[$] Large language models for patch review

There have been many discussions in the free-software community about the
role of large language models (LLMs) in software development. For the most
part, though, those conversations have focused on whether projects should
be accepting code output by those models, and under what conditions. But
there are other ways in which these systems might participate in the
development process. Chris Mason recently started a
discussion
on the Kernel Summit discussion list about how these models
can be used to review patches, rather than create them.

Reach Review: An Incredible Cinematic VR Action-Adventure

Reach is an exemplary hit that excels in its VR-focused design, and it’s out today on most major platforms. Read on for our full review.

There’s a mid-game incident that’ll stick with me for a while. I’m frantically climbing to safety, physically pulling myself higher and higher as an enormous, terrifying foe attacks from a distance. High-energy blasts keep damaging the structure I’m on, nearly scorching my hands with a narrow miss. There’s a fierce tension, I’m nervous, and I can’t linger without risking being vaporized. It’s one of many moments where Reach delivers incredible embodiment.

The Facts

What is it?: A cinematic fantasy action-adventure where you explore a lost underground civilization.
Platforms: PS VR2, PC VR, and Quest 3 (reviewed on PS VR2)
Release Date: Out Now
Developer: nDreams Elevation
Publisher: nDreams
Price: $39.99

Its strong VR-focused design is undeniably the star of the show, though Reach’s compelling cinematic fantasy story keeps me invested as you explore a lost underground civilization. Reluctant hero Rosa proves relatable in her personal struggles, there’s welcome character development on this journey across Ferra, and her back-and-forth with your companion, Atlas, shows chemistry. Plenty of VR games use nameless protagonists to self-insert yourself into that role, but using a specific character benefits this considerably.

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PlayStation VR2 gameplay captured by UploadVR

I previously said Reach aims to tackle a decade’s worth of VR design challenges, and the full game doesn’t disappoint. nDreams Elevation avoids a lot of flatscreen-adjacent design for enhanced immersion. Stats like your HP, shield strength, inventory of specialized arrows, and health boosts are all helpfully displayed through your gauntlets. No floating health bars affixed to your screen here.

Reach doesn’t hit the other extreme where going too all-in on immersion compromises my enjoyment, either. You’ve still got a 2D options menu, though pausing places you in an explorable environment showcasing your upgrades, found collectibles, and more. HUD elements appear briefly when there’s a mission update or you find an upgrade, but it’s always quick.

There’s great physicality as you explore this beautifully realized world, usually through climbing. When some ledges are unreachable (no pun intended), thrusting your arms down or sideways launches you to make those gaps. Sprinting requires pressing down the left thumbstick, though jumping mixes pressing a face button with swinging your arm upwards. Everything quickly becomes second nature; no convoluted gesture-based inputs to worry about.

Tools like the bow or your health injector are found through a useful on-body inventory system, and some items are storable in your gauntlets. Rosa’s shield remains a favorite, where you summon this by holding the trigger button and moving your hand down. Placing your hand near your mouth and hitting the trigger mimics whistling. Doing that near a sign translates it, providing some minor but appreciated contextual lore about Ferran culture.

Reach’s fast-paced gameplay quickly gets intense. Anyone prone to motion sickness may have a difficult time, though there’s a strong selection of comfort settings to assist. Jumping from pillar to pillar for light platforming as you navigate bottomless pits, grappling across chasms, sprinting for longer jumps, or using a jump pad for longer distances is a real thrill. Using the left thumbstick allows for more precise landings that aren’t too floaty.

Comfort

Movement only uses artificial stick-based locomotion, there’s no option for teleportation. Reach’s camera uses both quick turning and snap turning, the latter being more instant, alongside smooth turning. You can even choose no artificial camera turning for a more immersive option. Movement direction is based on either your hand or your head.

Optional subtitles can be switched on with four different sizes and various colors, also letting you display the speaker’s name. There’s a mandatory but light vignette when crouching that you can’t turn off. It’s slightly disappointing that you can’t choose to remove this when movement vignettes are completely optional, and those have different strengths.

