OpenAI has announced its phasing out GPT-4.5 from its developer API in favor of its new GPT-4.1 model. When it launched, OpenAI described GPT-4.5 as its best and most capable model so far, in part because it was a more natural conversationalist and could capably mimic some notion of emotional intelligence. Despite what its name suggests, GPT-4.1 is supposed to be better and more efficient.
OpenAI says GPT-4.1 is available exclusively to developer’s using OpenAI’s API, and comes in three sizes, GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 mini and GPT-4.1 nano. That means that if you won’t find it as in option in the public-facing ChatGPT interface, but you could someday interact with an agent that leverages the model’s improvements. GPT-4.1 is supposed to be better at coding and “long context understanding,” according to OpenAI, with support for “up to one million tokens of context” and knowledge of the world up to June 2024.
Important to the decision to phase out the GPT-4.5 Preview, GPT-4.1 is also cheaper to run. OpenAI says the model is “26 percent cheaper than GPT-4o for median queries.” The company imagines developers using GPT-4.1 to build agents that can work in software engineering environments, one of the more popular uses for generative AI. Even though GPT-4.5 will be eventually removed from OpenAI’s API, the model preview will still be available in ChatGPT if you wan’t to play with it.
OpenAI says the GPT-4.1 family is available to use today via the company’s API. GPT-4.5 will be fully-phased out in three months on July 14, 2025.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/openai-is-phasing-out-gpt-45-for-developers-185554841.html?src=rss
VMware has resumed offering a free hypervisor. News of the offering emerged in a throwaway line in the Release Notes for version 8.0 Update 3e of the Broadcom business unit’s ESXi hypervisor. From a report: Just below the “What’s New” section of that document is the statement: “Broadcom makes available the VMware vSphere Hypervisor version 8, an entry-level hypervisor. You can download it free of charge from the Broadcom Support portal.”
VMware offered a free version of ESXi for years, and it was beloved by home lab operators and vAdmins who needed something to tinker with. But in February 2024, VMware discontinued it on grounds that it was dropping perpetual licenses and moving to subscriptions.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Dynasty Warriors: Origins is nothing if not a power fantasy. Fighting thousands of grunts at once is fun in and of itself, but soaking up loads of skill points and experience points to unlock consistently stronger abilities makes the game hard to put down. That said, while Origins isn’t necessarily complex, its…
Ubisoft has open-sourced Chroma, the company’s in-house colorblind assistance tool. It’s available for download via GitHub and is described as a “one-stop solution for detecting color blindness-related issues in games.”
Here’s how it works. It throws a filter over the game screen that simulates various types of color blindness. This allows testers to flag accessibility issues in real time. The tool uses the Color Oracle algorithm and integrates with both single or dual-screen setups. It works with hotkeys and there’s a customizable overlay for adjusting settings. Ubisoft says that applying the filter will not impede game performance.
It’s important to note what this software does and who it’s for. It simulates how a person with color blindness will experience a game, allowing devs to take action. It doesn’t fix anything on its own. However, knowing is half the battle as they say. This move by Ubisoft should allow other devs to address these concerns before shipping a game out the door.
Ubisoft isn’t the only company that has been widening the availability of accessibility tools. EA recently made a whole bunch of accessibility patents open-source. This included photosensitivity and speech recognition tech.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/ubisoft-just-open-sourced-its-colorblind-assistance-tool-chroma-184546640.html?src=rss
The work talked about back in January for improving the 32-bit PAE Linux kernel code for Physical Address Extensions to better jive with the code around Page Table Isolation (PTI) for mitigating the Meltdown vulnerability could soon be merged…
The European Commission is issuing burner phones and basic laptops to some US-bound staff to avoid the risk of espionage [non-paywalled source], a measure traditionally reserved for trips to China. Financial Times: Commissioners and senior officials travelling to the IMF and World Bank spring meetings next week have been given the new guidance, according to four people familiar with the situation. They said the measures replicate those used on trips to Ukraine and China, where standard IT kit cannot be brought into the countries for fear of Russian or Chinese surveillance.
