Judges are frequently confronted with cases that hinge upon scientific information that their educational backgrounds may leave them ill-equipped to manage. Because of this challenge, the Federal Judicial Center, a group within the judicial branch of the government, has collaborated with the National Academies of Sciences (NAS) to produce a reference manual that provides background on a range of scientific and medical issues that frequently confront the court system. The Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence is currently on its fourth edition, and it has turned out to be an unexpectedly controversial one.

For the first time, this edition of the Reference Manual has included a chapter on climate change, meant to prepare judges to manage and potentially decide cases focused on everything from federal environmental rules to charges that fossil fuel producers engaged in fraud by ignoring the many warnings of harms caused by their products. That didn’t sit well with Republican politicians; a collection of red-state attorneys general sent a letter demanding that the Federal Judicial Center pull the chapter. Back in February, it complied, posting a modified version of the Reference Manual with the climate chapter deleted.

But, as noted above, the NAS arranges for the production of the Reference Manual, and it hosts a copy in its extensive library of publications. So, fresh off their success with the government, the same collection of attorneys general turned their sights on the Academies. In a letter dated February 19, they “urge” the NAS to follow the judiciary’s example and delete the chapter. Citing sources such as a Wall Street Journal editorial and their own threatening letter, the attorneys general accuse the NAS of engaging in “one-sided advocacy” and “judicial indoctrination,” and say it “is building a reputation as a partisan actor.”

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Sony’s upgraded PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) tech is rolling out as part of the PlayStation 5 Pro system update that’s available today. The company had teased last month that this update was in the works. These improvements should be a better reflection of why you might pay a premium price for the more powerful console if you value peak image quality in gaming.

For a very surface-level definition, PSSR is Sony’s upscaling tech. It uses an AI library for a pixel-by-pixel analysis to display a game with better visuals even while running at a lower resolution. Today’s update revamped the algorithm and neural networked in use, which in practice means that “image reconstruction is more precise, motion stability is improved, and developers have greater flexibility to balance performance and fidelity on PS5 Pro,” according to the latest blog post from the company. For those who want more technical definition, you’ll likely be familiar with the folks at Digital Foundry, who have a more detailed analysis with comparisons between the old and new upscaling on four titles. 

The improved PSSR is only available for supported games, but several familiar Sony partners are already on board. PS5 Pro owners can enable the enhanced PSSR image quality for all supported titles via a toggle in the Screen and Video settings menu. The following games are joining Resident Evil Requiem in offering the better upscaling experience:

• Silent Hill 2

• Silent Hill f

• Dragon Age: The Veilguard

• Control

• Alan Wake 2

• Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II

• Final Fantasy VII Rebirth

• Nioh 3

• Rise of the Ronin

• Monster Hunter Wilds

• Dragon’s Dogma 2

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/playstation/sonys-enhanced-pssr-upscaling-arrives-on-ps5-pro-today-201020423.html?src=rss

Since Andrej Karpathy coined the term “vibe coding” just over a year ago, we’ve seen a rapid increase in both the capabilities and popularity of using AI models to throw together quick programming projects with less human time and effort than ever before. One such vibe-coded project, Gaming Alexandria Researcher, launched over the weekend as what coder Dustin Hubbard called an effort to help organize the hundreds of scanned Japanese gaming magazines he’s helped maintain at clearinghouse Gaming Alexandria over the years, alongside machine translations of their OCR text.

A day after that project went public, though, Hubbard was issuing an apology to many members of the Gaming Alexandria community who loudly objected to the use of Patreon funds for an error-prone AI-powered translation effort. The hubbub highlights just how controversial AI tools remain for many online communities, even as many see them as ways to maximize limited funds and man-hours.

“I sincerely apologize,” Hubbard wrote in his apology post. “My entire preservation philosophy has been to get people access to things we’ve never had access to before. I felt this project was a good step towards that, but I should have taken more into consideration the issues with AI.”

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xAI, which is already facing multiple investigations around the world over widespread reports that Grok repeatedly created sexualized images of children, is now facing a class action lawsuit. Three teenagers, who allege that photos of them were used by Grok to generate child exploitation material, have filed a class action lawsuit against xAI in California. 

According to the lawsuit, one of the teens was alerted last December that someone was sharing AI-generated images and videos of her and other minors “in settings with which she was familiar, but morphed into sexually explicit poses.” The images and videos were allegedly shared on Discord, Telegram and other platforms and used “as a bartering tool” for other CSAM imagery. Law enforcement officials who investigated the images told the girls’ parents they were created with xAi’s Grok, the lawsuit says.

The three teens, all of whom live in Tennessee and are identified as Jane Doe 1, Jane Doe 2 and Jane Doe 3, have “suffered severe emotional distress,” the filing says. “Their lives have been shattered by the devastating loss of privacy, dignity, and personal safety that the production and dissemination of this CSAM have caused,” lawyers for the teens write in the complaint, which was provided to Engadget. “xAI’s financial gain through the increased use of its image- and video-making product came at their expense and wellbeing. Plaintiffs will have to spend the rest of their lives knowing that their CSAM images and videos may continue to be trafficked and traded online by child sex predators.”

