On Sunday night, House Republicans added language to the Budget Reconciliation bill that would block all state and local governments from regulating AI for 10 years, 404 Media reports. The provision, introduced by Representative Brett Guthrie of Kentucky, states that “no State or political subdivision thereof may enforce any law or regulation regulating artificial intelligence models, artificial intelligence systems, or automated decision systems during the 10 year period beginning on the date of the enactment of this Act.”

The broad wording of the proposal would prevent states from enforcing both existing and proposed laws designed to protect citizens from AI systems. For example, California’s recent law requiring health care providers to disclose when they use generative AI to communicate with patients would potentially become unenforceable. New York’s 2021 law mandating bias audits for AI tools used in hiring decisions would also be affected, 404 Media notes. The measure would also halt legislation set to take effect in 2026 in California that requires AI developers to publicly document the data used to train their models.

The ban could also restrict how states allocate federal funding for AI programs. States currently control how they use federal dollars and can direct funding toward AI initiatives that may conflict with the administration’s technology priorities. The Education Department’s AI programs represent one example where states might pursue different approaches than those favored by the White House and its tech industry allies.

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Nothing says “please, leave me alone” while you’re in public like a good pair of over-ear, noise-canceling headphones. The Beats Studio Pro — which are, coincidentally, a good pair of over-ear, noise-canceling headphones — are on sale right now. You can snap up a pair for $170. That’s a discount of 51 percent (or $180) and only $10 more than the lowest price we’ve seen to date for them.

The Beats Studio Pro arrived in 2023 and we gave them a score of 81 in our review. While they aren’t among our top picks for the best wireless headphones or the best noise-canceling headphones, they’re still a decent option — especially at this price.

Thanks in large part to Beats’ second-gen chipset, the Beats Studio Pro deliver notably better audio quality than the brand’s earlier over-ear headphones. Beats upgraded the active noise cancellation (ANC), while the addition of spatial audio with dynamic head tracking is welcome. So too is the USB-C wired mode if you’d like to listen to high-resolution and lossless audio.

The Powerbeats Pro 2 earbuds are also on sale. They can be yours for $200, which is $50 off and a record low price. We gave these a score of 79 in our review.

These are Apple’s first earbuds with built-in sensors that can track your heart rate, making them an intriguing option for fitness enthusiasts. The Powerbeats Pro 2 have Apple’s H2 chip, which enables them to offer many of the same features that you’d find on the AirPods Pro 2, such as Hearing Protection — but not the hearing aid or hearing test options. The earbuds are comfortable to wear (though the hook design may not be for everyone) and deliver generally solid audio including powerful, balanced performance on the low end. However, we felt the ANC performance was so-so.

Check out our coverage of the best Apple deals for more discounts, and 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-beats-studio-pro-headphones-are-half-off-right-now-144737501.html?src=rss

Microsoft is laying off 3% of employees across all levels and geographies, the company said Tuesday. “We continue to implement organizational changes necessary to best position the company for success in a dynamic marketplace,” a spokesperson told CNBC. Microsoft had 228,000 employees worldwide at the end of June, meaning that the move will affect thousands of employees.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The second season of the Fallout TV series doesn’t even have a concrete release date in December yet, but Amazon has already renewed the show for a third season. Amazon has announced that it has greenlit the new season at its annual presentation in New York City. The company said Fallout has had more than 100 million viewers since it dropped on Prime Video in April 2024 and remains one of its top-three most watched titles ever. 

If you’ll recall, the live adaptation was so well-received, Fallout 4 enjoyed a resurgence in sales nearly a decade after its release. Amazon also renewed the series for a second season just a few days after the first season debuted on its streaming service. Based on the video game franchise of the same name, Fallout is set 200 years into the future after an apocalyptic event. In the story, the humans who survived the apocalypse hid in luxury fallout shelters where their descendants remained for hundreds of years. The show follows Lucy as she leaves her shelter after an attack by outsiders to find her father who’d been kidnapped. Along the way, she meets more characters, including a squire from the Brotherhood of Steel and a ghoul bounty hunter.

