BioWare’s loot shooter was shut down earlier this month
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AMD MI455X Could Combine HBM4 And LPDDR For Massive AI Memory Capacity
Let’s talk about transformers, dear readers. Not robots in disguise, but the neural network architecture that underpins basically every modern AI model. Transformers are smart, but they trade training efficiency for inference complexity. To help reduce the amount of compute needed for complex transformers, we use a thing called a Key Value
OpenAI’s Mysterious Hardware Device Finally Has A Launch Timeframe
OpenAI has been tight lipped about its upcoming AI native hardware after having acquired Jony Ive’s design firm last year. Although comments by the company’s chief global affairs officer Chris Lehane, which have been reported by Axios, point to the secretive device being released sooner rather than later.
During an event at the World Economic
Russia May Ban GTA 6 Over Claims Of Immoral Content And Child Influence
To the surprise of few, leaked footage from the upcoming Grand Theft Auto 6 has incited a moral panic, but not from the usual Stateside suspects like disbarred attorney Jack Thompson. Instead, it is coming from Russia, with a recent interview from deputy chairman of the World Russian People’s Council Mikhail Ivanov decrying “destructive and
Netflix to pay all cash for Warner Bros. to fend off Paramount hostile takeover
Netflix agreed to pay all cash for Warner Bros. Discovery, amending its $72 billion deal in an attempt to fight off Paramount’s hostile takeover bid.
Netflix originally agreed to buy the company with a mix of cash and stock. To sweeten the offer for shareholders, Netflix and Warner Bros. today announced that Netflix will pay all cash instead. If successful, Netflix’s purchase will include HBO Max, WB Studios, and other assets.
The price is unchanged at $27.75 per share, and Warner Bros. is targeting an April 2026 shareholder vote. The original plan was for Netflix to buy each Warner Bros. share with $23.25 in cash and $4.50 in Netflix stock.
AI Agents ‘Perilous’ for Secure Apps Such as Signal, Whittaker Says
Signal Foundation president Meredith Whittaker warned that AI agents that autonomously carry out tasks pose a threat to encrypted messaging apps [non-paywalled source] because they require broad access to data stored across a device and can be hijacked if given root permissions.
Speaking at Davos on Tuesday, Whittaker said the deeper integration of AI agents into devices is “pretty perilous” for services like Signal. For an AI agent to act effectively on behalf of a user, it would need unilateral access to apps storing sensitive information such as credit card data and contacts, Whittaker said. The data that the agent stores in its context window is at greater risk of being compromised.
Whittaker called this “breaking the blood-brain barrier between the application and the operating system.” “Our encryption no longer matters if all you have to do is hijack this context window,” she said.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
AI Agents ‘Perilous’ for Secure Apps Such as Signal, Whittaker Says
Signal Foundation president Meredith Whittaker warned that AI agents that autonomously carry out tasks pose a threat to encrypted messaging apps [non-paywalled source] because they require broad access to data stored across a device and can be hijacked if given root permissions.
Speaking at Davos on Tuesday, Whittaker said the deeper integration of AI agents into devices is “pretty perilous” for services like Signal. For an AI agent to act effectively on behalf of a user, it would need unilateral access to apps storing sensitive information such as credit card data and contacts, Whittaker said. The data that the agent stores in its context window is at greater risk of being compromised.
Whittaker called this “breaking the blood-brain barrier between the application and the operating system.” “Our encryption no longer matters if all you have to do is hijack this context window,” she said.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
System76 Continues Driving More Improvements Into The COSMIC Desktop
Following the December launch of Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS and the first major COSMIC desktop release, System76 software engineers have continued making improvements to their Rust-based desktop environment…
New Witcher 3 Online Mod Lets You Hang Together With Friends
You and a few friends can slay monsters together or just chill in a tavern for a few hours
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Sony is giving TCL control over its high-end Bravia TVs
TCL is taking majority ownership of Sony’s Bravia series of TVs, the two companies announced today.
The two firms said they have signed a memorandum of understanding and aim to sign binding agreements by the end of March. Pending “relevant regulatory approvals and other conditions,” the joint venture is expected to launch in April 2027.
Under a new joint venture, Huizhou, China-headquartered TCL will own 51 percent of Tokyo, Japan-headquartered Sony’s “home entertainment business,” and Sony will own 49 percent, per an announcement today, adding:
What Games Are Forever Stuck In Your Backlog?
Is there a game you’ve been trying to play or finish for years, but for whatever reason haven’t? Tell us about it!
The post What Games Are Forever Stuck In Your Backlog? appeared first on Kotaku.
Akai’s MPC XL groovebox is the most powerful device the company has ever made
Akai just revealed its most powerful standalone groovebox, the MPC XL. For the uninitiated, the MPC has been around since the 1980s and pretty much defined hip hop from that era. The line has continuously iterated to keep up with the times and the XL looks to be the baddest of them all.
