The action-RPG is currently on sale after a breakout free-to-play weekend
The post <i>No Rest For The Wicked</i> Will Cost As Much As <i>Baldur’s Gate 3</i> When It Leaves Early Access: ‘I’m Not Trying To Do Any FOMO Marketing Here’ appeared first on Kotaku.
NVIDIA has officially launched a native GeForce NOW client for Linux as a Flatpak, giving Linux gamers access to cloud-rendered RTX gaming. Phoronix reports: While confined to a Flatpak, for now NVIDIA is just “officially” supporting it on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and later. Granted, thanks to Flatpak it should run on other non-Ubuntu distributions too but in terms of the official support and where they are qualifying their builds they are limiting it just to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and later. […] At launch the Flatpak build is also just for x86_64 Linux with no AArch64 Linux builds or similar at this time.
Running GeForce NOW on Linux while games are rendered in NVIDIA’s cloud with Blackwell GPUs, you still need to be using a modern GPU with H.264 or H.265 Vulkan Video support NVIDIA isn’t yet supporting Vulkan Video AV1 with GeForce NOW on Linux but just H.264/H.265. If you are using NVIDIA graphics the NVIDIA R580 series or newer is recommended while using the X.Org session. If you are using Intel or AMD Radeon graphics, Mesa 24.2+ is recommended and using the Wayland session.
When you are up and running with GeForce NOW on Linux, you have access to over 4,500 games. The free tier of GeForce NOW provides standard access to the gaming servers and limited session caps for an introductory-level experience. It’s with the performance tier where you can enjoy RTX ray-tracing and 1440p @ 60 FPS performance and up to six hour sessions. With GeForce NOW’s Ultimate tier is where you are running on GeForce RTX 5080 GPU servers with support for up to 5K @ 120 FPS gaming or 1080p @ 360 FPS with up to eight hour gaming sessions in length.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
In its fourth major update since release, Thief VR: Legacy of Shadow refines its gameplay mechanics for a smoother experience.
Available now on all major platforms, Thief VR: Legacy of Shadow launched its 4.0 update, focusing on refining the gameplay experience for an overall smoother feel. As its 3.0 patch was released just shy of two weeks ago, it is clear developer Maze Theory and publisher Vertigo Games are on top of things, quick to apply any feedback shared to deliver a better game. Other improvements include more flexible customization options for the Steam version, such as higher-quality dynamic shadows and character models, and general quality-of-life bug fixes.
One of the flagship upgrades to this new patch is revamped crouch mechanics. As a marquee ability, players are supposed to spend a lot of time doing so while hiding in the shadows. While never broken since its initial release, it did feel that certain aspects of the game could have done with more time in the oven, as we mentioned in our review: “Sometimes objects fail to load in properly, like a treasure chest going transparent whenever I face it from the front—or an entire basement visually deloading momentarily if I walk too close to an adjoining wall.”
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A gameplay video recorded by UploadVR showcasing patch 4.0.
Previous upgrades mainly brought visual improvements and continued stability to the experience. No DLC or sequel has been mentioned as yet, but this ongoing support is at least a step in the right direction.
Thief VR: Legacy of Shadow is available now on Meta Quest, PlayStation VR2, and Steam.
Mozilla has taken a notable step toward improving Firefox distribution on Linux. An official Firefox RPM package is now available directly from Mozilla for Fedora-style distributions, including Fedora, RHEL-compatible systems, and related derivatives. This move gives users a new, upstream-supported option for installing and maintaining Firefox without relying solely on distro-maintained builds.
Because printing money is easy for some companies, LEGO has announced an official Lord Of The Rings Sauron’s Helmet build set. The kit will be released March 1st for $70 and include 538 pieces, including a Sauron minfig holding the One Ring. Honestly, $70 is still expensive, but after all the $200 and $300 sets they’ve been releasing lately it almost seems like a steal. It isn’t though, just to be clear. When completed (provided you didn’t eat any crucial pieces), the set makes a 13″ x 5″ replica of Sauron’s helmet. And what a helmet it is! Has anybody ever cosplayed as sloppy Sauron and made a Sauron beer helmet? Because that’s a convention-stealing cosplay idea right there. If you use it though I get half the costume contest prize money.
At this point, we’ve all heard plenty of stories about AI chatbots leading users to harmful actions, harmful beliefs, or simply incorrect information. Despite the prevalence of these stories, though, it’s hard to know just how often users are being manipulated. Are these tales of AI harms anecdotal outliers or signs of a frighteningly common problem?
Anthropic took a stab at answer ingthat question this week, releasing a paper studying the potential for what it calls “disempowering patterns” across 1.5 million anonymized real-world conversations with its Claude AI model. While the results show that these kinds of manipulative patterns are relatively rare as a percentage of all AI conversations, they still represent a potentially large problem on an absolute basis.
