nadella testifying in the Google antitrust trial that the tech titans are engaged in a Generative AI Gold Rush, it’s no surprise to learn that tech giant-backed and advised nonprofit Code.org has chosen “Creativity with AI” as the theme for this December’s Hour of Code, the annual global event that aims to whet K-12 schoolchildren’s appetite for rigorous computer science. “We’re taking Hour of Code to new heights with ‘Hour of Code: Creativity with AI’,” explained Code.org. “Whether it’s coding new apps and algorithms, generating unique art, or crafting choreography to get us dancing, AI is opening up fresh opportunities for digital expression that expand our understanding of creativity. What’s new? Did you catch that reference to ‘dancing’? That’s right: Code.org’s Dance Party [a ‘CS lesson’ developed in partnership with the ‘childhood to career’ Amazon Future Engineer program] will be better than ever this year! Coming soon, this Hour of Code activity will use generative AI to help students add awesome backgrounds and visuals to the dance parties they build with code.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Tech-Backed Code.org Picks ‘Creativity With AI’ As Theme For 2023 Hour of Code
Lucid has unveiled its most affordable Air EV trim yet. A rear-wheel drive variant of the Lucid Air Pure is available now for a starting price of $77,400. Lucid says this version, which is $5,000 less than the dual-motor all-wheel drive model, completes its Air lineup.
The brand is well-known for offering a large range in its EVs and it hasn’t skimped in that department here. When equipped with 19-inch wheels, the Air Pure RWD has a range of 410 miles, according to the automaker. The Environmental Protection Agency gave it an even more generous range estimate of 419 miles.
However you slice it, Lucid claims the Air Pure RWD has a larger range than any other electric car on the market save for its own models. The lineup tops out with the Lucid Air Grand Touring, which has an EPA-estimated range of 516 miles.
You won’t have to hang around by a charger for too long to top up your battery either. Lucid says the Air Pure RWD can add 150 miles of range after being plugged into a DC fast charger for less than 12 minutes.
The EV has Lucid’s most compact battery pack to date, which helps give those in the back seat more legroom, according to the automaker. Lucid also claims this model is the most aerodynamic car that’s in production right now.
The Air Pure RWD comes with Apple CarPlay, a 34-inch curved Glass Cockpit display, heated front and rear seats and steering wheel, DreamDrive driver assistance systems and the Lucid UX digital environment all as standard. While it’s still a pricey vehicle, the Air Pure RWD lowers the barrier to entry for those looking to hop into a Lucid EV.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/lucids-most-affordable-air-ev-still-has-a-projected-410-mile-range-183806231.html?src=rss
Source: Engadget – Lucid’s most affordable Air EV still has a projected 410-mile range
In a galaxy of compelling species, the Ferengi are one of Star Trek’s most peculiar, and most fascinating. Growing from not-quite-threatening villains in their TNG debut to a fascinating capitalist foil to the Federation’s post-scarcity utopia in DS9 through characters like Quark, Rom, and Nog, their outside…
Source: Gizmodo – Star Trek: Lower Decks’ Exploration of the Ferengi Does Deep Space Nine Justice
At the end of the season, it’s understandable that you just want to cover everything up and forget about it for winter. I urge you to consider better treatment your good pal the barbecue grill, which is already engaged in an ongoing, lifelong battle against rust. Because there are huge benefits to preparing your grill…
Source: LifeHacker – Winterize Your Grill Now to Keep It From Rusting
Voice actor Jennifer Hale needs little introduction, having gained fame playing characters like Metroid Prime’s Samus Aran, Bastila Shan from Knights of the Old Republic, and of course Mass Effect’s one true Commander Shepard. She’s also known for Konami’s Metal Gear Solid series, in which she’s played the shifty…
Source: Kotaku – Metal Gear Solid Paid Voice Actor Jennifer Hale Only ,200
Historically, the socketed desktop AMD Ryzen processors have come in two basic forms: your standard CPUs that typically didn’t have graphics until the most recent Ryzen generation, and then your “APUs”, or processors with powerful graphics built-in. The Ryzen APUs from the 3000 and 5000 series were also monolithic, where the standard Ryzen
Source: Hot Hardware – AMD AGESA Code Hints At Ryzen 7000G Phoenix APUs Rising On The Desktop
A week after an extortion group called Ransomed.vc claimed to have hacked into Sony’s systems and stolen 3.14GB of data, the company has admitted to a second security breach. This one occurred back in May and involved the personal data of nearly 6,791 current and former employees.
Source: Kotaku – Sony Suffers Two Hacks In Four Months, Thousands Of Employees’ Info Exposed
Explore some of the most common yt-dlp commands for downloading videos and audio from YouTube and other websites on Linux.