Amazon has yet to reveal season 3’s story, which doesn’t come as a surprise, seeing as the second season has yet to drop. But season 2 will pick up from where the first one had left off and will take viewers from the Mojave wastelands to New Vegas.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/streaming/amazon-renews-fallout-months-before-season-2s-premiere-143028657.html?src=rss

Following its initial reveal early last month, Nintendo has been drip-feeding announcements about the Switch 2, and two announcements recently posted to the Nintendo Today app are especially exciting. The company revealed that your Switch 2 will have a feature that can limit charging speeds once it hits around 90%, in order to reduce battery degradation. But perhaps more exciting, especially for parents or kids with nosy siblings, is that you’ll be able to use a PIN to lock your Nintendo Switch 2.

Set charging limits on Nintendo Switch 2

Credit: Nintendo

In a feature similar to the 80% charge limit on iPhones, Nintendo Switch 2 will optionally let you stop charging the device once the battery reaches around a 90% charge. This could help reduce battery degradation on your Switch 2, which could stave off repairs in the future. That said, the settings page mentions that your Switch 2 may still occasionally charge to 100% to ensure accurate display of the console’s battery level.

Once you have your Switch 2, you can enable this feature by going to Settings > System > Stop Charging Around 90%. This is a great feature when you consider that many people will near permanently leave their Switch 2 in docked mode.

Lock your Switch 2 with a PIN

Credit: Nintendo

Got someone in your house that you don’t trust with your console? The good old PIN lock is finally coming to the Nintendo Switch 2. The default screen lock on the original Nintendo Switch would require you to press a button thrice to unlock the console, which wasn’t great for security. With the Switch 2, you can lock the console with a PIN, which is better for those who want to stop people from using their console without permission. 

To enable a screen lock on your Switch 2, go to Settings > System > System Lock and enable the feature. This means that you’ll have to enter a PIN every single time you wake the Switch 2 from sleep mode. Such is the price of improved security. Personally, the slight inconvenience is worth it for me, and I’m sure any parents with kids who are always trying to sneak in extra screen time would agree.

This is a video of a man attempting a speedrun past his cat Gulliver in the hallway, which requires a boss battle in order to proceed. Things get pretty hairy for a couple of the splits, but he manages to set a new world record thanks to great times in both claw sequences. The internet, am I right? “What about it?” This is as high as it goes, we should all return to the wilderness now.

We’re about three weeks out from the theatrical release of From the World of John Wick: Ballerina, starring Ana de Armas. So naturally Lionsgate has released one final trailer to whet audience appetites for what promises to be a fiery, action-packed addition to the hugely successful franchise.

(Some spoilers for 2019’s John Wick Chapter 3: Parabellum.)

Chronologically, Ballerina takes place during the events of John Wick Chapter 3: Parabellum. As previously reported, Parabellum found Wick declared excommunicado from the High Table for killing crime lord Santino D’Antonio on the grounds of the Continental. On the run with a bounty on his head, he makes his way to the headquarters of the Ruska Roma crime syndicate, led by the Director (Anjelica Huston). The Director also trains young girls to be ballerina-assassins, and one young ballerina (played by Unity Phelan) is shown rehearsing in the scene. That dancer, Eve Macarro, is the main character in Ballerina, now played by de Armas.

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After dropping a rare photography-oriented camera recently with the S1R II, Panasonic is going back to its creator roots. The company just unveiled the S1 II, a 24-megapixel full-frame mirrorless camera with a partially-stacked sensor (like the Nikon Z6 III) that can capture 6K ProRes RAW video internally with minimal rolling shutter wobble. At the same time, Panasonic is pitching it as a relative value next to full stacked sensor cameras.

With the same body as the S1R II, the S1 II is considerably smaller and lighter than the original S1 while still offering a large grip and full complement of manual controls. It also comes with a display that both tilts and flips out, a high-resolution 5.76 million-dot electronic viewfinder, CFexpress Type B and SD UHS-II card slots and optional support for Panasonic’s 32-bit float audio. 

Steve Dent for Engadget

Photographers get up to 70 fps burst shooting speeds in electronic shutter mode and 10 fps with the mechanical shutter (along with 1.5s pre-burst capture). They can also take 96MP high resolution shots (with no tripod needed), along with live view composites, multiple exposures and timelapse animations. Autofocus is via Panasonic’s latest AI Phase Hybrid AF with Eye/Face AF, AF tracking and detection of animals, vehicles and a new category, “urban sports” (ie breakdancing). 

