Alex Mashinsky—the disgraced founder of the Celsius Network cryptocurrency bank who deceived hundreds of thousands into losing billions with the catchy slogan “unbank yourself”—was sentenced to 12 years in prison on Thursday.
Back in December, Mashinsky pleaded guilty to securities fraud and commodities fraud. Federal prosecutors slammed him for reaping $48 million in profits while causing billions in investor losses by artificially inflating the value of his network’s token, Cel. The Department of Justice and dozens of victims urged the court to order a maximum sentence of 20 years, while Mashinsky hoped the court would agree that he had shown remorse and should only serve one year and one day, Reuters reported.
Mashinsky’s downfall started in 2022, when the Celsius Network suddenly stopped allowing withdrawals, claiming that “extreme market conditions” were to blame, a shady move that caused some customers to question the crypto bank’s financial health. One month later, the bank filed for bankruptcy, exposing a $1.19 billion deficit in its balance sheets and still holding onto customers’ funds while scoffing at supposed “misinformation” that their money would be lost.
Yesterday’s naming of Chicago native Robert Prevost as Pope Leo XIV—the first American-born leader of the Catholic church—has already led to plenty of jokes and memes about his potential interactions with various bits of American pop culture. And that cultural exposure apparently extends to some casual video games, making Leo XIV is our first confirmed gamer pope.
Speaking to NBC5 Chicago Thursday, papal sibling John Prevost confirmed that the soon-to-be-pope played a couple of games just before flying to the papal conclave earlier this week. “First we do Wordle, because this is a regular thing,” Prevost said. “Then we do Words with Friends. It’s something to keep his mind off life in the real world…”
OK, so the pope’s love of casual word games doesn’t exactly put him in the same category of people who are speedrunning Doom slaughter maps. But it’s still striking to realize that the 69-year-old pontiff is among the reported 44 percent of American Baby Boomer men who play video games regularly and the 15 percent of Americans aged 55 and over who have played Wordle specifically.
Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang has served up another blunt take on the job market as AI permeates society. From a report: “You will not lose your job to AI, but will lose it to someone who uses it,” Huang said at the Milken Institute Conference. Added Huang, “I recommend 100% take advantage of AI, don’t be that person.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
OpenEmbed is developing the MeshWalkie, a handheld wireless device built around the ESP32-S3, SX1262 LoRa module, and L76K GNSS, using the enclosure of a Quansheng UV-K6 radio. The device is described as an open-source platform for LoRa, Wi-Fi, and GPS-based applications, including support for Meshtastic. The MeshWalkie integrates several hardware components to support low-power […]
This is a video highlighting the work of conservationist Shawn Miller’s ‘Make The Switch 4 Nature‘ program, which aids in providing hermit crabs living in plastic waste shells with real shells. It also encourages humans to leave potential hermit crabs shells on the beach instead of taking them home to populate their junk drawer or a jar in a beach-themed guest bathroom. Even aware of the hermit crab’s plight, will people stop taking their homes? I’d certainly like to think so, but a lot of people, just like the plastic these crabs stuffed their asses into, are garbage.
The British car industry got a big break from US President Donald Trump yesterday afternoon. Trump and UK Prime Minister Kier Starmer have agreed to a bilateral trade agreement that cuts tariffs on a range of imports from the UK, including pharmaceuticals, aluminum and steel, and cars.
Now, the first 100,000 cars that come to the US from the UK will only be subject to a 10 percent tariff rather than the 27.5 percent they have been under since the start of this trade war in April.
“The car industry is vital to the UK’s economic prosperity, sustaining 250,000 jobs,” said Jaguar Land Rover CEO Adrian Mardell. “We warmly welcome this deal which secures greater certainty for our sector and the communities it supports. We would like to thank the UK and US Governments for agreeing this deal at pace and look forward to continued engagement over the coming months,” Mardell said.
I love Overwatch 2. I love Street Fighter. Put the two of them together for a skin collaboration, and that should, in theory, speak to me directly. But I don’t know, I feel like I’m becoming desensitized to all the collaborations Blizzard has been shoving into its hero shooter, even when they involve things I enjoy.…
For decades now, you could count on there being a certain rhythm to a Doom game. From the ’90s originals to the series’ resurrection in recent years, the Doom games have always been about using constant, zippy motion to dodge through a sea of relatively slow-moving bullets, maintaining your distance while firing back at encroaching hordes of varied monsters. The specific guns and movement options you could call on might change from game to game, but the basic rhythm of that dodge-and-shoot gameplay never has.