First of all, it offers four times the processing power of previous MPCs, which is enough to load up to 32 virtual instruments at the same time. This is assisted by a full 16GB of RAM, which is a whole lot in this era of AI tomfoolery. The XL can handle 16 audio tracks simultaneously. In my experience with previous units, this is more than enough for a full song.
It runs on a proprietary OS and features a 10-inch OLED touchscreen for making adjustments. There are also dozens of knobs and buttons to play with, including 16 knobs that integrate with the display for real-time feedback.
The XL features a step sequencer, but this is an MPC. The real star attraction are those 16 drum pads. These pads can be set to trigger samples and hits, but can also be programmed to initiate effects and do all kinds of other stuff. Each pad has four quadrants, one for each corner, and they are all fully adjustable.
Looking for even more nuanced control? There are two assignable touch-strips and plenty of short-cut keys. It has built-in microphone preamps, phono inputs for sampling, instrument inputs and numerous other connectivity options. This is a true flagship in every sense of the word. It’s also very, very large.
The MPC may have started as a hip hop machine, but newer models are useful for any genre of music. To that end, it comes with an extensive collection of plugins, samples and effects. These even include some plugins made by rival company Native Instruments.
The software can handle stuff like stem separation, time-stretching and more. The workflow has been heavily inspired by modern DAWs, with a full arrangement view available on that OLED.
The MPC XL is a standalone unit, so it doesn’t need a computer or anything like that. The power requirements here, however, don’t allow for batteries. This thing has to be plugged in, much like Native Instruments’ Maschine+. It’s available right now and costs a whopping $2,900. This is a serious machine with a serious price tag, just like Roland’s recently-released TR-1000 drum machine.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/audio/akais-mpc-xl-groovebox-is-the-most-powerful-device-the-company-has-ever-made-183952483.html?src=rss
Palantir CEO Says AI To Make Large-Scale Immigration Obsolete
AI will displace so many jobs that it will eliminate the need for mass immigration, according to Palantir CEO Alex Karp. Bloomberg: “There will be more than enough jobs for the citizens of your nation, especially those with vocational training,” said Karp, speaking at a World Economic Forum panel in Davos, Switzerland on Tuesday. “I do think these trends really do make it hard to imagine why we should have large-scale immigration unless you have a very specialized skill.”
Karp, who holds a PhD in philosophy, used himself as an example of the type of “elite” white-collar worker most at risk of disruption. Vocational workers will be more valuable “if not irreplaceable,” he said, criticizing the idea that higher education is the ultimate benchmark of a person’s talents and employability.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Earth is having some issues, so let’s enjoy the Webb telescope’s new nebula image
Sometimes, you just need to give your mind a little vacation. And these days, outer space sounds like as good a destination as any. Thankfully, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is here to give us a dazzling new image of the Helix Nebula.
Discovered in the early 19th century, the Helix Nebula resides in the constellation Aquarius. (Cue The 5th Dimension.) At about 655 light-years away, it’s one of Earth’s closest planetary nebulae. When zoomed farther out, it’s easy to see why it’s been nicknamed the Eye of God or Eye of Sauron. This 2004 image from the Hubble telescope illustrates that.
NASA / ESA / C.R. O’Dell (Vanderbilt University) / M. Meixner / P. McCullough / G. Bacon ( STSI)
What we’re seeing in the nebula is, in a sense, a moment of death that lays the groundwork for a new birth. The dying star (out of frame in the closer new image) sheds its outer layers. As expelled gas and dust cool, they provide raw material that could someday form new stars and perhaps planetary systems.
The new image from Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) provides a much closer, higher-resolution view.
Those pillars you see are called cometary knots, and this image is our best view of those to date. “Here, blistering winds of hot gas from the dying star are crashing into colder shells of dust and gas that were shed earlier in its life, sculpting the nebula’s remarkable structure,” the ESA wrote in its press release.
The knots’ colors represent temperature and chemistry. Hints of blue indicate the hottest gas (energized by ultraviolet light). The yellow regions, where hydrogen atoms form molecules, are farther from the nebula’s nucleus (and therefore cooler). On the edges, reddish-orange regions depict the coolest material, where gas thins and dust begins to form.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/space/earth-is-having-some-issues-so-lets-enjoy-the-webb-telescopes-new-nebula-image-181049901.html?src=rss
Crypto News Outlet Cointelegraph Loses 80% of Traffic After Google Penalty For Parasitic Blackhat SEO Deal
Cointelegraph, once one of the most-visited cryptocurrency news sites, has seen its monthly traffic plummet from roughly 8 million visits to 1.4 million — an 80% drop in three months — after Google issued a manual penalty in October 2025 for the outlet’s partnership with a blackhat SEO firm that used Cointelegraph’s domain authority to promote affiliate links to offshore casinos and betting platforms.