“They are worried about the US getting into the commission systems,” said one official. The treatment of the US as a potential security risk highlights how relations have deteriorated since the return of Donald Trump as US president in January. Trump has accused the EU of having been set up to “screw the US” and announced 20 per cent so-called reciprocal tariffs on the bloc’s exports, which he later halved for a 90-day period.
At the same time, he has made overtures to Russia, pressured Ukraine to hand over control over its assets by temporarily suspending military aid and has threatened to withdraw security guarantees from Europe, spurring a continent-wide rearmament effort. “The transatlantic alliance is over,” said a fifth EU official.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
2024 was the hottest summer ever recorded, and there’s a good chance that future summers will be even warmer. For most people, planning for those future summers involves upgrading their air-conditioning systems and taking other steps to turn the interior of their homes into cool, dark caves. But what happens if you want to get outside for some fresh air? If your yard is too hot to enjoy during the summer, you might as well not have a yard at all.
You can’t air condition the outdoors—but you can lower the temperature with some thoughtful landscaping decisions. If you hesitate to throw a cookout in your outdoor space because you feel like you’re on a grill when you’re out there, consider implementing some of these simple suggestions for how your landscaping is designed.
Step one for making your outdoor areas cooler is to remove all that pesky solar energy that makes every moment in your yard feel like a trip to Mercury. Trees are the most attractive, natural, and effective way to shade your yard. Shade can lower the air temperature of your outdoor space by 15 to 20 degrees, which is a significant drop.
Concentrate on deciduous trees (trees that lose their leaves annually), as these will shade your yard and house in the summer but let the warming sun through in the winter. Fast-growing choices include sycamores, which have varieties that thrive in a wide range of climates, as well as maple, oak, and honey locust trees.
If you’ve ever walked out onto your patio in bare feet in the summer, you know that pavement and hardscaping absorb the sun’s heat. While a grass yard has an average temperature of about 78° in full sun, concrete can reach temperatures as high as 135°. Eliminating as much hardscaping as possible in your outdoor areas will not only spare your feet, it will help tamp down the ambient temperature because less heat will be radiating from the ground.
For the hardscaping you want or need to keep, consider using a lighter color scheme, as lighter colors reflect more heat. When installing pavers or other hardscape materials, check the light reflectance value (LRV), which is a measurement of how much light the color reflects. The higher the number, the cooler the surface will be—an LRV above 50 percent is a good starting point.
Finally, consider using permeable pavers or pavements. These materials allow water to pass through, soaking the ground, which can help cool off your outdoor space.
You can lower the temperature of the ground or hard surfaces by planting ground cover plants like creeping thyme or vinca. These low-growing plants will spread out and block the sun, lowering the overall temperature of the area and avoiding surfaces that are like skillets against your feet. You can also use a reflective mulch in your plant beds; these include aluminum or other reflective materials to bounce the sun’s light away from the ground, resulting in a small but appreciable decrease in temperature.
One strategy for cooling down your outdoor area is to trap and hold onto cool, shaded air. You can accomplish this by creating a layered effect, with plants of different heights helping to hold cooler air in and warmer air out. Trees would obviously be your tallest layer, but planting shrubs and other medium-height plants along with a robust ground cover can insulate your outdoor space naturally, moderating the temperature (and enhancing privacy).
While tree canopies can keep the sun off your outdoor space when it’s high in the sky, when it starts to sink those punishing rays can still bake your space. Vines and other climbing plants can provide shade horizontally, creeping up fences, trellises, or other vertical surfaces and blocking the sunlight while allowing air movement. Just don’t let them grow on your house—that can lead to serious damage.
Even on hot summer days, a cool breeze can make an incredible difference in your comfort levels. Designing your landscaping to guide those breezes to the areas where you utilize your outdoor space can help tremendously. Planting a line of tall shrubs or evergreen trees on the opposite side of a fence or wall can create a “wind tunnel” effect that drives refreshing breezes toward you, and pruning your shade trees low will facilitate air movement.