Just a few minutes in, Doom: The Dark Ages throws out that traditional Doom rhythm almost completely. The introduction of a crucial shield adds a whole suite of new verbs to the Doom vocabulary; in addition to running, dodging, and shooting, you’ll now be blocking, parrying, and stunning enemies for counterattacks. In previous Doom games, standing still for any length of time often led to instant death. In The Dark Ages, standing your ground to absorb and/or deflect incoming enemy attacks is practically required at many points.
During a preview event earlier this year, the game’s developers likened this change to the difference between flying a fighter jet and piloting a tank. That’s a pretty apt metaphor, and it’s not exactly an unwelcome change for a series that might be in need of a shake-up. But it only works if you go in ready to play like a tank and not like the fighter jet that has been synonymous with Doom for decades.
Researchers are sounding alarms about the proliferation of AI-generated content — dubbed “slop” — that may be overwhelming the internet’s human-created material. Fil Menczer, distinguished professor of informatics at Indiana University, who has studied social bots since the early 2010s, is now expressing serious concern about generative AI’s impact. “Am I worried? Yes, I’m very worried,” he told Bloomberg.
Another research from Georgetown University found over 100 Facebook pages with millions of followers using AI-generated images for scams. According to Tollbit, a company that helps publishers get compensated when their sites are scraped, web scraping volume doubled from Q3 to Q4 2024, causing significant strain on sites like Wikipedia during high-traffic events.
The situation creates a dangerous feedback loop where AI content is generated to please AI recommendation systems, potentially marginalizing human creators. Jeff Allen of the Integrity Institute told Bloomberg this resembles “the algae bloom that can blow up and suffocate the life you would want to have in a healthy ecosystem.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Doom as a franchise has evolved a lot over the decades since it first arrived in the ‘90s. But through all those changes, there remain a few things I need in a Doom game to feel satisfied with it. A Doom game checklist, if you will. It’s not long, but it does make up the core of Doom.
Guardian of Realms, a mixed reality combat game from the Swordsman VR developer, is now free on Quest 3 and 3S.
Launched in early access last September, Guardian of Realms aims to deliver a roomscale power fantasy combat game without artificial stick-based movement. Initially launched as a paid game, Sinn Studio’s chief operating officer Almir Brljak informed UploadVR that the team has now made this self-funded mixed reality project a free-to-play release.
“We self-funded the project with hopes that the MR audience would grow significantly following the release of the Quest 3S, but that hasn’t materialized. Instead of keeping an experience we’re proud of behind a price wall, we’re opening it up, hoping that players will see the magic of MR and help grow the ecosystem,” confirmed Brljak in a prepared statement.
Continuing on, Brljak explained that Sinn Studio’s core thesis was that playing in MR would allow players to feel more confident in movements. While the team believes they’ve proven this to be true with Guardian of Realms, “we didn’t have enough scale to sustain it.”
Guardian of Realms comes with two modes; ‘Sandbox Mode’ offers full control over the type, frequency, and difficulty of enemies, whereas ‘Survival Mode’ requires protecting a sacred crystal from various enemies. In-game mod support is also included, and combat provides options ranging from melee weaponry to magical powers like gravity manipulation.
Since September’s launch, it’s also received various post-launch updates, with the most recent patch adding a new ‘Gothic Island Castle’ map and additional hazards. Other changes include more new enemies and props, additional features for the enemy AI, new weapons, seasonal updates for Halloween and Winter, plus more.
Guardian of Realms in early access is available for free on Quest 3.
The European Commission has launched a new initiative to attract researchers and scientists to the European Union—especially those from the United States. The Choose Europe for Science program, backed with more than half a billion dollars, is designed to offer an alternative to researchers who have been forced to seek new opportunities following cuts in scientific funding imposed by President Donald Trump’s administration.
The program will invest €500 million ($568 million) between 2025 and 2027 to recruit specialists in various fields of knowledge to come and work in Europe. The initiative also includes a target for member states to allocate 3 percent of their GDP to R&D projects by 2030.
“The role of science in today’s world is questioned,” warned Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, in a statement on Tuesday. “What a gigantic miscalculation. I believe that science holds the key to our future here in Europe. Without it, we simply cannot address today’s global challenges—from health to new tech, from climate to oceans.”