In the newly published paper “Who’s in Charge? Disempowerment Patterns in Real-World LLM Usage,” researchers from Anthropic and the University of Toronto try to quantify the potential for a specific set of “user disempowering” harms by identifying three primary ways that a chatbot can negatively impact a user’s thoughts or actions:
Science fiction and science leaders alike have warned us that artificial intelligence may one day take over the world, but until those predictions come to pass, generative AI’s biggest impact on my life has been overloading my social media feeds with slop. It seems I can’t open TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube without running smack into bizarre and troubling AI concoctions featuring babies in danger and cats having affairs. It really is the wild west (or maybe Westworld) out there.
I think few among us really believe these videos are any good, and it’s pretty obvious they aren’t good for us, or for the world. Short-form video is already numbing enough, but this AI content is generally completely devoid of any meaning or substance. And yet, it’s everywhere. I haven’t spent too much time on YouTube Shorts recently, but in my limited experience, the feed has been chock full of AI, especially if I’m logged out of my personal account.
Still, if you’re a dedicated YouTube Shorts user (or a frequent YouTube user in general) you might have noticed something odd in recent days: There don’t seem to be quite as many AI videos on the platform right now. There are still a lot, don’t get me wrong, but it turns out YouTube has recently taken action to remove some of its AI content—the sloppiest of the slop.
Android Police spotted the development on Wednesday, basing its findings on a November report from Kapwing, a company that develops an online video editor. Kapwing investigated AI slop across YouTube’s vast content library, noting the top 100 most-subscribed YouTube channels that publish this sort of AI content. In the two months since that report, Android Police noticed that 16 of those 100 channels are no longer with us.
That includes the most popular AI channel on YouTube, at least according to Kapwing. “CuentosFacianantes” had 5.95 million subscribers at the time of their initial report, and produced AI-generated shorts inspired by Dragon Ball. The channel had amassed roughly 1.28 billion views by the end of last year; despite launching in 2020, it had curated its library to begin Jan. 8, 2025, so those numbers were racked up pretty recently. The number two channel, “Imperio de Jesus” with 5.87 million subscribers, and the number seven channel “Super Cat League,” with 4.21 million subscribers, were also shut down.
According to Android Police, the 16 channels in question had a total of 35 million subscribers and over 4.7 billion views across their collective videos. Some of these channels are completely gone, while others simply have had their videos removed.
YouTube CEO Neal Mohan published a post on Jan. 21 of this year describing the company’s vision for 2026. Towards the end of that letter, he acknowledges AI content, predicting that, “AI will be a boon to the creatives who are ready to lean in,” and comparing it to tools like Photoshop and CGI, adding “AI will remain a tool for expression, not a replacement.” However, Mohan was also critical of the technology, noting that it’s becoming more difficult to tell real videos from AI. He notes that YouTube is now removing “any harmful synthetic media that violates our Community Guidelines,” and is giving creators tools to help identify and block deepfakes.
More interestingly, the letter includes a section labeled “Managing AI slop,” which is the first time I’ve seen a company like YouTube use that expression. Mohan says that YouTube’s goal is to be a place where free expression thrives, but also a place “where people feel good spending their time.” To that point, he says, “To reduce the spread of low quality AI content, we’re actively building on our established systems that have been very successful in combatting spam and clickbait, and reducing the spread of low quality, repetitive content.”
Mohan doesn’t call out any accounts by name, nor does he acknowledge the accounts and content the company has already deleted, but it’s a clear line in the sand: YouTube is not against AI-generated content, but it will remove low-quality AI content it feels is, well, slop. That’s good news for anyone who uses YouTube (so, pretty much everyone), even if it’s far from a cure for the growing problem.
I’ve reached out to YouTube for comment on this story, and will update this piece if I hear back.
MeowGun: Hell Denizen is a boomer shooter that understands why people play these games
The post Save Kittens And Blast Away Demons In This New $15 FPS appeared first on Kotaku.
The first images from the European Space Agency’s MTG-S satellite offer an early look at how the mission will improve weather forecasting across Europe and Northern Africa.
The preprint repository arXiv will require all submissions to be written in English or accompanied by a full English translation starting February 11, a policy change that explicitly permits the use of AI translators even as research suggests large language models remain inconsistent at the task.
Until now, authors only needed to submit an abstract in English. ArXiv hosts nearly 3 million preprints and receives more than 20,000 submissions monthly, though just 1% are in languages other than English.