The post Yt-dlp: Complete Tutorial for Beginners appeared first on Linux Today.
Source: Linux Today – Yt-dlp: Complete Tutorial for Beginners
Enlarge / This illustration shows what the shore of ancient Lake Otero may have looked like 21,000 years ago.
People really were walking around in the southwestern US during the middle of the last Ice Age, according to a recent study that double-checked the dates on a set of surprisingly ancient human footprints at White Sands National Park.
Many thousands of years ago, someone walked along the muddy shore of an ancient lake at what’s now White Sands. They crushed ditchgrass seeds and grains of conifer pollen beneath their feet with every squishing, slippery step. Bournemouth University archaeologist Matthew Bennett and his colleagues (including the authors of the current study) unearthed eight layers of tracks at the site in early 2020; they radiocarbon-dated the ditchgrass seeds from the oldest layer of footprints to 23,000 years old and the youngest layer to around 21,000 years old.
Their 2021 paper sparked immediate debate.
Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Source: Ars Technica – More evidence that humans were in North America over 20,000 years ago
An algorithm that takes just seconds to scan a paper for duplicated images racks up more suspicious images than a person. Nature: Scientific-image sleuth Sholto David blogs about image manipulation in research papers, a pastime that has exposed him to many accounts of scientific fraud. But other scientists “are still a little bit in the dark about the extent of the problem,” David says. He decided he needed some data. The independent biologist in Pontypridd, UK, spent the best part of several months poring over hundreds of papers in one journal, looking for any with duplicated images. Then he ran the same papers through an artificial-intelligence (AI) tool. Working at two to three times David’s speed, the software found almost all of the 63 suspect papers that he had identified — and 41 that he’d missed. David described the exercise last month in a preprint, one of the first published comparisons of human versus machine for finding doctored images.
The findings come as academic publishers reckon with the problem of image manipulation in scientific papers. In a 2016 study, renowned image-forensics specialist Elisabeth Bik, based in San Francisco, California, and her colleagues reported that almost 4% of papers she had visually scanned in 40 biomedical-science journals contained inappropriately duplicated images. Not all image manipulation is done with nefarious intent. Authors might tinker with images by accident, for aesthetic reasons or to make a figure more understandable. But journals and others would like to catch images with alterations that cross the line, whatever the authors’ motivation. And now they are turning to AI for help.
Some 200 universities, publishers and scientific societies already rely on Imagetwin, the tool that David used for his study. The software compares images in a paper with more than 25 million images from other publications — the largest such database in the image-integrity world, according to Imagetwin’s developers. Bik has been using Imagetwin regularly to supplement her own skills and calls it her “standard tool,” although she emphasizes that the AI has weaknesses as well as strengths — for instance, it can miss duplications in images with low contrast.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – AI Beats Human Sleuth at Finding Problematic Images in Research Papers
Fossilized human footprints at White Sands National Park in New Mexico are every bit as old as the 23,000 years-and-change they were dated at in 2021, according to new analysis published in Science.
Source: Gizmodo – Oldest Human Footprints in North America Really Are That Old, New Dating Confirms
Ever paid for a ridiculously expensive drink in cash, hence it was “free”? Or spent an extra 30 bucks just to get “free” shipping? Or avoided looking at your credit card statement, because if you can’t see a spending problem then surely it will go away on its own? Welcome to the mental gymnastics of “girl math.”
Source: LifeHacker – ‘Girl Math’ Isn’t a Joke for Your Finances
Google announced today that the original Pixel Watch will be getting the Wear OS 4 “later this year”. We were already aware that the new Pixel Watch 2 is releasing with Wear OS 4 but it will be available for the 2022 model as well.
Source: Gizmodo – The Original Pixel Watch Is Also Getting Wear OS 4
Blenders, lawnmowers, kitchen knives. These are common household items you expect to see featured in a horror film. You don’t expect to see the serene things. You don’t expect to see things known for their beauty. You don’t expect to see a killer pool.
Source: Gizmodo – Watch the Freaky Trailer for Blumhouse’s Killer Pool Movie
In the realm of do-it-yourself home improvement, cutting tile can be particularly challenging to accomplish safely. Since the dust it creates can be hazardous to your lungs, and the heat generated while cutting can also cause problems with the tile and for your tools, a wet saw is the best, safest option to handle…
Source: LifeHacker – How to Choose Between a Makita and Ryobi Battery Powered Wet Saw
Enlarge (credit: BMW)
LISBON, Portugal—Last week we wrote about driving a pair of new M-badged electric BMWs. With the arrival of the i5 M60 and the iX M70, there are now go-fast variants of all four of BMW’s battery-electric vehicles. But as BMW will openly admit, those aren’t true M cars. That’s not to say that BMW’s M Division is afraid of electrification—last year it debuted the XM, a performance plug-in hybrid SUV. And next year, the XM’s powertrain will reappear in a plug-in hybrid M5. But when might we see a purely electric M car?