The CEO, who had no prior media experience, proceeded despite warnings from Google earlier in 2025 and repeated objections from the outlet’s three most senior editorial staff members throughout the year. The penalty removed Cointelegraph from Google News, Discover and search results entirely; a search for “Cointelegraph” now returns CoinDesk as the top result. Jon Rice, the former editor-in-chief, resigned on December 31st and described the situation as an “existential threat to business.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
AMD Making It Easier To Install vLLM For ROCm
Deploying vLLM for LLM inference and serving on NVIDIA hardware can be as easy as pip3 install vllm. Beautifully simple just as many of the AI/LLM Python libraries can deploy straight-away and typically “just work” on NVIDIA. Running vLLM atop AMD Radeon/Instinct hardware though has traditionally meant either compiling vLLM from source yourself or AMD’s recommended approach of using Docker containers that contain pre-built versions of vLLM. Finally there is now a blessed Python wheel for making it easier to install vLLM without Docker and leveraging ROCm…
Ex-BioWare Dev Disputes The Idea That It Shouldn’t Have Made Anthem
Mark Darrah says the ill-fated looter shooter wasn’t all EA’s fault
The post Ex-BioWare Dev Disputes The Idea That It Shouldn’t Have Made <em>Anthem</em> appeared first on Kotaku.
Canyon cutting up to 320 jobs in Koblenz and Amsterdam
Canyon announced to staff this morning that it will make up to 320 redundancies from its 1,600-strong workforce at its Koblenz and Amsterdam sites.
Canyon said: “After years of rapid growth, the company is now responding to a fundamentally changed market environment and is strategically adapting its organisational and cost structures to ensure long-term innovation and competitiveness.”
The statement cites the “consolidation” of the cycling industry, along with US tariffs, geopolitical tensions, and subdued economic forecasts, as the reason behind the job losses.
The statement adds: ”Following years of strong growth, particularly during the COVID-19 boom between 2020 and 2023, the company now aims to reduce complexity and simplify processes.”
‘We’ve become a bit bureaucratic’
In the statement, Roman Arnold, founder and newly re-appointed executive chairman of Canyon, said: “We are now laying the foundation to regain our operational power and strengthen our position at the top of the bicycle industry.
“Canyon is a close-knit community, united by a passion for cycling. It is therefore particularly painful that we have to part ways with valued colleagues. That makes it all the more important to me to navigate this process as responsibly as possible.”
Canyon says the “realignment is linked to sharpening Canyon’s DNA”, and that the brand will focus on “strategic growth areas”, including e-bikes.
Financial Times reported earlier this month that Arnold claimed he could raise annual revenue to €1bn, adding that the company had lost its direction due to changes in culture.
Speaking to the FT, Arnold said: “Here and there, internal silos have . . . developed, and we’ve become a bit bureaucratic.”
The fresh round of redundancies follows lay-offs in the US in April 2025. Bicycle Retailer reported at the time that the job losses were part of “an ongoing process” that wasn’t tied to changing tariff policy.
Today’s news follows last week’s re-release of its Spectral:ON and Torque:ON electric bikes, which were recalled in late 2024 due to concerns over battery safety.
My Favorite Amazon Deal of the Day: The Beats Pill Portable Speaker
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Today’s Bluetooth speakers have features that make them better than they were just a few years ago, from USB-C for universal fast charging, to hi-res audio playback, to serving as battery backup for other devices. The Beats Pill speaker has all these features and more, making it a great choice, and it has dropped in price to $99.95 (down from $149.95), matching the lowest price it has reached since its recent release, according to price-tracking tools. For less than a hundred dollars, this speaker is a steal.
I’ve been trying out the Beats Pill speaker since it came out in summer 2024, and it has everything I could want in a portable speaker: stereo sound when connected to another compatible speaker, multi-room mode to play the same music on multiple speakers, the Find My Device feature in case you misplace it during a rager, and Class 1 Bluetooth for extended range.
Apple users will get the most out of the Pill, with seamless iOS compatibility for a smoother experience. (You can read about it in more detail on PCMag’s “excellent” review), but this Beats speaker is not just for Apple users: Android users can also connect to it with a Bluetooth 5.3 connection, but it only supports AAC and SBC codecs, so there are no Android-friendly codec options that will make the audio really pop.
When it comes to battery life, you can expect around 24 hours per charge, depending on your use, which is comparable to other speakers of its size. It has that classic, bright Beats sound signature, balanced yet bass-heavy. It is rated IP67 dust-proof and waterproof, so it can be submerged in water for up to 30 minutes. The biggest downside is that there is no adjustable EQ within the app, but that’s less important when it sounds so great out of the box.
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Life Is Strange: Reunion Leaks Early, Coming Sooner Than We Thought
Chloe is returning as a playable character alongside Max in the ‘definitive close’ to their story
The post <em>Life Is Strange: Reunion</em> Leaks Early, Coming Sooner Than We Thought appeared first on Kotaku.