Microsoft cites ‘changes in the macroeconomic environment’ for the decision
The post Microsoft Reveals The First $800 Xbox With Another Round Of Price Hikes appeared first on Kotaku.
The open-world RPG sequel teases work on matchmaking and other features
The post <i>Cyberpunk 2077</i> Sequel Experimenting With Multiplayer As CDPR Embraces Online Gameplay appeared first on Kotaku.
The upcoming ports on Switch 2 and Xbox feature an easy mode that has me wondering what the point of playing the game even is
The post <i>Final Fantasy 7 Remake</i> On Switch 2 And Xbox Has New Options To Make The Game Much, Much Easier appeared first on Kotaku.
Microsoft will increase Xbox Series X and Series S console prices in the United States on October 3. The Series X rises to $649.99 from $599.99 and the 512GB Series S increases to $399.99 from $379.99. The 1TB Series S moves to $449.99 from $429.99. The Series X Digital Edition reaches $599.99 from $549.99 and the 2TB Galaxy Black Special Edition climbs to $799.99 from $729.99. Microsoft cited macroeconomic changes for the increases. Console prices outside the US and controller and headset prices domestically remain unchanged. The company raised console prices globally in May.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The Linux kernel generally wants to be in charge of the system as a whole;
it runs on all of the available CPUs and controls access to them globally.
Cong Wang has just come forward with a different
approach: allowing each CPU to run its own kernel. The patch set is in
an early form, but it gives a hint for what might be possible.
Ubuntu Studio 25.10 “Questing Quokka” Beta has officially launched, bringing significant improvements to creative professionals and multimedia enthusiasts. This latest Ubuntu Studio 25.10 release introduces major desktop environment upgrades, enhanced audio production capabilities, and substantial updates to creative applications that position it as a leading choice for content creators.
It’s cheap, and it can totally change your iPhone videos.
The post This iPhone Gimbal Costs Peanuts, Amazon Is Clearing Out DJI’s Budget Model appeared first on Kotaku.
Unseen Diplomacy 2 promises roomscale spy shenanigans with next week’s early access launch on Quest 3 and Steam.
Developed by Cornish studio Triangular Pixels, this upcoming sequel to the 2016 PC VR hit Unseen Diplomacy re-emerged several months ago and later teased its roomscale gameplay. Featuring a full campaign that uses procedurally generated levels, today’s announcement confirmed that Unseen Diplomacy 2 is heading to early access on September 25 for both platforms.
Though the launch build is complete, Triangular Pixels is taking the early access approach “to gather community feedback, refine mechanics, balance difficulty, and polish the experience across different playstyles and spaces.” Early access isn’t expected to last long, while version 1.0 features more missions, multiple endings, and more varied challenges. Other changes include promised improvements to accessibility, performance, and further balancing.
Playing as a spymaster leading an elite agency, your goal is to sneak across enemy bases to steal intel and resources, sabotaging your foe’s plans using various gadgets, and escape undetected. This also involves managing your agency through tactical deployment of other operatives, and the Quest 3 version features an exclusive mixed reality mode.
Unseen Diplomacy 2 enters early access on September 25 on Quest 3 and Steam.
Meta is moving to break into the wholesale power-trading business to better manage the massive electricity needs of its data centers. Bloomberg: The company, which owns Facebook, filed an application with US regulators this week seeking authorization to do so. A Meta representative said it was a natural next step to participate in energy markets as it looks to power operations with clean energy.
Buying electricity has become an increasingly urgent challenge for technology companies including Meta, Microsoft and Alphabet’s Google. They’re all racing to develop more advanced artificial intelligence systems and tools that are notoriously resource-intensive. Amazon, Google and Microsoft are already active power traders, according to filings with US regulators.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Earlier this year, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it was going to reject the work it had done back in 2009, when it first determined that greenhouse gas emissions posed a threat to the US public. While it laid out a number of reasons for revisiting its earlier work, one of those focused on the science: The EPA’s original decision was over 15 years old, and it claimed our understanding of climate change had itself changed since then.