Conveniently for us, Frank van Meel, CEO of BMW M, was on hand in Portugal to sit down and talk about the future of M performance and electrification. And, as it turns out, we might see a fully electric BMW M car in plenty of time before the end of this decade.
“Well, if you look on social media, you can already see our mule test car with quad motors, because for us, that is a very promising concept for high performance,” van Meel said, referring to recently released photos of a BMW i4 EV with the license plate M HP 4 E.
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Source: Ars Technica – When will we see an electric BMW M car? We speak to its boss to find out
Developer CD Projekt Red just announced it is in the early stages of developing a live-action TV show or movie based on the once-hated and now-beloved Cyberpunk 2077 game. Details are scant, as we don’t even know if it’ll be a film or ongoing series, but the game developer has teamed up with production company Anonymous Content to bring Night City to glorious live-action life.
You probably don’t know Anonymous Content by name, but the company’s behind a slew of high-profile and critically-acclaimed TV shows, like True Detective and Mr. Robot. It’s also helped produce recent films like The Revenant and Spotlight, but also classics like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Being John Malkovich. This is a serious production company, so we could be in for something special.
While CD Projekt Red hasn’t announced whether this will be a show or movie, there are some hints indicating it’ll be a TV series. The developer went out of its way to note that it’s working closely with certain members of the Anonymous Content team, all of which are heavily involved in the TV side of things. For instance, the dev called out the company’s Head of Television Garret Kemble and noted Chief Creative Officer David Levine’s decade-long tenure at HBO. Levine was heavily involved with getting Game of Thrones and Westworld on the network, in addition to other hit shows.
This situation here looks slightly different from Netflix’s The Witcher show, as that’s adapted from the source books and not the video game series. Cyberpunk 2077 is a wholly original IP, giving CD Projekt Red a good amount of creative control over how the story plays out. To that end, the developer hasn’t indicated this would be a one-to-one adaptation of the game, rather stating its “set in the world” of Cyberpunk 2077.
This looks to be in the extreme early stages of development, so it could be years before we see the lawless Badlands or the slums of Dogtown in live action. This series or movie will join the Netflix cartoon Cyberpunk: Edgerunners.
When you think about it, it’s pretty nuts that the Cyberpunk IP is flourishing in this way. The game launched as a buggy mess, forcing Sony to actually pull it from its online store and both CD Projekt Red and Microsoft to issue refunds to unhappy customers. Since that disastrous launch, the developer has slowly and steadily improved just about every aspect of the game, transforming whole gameplay mechanics in the process. The end result? Cyberpunk 2077 is now considered to be a truly special video game, with 25 million sales to prove it. Even the recently-released Phantom Liberty DLC has already racked up 3 million downloads. There’s also a pseudo-sequel on the way.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/theres-a-live-action-cyberpunk-2077-show-or-movie-on-the-way-172248247.html?src=rss
Source: Engadget – There’s a live-action Cyberpunk 2077 show or movie on the way
The latest Linux kernel patches for enabling the Milk-V Pioneer board have been posted, which is that interesting 64-core RISC-V micro-ATX board with two PCIe x16 slots and more…
Source: Phoronix – Linux Patches Updated For 64-Core RISC-V Milk-V Pioneer mATX Board
A week after laying off almost 900 employees, Epic Games has said that it’s increasing the price to use Unreal Engine — just not for the game development community. From a report: The news came from Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney himself in a presentation at Unreal Fest 2023. In a video captured by Fortnite Creative developer Immature, Sweeney explains that developers using Unreal Engine in the film, TV, automotive, and other industries can expect to start paying a per-seat licensing fee. He claimed that the pricing model will not be “unusually expensive or unusually inexpensive,” and that its pricing structure will be similar to subscription services like Maya or Photoshop. Sweeney said he wanted to announce these changes now in the name of “transparency.”
He also shed some light on the business decisions that led to the company making unexpectedly significant business shifts in the last week. Apparently Epic Games began running into “financial problems” about 10 weeks ago, meaning that the company was facing some sort of financial downturn from late July through September. Evidently, all of Epic Games’ business had been “heavily funded by Fortnite” in the last six years, and different parts of the company became “disconnected” from their revenue streams. It adds some context to previous comments made by Sweeney about the impact of declined Fortnite revenue — if the company’s signature game had started to not turn a profit, other parts of Epic Games may not have easily been able to make up for declining revenue.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Epic Games To Update Unreal Engine Pricing for Devs Outside Game Industry