Sprint lines can be switched on or off, and tutorials for basic gameplay actions are available in the pause area at all times. You can also select how often hints appear or turn them off entirely. There isn’t a specific seated mode, though you can comfortably play seated or standing after recalibrating your position. Left handed mode isn’t supported, and three difficulty settings are present.

This action-focused approach naturally extends into combat, giving you enough space to spread out while fighting and pull off sick moves. Grappling between different beams with one hand while lobbing my shield into my foes, the Living Statues, makes me feel like an action hero. As does launching from a jump pad while sending a barrage of arrows into a nearby enemy.

Enemy variety isn’t huge, but there’s enough to keep fights well varied. You can sneak up on Living Statues and rip out their robotic spines, though I prefer a head-on assault. Beyond your standard rank and file, other Living Statues include a drone-like foe that shields its allies if you’re discovered. This creates some welcome strategy, as I carefully crouch behind cover and pick the right moment to shoot. Shielded enemies aren’t invincible; those fights just get harder.

Combat’s frantic nature means this is better suited to being an action game than a simulator, so you don’t manually nock your bow. Pulling back the string spawns an arrow, while holding the trigger lets you swap in specialized elemental arrows obtained by, uh, squishing bugs. Stun arrows let you steal an enemy gun, or you could also freeze them. For the aspiring demolition experts out there, setting off explosive arrows makes for some entertaining crowd control.

Manually nocking arrows in your bow would feel like an inessential addition; I’d prefer to keep the action running smoothly than fiddle with this during heavy combat segments. When you’re exploring a forgotten society filled with advanced tech beyond our understanding, arrows spawning automatically in a magic bow seems reasonable enough. Guns have some interactivity, like charging the shot, though I rarely bother stealing them.

On PS VR2 via PS5 Pro, Reach maintains steady performance even when Living Statues start swarming me, and I didn’t spot any framerate drops. This review is based off the PS VR2 version, and PC VR performance is largely comparable. However, myself and several others struggled playing it pre-release on SteamVR when using a Quest 3, though testing it with a native PC VR headset was fine. nDreams is working on a fix, and you can find more on this below.

How Does Reach Compare on Quest 3 and SteamVR?

Due to issues with gaining pre-release access, I’ve only played about two hours of the finished release on Quest 3. Much like my preview last month, the standalone version currently compares well with the expected trade-offs against SteamVR and PS VR2.

Most notable are flatter environmental textures and more noticeable visual pop-in. I’ve also experienced some brief but very occasional framerate drops, though never to the point of making me uncomfortable or breaking the game. Action scenes so far have been largely smooth, and the visual presentation largely holds up well.

I’d need to make further campaign progress on Quest 3 before I can comfortably make any definitive statements. However, going by my early initial impressions, this is currently one of the better porting efforts I’ve encountered for Meta’s standalone headset.

That said, I suggest caution if you’re buying Reach on Steam. For nearly a week, loading the game via Virtual Desktop on Quest 3 brings me into the game, only for me to fall through the world immediately. I’d respawn back in an elevator, only for it to happen again in the next mission after entering a van. I’d then respawn in the van without being able to open the door, soft-locking me from progressing. I could replicate this error repeatedly.

As of yesterday, I’ve gotten past that initial bug when playing on Virtual Desktop after updating my Nvidia drivers and installing the latest Windows 11 updates. I cannot pinpoint the specific fix, though David Heaney and regular freelance contributor Pete Austin have both experienced the exact same bugs with Virtual Desktop. Using the Steam Link app on Quest 3 right now completely crashes the game for me.

For reference, my desktop uses an Intel i9 16-Core Processor i9-12900 (Up to 5.1GHz), 32GB RAM – Corsair VENGEANCE DDR5 5200MHz, and a 16GB Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super. nDreams provided access to several review builds to assist with these issues. This was tested before and after a pre-release patch was deployed too.