Though the lawsuit currently names three individuals, the complaint says that it could cover “at least thousands of minors” who have also had their photos manipulated by Grok into sexualized images. The lawsuit claims xAI has violated multiple laws, including laws barring the production and distribution of child abuse material. 

xAI didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit. The company is also facing multiple investigations in the US and Europe over Grok’s alleged generation of nonconsensual nudity. Researchers at the Center for Countering Digital Hate estimated in January that Grok had produced millions of sexualized images, including 23,000 that appeared to show children.

xAI CEO Elon Musk, who previously promoted Grok’s “spicy” abilities, has claimed that he was “not aware of any naked underage images generated by Grok.” xAI announced in January it would stop allowing people to use Grok to edit images of real people into bikinis and limit Grok’s image-generation feature to paid subscribers. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/xai-is-being-sued-by-teens-who-say-grok-created-csam-using-their-photos-200102733.html?src=rss

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Once you’ve lived in a place for a while, one fact becomes clear: Your home isn’t getting any bigger, at least not without time and effort (and a truckload of cash). We all tend to grow into our homes, filling it with stuff over time, and that can lead to a storage crisis.

But your house can probably offer you extra storage with the right purchases and approach. There are all kinds of clever ways to increase the storage around your house. If you’re ready to get all that stuff off the floors and furniture and nearly tucked away, here are some ideas to explore.

17″ x 21″ – Brown Frame

Brown Secret Storage Wall Art

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28 x 12 x 6.5 inches, Rustic Brown, Chic Floating Storage Console Table or Desk for Wall

Kate and Laurel Kitt Modern Floating Shelf with Drawers

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at Amazon

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12″ x 13.5″ x .75″ Metal Drop-Leaf Table Brace Mounted Counter Extension

Camco Bamboo Accents RV Counter Extension

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at Amazon

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4-pack Heavy Duty Stackable Furniture Risers Supports 1,300 lbs, Black

Home It Adjustable Bed Risers

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600D Oxford Fabric, PU Leather Handles, Adjustable Magic Tape Partition, XXL 66L (2, Black)

DCET Rolling Underbed Containers

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at Amazon

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White, 22.5 inch Rustic Wood Wall Mounted Shelves 22 lbs Capacity, Set of 2

BAYKA Floating Shelves

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Queen Headboard with 2 Drawers, Charging Station and LED Lights

Maupvit Wueen Size Headboard with Storage

$159.99
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4-Tier Slim Kitchen Cart with Wheels

KLM Rolling Storage Cart

$69.99
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10-Pack Space Saving Cascading Hanger

Wonder Hanger

$22.90
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$22.90
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Use wall art that doubles as storage cabinetry

If every room in your house is littered with small items that don’t have a permanent home and you don’t have any space for extra storage units or bulky open shelving, your walls might still offer a solution: wall art that also serves as shallow cabinetry. You can find framed art like this that doubles as a cabinet for storing jewelry, keys, documents, or any other small items that can clutter your home.

Add some shelves that have drawers

Adding some floating shelves to your walls is an obvious answer to your storage problems, sure, but if they’re just shelves, you’re missing a double-whammy opportunity. Choosing floating shelves that also offer drawers means you get twice the storage power in a single unit.

Transform a bookcase into a closet

Closet space is a crucial part of every home’s storage system. If you need closet space but are out of luck, you can create a shallow closet from a bookcase. All you need is a bookcase that fits your space, closet rod hardware, and some reinforcing lumber if necessary (this depends on how sturdy your bookcase is. Remove the shelves you don’t want from the upper or lower part of the bookcase, install your hanging rod, and move all those extra clothes, shoes, and other items into place.

Add a hinged countertop extension as a prep or dining area in the kitchen

An indirect way to increase your kitchen storage is to add a hinged countertop extension like this. The extension can be used as extra prep space or as a quick dining area, and having it will allow you to keep more appliances and storage jars or baskets on the rest of your countertops without having to constantly move them out of the way when you work or eat.

Use bed risers and under-bed storage containers to reclaim lost storage space

If you’ve run out of ideas for where to stash all your stuff, sometimes the trick is to create some extra vertical space by lifting your bed. A set of simple bed risers combined with easy-access rolling containers like these will give you a huge amount of storage.

Install a shelf over doorways and windows

One of the most overlooked places for storage is over doorways and windows, areas that are usually just dead space. If you’ve got enough vertical wall space over a door, a simple floating shelf can create a spot for books or other items.

Replace your bed’s headboard with one that offers storage

A headboard on your bed doesn’t have to be purely decorative, and the wall your bed is pushed up against doesn’t have to be wasted space. Buy a headboard with storage built in and you can stash away all the stuff that’s sitting on top of your tables, dressers, and the floor. As a bonus, you can find these with charging ports, so you’ll never have to worry about missing an alarm again.

Add a rolling pantry to your kitchen

No matter how big your kitchen is, you’ll always wind up with stuff cluttering your countertops, or jammed up on top of your wall cabinets. But you can take advantage of another quirk found in many kitchens: that narrow gap between your lower cabinets and the appliances that seems to exist only to collect dust and crumbs. A narrow rolling pantry cart can get you the extra storage you need while eliminating that weird gap, a twofer win.