The National Academies of Science (NAS) decided that at least one aspect of that was probably right: Our understanding of the climate has changed in the last 15 years. So, it asked a group of scientists to do a quick update of our understanding of greenhouse gases, completed before public comment was closed on the EPA’s plan. That report is now out, and the NAS’s conclusion is clear: The EPA was right in 2009, and everything we’ve learned since has only made it more right.
The EPA’s endangerment finding already had a long history by the time it was completed during the Obama administration. In it, the EPA concluded that greenhouse gases pose a risk to the US and its citizens, both directly through health impacts and indirectly through economic damages. Under the Clean Air Act, that finding enabled regulation of greenhouse gas emissions and formed the foundation of plans to reduce those originating from transportation and electrical generation. All of those plans have been held up in court or abandoned before coming into effect.
After pressuring ABC to suspend Jimmy Kimmel, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr is setting his regulatory sights on ABC’s The View and NBC late-night hosts Seth Meyers and Jimmy Fallon.
Carr appeared yesterday on the radio show hosted by Scott Jennings, who describes himself as “the last man standing athwart the liberal mob.” Jennings asked Carr whether The View and other ABC programs violate FCC rules, and made a reference to President Trump calling on NBC to cancel Fallon and Meyers.
“A lot of people think there are other shows on ABC that maybe run afoul of this more often than Jimmy Kimmel,” Jennings said. “I’m thinking specifically of The View, and President Trump himself has mentioned Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers at NBC. Do you have comments on those shows, and are they doing what Kimmel did Monday night, and is it even worse on those programs in your opinion?”
Void Interactive says it is focused on ‘fostering a respectful and professional community’
The post <i>Ready Or Not</i> Community Manager Fired For Responding To Charlie Kirk Assassination With ‘Nothing Of Value Was Lost’ appeared first on Kotaku.
An analysis of tens of thousands of research-paper submissions has shown a dramatic increase in the presence of text generated using AI in the past few years, an academic publisher has found. Nature: The American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) found that 23% of abstracts in manuscripts and 5% of peer-review reports submitted to its journals in 2024 contained text that was probably generated by large language models (LLMs). The publishers also found that less than 25% of authors disclosed their use of AI to prepare manuscripts, despite the publisher mandating disclosure for submission.
To screen manuscripts for signs of AI use, the AACR used an AI tool that was developed by Pangram Labs, based in New York City. When applied to 46,500 abstracts, 46,021 methods sections and 29,544 peer-review comments submitted to 10 AACR journals between 2021 and 2024, the tool flagged a rise in suspected AI-generated text in submissions and review reports since the public release of OpenAI’s chatbot, ChatGPT, in November 2022.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Google’s Gemini AI seems to be everywhere these days. It’s in your Gmail, it’s on your phone, and soon, it’ll be in your browser. While Google’s AI browser integration was already live for Google AI Pro and AI Ultra subscribers, it’s now rolling out to everyone—and getting a bunch of new features, too.
If you’re suddenly seeing a new Gemini button in the top right of your Chrome browser (in the same pane as your tabs), then you’ve already been hit with the update. If not, you may need to use the three-dots button in the top right corner and select Gemini in Chrome to turn it on, assuming you want to.
When you click the Gemini button, or summon it via a keyboard shortcut (Alt + G by default), you’ll be able to try out the same features Google’s paying customers have had access to for a while. That means Gemini will be able to answer questions about the webpage you’re on, or just answer general questions unrelated to what you’re browsing. Or, if you’re in a Google app or on a Google website, it’ll be able to take some simple actions for you, like jumping you to a specific spot in a YouTube video.
Additionally, Gemini can also now work across your tabs and compare information between them. Simply start a dialogue with Gemini by tapping the button in the top right corner, and at the bottom of the window, click “Add tab” to give Gemini another source of data to consider.
Weirdly, while these updates are already pushing live to average folks, Google says businesses will need to wait a couple of weeks, so they can get “enterprise-grade data protections and controls.”
As of now, aside from the new access, it’s not the biggest update, especially because to try it, you need to be on Windows or Mac, have your language set to English, and be in the U.S.. Google stresses that the Gemini Assistant on Android can also help you browse Chrome, and that it’s working to bring more direct Gemini in Chrome access to both its Android and iOS apps.