Ralph Wijers, chair of arXiv’s editorial advisory council, advises authors to verify any AI-generated translations. “Our own experience is that AI translation is good but not good enough,” he says. A 2025 study from ByteDance Seed and Peking University ranked 20 LLMs on translation quality between Chinese and English; GPT-5-high scored nearly 77, just below the human expert benchmark of 80, but most models including GPT-4o, Claude 4, and Deepseek-V3 scored under 60.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Two Elon Musk companies are reportedly planning to merge. On Thursday, Reuters reported that SpaceX and xAI are holding merger talks ahead of a planned IPO. Part of their plan is to launch AI data centers into space (but unfortunately, only as far as Earth’s orbit).
Last week, it was reported that Musk planned to take SpaceX public despite having once said it wouldn’t happen until the company had a presence on Mars. Now, the IPO could happen as early as this year. Shares of xAI would reportedly be exchanged for shares in SpaceX under the merger. Reuters reports that two entities were set up in Nevada on January 21 to facilitate the deal.
If the idea of two Musk companies becoming one sounds familiar, that’s because it happened less than a year ago. In March 2025, xAI bought X, putting Grok (known for nonconsensual “nudifying” images) and X (infamous for being a far-right hellscape) together under one unholy roof.
The latest idea Musk is pitching is blasting AI data centers off into space. At last week’s gathering of the rich and powerful in Davos, Switzerland, he said, “The lowest cost place to put AI will be in space. And that will be true within two years, maybe three at the latest.” The idea is that data centers in orbit could harness solar power and reduce cooling costs. However, industry analysts and executives consider it a risky bet, questioning whether the savings would warrant the massive investment. If or when the AI bubble bursts, the plan could go down in flames — if not literally, then figuratively.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/elon-musks-spacex-and-xai-are-reportedly-holding-merger-talks-211740150.html?src=rss
Scientists say it’s a rare natural phenomenon driven by pollution and—yep—climate change.
In just the kind of news I like to hear, this is a video documenting the good work of 12-year old Roman McKonn, who’s helped rehome over 4,800 shelter dogs through transporting, fostering, and making videos with the dogs. Great job, Roman. He’s also very well spoken for a 12-year old. Heck, he’s well spoken for an adult, because most adults I know can only communicate through text. You see them in real life and they’re all elbows when they can’t use emojis. If I could take care of all the dogs I would. I daydream about acres of land and dogs as far as the eye can see living their best lives. Absent from the dream? “Other people.” You’ve dreamt it too!
An anonymous reader shares a report: The US is leading a huge global surge in new gas-fired power generation that will cause a major leap in planet-heating emissions, with this record boom driven by the expansion of energy-hungry datacenters to service AI, according to a new forecast.
This year is set to shatter the annual record for new gas power additions around the world, with projects in development expected to grow existing global gas capacity by nearly 50%, a report by Global Energy Monitor (GEM) found. The US is at the forefront of a global push for gas that is set to escalate over the next five years, after tripling its planned gas-fired capacity in 2025.
Much of this new capacity will be devoted to the vast electricity needs of AI, with a third of the 252 gigawatts of gas power in development set to be situated on site at datacenters. All of this new gas energy is set to come at a significant cost to the climate, amid ongoing warnings from scientists that fossil fuels must be rapidly phased out to avoid disastrous global heating.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The Internet Archive has often been a valuable resource for journalists, from it’s finding records of deleted tweets or providing academic texts for background research. However, the advent of AI has created a new tension between the parties. A few major publications have begun blocking the nonprofit digital library’s access to their content based on concerns that AI companies’ bots are using the Internet Archive’s collections to indirectly scrape their articles.
“A lot of these AI businesses are looking for readily available, structured databases of content,” Robert Hahn, head of business affairs and licensing for The Guardian, told Nieman Lab. “The Internet Archive’s API would have been an obvious place to plug their own machines into and suck out the IP.”
The New York Times took a similar step. “We are blocking the Internet Archive’s bot from accessing the Times because the Wayback Machine provides unfettered access to Times content — including by AI companies — without authorization,” a representative from the newspaper confirmed to Nieman Lab. Subscription-focused publication the Financial Times and social forum Reddit have also made moves to selectively block how the Internet Archive catalogs their material.