On paper, though, this is more of a video-oriented camera camera. You can shoot ProRes and ProRes RAW video at up to 5.8K and 3:2 “open-gate” video at 5,952 x 3,968 resolution, along with 4K at 120 fps. It supports V-Log / V-Gamut capture with dual native ISO at 640/5000 and up to 15 stops of dynamic range. In addition, you get anamorphic video modes plus external RAW HDMI recording in either ProRes or Blackmagic formats. 

Panasonic boosted in-body stabilization to 8.0 stops via it’s Dual I.S.2 system, while also offering the cropless IBS mode introduced on the S1R II. Optical smoothing can can be enhanced with electronic stabilization when more aggressive smoothing is required for walking or quick camera movements. 

Panasonic

Other key features include video monitoring tools like false color and exposure review, live streaming, wired webcam supports via USB-UVC/UAC (a first for Panasonic) and support for the Lumix Flow app that lets you do things like creator storyboards and shot lists for quicker editing. And as with other recent models, the S1 II supports real time LUTs and the Lumix Lab app, letting you download creator designed film looks that can be baked in to your video or added later in post. Panasonic will also introduce ARRI LogC3 so that the S1 II, S1R II and S1 IIE can be used in conjunction with ARRI digital cinema cameras. 

The Panasonic S1 II is now available for pre-order at $3,199 (body only) with shipping set to start on June 16th. That price is high next to its main competition, the Nikon Z6 III, which retails for $2,497 and is often on sale. 

Panasonic

Panasonic does have an answer to that: the $2,499 S1 IIE that has the body and features of the S1 II but lacks the stacked sensor and high-speed photo bursts. Panasonic also introduced an interesting lens, the Lumix S 24-60mm f/2.8. It offers the features and most of the range of its $2,000 Lumix S 24-70mm f/2.8 lens but in a smaller and lighter size and at a lower $1,200 price tag. I’ve had the S1 II for a short time now and have been impressed so far with its speed and capabilities, so stay tuned for a full review with final firmware.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/cameras/panasonics-s1-ii-is-its-most-powerful-creator-camera-yet-140039445.html?src=rss

WARREN, Mich.—If you’ve been following General Motors’ development of electric vehicles on its Ultium platform, you’d be forgiven for thinking that it hasn’t gone entirely smoothly. While plagued by some initial hiccups, GM has worked through those issues and now has a total of 12 EVs on the road. By my count, that’s nine more than Ford, the crosstown rival that had a significant lead in this generation of EVs.

Furthering GM’s advancement is the development of new battery technologies. Kurt Kelty, the company’s newest head of batteries (after spending 12 years at Tesla), told me that new technology is a way to get to mass adoption of EVs.

“There needs to be price parity between gasoline and electric,” he told me. “Without the tax credit.”

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A few weeks ago, I posted a story about the proliferation of AI-created fake news videos about Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt. Because I am fair (and balanced!), this week I’m looking at the AI distortion of a hero from the left: Dallas-based congressperson Jasmine Crockett.

The real Crockett is sharp, confrontational, and isn’t afraid to curse people out. AI-Jasmine Crockett is a folk hero who spends her life STUNNING, DESTROYING, and OBLITERATING various talk show hosts, actors, and political opponents. She took on Bill Maher, humiliated Seth Meyers, made Ellen DeGeneres regret insulting her, and still had time to have a judge arrested. On YouTube.

The real Jasmine Crockett is a political figure, but I don’t think these fakes are propaganda exactly. They aren’t political misinformation in the way we usually understand it. No one is trying to convince anyone to vote a certain way or write a letter to Congress. It’s stranger than that. It’s a flood of algorithm-driven cultural wish fulfillment in which computers make videos to satisfy some deeply rooted, tribal emotional need. I’d like to think most people recognize that these videos are fake (they’re not faked very well) but there wouldn’t be so many of them if they didn’t work.

Jasmine Crockett STUNS Jimmy Kimmell—and Bill Maher, Seth Meyer, Ellen Degeneres, and everyone else

The video below describes an imaginary confrontation between talk show host Jimmy Kimmel and Jasmine Crockett.