Google says it also has big things in store for the feature, with “agentic browsing” set for the “coming months.” This will supposedly let Gemini in Chrome complete tasks, like booking a haircut for you, or ordering your groceries. Alternatively, it’ll also help you browse a bit more easily, as Google says it’s working to let you ask Gemini questions about your browser history when you want to go back to a specific page. For instance, “what was the website where I saw the walnut desk last week?” could take you back to a shopping page you only vaguely remember.
A more powerful address bar is apparently in the works that will let you ask questions of Google’s AI model without having to navigate to it first. For now, Gemini in Chrome will start suggesting questions to ask it about whatever page you’re on, right in the address bar.
The update includes a few security updates too, although they mostly seem to work in the backend, supposedly using AI to better block scammy ads and notifications. Now that’s the type of AI integration I can support wholeheartedly.
All that said, if you’re a bit skeptical about Gemini in Chrome, you can turn it off. Simply navigate to Settings > AI Innovations, and you’ll be able to turn off the Gemini button, as well as disable its keyboard shortcut. You can also restrict its permissions: Set everything to off, and it’ll be like it was never installed in the first place.
Canonical released today the beta version of the upcoming Ubuntu 25.10 (Questing Quokka) release for public beta testing, so it’s time to take a look at what to expect from the final release.
The Deep of Night’s first balance patch offers fans some small mercies
The post <i>Elden Ring: Nightreign</i>‘s New Hard Mode Is Kicking Players Asses So Much They Can Now Demote Themselves to A Lower Difficulty appeared first on Kotaku.
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Apple’s new sleep score, now available on the Apple Watch and in the Apple Health app, grades how well you slept on a scale from 0 to 100. Since it grades you retroactively, I can look back at my last month (or even years) of sleep scores to see how the new numbers compare to the scores I’ve gotten from Oura and other wearables. I tried this out, and one thing stood out: Apple is way too easy on me.
I’m kidding, sort of. Yes, Apple’s scores are consistently higher than those I get from other wearables, but it’s not like I can definitively say Apple is wrong or Oura is right. I think of a sleep score like a grade on an essay: A bad essay will probably get a bad grade, and a good essay will probably get a good grade, but it’s not like every teacher in the world would agree that your take on Moby Dick’s symbolism deserves exactly a 92%. You may feel like you got away with something if your mid essay comes back with an A+, but as long as the prof is consistent with their grading scheme, you can’t say your grade was wrong.
That’s why the accuracy of sleep scores doesn’t matter a ton, in my opinion. The World Sleep Society more or less agrees, saying not to read too much into individual scores, but instead keep an eye on trends, like whether your sleep seems to be getting better or worse over time.
With all of that in mind, I thought it would be interesting to compare my last month or so of Apple sleep scores to those I get from the Oura ring, plus a few data points from my Garmin and Whoop devices.
Apple calculates your sleep score based on your sleep duration, bedtime consistency, and interruptions. Competing devices each have their own algorithm. Apple can calculate its score based on the data from any device, not just an Apple Watch, so in some cases the Oura and Apple scores are actually using the same underlying data.
Here are the results:
Apple says that over the past month, my most frequent sleep score level is “excellent,” earned on 17 nights. I also had a “high” sleep score on 10 nights, with just one night of “OK” sleep, one of “low” sleep, and no nights “very low.”
My major takeaway is that Apple’s scores are almost always higher than those I get from other devices. That said, they tend to go up when the others go up, and down when the others go down, which means that all of these scores are probably useful when looked at from a big-picture point of view.
Subjectively, I don’t think my sleep has been all that good lately. I’ve been staying up late more often than I’d like, and waking up tired more often than not. I’d judge it as mostly OK, occasionally poor, and sometimes good. But that’s just, like, my opinion, man.
It is true that there’s probably nothing medically wrong with me, and I don’t think my sleep is drastically poor—so maybe Apple’s rosy outlook is just a better way to think about my sleep. It’s OK to be a straight-A student sometimes.