Many publishers have attempted to sue AI businesses for how they access content used to train large language models. To name a few just from the realm of journalism:
The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft
The Center for Investigative Reporting sued OpenAI and Microsoft
The Wall Street Journal and New York Post sued Perplexity
A group of publishers including The Atlantic, The Guardian and Politico sued Cohere
Penske Media sued Google
The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune sued Perplexity
Other media outlets have sought financial deals before offering up their libraries as training material, although those arrangements seem to provide compensation to the publishing companies rather than the writers. And that’s not even delving into the copyright and piracy issues also being fought against AI tools by other creative fields, from fiction writers to visual artists to musicians. The whole Nieman Lab story is well worth a read for anyone who has been following any of these creative industries’ responses to artificial intelligence.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/publishers-are-blocking-the-internet-archive-for-fear-ai-scrapers-can-use-it-as-a-workaround-204001754.html?src=rss
More unwatchable than the ending of Requiem for a Dream
The post Darren Aronofsky’s AI Movie Is As Bad As It Sounds: ‘Slop About The Forming Of The Country That Is About To Crumble’ appeared first on Kotaku.
If you and your friends have the same taste in music, you probably text each other what you’re listening to. I know when I stumble upon a new discovery I love—or even something I think is trash—I fire it off to the group chat to talk about it. Of course, I just forward the song to the group chat in the Messages app, like any other thing I’d want to send to that group. If you have Spotify, however, you have a new group chat option to choose from: Spotify itself.
Spotify heads might already know that the app has had a messaging feature since August. While the point of the feature is to send Spotify content to your friends, it’s a basic messaging service, which means you can send any text you want—including emojis. It’s available to any Spotify user, whether you have Premium or just a free account, so long as you’re 16 or older. None of that is new today.
What is new today is the amount of people you can text at once in Spotify. Since August, chats have been limited to one-on-one interactions. Now, you’re able to add up to nine other people at once to a thread. That means 10-person group chats to talk about new music, podcasts, audiobooks, or, of course, anything at all—assuming you actually want to move your DMs to Spotify.
To start, open Spotify on mobile (this isn’t supported on desktop at this time) then tap your profile in the top right corner. Look for “Messages” at the bottom of this menu, then choose “New Message.” If this is your first time interacting with people on Spotify, you’ll need to invite others to chat before you can craft a new message. Here, you’ll have the choice to share a link to invite a friend to join your message. You can also find this option from the share menu on any piece of Spotify content, and hitting the “Invite friends” option.
Once you’ve initiated a message, you’ll be able to start crafting new ones—including group chats. Head back to this Messages menu—or hit the share button on a song, podcast, or audiobook—then choose “Create group.” Here, tap any friends from the suggestions you’d like to add, then choose “Create group” again to finalize the chat. Spotify says the people that appear in the list of suggestions are those you have shared content to before, created a playlist or Blend with previously, were in a “recent” Jam together, or are on an active Family or Duo plan. If they don’t appear, you can always choose the invite option to reach out directly.
Whoever creates the group is officially its admin. As the admin, you have the power to add or remove anyone from the group chat. If you’re in the group chat, you’re labeled as a “Participant.” Invited members are labeled “Pending.” The admin as well as any participants are allowed to block any group chat user for any reason.
The issue is, do you really want to dedicate a group chat to Spotify itself? Maybe if this feature rolled out when the app launched way back when, it’d be different. But people are set in their ways: It’s so hard to get people to move chat apps, especially when it’s for one specific purpose. Rather than open yet another thread to keep track of, I think I’d rather just text links to my main group chat—and I’m guessing the other members of the chat would agree.
If you don’t want to use Spotify’s messaging service at all, you can leave it behind, and save yourself from getting added to all future group and one-on-one chats. To do so, tap your profile, choose “Settings and privacy,” then hit “Privacy and social.” Here, scroll down to “Social features” and turn off “Messages.”
Project Genie whipped up an obvious Breath of the Wild clone, complete with paragliding
The post Google’s New AI Tool Had No Problem Making Bad Rip-Offs Of <i>Mario</i> And <i>Zelda</i> appeared first on Kotaku.
An anonymous reader shares a report: U.S. life expectancy rose to a record high of 79 years in 2024, an increase of six months from the previous year, reflecting a sharp decline in deaths from COVID-19 and drug overdoses, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Thursday.
According to a report from the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, life expectancy improved for both men and women across races and among Hispanics, surpassing the previous peak set in 2014.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
In April 2025, Comcast President Mike Cavanagh bemoaned that the company’s cable broadband division was “not winning in the marketplace” amid increased competition from fiber and fixed wireless Internet service providers.
Cavanagh identified some problems that had been obvious to Comcast customers for many years: Its prices aren’t transparent enough and rise too frequently, and dealing with the company is too difficult. Comcast sought to fix the problems with a five-year price guarantee, one year of free Xfinity Mobile service for home Internet customers, and plans with unlimited data instead of punitive data caps. But the company is still losing broadband customers at a higher-than-expected rate.
In Q4 2025 earnings announced today, Comcast reported a net loss of 181,000 residential and business broadband customers in the US. The loss consists of 178,000 residential Internet customers and 3,000 business customers.