On the other hand, if your outdoor space is baked by hot winds, you can plant shrubs or trees to block those winds. Even tall grasses can be effective windbreaks, absorbing and breaking up oven-like breezes before they invade your patio area.
Rain gardens are typically used to control water runoff, but they can also be effective in lowering the surrounding temperature of an outdoor space. Rain gardens are located in depressions where deep-rooted native plants are planted, allowing rainwater to drain into the garden instead of pooling elsewhere (on hardscapes, for example). The cooling effect of the rainwater on the ground can impact what’s known as the Urban Heat Island Effect, lowering the overall temperature of the space.
You can also add water features like fountains or ponds to help with the temperature of an outdoor space—especially when used in conjunction with layered plantings of trees, shrubs, and grasses. The impact of a small water feature might not be huge, but every little bit will help, and water features also bring beauty and a sense of tranquility to any space—which might make the heat more tolerable.
MX Linux 23.6 has just been officially released today as the newest ISO snapshot in the MX Linux 23 “Libretto” series of this lightweight Debian-based GNU/Linux distribution for everyday use.
Meta plans to start using data collected from its users in the European Union to train its AI systems, the company announced today. Starting this week, the tech giant will begin notifying Europeans through email and its family of apps of the fact, with the message set to include an explanation of the kind of data it plans to use as part of the training. Additionally, the notification will link out to a form users can complete to opt out of the process. “We have made this objection form easy to find, read, and use, and we’ll honor all objection forms we have already received, as well as newly submitted ones,” says Meta.
The company notes it will only use data it collects from public posts and Meta AI interactions for training purposes. It won’t use private messages in its training sets, nor any interactions, public or otherwise, made by users under the age of 18. As for why the company wants to start using EU data now, it claims the information will allow it to fine tune its future models to better serve Europeans.
“We believe we have a responsibility to build AI that’s not just available to Europeans, but is actually built for them. That’s why it’s so important for our generative AI models to be trained on a variety of data so they can understand the incredible and diverse nuances and complexities that make up European communities,” Meta states.
“That means everything from dialects and colloquialisms, to hyper-local knowledge and the distinct ways different countries use humor and sarcasm on our products. This is particularly important as AI models become more advanced with multi-modal functionality, which spans text, voice, video, and imagery.”
Meta notes other AI companies, including Google and OpenAI, have similarly used data from European users to fine tune their own systems. Today’s announcement follows the initial release of Meta’s new Llama 4 models. After some early hype, the company was accused of gaming LMArena, a website where humans compare the outputs of different AI models to rank them. Researchers noticed Meta had provided an experimental version of Llama 4 to the site “optimized for conversationality.”
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/meta-will-start-using-data-from-eu-users-to-train-its-ai-models-175307338.html?src=rss
The Meta Quest 3S is on sale for $269 via Amazon. This is a record-low price for the 128GB VR headset, as it typically costs $300. It comes with a download code for Batman: Arkham Shadow and a three-month trial for Meta Quest+. This is the platform’s version of Game Pass or PS Plus, with an extensive catalog of playable titles.
The Quest 3S made our list of the best VR headsets, and for good reason. It offers a similar experience to the standard Quest 3, with just a couple of cut corners. This means that the graphics fidelity is a bit lower with the 3S, as it doesn’t have those sweet pancake lenses.
However, it does have the exact same Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 chip as the Quest 3 and uses the same Touch Plus controllers. They offer decent motion controls and responsive joysticks and buttons. There’s no headphone jack, but we found the speakers to be adequate in most cases. Plus, you can always insert a USB-C to 3.5mm adapter or just pair wireless headphones.
Just like the original Quest 3, this one can connect to gaming PCs over USB-C or wirelessly. This allows folks to play AAA titles intended for power-hungry computers and not standalone VR headsets. It can also wirelessly stream gameplay to Chromecast devices or to AirPlay devices by mirroring the Quest app from an iPhone.
We called it “impressive VR for $300” in our official review. This is even more true with today’s sale. The only caveat here is this is the 128GB version, which could fill up pretty fast. Batman: Arkham Shadow, for instance, is around 20GB. The 256GB model is on sale for $369 instead of $400.