When working with Unix-like systems, it’s important to understand the role of different configuration files that influence the shell’s behavior.
Two critical files for Bash users are bashrc and bash_profile. Although they might seem similar at first glance, they are loaded under different circumstances and serve distinct purposes.
Knowing when and how these files are used can help you configure your environment more efficiently, customize your prompt, set aliases, and automate certain tasks when you log in or open a new terminal session.
The post Understanding the Difference Between bashrc and bash_profile appeared first on Linux Today.
Back in 2024, a system set up to identify objects that suddenly brighten found something unusual. Unfortunately, the automated system that was supposed to identify it couldn’t figure out what it was looking at. Now, about a year later, we know it’s the first tidal disruption event—meaning a star being ripped apart by a supermassive black hole—identified at visual wavelengths. It’s also a rather unusual one, in that the supermassive black hole in question does not reside at the center of its galaxy. Instead, there’s an even more massive object there, which is feeding on matter at the same time.
The object, now called AT2024tvd, was identified by the Zwicky Transient Facility, which is set up to scan the entire northern sky over a period of just two days, after which it repeats the process. Combined with software that scans the data for changes, these repeated exposures allow the system to identify objects that suddenly brighten (or, potentially, anything that suddenly goes dark). Among the events it can identify are tidal disruption events, where a star gets spaghettified by the enormous gravity of a supermassive black hole.
Normally, supermassive black holes live at the center of galaxies. So, the software that does the scanning will only flag something as a potential tidal disruption event if it coincides with the presence of a previous light source at the same location. And that wasn’t the case with AT2024tvd, which appeared to be over 2,500 light years from the center of the galaxy. As a result, the software didn’t flag it as a potential tidal disruption event; people didn’t figure out what it was until they looked more closely at it.
Arriving a little over four months after 4MLinux 47.0, the 4MLinux 48.0 release features support for new apps and components, including the Kino IEEE 1394 DV non-linear video editor, the VVenC H.266/VVC encoder, FreeTube YouTube client, and the Bristol emulator for synthesizers, electric pianos, and organs.
The post 4MLinux 48.0 Is Now Available for Download, Powered by Linux Kernel 6.12 LTS appeared first on Linux Today.
I don’t really use AI. At least part of this, I think, is the user interface most large language models (LLMs) are presented in: the chatbot. I never think to open a dedicated window and ask a fictional person for help—I find it a clumsy way to interact with a computer. Why can’t the AI help me in the places I’m already working?
That’s the idea behind Cotypist, a (currently) free Mac application by developer Daniel Gräfe that adds mobile-style autocomplete to every application on your Mac. The tool, which uses an offline LLM running on your device, requires an Apple Silicon processor (16 GB of RAM is recommended).
While you’re typing, predictive text (in gray) appears to the right of your cursor, no matter what application you’re using. You can hit “Tab” to accept everything suggested or “`” (the key right above Tab) to accept the next word. The idea is that the AI makes writing faster by suggesting words you were going to type anyway—accept the words you wanted and ignore the ones you didn’t. Gräfe calls this kind of writing “dancing with the AI,” which is a romantic notion.
Setting things up is fairly straightforward. After installing the application and launching it, you’ll get a short tutorial. You’ll need to enable the permissions needed by the application. You’ll also need to wait for the application to download a large language model (the application automatically picks the most powerful model likely to run well on your device). After that’s set up, you’ll start seeing suggestions.
You can configure a few things using the menu bar icon; e.g., you can disable suggestions in a particular application for a set amount of time or indefinitely. This is helpful if you’re tripping over the suggestions in some apps but find them useful in others. You can also click the settings option to change the keyboard shortcuts for accepting suggestions.
You can also set system-wide instructions for the bot. This is basically a block of text that the AI will use to guide the suggestions it makes—the documentation suggests you include information like your name, your profession, and any guidance you want the AI to follow while writing.
I’ve been using Cotypist, off and on, for about a week now. Every once and a while it accurately predicts where I’m going and suggests the right words, saving me a few keystrokes. Most of the time, though, I find myself distracted by the suggestions. This might have something to do with my writing style—I’m a pretty fast typist, and I usually know the next word I’m going to type before I actually type it.
The thing about writing, though, is that it’s intensely personal—everyone does it a little bit differently. I can imagine this being a useful tool for someone whose brain works a little differently than mine, or someone who struggles with typing. If you’re curious whether this tool will fit your workflow, I highly recommend giving it a spin.