For comparison, here’s what really happened when Crockett was a guest on Kimmel’s show:

As you can see, at no point was Kimmell STUNNED or HUMILIATED, and Crockett did not refer to the host as a “f*cking weasel” even once. (“F*cking weasel” is the go-to thumbnail insult on these videos, for some reason.)

The real video has been viewed 3.1 million times in 10 months. The fake has a view count of more than 600k in three weeks, but that’s not a fair number, because there are dozens, maybe hundreds, of AI-created videos entitled “Jasmine Crockett Stuns Jimmy Kimmel on Live TV with a Savage Comeback—Audience Left in Shock!” on YouTube and other video sites. Some have 100k views, some have less than a thousand views, so there may be as many people watching the fake appearance as the real one.

If the idea was to influence American politics, to “own conservatives,” or something, Jimmy Kimmel is a strange choice for Crockett’s opposition. He’s not a conservative. But the politics only function as bait to be clicked, and Jimmy and Jasmine are emotional buzzers, not people. Viewers have strong feelings about them, so a video with Crockett and Kimmel in conflict hits recommendation pay dirt.

Developing videos titles for this breed of AI slop is like political Mad Libs, but it’s an easy-to-understand formula: The subject is a controversial media figure, the predicate is a verb that could describe both physical violence or rhetoric, and the object is a media figure. Close it off with a button and you got a YouTube AI political video.

The result are titles like these (that I made up):

• Matt Gaetz CRUSHES Rachel Maddow Live on MSNBC—She’s Going Off the Air!

• AOC BALL-KICKS Tucker Carlson onto his fainting couch—That’s gotta HURT!

• RFK Jr. MELANCHOLIES Brian Kilmeade With a Haunting Stare—Audience SHOCKED!

• Angela Davis FLAME THROWS Dick Cavett’s Sitting Room Liberalism Into an Afro-Futurist Death Spiral: “YOU GOT DIALECTICALLY DESTROYED!”

(That last one probably wouldn’t get many hits, but the thumbnail would look like this):

Credit: Stephen Johnson/Sora

The point is: AI slop-makers will have anyone fight anyone, regardless of political affiliation. Crockett has STUNNED Seth Meyer, Stephen Colbert, Tucker Carlson, Bill Maher, and Jon Stewart. But so, roughly, has Caroline Leavitt. For some reason, so has Denzel Washington.

You might be wondering who would be DESTROYED if the queens of AI slop, Karoline Leavitt and Jasmine Crockett, were to face off, maybe to debate why they both have two Ts at the end of their name when so many names go without any Ts at all. The answer: Karoline Leavitt would ERUPT, but Jasmine Crockett would be STUNNED.

The videos themselves are secondary to their titles, and they’re all terrible. They’re uniformly slow-paced (longer videos lead to longer engagement time, a key YouTube metric) and the content is strangely tame, given the titles. Just a droning AI voice telling a boring story for half an hour over a single still frame of the video’s subjects. It’s only interesting when the AI screws up and gives someone extra fingers or mistakes Bill Maher for Chuck Schumer.

Regardless of the low quality, sometimes one of these AI-developed videos hits the the YouTube recommendation sweet spot and gets some traffic. There’s no honor among thieves on social media, so many, many channels that produce this shit (Valorium Story, Gentry Stories, Battle Arena, etc., etc.) swarm like flies to rip off any mildly “sticky” title, and post roughly the same content, generally with diminishing returns in terms of views. It’s ridiculously easy and inexpensive to set up an automated content farm. Whether you’d make back the $100 a month or so in software subscriptions you’d need to create these videos is an open question, but I guess people have to hope.

What are viewers getting out of these videos?

Although these videos almost always have a quick disclaimer screen explaining that they’re fake or “parody,” judging by the comments, people are taking them seriously. “This young lady’s education as a lawyer was not in vain!!! She’s amazing!!!” one reads. “Those who voted for Ms. Crockett did so with unwavering confidence in her, and she delivers making us proud that she will challenge injustice without pause!” reads another.