While it’s a more dated PC VR-only headset, trying my Rift S worked immediately for the Steam version. What I’ve managed to play on PC VR on the highest graphical settings, ‘Epic,’ runs smoothly. I can’t speak for using PS VR2 via the PC adapter, any Pico or HTC models, or other PC VR headsets. Our video producer, Don Hopper, couldn’t get this running on Play for Dream with the recent Steam Link beta.

nDreams has confirmed in its Discord server that it’s working on a fix for Virtual Desktop, warning not to run Reach through that right now. Should these Steam issues be resolved in the near future, I’ll update this section accordingly.

These combined issues left me reliant on the PlayStation VR2 edition using a PS5 Pro for this review. There aren’t any dedicated PS5 Pro enhancements, though haptic feedback and adaptive trigger support make Sony’s platform my preferred way to play.

Reach generally shines with its strong presentation, well-designed environments, and fine character designs, boosted further by a fitting soundtrack and great voice acting. On PS VR2, the visuals could use some slightly extra polish; visual pop-in is noticeable in quieter moments, as is my hand sometimes gripping an invisible wall when squeezing through gaps. Small gripes that do little to detract from my enjoyment.

Clearing the campaign takes roughly nine hours, and the pacing is solid. It’s left me wanting more for all the right reasons. You could finish this sooner if you mainline the campaign, while hidden collectibles and Rosa’s optional upgrades – like increased ammo for specialized arrows or improved health – will help extend this. It’s worth exploring as the extra upgrades are helpful on harder difficulties. I haven’t found everything, but I secured more than half of them.

Beyond chasing the extras, there’s not much else to do once you finish the campaign. Reach doesn’t have a New Game+ mode, which isn’t a major loss for me personally, though I would love to see nDreams Elevation add a chapter select option after clearing levels for the first time. I’d love to replay some levels without having to do the entire thing all over again.

Reach – Final Verdict

Reach is an outstanding effort from nDreams Elevation that wows with its cinematic thrills, compelling narrative, high production values, and deeply satisfying combat. This is an unapologetically high-intensity action game, using as few flatscreen-inspired elements as possible to create a highly immersive, refreshingly high-budget game that’s learned from the best VR design practices of the last decade.

nDreams Elevation was founded with the intent of creating AAA VR experiences, and Reach sends a strong message that its mission statement wasn’t all talk. Some extra visual polish would boost this even further on PlayStation VR2, and I hope the Steam Link issues get resolved soon. It’s my favorite VR game so far this year, and I cannot wait to see what the studio does next.


UploadVR uses a 5-Star rating system for our game reviews – you can read a breakdown of each star rating in our review guidelines.

For its next trick, Quantic Dream is trying to compete with League of Legends and Dota

It’s been quite a while since we’ve heard much about Quantic Dream’s Star Wars: Eclipse. The studio revealed that project at The Game Awards back in 2021 and details have been scarce since then. As it turns out, the developer of Heavy Rain and Detroit: Become Human had been working on a second game this whole time. It’s one that sees Quantic Dream venturing into entirely new territory, because the studio is making its first multiplayer game.

Spellcasters Chronicles is a 3 vs. 3 MOBA with a third-person perspective that’s akin to Marvel Rivals. Each round lasts 25 minutes, with teams summoning minions, battling to conquer territory and earning victory by destroying their opponents’ lifestones. So far, so typical MOBA. But Quantic Dream has a few tricks up its sleeve that it hopes will help make Spellcasters Chronicles stand out in a highly competitive live-service market.

It’s a magic-based MOBA with characters that have unique abilities, personalities and backstories. Every one of these mages has the ability to fly at any time and for as long as they want. So you can freely take to the skies to get a bird’s eye view of the battlefield and help you make decisions about what to do next. You can duke it out with enemies in the air too.

Along with attacks, support spells and summoning armies with hundreds of creatures, players can use their magic to plunk down buildings and shore up their defenses while altering the environment. There’s interplay between characters too, as you can infuse allies (including summoned creatures) with spells. One mage, for instance, might add fire to a tankier teammate’s hammer, so there are synergies to discover. “Something we wanted to push is the sense of creativity,” game director Greg Diaconu told reporters ahead of the reveal.