Use space-saving hangers in your closets

You can get a lot more out of your closets with space-saving hangers like these, which allow you to hang five garments on one hanger—basically making every closet five times larger.

Add pedestal storage under your washer and dryer

The key to finding more storage in your house is looking for the hidden dead space you’re overlooking. One of the most common spots we miss is under the washer and dryer in our laundry area. Adding a pedestal with a drawer under each appliance turns a slice of vertical space into valuable storage.

Encyclopedia Britannica has sued OpenAI, alleging its AI models were trained on nearly 100,000 copyrighted articles and sometimes reproduce or misattribute passages to the encyclopedia. The lawsuit also claims trademark infringement and argues tools like ChatGPT divert traffic away from Britannica and Merriam-Webster sites. Engadget reports: More specifically, Britannica alleged that OpenAI illegally used its “copyrighted content at a massive scale” when training its AI models. Not just with training, the encyclopedia company claimed that ChatGPT’s responses to user queries sometimes contain “full or partial verbatim reproductions of [Britannica’s] copyright articles.”

Along with claims of copyright violations, Britannica argued that OpenAI was also responsible for trademark infringement. According to the lawsuit, ChatGPT generates “made-up content or ‘hallucinations’ and falsely attributes them” to Encyclopedia Britannica. The lawsuit doesn’t specify an amount for monetary damages, but Britannica is also seeking an injunction to prevent OpenAI from repeating these accusations.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

President Trump and the Federal Communications Commission chairman are demanding more positive media coverage of the Iran war. On Saturday, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr issued yet another threat to revoke licenses from news broadcasters, claiming without evidence that they are running “hoaxes and news distortions” related to the war in Iran.

In an X post, Carr shared a complaint about an Iran war headline that Trump had made on Truth Social and added his own commentary. “Broadcasters that are running hoaxes and news distortions—also known as the fake news—have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up,” Carr wrote. “The law is clear. Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will lose their licenses if they do not.”

Carr making vague threats about enforcing rules against hoaxes and news distortion is nothing new. Given how difficult it is to actually revoke a broadcast license, and the fact that no TV station licenses are up for renewal until 2028, the threats so far have been attempts to intimidate news organizations without any concrete punishment.

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Just months after announcing DLSS 4.5 at CES, NVIDIA has unveiled its next major upscaling technology, DLSS 5. The company is doubling-down on AI for this next iteration, claiming DLSS 5 “infuses pixels with photoreal lighting and materials” using a real-time neural rendering model when it arrives this fall.

So what does this mean in practice? In an on-stage demo at NVIDIA’s GTC 2026 keynote, CEO Jensen Huang showed off the technology with Resident Evil: Requiem, Hogwarts Legacy and Starfield. DLSS 5 adds a noticeable amount of detail to character’s hair and skin tone, but it also appears it’s being compared to those games without any DLSS features turned on. It’s unclear how much of a difference it makes compared to DLSS 4.5 with path tracing and all of its features turned on.

“DLSS 5 takes a game’s color and motion vectors for each frame as input, and uses an AI model to infuse the scene with photoreal lighting and materials that are anchored to source 3D content and consistent from frame to frame,” NVIDIA said in a blog post. The company also notes that the technology runs in real time, and it works at up to 4K.

Huang showed off DLSS 5 while running a system with two RTX 5090 GPUs. Eventually, it will be able to run on a single video card (though I’d imagine it would have to be almost as powerful as two 5090s). Huang also paints DLSS 5 as a step towards offering Hollywood-like quality for real-time rendering, without the need for the GPU horsepower required by studios. It sounds a bit like a generative AI video model that can be directly controlled by developers, instead of just AI prompts.

NVIDIA, never shy from self-aggrandizing, claims DLSS 5 is also the “biggest breakthrough in computer graphics” since real-time ray tracing arrived in 2018. But given that ray tracing itself hasn’t being mainstream for many gamers, it’ll be interesting to see if there’s any interest in NVIDIA’s AI-produced pixels.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/pc/nvidia-claims-dlss-5-will-deliver-photoreal-image-quality-with-ai-this-fall-193452088.html?src=rss

Apple has quietly announced the AirPods Max 2, featuring improved active noise cancellation, an H2 chip, and new features like adaptive audio and AI-powered real-time translation. Like the original model, these headphones start at $549. The Verge reports: As noted by Apple, the AirPods Max 2 offer active noise-cancellation that’s 1.5 times more effective when compared to its predecessor. Transparency mode, which allows you to hear your surroundings while wearing the headphones, also sounds “more natural” with the AirPods Max 2, according to Apple.

The AirPods Max 2 support 24-bit, 48kHz lossless audio when connected with a USB-C cable, as well as offer up to 20 hours of listening time on a single charge. Other capabilities include loud sound reduction, a camera remote feature that works by pressing the digital crown to take a photo or start a recording, as well as a personalized volume feature that “automatically fine-tunes the listening experience” based on your preferences over time.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.