But are the comments fake, too? Is this just AI commenting on videos made by AI, the Dead Internet Theory coming true in real time? Man, I don’t even know. It’s easier to make fake comments on YouTube than it is to fake a whole video, but I still assume that, at the end of the conveyor belt, there are actual viewers slumped over their phones, thinking (or doing whatever passes for “thinking” these days) about Jasmine Crockett. Something is shaping this narrative, and it feels depressingly human.

You can’t blame computers for videos like “Jasmine Crockett LOSES IT As Elon Musk Confronts Her to Her FACE!” That’s on us, baby. We want to watch endless videos of our perceived tribal enemies being HUMILIATED, DESTROYED, STUNNED, and FORCE-CHOKED, maybe because we like carnage, or maybe because we want to feel like we belong to something, that somewhere, Justice is jumping off the top rope, ready to SUPLEX, STUN, and OBLITERATE the people who annoy us. And if we can’t find enough of the real thing to get that little jolt of spite-flavored dopamine, we’ll make computers fake it for us.

Gaming pioneer John Carmack believes we’re not nearly as dependent on cutting-edge silicon as most assume — we just lack the economic incentive to prove it. Responding to a “CPU apocalypse” thought experiment on X, the id Software founder and former Oculus CTO suggested that software inefficiency, not hardware limitations, is our greatest vulnerability. “More of the world than many might imagine could run on outdated hardware if software optimization was truly a priority,” Carmack wrote, arguing that market pressures would drive dramatic efficiency improvements if new chips stopped arriving.

His solution? “Rebuild all the interpreted microservice based products into monolithic native codebases!” — essentially abandoning modern development patterns for the more efficient approaches of earlier computing eras. The veteran programmer noted that such changes would come with significant tradeoffs: “Innovative new products would get much rarer without super cheap and scalable compute.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Notion is coming for Otter.ai. On Tuesday, the company announced an update for Notion AI, the suite of generative AI features available through its popular note-taking app. Among the new tools included in the package is AI Meeting Notes, a feature that can transcribe and summarize any conversation directly within Notion. No need to turn to dedicated software like the aforementioned Otter.ai.

If you use Notion Calendar, your meeting notifications will include the option to start an AI Meeting Note page. Alternatively, you can write “/meeting” to add a transcription block to an existing note. Any conversation Notion AI transcribes for you is searchable through the app, and you can add what you get to any of your projects.

Notion

Speaking of search, you can now use Notion AI to comb through a number of different productivity apps, including Slack, Google Workspace and Github. As long as you’ve connected those platforms to Notion, the app can resolve natural language queries, like, “What’s the latest on our upcoming brand campaign?” and sort results by source.

Separately, Notion is adding a Research Mode. Similar to Deep Research modes from Google and OpenAI, you can ask Notion’s built-in AI to write reports for you. The difference here being that Notion AI will pull information from your projects, in addition to what it finds online. The company is pitching this as a real time-saver. “Create project updates, research reports, and internal best practices in minutes with one prompt,” Notion says. “We’ve already seen this save days worth of time.”

Last but not least, if you would rather prompt with GPT-4.1 or Claude 3.7 than Notion’s own chatbot, you can now do that directly within the app courtesy of a new model picker. OpenAI and Anthropic’s models won’t have access to your workspace data, but they’re there for users who prefer their responses for general questions and in case you want to turn to a reasoning system in the form of Claude 3.7 Sonnet.

As part of today’s announcement, Notion is changing how it bills for its AI features. Instead of a separate $10 per month plan, unlimited access to Notion AI is now part of the company’s Business plan, which is increasing from $15 per month and per member to $20 per month and per member. Notion’s justification for the increase is that it’s giving users access to several different tools, including GPT-4.1 and Claude 3.7, for the price of an all-in-one package. Of course, it’s not quite a one-to-one comparison. For example, if you decide to skip out on ChatGPT Plus, you miss out on expanded limits on Advanced Voice mode and Deep Research. Still, for Notion users that might be a tradeoff well worth making. 

If you’re a current Notion AI subscriber, you’ll keep access to all the AI features you had before today’s announcement. For Free and Plus users, you get limited trial access to all the new features.   

Update 9:54AM ET: Notion initially said the price of its Business plan was going up to $30, but it actually going up to $20 per month and per member.  

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/notion-ai-can-transcribe-conversations-and-write-reports-but-itll-cost-you-130018464.html?src=rss