Spellcasters Chronicles
Spellcasters Chronicles
Quantic Dream

Eventually, you’ll be able to bring giant, game-changing titans into battles. Each player can summon one. Whenever a titan appears, it’s an all-hands-on-deck situation for the opposing team, since these are powerful creatures that can completely change the course of a round.

“It was important for us to create a sense of spectacle,” Diaconu said. “Something that’s as fun to watch as it is to play.”

It all seems quite action-packed, but there’s a heavy strategic element to Spellcasters Chronicles as well. Before you go into a battle, you’ll select your spells and summons, including your titan — so this is a deckbuilder game too. In the thick of the action, your team will need to decide when to pressure the map and try to expand your territory while capturing altars of power, totems that will grant you resources. Speaking of which, each spell has a limited number of uses, so resource management is a factor too.

Spellcasters Chronicles is free-to-play, but there are no pay-to-win concerns here. In-game purchases will be purely cosmetic. Expect battle passes full of new looks for the characters. Lots of updates are in the pipeline too, including new mages, spells and creatures.

Seven years in the oven

Quantic Dream started making Spellcasters Chronicles seven years ago (so before Netease bought a stake of the company and eventually the whole shebang). Although the studio decided to keep making narrative-driven single-player games after Detroit: Become Human, it wanted to try something new as well. The idea was to take the team’s experience of working on interactive storytelling to a different genre by creating a multiplayer game with a stylized look. 

“Multiple teams are fully dedicated to crafting the next generation of great games, including something very different, a competitive multiplayer experience, born from the same spirit of curiosity and creativity that has always defined us,” Quantic Dream founder David Cage wrote in a blog post on Thursday. “This new title may surprise our fans as it is very different from what we have done so far. But taking risks, challenging ourselves, exploring new ways of playing and telling stories, and attempting what seems impossible, has always been part of our DNA.”

In the world of Spellcasters Chronicles, gods are no more and mages who are able to harness an energy called the Source will shape the future. Quantic Dream hasn’t shared too many details about the plot and characters of Spellcasters Chronicles just yet — the reveal focused on gameplay. That’s perhaps in part because the studio is leaning into a community-driven narrative approach. Victories and defeats will contribute “to the evolving Tapestry of Fate, where seasonal decisions will change gameplay, lore and map meta.”

We shouldn’t have to wait too long to see how all of that works in practice. Quantic Dream will run a closed beta for Spellcasters Chronicles on Steam later this year, and the game is set to hit consoles with cross-play support in 2026. Those who are attending TwitchCon San Diego this week can try out the MOBA there.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/for-its-next-trick-quantic-dream-is-trying-to-compete-with-league-of-legends-and-dota-150000283.html?src=rss

Amazon Drops GeForce RTX 5070 To $50 Below NVIDIA’s MSRP For A Sweet GPU Deal

Amazon Drops GeForce RTX 5070 To $50 Below NVIDIA's MSRP For A Sweet GPU Deal
Now is your chance to score a GeForce RTX 5070 graphics card for its lowest price to date, with a killer deal on Amazon for a factory-overclocked model that is on sale for $50 below NVIDIA’s baseline MSRP. To partially borrow a line from The Outer Limits, ‘There is nothing wrong with your monitor. Do not attempt to adjust the picture’.

When

Pogačar earned €12 million in 2025 – how does his pay compare to cycling’s other all-time greats?

Scoop up 20 victories in a year, your second rainbow jersey in a row, three monuments and your fourth Tour de France win, along with increasingly being referred to as the GOAT and surpassing Eddy Merckx, and you can expect to be rewarded well.

According to La Gazzetta dello Sport, that’s certainly the case for Tadej Pogačar, with the Italian sports journal estimating his 2025 earnings at €12 million.

That’s split between the salary from his deep-pocketed UAE Team Emirates-XRG team, a well-merited bonus, personal sponsorship and merchandising.