Follow @EngadgetDeals on X for the latest tech deals and buying advice.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/deals/the-meta-quest-3s-is-on-sale-for-a-record-low-price-174954820.html?src=rss
Monster Hunter Wilds has brought a ton of new features along for the latest entry in the series. While both the Wounds System and Power Clash mechanics are vital for combat, equally exciting is the addition of a Day/Night cycle, complete with weather events. Naturally, there is also a Rest feature to let you change…
How do you justify porting a 4X strategy game to VR and mixed reality? Unfortunately, Civilization VII VR doesn’t offer any convincing answers.
The eminence of this legendarily moreish series demands its appearance on all platforms with each new release, but the game’s existence in headset world is a strange novelty — and having played it, I’m not sure who it’s for.
What is it?: Grand strategy in virtual space — history in the palm of your hands
Platforms: Quest 3 & Quest 3S (reviewed on Quest 3)
Release Date: Out Now
Developer: PlaySide Studios in partnership with Firaxis Games
Price: $60
Your experience with Civilization VII VR begins with a greeting from an enthusiastic tour guide, who leads you through the quibbles of this peculiar port in a lavish museum setting. Flanked by precious artifacts and statues of Machiavelli, you make an important choice — Mixed Reality or Virtual Reality?
In virtual reality, you’re planted at a circular war table, with Civilization’s famous tile-based playspace cropped into its basin. You can raise or lower the table as you see fit, as well as teleport into a side room of the museum to inspect dioramic exhibits of the relics you’ve earned in-game. Unfortunately, that is the start and end of this port’s platform-specific features. Other than that, it’s just Civilization VII in VR, warts and all.
The museum’s depressingly flat central vista will eventually make you curious about what the mixed reality experience has to offer. Thankfully, bringing the playspace into the real world is a slightly more compelling proposition. The table, and the leaders who surround it, quite neatly pop into your real-world boundary, ready for you to sit and scheme your way to glory, whether that’s through economic dominance, military might, scientific prowess or cultural hegemony.
Starting a game of Civilization VII is as intuitive in virtual reality as it is on a flatscreen device. You select your leader from a series of portraits, and just like that, an avatar of Benjamin Franklin will appear in your bedroom, his walking stick prodding the carpet with a satisfying thud. The presence of these exaggerated historic figures is impressive up close — and when they react to your surprise war or capitulate in a peace deal, they’ll gesticulate their emotions in your general direction, which is a nice boon for diplomatic immersion.
What isn’t a boon for immersion is that the leaders don’t have legs. It’s already eerie enough having these figures silently encircle you at the war table… without being able to see into their hollow chest cavities. Their character models are grainy up close, too, which tracks with the rest of the visuals in Civilization VII VR. The textures jag into each other and look filtered through layers of crud, even if Franklin’s jowls were still admirably mottled. The material work is still quite pretty, though, with the gilding on the marble controller models sticking out as a nice touch.
The playspace in Mixed Reality is an ornate but slightly-smaller wooden table, which you can grab and move around your room or place on a raised surface. From there, you’ll point your controllers at the table’s innards for context-sensitive interactions, like zooming into a combat engagement or panning the local area for discoveries. To move, you pull the right trigger while aiming at a unit before dragging your hand to the intended hexagonal tile, which feels just as human-error-friendly as the existing right-clicking solution on PC.
Ancillary unit interactions are situated in a little context wheel that stems from your non-dominant hand, and it’s here where you can tell a Settler to found a settlement or quickly check your resource allocations. The translated gameplay meets a very low bar, but a glaring omission is the inability to spin the table like a roulette wheel for better maneuverability, or better yet, cast the playspace on a wall so you aren’t constantly craning your neck trying to read the flickering text on the battlefield.
One of the most frustrating aspects of Civilization VII on PC is its Daedalean user interface, but on the Quest 3, the alternative control scheme necessitates a certain streamlining that makes it a bit more enjoyable to navigate these menus from even the most slouched of positions. And though it quickly gets tiresome, there is a charming imperatorial spirit to your inputs, like the way you tend to lean over the table and leer at your subject’s yields when deliberating about what to do with a captured city. It’s a shame everything is so ugly up close or you might risk getting caught up in some despotic role play.