The Gazzetta says that, following the 2024 season, when he took the triple crown of the Giro, Tour and Worlds, UAE signed a six-year, €8m per season contract with Pogačar, securing his services until 2030, when he will turn 32.  

As an incentive to keep pedalling, the contract is claimed to add a bonus of €1m for winning the Tour de France, which maybe helps explain why Pogačar kept going in the 2025 edition despite suffering from knee pain.

There are further bonuses of €500,000 each in the contract for winning the Giro d’Italia and the Vuelta a España, and €250,000 for winning the World Championships, according to the Gazzetta.

It calculates that Pogačar‘s bonus income has dropped by €0.5m this year from 2024, though, thanks to not competing in a second grand tour, having won the Giro as well as the Tour last year.

Plus sponsorship income

Tadej Pogačar's Colnago V5Rs at the 2025 Tour de France
Expect to see Pogačar’s TP logo appearing on an increasingly expansive range of products in the coming years. Simon von Bromley / Our Media

Turning to sponsorship income, La Gazzetta dello Sport reckons Pogačar‘s income from his main sponsors is €2m, with another two sponsors negotiating to come on board next year and rumoured to be paying €1m each.

The €2m is said to be paid out by bike sponsor Colnago, shoe brand DMT, MET helmets and a cluster of other brands, including the Slovene tourist office. Pogačar will play host at the UCI eSports World Championships in November, an event platformed by another of his sponsors, MyWhoosh.

Then there’s Pogačar‘s merchandising income, with his TP logo appearing on everything from Carbon-Ti chainrings to MET helmets. La Gazzetta dello Sport reckons that’s worth another €1m, paid out by brands including cycling kit maker Pissei, and sunglasses and bag vendor Scicon. You can buy one of 300 special Pogačar edition Colnago V4Rs bikes for €17,000.

More cash than Armstrong or Pantani

US Lance Armstrong (yellow jersey)looks at Italian Marco Pantani during the 12th stage of the 87th Tour de France
Two high earners past go head-to-head on the Ventoux. Joel Saget / Getty Images

La Gazzetta dello Sport points out that there have been other high-earning cyclists in the past with, ahem, Lance Armstrong benefiting from a $28m contract with Nike.

In 1998, Marco Pantani, who had just taken the Giro-Tour double, declined an offer of 5 billion Lire from Mapei to leave his Mercatore Uno team. Even when translated to Euros, that’s quite a lot: the Gazzetta calculates it to be worth around 4 million Euros in today’s money, accounting for inflation.

Totting it all up, the Gazzetta comes to the €12m figure for Pogačar’s 2025 income, which it reckons he will eclipse in 2026. It points out that it doesn’t all end up in his pockets, though, with some of Pissei’s cash paid into the Tadej Pogačar Foundation, which funds cancer research, support for sick children and assistance for victims of natural disasters.

What if another team wants to sign Pogačar before 2030? It will need deep pockets; his contract with UAE Team Emirates-XRG includes a €200m break-out clause, so expect to see Pogačar winning in UAE team colours for some time to come.

Apple Refreshes 14″ MacBook Pro, iPad Pro & Vision Pro With M5 Chip For A Big AI Uplift

Apple Refreshes 14
Just in time for the holiday shopping season, Apple dropped a triple-header announcement centered around its core pro devices powered by the all-new M5 chip. The Fall refresh of the 14-inch MacBook Pro, the iPad Pro, and the Vision Pro headset signals Apple’s push to dominate not just the CPU performance totem pole (at least until the M5 Pro

An Early Look At Linux 6.18 Performance With Intel Xeon 6 Granite Rapids

With Linux 6.18 now past the merge window and many new features and changes introduced (https://www.phoronix.com/review/linux-618-features), I have begun testing out this kernel on various servers, desktops, and laptops at Phoronix. Linux 6.18 is quite important with expected to become this year’s LTS kernel version upon its stable debut in December. Up today is a first look at Linux 6.17 vs. 6.18-rc1 performance using Intel Xeon 6 Granite Rapids server performance.

Steve Jobs Honored On New 2026 US Coin Celebrating Innovation

BrianFagioli writes: The United States Mint is honoring Steve Jobs and Apple with a new coin for 2026. Part of the American Innovation $1 Coin Program, California’s entry depicts a young Jobs seated before rolling northern California hills, accompanied by the words “Make Something Wonderful.” The reflective design, created by Elana Hagler and sculpted by Phebe Hemphill, captures how Jobs’s surroundings and vision shaped Apple’s mission to make technology feel intuitive and human.

The 2026 series also celebrates Dr. Norman Borlaug for Iowa, the Cray-1 supercomputer for Wisconsin, and mobile refrigeration for Minnesota. The obverse of all coins features the Statue of Liberty and a special Liberty Bell mark commemorating the nation’s Semiquincentennial. The Steve Jobs coin stands out as one of the few times the U.S. Mint has recognized a modern tech innovator, and some collectors are already calling it one of the most exciting releases in years.


Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Vision Pro will get an iPad app in upcoming iPadOS update

Buried in the press release for the upgraded Vision Pro headset that Apple announced yesterday was the news that the dedicated Apple Vision Pro app is making its way to iPad via iPadOS 26.1 later this fall. This means iPad users can browse Vision Pro content like apps and games from their tablet and queue downloads for the headset without needing to put it on each time.

The Vision Pro app has been available on iPhone since the arrival of iOS 18.4 in April, and features a regularly updated selection of curated spatial content that Apple thinks Vision Pro users might want to try. Open it up today, for example, and it’ll point you towards the Lungy app’s audiovisual meditations, the travel show Elevated on (the recently and very confusingly rebranded) Apple TV, some recommended games and a list of education-focused apps available on Vision Pro. The Vision Pro app also includes news and tips for using the headset, as well product information and account settings. All of the same features will be offered in the iPad version of the app.

In case you missed yesterday’s announcement, Apple has introduced an improved Vision Pro headset powered by the same M5 chip housed in its new iPad Pro and MacBook Pro. This should represent a fairly significant jump up from the first-gen product’s M2 chip. Web-browsing will be faster, as will loading apps and just generally navigating menus on your headset.

The M5 chip also features a new 10-core GPU, which should significantly boost gaming performance, and without handing us any battery specs (which the company never likes to do), Apple says the upgraded Vision Pro should last a bit longer too. The M5 Vision Pro is now ready to pre-order now and still costs $3,499. Apple will start shipping the device on October 22.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apps/the-vision-pro-will-get-an-ipad-app-in-upcoming-ipados-update-142904090.html?src=rss

Antarctica is starting to look a lot like Greenland—and that isn’t good

As recently as the 1990s, when the Greenland Ice Sheet and the rest of the Arctic region were measurably thawing under the climatic blowtorch of human-caused global warming, most of Antarctica’s vast ice cap still seemed securely frozen.

But not anymore. Physics is physics. As the planet heats up, more ice will melt at both poles, and recent research shows that Antarctica’s ice caps, glaciers, and floating ice shelves, as well as its sea ice, are just as vulnerable to warming as the Arctic.

Both satellite data and field observations in Antarctica reveal alarming signs of a Greenland-like meltdown, with increased surface melting of the ice fields, faster-moving glaciers, and dwindling sea ice. Some scientists are sounding the alarm, warning that the rapid “Greenlandification” of Antarctica will have serious consequences, including an accelerated rise in sea levels and significant shifts in rainfall and drought patterns.

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Samsung Galaxy S26 Edge Reportedly Scrapped Ahead Of Showdown With iPhone Air

Samsung Galaxy S26 Edge Reportedly Scrapped Ahead Of Showdown With iPhone Air
Coming almost as a non-surprise, Samsung has reportedly canceled next year’s Galaxy S26 Edge, effectively pulling the plug on plans to jump-start the ultra-slim flagship trend merely five months after the Galaxy S25 Edge purportedly failed to win over consumers. Sales figures are mediocre enough that the company is also talking about halting