By making a time-checking gesture you’ll summon the leader overview, which provides quick stings of information to let you know how you’re faring amongst your legless buddies — and inform future diplomatic efforts. A minimap is nested here which lets you tag spots to zip around the continents, which is helpful for fast travel. And while the major morsels of info you need to proceed in Civilization VII VR are typically available at your fingertips, you can also click to throw expanded interface assets like tech trees onto the walls around you for further study, which is always handy.
So you make your way through the Antiquity age, expanding civics and liaising with your fellow leaders. Civilization VII VR is admirably evocative of the flatscreen experience to begin with, especially when you have few units and settlements to manage. Building your first wonder and being transported into a showcase instance with Gwendolyn Christie’s wonderful narration overhead is a rejuvenating experience. But as is the game’s intention, complexity quickly grows, and you’re soon beset with map-spanning complications, wars on separate fronts and a dizzying field of yields emanating from your capital.
It’s here where the premise of this port falls apart, and quickly. In the Modern age, you can barely zoom out to take a look at your mighty works before the game transforms your unique units into faceless statues. And when you hone in on proceedings, the glitches and constant pop-in of downscaled textures is persistently demoralising. The wheels of my Katyusha Rocket Launchers kept jutting into a diamond shape, and my Cuirassiers were firing with finger guns, flanked by headless Cossacks. This laughable low poly battalion wouldn’t look out of place in Old School RuneScape.
But if I had to pin it on any one thing, the root cause of this port’s issues is the claustrophobic playspace. It feels antithetical to the essence of the series, and there are many irritating repercussions. Arching your hands to target a specific unit in the middle of a busy siege is just one deeply tedious example. Tack on overbuilding and district management and the pace soon becomes glacial. You’ll wonder why you’re not just beaming the high-fidelity flatscreen version of Civilization VII to your headset via Virtual Desktop.
Ironically, what makes matters worse are some of Civilization VII’s unique additions like Commanders and Attributes. These nested menu-specialization systems become arm-aching annoyances to deal with when you’re trying to make it through a crisis, or capitalise on a period of exciting warfare. And good luck getting an age or two done before your battery dies. Civilization VII VR is power hungry, and I soon resigned myself to playing plugged in.
An empire has no business being confined to a tiny table. No matter the well-animated charm of seeing a little tricorned fellow pontificating at a map in the middle of the jungle, I found no meaningful reason to play a game like Civilization VII in virtual reality, especially with this many visual and mechanical caveats.
One of the most beloved aspects of the Civilization series is how it makes 4X strategy accessible and unusually nice to look at, at least compared to its many bureaucratic peers in the genre. This port sacrifices both of those defining facets without any meaningful consolation. Civilization VII VR is a good enough proof of concept that is desperately in need of its own flavour. Sure, it works, but at what cost?
UploadVR uses a 5-Star rating system for our game reviews – you can read a breakdown of each star rating in our review guidelines.
Following a leak earlier this month, Electronic Arts and Lucasfilm Games have officially announced Star Wars Zero Company, a turn-based single-player tactics game that sounds like might be very similar to XCOM.
Demeo has received a major engine update that improves graphics, load times, and performance and enables eye-tracked foveated rendering.
The post Tabletop RPG Demeo looks and runs better after major technical update appeared first on MIXED Reality News.
The Pokémon Company may be absolutely terrible at keeping Pokémon TCG cards in stock, but one thing it’s great at is making me want to buy more plushies. The Pokémon Center online stores add new ranges on an almost weekly basis, while updating current ranges with ever more obscure inclusions. The latest gravitational…
We still have no idea who will play the lightning bolt-tattooed titular character in HBO’s Harry Potter series, but we do know who will be teaching him and his crew of wizards. After months of speculation, HBO has confirmed the casting of key characters for the upcoming series.
PeaZip 10.4 open-source file archiver enhances stability, error handling, and UI adaptability with new theme support, smarter context menus, and more.